Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 46

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deaths – while attending to ever-pressing economic demands, particularly
experienced by postcolonial populations.18
A note on apartheid politics is necessary as it provides a backdrop against
which to read the play. Irrespective of the country’s independence from Western
colonisation, Afrikaner settler rulers continued to implement segregation regulations,
by categorising all South Africans as White, Asian, Coloured or Black.19 Using the
Group Areas Act, the best, most developed areas were reserved for whites, whereas
the least developed rural outskirts were allotted to non-whites: more than 80% of
land was granted to white people who made up only about 15% of the total number
of citizens. Abject poverty and abysmal modes of marginalisation were a matter of
policy, particularly for black populations because they outnumbered the other
groups. Black people were not only dispossessed of their lands and offered menial
jobs, either in dangerous environments such as mines and factories; they were
exposed to hunger, disrespect and subjugation. This segregation was an intentional
socio-political economic strategy to preserve a supremacist monopoly for the
Afrikaner rulers. This is an avowal of the rulers’ racism and echoes an objective of
biopolitics – to seize and control human beings as a ‘global mass’.20 An apposite
case in point is represented through Sizwe Bansi is Dead.
‘Bloody circus monkey’: Styles in Sizwe Bansi is Dead
Sizwe Bansi is Dead is ‘constructed in two circles: the story of the photographer
Styles and that of his client Sizwe;’ the focus of this article rests only with Styles’
story, the first part.21 The later part of the story also reveals political death as Sizwe
is compelled to live as another man’s ghost for survival. Set in the township named
New Brighton in Port Elizabeth, the play opens in a photography studio with the
owner Styles delivering a monologue. It begins with Styles reading newspaper
headlines to the audience before Sizwe’s (Robert’s) arrival. The theatrical
importance of Styles’ narrative is apparent as his lengthy one-way dialogue with the
audience lasts for more than twenty or thirty minutes in performance and comprises

18

Dis-embodied deaths in this context refer to, not literal death, but psychological, political and civil
death manifested through diverse technologies of power,
19
Glaser, 2001.
20
Foucault, 2003. 242-243.
21
Andre Brink, “Challenge and Response: The Changing Face of Theater in South Africa,” Twentieth
Century Literature 43.2 (1997): 168.