A Quote by John Kani

In Australia, I almost became a counsellor. At the end of each performance there would be a queue of sobbing people backstage. They all wanted to explain why they left South Africa.
Australia always gives a tough fight, and that's why every player wants to perform against Australia. When you perform against Australia, England, and South Africa, you automatically earn more respect.
When I left South Africa in 1960 I was 20 years old. I wanted to try to get an education, and music education was not available for me in South Africa.
I've been lucky to travel through quite a bit of Europe and Australia, but I would love to do Asia and South America and South Africa.
My list would be Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa I'm doing which is somewhere I've wanted to go, Australia, Japan maybe, and China, if I have the energy to go and play at all those places.
We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.
Theatre has had a very important role in changing South Africa. There was a time when all other channels of expression were closed that we were able to break the conspiracy of silence, to educate people inside South Africa and the outside world. We became the illegal newspaper.
Mandela didn't end Apartheid in South Africa, the poor guy was in jail for 27 years, it was the African people that ended it but he was a symbol of their struggle. Or Gandhi in India, Gandhi was a great believer in non-violence and he was in and out of jail, but India became free. I think it's better to look at what people can do collectively and that's why it's so important to encourage them.
South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.
At the end of the day, when you go on to Google everything is about the way you were sacked when you were in charge of Australia. It doesn't mention the good things I did with South Africa or the good things I did in my first year with Australia when I brought in a lot of young players and gave them opportunities and tried to build a team.
It's enough to play for South Africa and take wickets for South Africa, and then I managed to get 400. I never thought that that would happen.
I grew up in South Africa without a television; there was no television, and the year after I left, television arrived in South Africa, so I have never really acquired a taste for watching television.
And now South Africa has finally woken up and it is doing great things. And if South Africa becomes the template to what AIDS is in the sub-Saharan continent, then all the other countries are going to follow suit. And Michel Sidibe, who spoke at the breakfast meeting this morning, was saying that there is so much hope for Africa now that South Africa has got its house in order.
People think that South Africa and Australia are culturally similar but, having worked in both environments, I found that theory to be untrue.
The insanity rate per capita in South Africa is appalling. ...it is easily seen that a primary requisite in any programme of the rehabilitation of the Bantu in South Africa would be mental health.
A number of African countries came to us and said, we request that South Africa should not field a candidate, because so many other African countries wanted to, and, in any case, South Africa would continue to play a role in terms of building the African Union, and so on. And they actually said, please don't field a candidate, and we didn't. As I have said, it is not because we didn't have people who are competent to serve in these positions.
Bangladesh is not India, Pakistan, South Africa or Australia.
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