Apartheid Ended. John Kani’s Kunene and the King Asks What Changed.
— Afridiaspo Editorial
Explore John Kani’s Kunene and the King at the Guthrie: apartheid history, Shakespeare in isiXhosa, African identity and the dignity of caregiving.
Featured photograph: Edward Gero as Jack Morris and John Kani as Lunga Kunene. Credit: Octopus Theatricals, supplied by the Guthrie Theater.
A man can know King Lear by heart and still struggle to see the person caring for him.
That tension sits inside the premise of John Kani’s Kunene and the King. Jack Morris, a white South African actor facing terminal illness, is preparing to play Shakespeare’s ageing monarch. Lunga Kunene, a Black nurse, comes into his home to provide care. They share a country and a knowledge of Shakespeare. They have not experienced that country on equal terms.
The setting is South Africa in 2019, a quarter-century after its first democratic elections. The question is what those twenty-five years have changed between two people whose ideas of status, belonging and history were formed under apartheid.
Now presented at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the play offers an opening into a conversation much larger than a theatre listing. For African and diaspora audiences, it connects political freedom with the everyday work of dignity: who is heard, who is underestimated, and who is allowed to interpret the world.
The actor behind Wakanda’s king
Many filmgoers recognise Kani as T’Chaka in Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther. His theatre history reaches back decades before those films. In 1975, he and Winston Ntshona shared the Tony Award for Best Actor for Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, works they co-wrote with Athol Fugard. The National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive records that collaboration and award.
Remembering all three writers matters. A famous face can become the shorthand for a collective history, leaving the relationships that produced the work out of view.
It also changes how an international audience encounters Kani today. His authority as a storyteller does not begin with Hollywood recognition. The films are one chapter in a career already rooted in South African theatre and the struggle against apartheid.
In Minneapolis, he is both the playwright and the performer playing Kunene. Edward Gero plays Morris; Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs. The company also includes South African artist Ntebo as Isithunywa. These are the people making this production, distinct from the characters and historical experiences the drama examines.
Apartheid was built into ordinary life
To understand the stakes, apartheid needs more explanation than the word “racism.” Under the National Party government that came to power in 1948, racial hierarchy was organised through an extensive system of law and state enforcement, building on earlier segregation.
The Population Registration Act of 1950 imposed racial classification. The Group Areas Act organised residential separation and forced removals. As South African History Online explains, these policies disadvantaged people through the institutions governing everyday life.
The point is not simply that individuals held cruel opinions. A person’s treatment was connected to an official racial category. Homes, neighbourhoods and opportunity were shaped by a political order that assigned unequal value to different people.
That distinction matters when we enter Morris’ home through the play’s premise. His prejudice and Kunene’s resistance are not two equivalent personal preferences floating free of history. Their relationship begins within the aftermath of a system that distributed power unequally.
Recognising both men’s humanity does not require pretending that their historical positions were the same.
The schoolboy who met Shakespeare in isiXhosa
One of the richest educational threads lies in language. The supplied synopsis says Kunene learned Julius Caesar in isiXhosa. That detail has a connection to Kani’s own life.
In a first-person essay published by the British Council, Kani recalls studying B.B. Mdledle’s isiXhosa translation. He describes his teacher reading the play as a challenge to dictatorship, and remembers finding the translation’s emotional expression more powerful than the English version he encountered later.
The Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand identifies Mdledle as an influential writer and educator whose translation became a school text in the Eastern Cape. Its research also stresses the complicated relationship between African-language Shakespeare and apartheid’s education policies.
Translation, in this history, involves more than replacing words. A teacher and a translator could open a text to meanings that challenged the political order surrounding the classroom.
For a diaspora reader, this offers a useful way to think about language. English can provide access to institutions without becoming the measure of a person’s intelligence. An African language can carry intellectual argument, emotional precision and literary authority.
Speaking the language of an institution should not require surrendering the language through which you first understood yourself.
In the same essay, Kani recalls security officers questioning him about interracial intimacy in a production of Othello. One detail stayed with him: the officers had read the play closely enough to challenge particular actions onstage. His recollection shows theatre becoming a place where a political order’s assumptions could be exposed through bodies, language and performance.
