Missing

John Kani

Description

Missing is the story of Robert Khalipa, an ANC cadre living in exile, who is very senior in the organisation but is left out of the negotiations and almost forgotten in Sweden. Robert has a wealthy Swedish wife, Anna, and they have a daughter who is a practising doctor in a hospital in Stockholm. There is also Robert’s protégé Peter Tshabalala, junior in the organisation, yet he gets the call to return to South African to join the democratic government. What follows is a story of conspiracies, lies, back stabbing and disappointments. Robert and his family are faced with the challenges of a South Africa that has changed radically from the one he remembers from more than thirty years ago. The government, in his opinion, does not seem to uphold the principles enshrined in the Freedom Charter. There is also conflict within his own family. Robert wants to stay in South Africa, while his wife and daughter want to go back to Sweden. Their love is tested to breaking point and difficult decisions have to be made by every individual. As with Kani’s very successful and often-performed previous play, Nothing but the Truth, the ambiguities of freedom and of personal commitment are explored in this play.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Théâtre
• Film
• General
• General officer
• Theatre
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776146437
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Missing
Missing
John Kani
Introduction by Njabulo S Ndebele
Witwatersrand University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
South Africa
© John Kani, 2015
Introduction © Njabulo S Ndebele 2015
Photographs © Individual copyright holders 2015
First published 2015
ISBN: 978-1-86814-889-9 ISBN: 978-1-77614-643-7 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
Cover photograph by Val Adamson from the production of Missing at the Playhouse Company, Durban, in 2015
Other photographs by Ruphin Coudyzer from the production of
Missing at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 2014
Cover design and typesetting by Michelle Staples
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
Contents
Missing: John Kani’s Meditation
Introduction by Njabulo S Ndebele
Foreword by John Kani
Missing
Act I
Act II Scene 1
Act II Scene 2
Missing: John Kani’s Meditation
Njabulo S Ndebele
What is home? Where is it?
Ayanda, the Swedish-South African daughter of Robert Vuyo Khalipa, the protagonist in Missing , ponders the word ‘home’. She has realised just how much the word means to her father. ‘I wonder if it is a place in his heart or the place where he was born.’
The dimensions of home as a place in the heart are never fixed. They expand or contract with the expansions or contractions of our interactions with the world. They are as malleable as clay; capable of taking many shapes. The dimensions of home as a place of birth, on the other hand, tend to be fixed. They may remain unchanged in memory, whether we have moved to live away from our place of birth, or have never left it. Home as place of birth can be a lingering sense of sameness. If change occurs, as it always does, it is experienced more as small rather than as phenomenal transformation.
But beyond where it is, what is home?
Robert Khalipa answers this question at the end of the play. Home is ‘my family and that is the most important thing to me’. He comes to realise that a family chooses where it seeks to be, whether in the heart, anywhere in the world, or in the specificity of place of birth. Missing dramatises how the Khalipa family arrives at this choice of meaning or understanding of home. It is a formative moment for them.
Making a choice is a significant moment of cognition. It is a decision that can never be made without the awareness that it is being made. That moment, when it comes, as it finally does to Robert Khalipa, can also be experienced as liberating. ‘My country is free,’ says Khalipa. ‘The struggle is over. That is my reward. And that is enough for me.’
‘And I can go on now,’ he virtually tells us through his actions, ‘to live my life with my family in Sweden. I am no less a South African for doing so.’ This is how Robert Khalipa feels at the end of the play: free at last. It is as if for many years he has been meditating on exile and home without being fully aware that he is doing so, until finally a deep light is shed.
We first encounter Robert Khalipa in the year 2000 at home with his family in Stockholm, Sweden. He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Stockholm. His Swedish wife, Anna, at 52, has stepped in as Executive Chair of her late father’s electronics and communications company. The South African-Swedish couple live with their daughter Ayanda, a medical doctor practising at a local hospital. Twenty-five years old, she is dating Swedish Karl, who has proposed marriage. Impatient, Karl is pressing for a marriage date.
How has Khalipa of Port Elizabeth (PE) in South Africa ended up in Sweden, in the far north of the world, thousands of kilometres from his country, at the southern-most point of Africa?
Many years ago, in PE, Khalipa was an activist in the African National Congress (ANC). Almost inevitably, in the early 1970s he was detained under the Terrorism Act. We learn from Khalipa that after he had been detained without trial for six months the leadership of the ANC in PE ‘arranged for [him] to flee the country’. Thus began his three decades of exile from ‘home’.
