Shanti

by Mthuli Shezi. A politically charged and banned play which deals with the interracial love between Shanti and Thabo and Thabo’s coming of age as a man in South Africa and his conversion to the armed struggle.

Perhaps the best known play in the Black Consciousness repertoire, directly reflecting its the aims and ethos at the time, it became the “signature play” of the People's Experimental Theatre. They first produced it as an open act of defiance against the Apartheid regime in Lenasia in September 1973, in association with Shiqomo of Soweto and directed by Solly Ismael. After the production was closed down by the police, the text was used as evidence against members of PET and TECON arrested under the Terrorism Act in 1975.

Published in Robert Kavanagh (ed): South African People’s Plays by Heinemann, 1981.