It does not make every Shakespeare production an act of resistance. It shows what artists and audiences can do with a text within a particular history. The meaning also depends on who performs it, who watches and what the surrounding society tries to forbid.
Why a story about a king belongs in a room with a nurse
You do not need to have studied King Lear to understand the connection. Shakespeare’s tragedy follows an ageing ruler whose choices expose him to loss, suffering and dependence. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s introduction places vulnerability, pride, cruelty and consolation among its central concerns.
Those themes provide a way into Morris’ situation. An actor preparing to embody royal authority is also a patient who needs another person’s expertise. The role he wants and the care he requires place different demands on his sense of control.
Read through that premise, care becomes a revealing setting for a story about equality. A patient may hold social status and still depend on someone whose professional knowledge he underestimates. The person providing care has responsibilities, but also a history, an intellect and a right to respect.
Illness does not establish that a character has abandoned prejudice. Nor should a caregiver have to earn dignity by patiently absorbing it. These are questions the relationship invites us to consider, without assuming that dependence automatically produces understanding.
The title itself offers a productive tension: one man’s name stands beside an office of supreme power. Before deciding who has the greater authority in the room, we might ask what kind of authority we mean.
Reconciliation needs room for an honest account
It would be easy to package the play as a reassuring message that people should simply get along. That reading would leave its historical question largely unanswered.
A shared interest can begin a conversation. It cannot, by itself, settle what happened before the conversation became possible. Enjoying the same writer does not establish that two people had equal access to education, equal freedom or equal recognition.
Kani described the play in an RSC announcement as an examination of South Africa’s democratic successes and failures. His stated frame allows achievement and unfinished work to occupy the same story.
That is the distinction worth carrying into a wider discussion. Political freedom is consequential. So is the question of what people continue to inherit from the order it replaced. Taking the second question seriously does not cancel the first.
For audiences in the United States, the relevance is an invitation to examine that distinction in their own setting. South African apartheid and American racial history have different laws, institutions and timelines. They deserve to be understood on their own terms before comparisons are made.
A South African story with an international journey
The play’s travel history shows African authorship moving across stages. The RSC records its premiere at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in March 2019, in a co-production with Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre directed by Janice Honeyman. Its London engagement at the Ambassadors Theatre began in January 2020.
Octopus Theatricals records the U.S. premiere at Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2025. The current Guthrie presentation brings Kani and Gero’s roles to Minneapolis under Santiago-Hudson’s direction.
The distinctions matter: the original production, a later staging and a new city are separate chapters. Treating them accurately gives the artists a history rather than turning every arrival into a supposed discovery.
What Minnesota audiences can do with the conversation
The Guthrie lists the production through November 8, 2026, on its McGuire Proscenium Stage. Its current guidance gives an approximate running time of one hour and forty minutes without intermission, recommends ages twelve and up, and flags terminal illness, alcohol addiction, mature language and systemic racism.
There is also a free Community Creates workshop on October 29, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., in the Dowling Studio. Led by actor L. Peter Callender, it invites participants to perform Shakespeare; no experience is necessary, but an RSVP is required. That provides a practical way to explore the language rather than assume it belongs to experts.
For a classroom, book club or conversation after the show, three questions can carry the discussion further:
- When does a shared cultural reference create understanding, and when can it hide an unequal relationship?
- Whose knowledge do we overlook because of their accent, occupation or social position?
- What must a truthful account of the past include before reconciliation becomes meaningful?
The person beyond the role
For African and diaspora audiences, one value of this story is the range of African intellectual life it makes visible: a playwright, a translator, a teacher and a nurse whose knowledge cannot be reduced to the work someone expects him to do.
Kani’s career also asks us to look beyond the screen role through which we first recognised him. T’Chaka may be the introduction. The theatre history, language and political questions lead much further.
A king commands attention. A nurse provides care. Neither description tells us everything about the person carrying it.
The harder work begins when we stop confusing someone’s place in a hierarchy with the full measure of their humanity.
Apartheid Ended. John Kani’s Kunene and the King Asks What Changed.