Quotes from John Kani

We've got the right to vote, but what does it mean? People now want to have the right to a job, the right to education, the right to medical services.

Every time there is a movie that tells a South African story, it is done by someone who must be taught the right way of pronouncing 'Sawubona.' Enough is enough.

Shakespeare's words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.

I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles.

Shakespeare examines how democracy is built.

'iNkaba' has made me famous in the living rooms of the people of my country. It was almost like being famous all over again. People stop me in the street and shopping malls to take pictures.

Very rarely in the life of an actor and a performer do you do something you truly believe in, do you do something you are absolutely proud of.

I still remember the moment when my teacher, Mr. Budaza, walked into class and said, 'Today we are going to study 'Julius Caesar,' one of Shakespeare's most important plays.'

I spent 51 years under apartheid. I don't imagine suffering. I know it.

I am a citizen of the world, or no world at all!

In South Africa, we've been watching these movies all our lives - 'Batman,' 'Superman,' 'Captain America' - and every time the mask comes off it's a white man.

I understood the whole purpose of Truth and Reconciliation, and I supported it 100 per cent, but I couldn't deal with it myself.

Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.

You can give me any of Shakespeare's plays and I'll tell you a parallel African folktale.

I must concentrate all my efforts in the attainment of freedom for my people.

This is the problem I have: I write a play and I give it to a director and they say, 'I'll do it one condition: if you play the role.'

The government harasses everything. The government must keep a constant surveillance of all activities by black people in order to maintain their reign over them, especially when they are in a minority.

My stories are about humanity, about the challenges of surviving and the constant fight against ignorance, inhumanity and complacency.

It dawned on me that theatre is a powerful weapon for change.

When the situation politically became intolerable within South Africa, we used the arts as a weapon for change.

My love, my passion, my everything is this continent of Africa. I have always celebrated African humanity.

I remember the words of my grandmother who died at 102. I remember my great mother, Grand Brika, who died at the age of 106. They talked to us all the time. And my grandmother even lied to me. She said there was royalty. She said that my great-great-great grandfather was the king of the outer Thembu.

'Captain Marvel,' whereby the steel trap is challenged, where the hero is a heroine, where the most powerful person who has the welfare of the future of the human race is a woman. What else can it be? Because that was the role of my mother when I was a kid.

When western culture developed, we became detached from nature, detached from our relationship with the animals. We saw animals perhaps as only the rhino horn, the elephant's tusk, we saw it as making money.