Black on Both Sides: SURVIVAL in the USA

Seth Sibanda, Fana Kekana, Selaelo Maredi, Themba Ntinga, and understudy Peter Sephuma arrived in California in January 1977. Jimmy Carter was being inaugurated as president and Stevie Wonder’s exquisitely funky I Wish topped the Billboards. The Black Panther Party, which had formed in nearby Oakland in 1966 in response to police violence in black communities, was being internally ravaged by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). It had been twelve years since the assassination of Malcolm X and nine years since the assassination of Martin Luther King. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was thirteen years into his life sentence on Robben Island, and Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, would be murdered in police detention that September. The student uprising of the previous year had marked the beginning of an escalation of political resistance that would be met with increasingly violent repression until the dismantling of Apartheid began in 1990.

On January 23, 1977, the Roots miniseries aired over eight consecutive nights, hurtling the historical reality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade directly into American popular consciousness and inspiring millions of black Americans to embrace their connections to the continent. Over those eight nights, the cast of Survival would wait patiently in the theater at Orange County College, knowing their audience would come to the performance only after Roots had aired. These audiences would move directly from the tribulations of Kunta Kinte and his descendants to the absurdity and cruelty of Apartheid South Africa. Their viewing on these nights traced an expansive arc of global struggle, back and forth between West and Southern Africa and the United States, from the eighteenth century until the present.

Despite these potent resonances, a televised newsreel from 1977  portrays the segregated South Africa that the actors had left as diametrically opposite to the “integrated” United States in which they had arrived. “For Americans, it’s hard to understand what arriving in Los Angeles means to these men,” says the narration, as the actors are shown sharing ice creams with a group of white women in an LA mall and excitedly riding escalators, “that the adjustment revolves around simple, social acts that we [Americans] take for granted tells us something about freedom here.” While white America may have imagined black South Africans to be bowled over by US “freedom,” this was not quite the actors’ experience.

On his first morning in California, Seth Sibanda found himself showing his passbook to American police officers. Fana Kekana remembers signs on the door of their college rehearsal room reading, “Shhhh, Africans rehearsing,” and other not-so-microaggressions. Fana and Seth soon requested to be moved out of the disconcertingly white and openly racist Orange County to the African American neighborhood of Watts, where they lived with a member of Kwame Nkrumah’s All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Between the “two worlds” of Watts and Orange County, it became clear that the America they had heard of from the outside – a land of freedom and racial inclusion – did not exist in reality.

Throughout the US, Survival would be subject to contending political claims and aspirations. For liberal white Americans, Apartheid represented a racial past from which they believed the US had decisively progressed. Middle class black audiences and reviewers, Seth says, were critical of the anger and explosiveness of his character in particular, hoping for a more likable revolutionary figure. On the other hand, radical audiences were both enthusiastic about Survival and already knowledgeable about South Africa. Fana remembers an Oakland performance for the Soledad Prison Poets being excitedly punctuated by outbursts of “Speak the truth!” from the audience. Survival was particularly popular with incarcerated audiences. At one performance in the Walpole maximum security facility in Massachusetts, a man volunteered to come to South Africa and join the struggle, if only they could get him out of prison! Contested views of the production were also felt within the cast. Some of the performers pushed a radical and sometimes inflammatory political angle in interviews, which reviewers eagerly lapped up, while others felt this overshadowed the artistry of the work, turning it into a political prop.

Survival’s creators had chosen to focus on criminal, rather than political, prisoners to emphasize how black South Africans living under Apartheid could not escape the politicization of every aspect of their lives. It is both ironic, and testament to the play’s potency, that it too could not escape being claimed by political narratives. But what is radical in Survival is not some grand revolutionary vision. Rather, it is the active, messy struggle of the characters and the performers as they work out the gritty details of their own survival in real time. In the activities of the play – conflicts and bickering, the sociality of the shared cell and stage, the singing that makes time bearable, the philosophical wrestling with the conditions of their lives, and the collective labor of performance itself – revolution is not an event on the ever-receding horizon, but already there, within the daily act of surviving. It is perhaps this emphasis that most closely aligns Survival with the Black Panther Party’s program of the same name. In a process that Huey P. Newton termed “Survival Pending Revolution,” the Black Panthers recognized that revolutionary activity required the meeting of daily needs. These were addressed through their “survival programs,” most extensively in a Free Breakfast program which at one point provided over 50,000 children across the United States with daily meals.

As the California tour progressed, the actors gradually recognized that this journey was one of exile. A month after their departure from South Africa, the security police had arrived at the actors’ homes to arrest them and raided their houses for political materials. In California, they began to recognize signs of surveillance from the Apartheid government’s extensive international network as planted hecklers disputed their descriptions of South Africa, and people called in with bomb threats before performances. Backstage at one performance, Fana’s passport was stolen, and when he went to the South African consulate they revealed that the authorities had been tracking the tour.

The cumulative trauma of their lives under Apartheid also caught up with them, manifesting in nightmares about prison and arrest. When an inexperienced tour driver rolled their minibus, the actors wondered whether it had been an assassination attempt. Only Peter Sephuma, the production’s understudy, chose to return to South Africa, where he launched a bootleg production of Survival, which the government quickly banned. This confirmed the others’ decision to remain in the US in exile.

After the California tour, they moved to the East Coast for an off-Broadway run produced by Woody King Jr., and smaller college tours in Boston and Baltimore. As in South Africa, the largely white off-Broadway audiences were audibly horrified by Themba’s line: “I wonder how many of those who hate us now, won’t one day wish that they too could be black.” New York theater critic Rex Reed went so far as to urge white audiences to avoid the production on account of it.

After four years with Survival, the actors began to go their separate ways. Themba Ntinga studied Journalism at Columbia University and English at Stony Brook and became a member of the ANC mission to the UN. Salaelo Maredi continued to write and direct plays throughout the US, becoming the artistic director of the Julian Theater in San Francisco. Both Seth Sibanda and Fana Kekana continued acting, often touring South African productions in the US and Europe, and even appearing again together in “The Long Journey of Poppie Nongema.” Fana married and had four daughters, and went on to become a co-anchor on PBS’s “South Africa Now.”

In 1990, South African director Jerry Mofokeng reunited the cast in a revival of Survival at Riverside Church in Harlem. A week into the run, on Sunday, February 11, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, signaling the beginning of the end of Apartheid. Seth remembers his shock at the news, and struggling through the performance, digging deep to access the anger that all of a sudden felt like a thing of the past. They managed to get to the end of the show, and the audience erupted in celebration and a spontaneous evening of singing, dancing and poetry.

Themba and Salaelo returned home, shortly before the first democratic elections in 1994. Salaelo returned to Alexandra, Johannesburg, where he continued to write and direct theater. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 85. Tragically, Themba was fatally shot not long after returning to South Africa. Fana and Seth chose to remain in New York, where they are still based.

Between the 1976 Soweto uprising, Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, and even the release of Roots in 1977, Survival has a knack for popping up at charged historical moments. What does it mean to return to it in 2024, a fraught election year in both South Africa and the US, and the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy? In an interview while in exile, Salaelo Maredi was asked when he would return to South Africa. He replied, “I wouldn’t say ‘when’, you cannot gauge the time for a revolution.” Instead of waiting for the revolution, Survival discovers it within the collective practice of survival, which is both locally grounded and globally interconnected. This power, in Themba’s words, “lies with the people, who carry with them in their lives the justification for the struggle.” In coming together for this revival, we continue to practice the ongoing and radical task of our collective survival.

Click here to return to the first part of this series on the history of Survival.