On 27 April 1994, six years before the action of the play begins, Khalipa received what he calls his ‘reward’ for a life of struggling for freedom. For the first time ever in the lives of millions, all South African citizens voted to elect their government democratically. It was a historic moment! Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of a liberated and democratic South Africa on 10 May 1994.
Five years later, on 14 June 1999, Mandela left office after deciding to serve only one term. President Thabo Mbeki was inaugurated as the second president of the Republic two days later, on the historic date of 16 June 1999. 1 President Mbeki is in office when we meet Robert Khalipa and his family.
If we wonder why Robert Vuyo Khalipa came to be in Sweden for long enough to seem well settled with his family, we will wonder even more why he is still there in 2000? Why has he not returned home, like thousands of other exiled South Africans? This is the question master storyteller John Kani would like us to ask. The search for answers drives the action in Missing and invites the audience into Khalipa’s meditation.
The fact is that in 2000 Khalipa is no longer really in exile. He continues to live in Sweden by choice. It is the reasons for that choice that this tightly constructed drama explores. If his earlier ‘occupation’ as Organising Secretary for Europe and Scandinavia for the ANC was a factor of his exile, he is now independent of the ANC for his livelihood. His material conditions couldn’t be better.
Khalipa’s plain-speaking daughter, Ayanda, may not be entirely wrong when she says about her father: ‘I don’t know why he is so hung up about a job with the government. It’s not like we need the money. We don’t need South Africa.’ Yet her father is troubled. His daughter’s statement may be factually true, but it cannot be advanced as sufficient reason for his not returning home. Some of his comrades back home might misconstrue it as betrayal. They will think Khalipa has chosen the comforts of Sweden in place of the work of building South Africa into a new country. The problem is that Khalipa does want to return home. But we soon learn that it is not that he cannot do so. He can, but he will not.
When most exiled South Africans returned home after April 1994, Robert Khalipa chose not to. It is important for him to be called home to serve his country rather than to turn up and inquire whether he is needed. Khalipa needs to be needed. We find him waiting for the call. It has been a long and uncertain wait. But why does he expect to be called? Why is he different from others who have simply returned home? What is so special about Robert Vuyo Khalipa that his friend, Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, would go out of his way to call him home to serve his country? And if he expects the call and does not receive it, as the years pass, why does he keep wanting and hoping that it will come?
We are unable to answer these questions yet, but we are able to form some impressions about Khalipa’s state of mind. Waiting for something to happen which does not happen may lead to uncertainty, doubt, even about oneself, insecurity, hesitation, or indecision. These states of mind can destabilise one’s sense of self and lead to self-blame: ‘What have I done wrong? Could I be less than who I think I am?’ Such states of mind may arise out of a situation in which Khalipa asks himself questions which should otherwise come from an interlocutor – in this case, President Mbeki – and he answers them himself.
But if waiting can result in such debilitating doubts and uncertainties, it can also result in the opposite state of mind. The subject in question may develop a confidence and self-assurance that appear inflated and overbearing. In such a state of mind, Robert Khalipa can project himself as a beautiful flower in the desert whose beauty nobody else can see and appreciate. Then Khalipa may become the flower that appreciates itself. ‘I am Robert Khalipa. They cannot forget me.’ Does self-esteem of this nature emerge as compensation in proportion to the sense of having been forgotten and the uncertainties that may result from having no definite answers?
To escape from this agony there is only one thing for Khalipa to do: go home and find out. Is he needed or not? Or, to complicate the situation even further, could he, in his own estimation, have become too important to subject himself to verifying his actual worth? Going out to find answers in which the self is the subject might be demeaning. Anna has, almost brutally, confronted this issue of self-importance: ‘Maybe it’s time to accept the frightening truth, Robert – that you may not be as important to the Organisation as you think you are.’
So, what kind of Robert Vuyo Khalipa are we seeing before us: a humble man who believes that others will recognise his worth; or a deluded man whose worth is of value only to himself and remains so for as long as it is not tested against impressions of others? What are the realities or illusions of the situation in which he finds himself?
In Missing , John Kani grapples with these questions in the context of people who were involved in the political struggle and the way the resolution of that struggle affects the manner in which they see themselves and others they were once very close to. He explores the real nature and sources of our doubts and certitudes.
Finally, Khalipa and his family do travel to South Africa. When the second act opens we find them in a ‘five-star hotel room in Johannesburg’. Khalipa has an appointment with President Mbeki, for which he has rehearsed:
I want to remind the president what our struggle was about. We left this cou