John Kani

Bonisile John Kani was born on 30 August 1942 in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. He is an actor, playwright, and theatre administrator whose career has spanned stage, film, and television across multiple decades. His son Atandwa is also an actor, having made his U.S. television debut on the CW series Life Is Wild and portraying a younger version of Kani's character T'Chaka in Black Panther.

Kani's theatrical career began in 1965 when he joined the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, a group whose name derived from the former snake pit of a zoo where the company gave its first performance. With that ensemble he helped develop numerous plays that, while unpublished, were performed to significant reception. In the early 1970s he co-wrote Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, two anti-apartheid works that would define his international reputation. Both plays reached Broadway in 1974, presented in repertory at the Edison Theatre for a total of 52 performances, with Sizwe Banzi Is Dead running for 159 performances. For his performances in these productions, Kani and Ntshona each received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1975. He also co-wrote Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act with Fugard and Ntshona.

Following his time in the United States, Kani returned to South Africa in 1975, where he was surrounded by police, beaten, and left for dead. The attack resulted in the loss of his left eye, for which he now wears a prosthetic. In 1987, while South Africa remained under apartheid, Kani played Othello in a South African production of Shakespeare's play. He received an Olivier Award nomination for his role in My Children! My Africa! and in 2003 was awarded a special Obie Award for his extraordinary contribution to theatre in the United States.

Kani made his debut as a sole playwright in 2002 with Nothing but the Truth, first staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, the play examines the divide between Black South Africans who remained in the country to resist apartheid and those who left and returned after the regime ended. It won the 2003 Fleur du Cap Awards for best actor and best new South African play. His subsequent solo-authored works include Missing in 2014 and Kunene and the King in 2019, the latter a co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Fugard Theatre, staged at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon before transferring to Cape Town, where Kani appeared alongside Antony Sher. He also appeared as Caliban in a 2008 production of The Tempest at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and on tour.

On screen, Kani portrayed T'Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and Black Panther in 2018. His status as a native Xhosa speaker influenced Chadwick Boseman, who played T'Challa, to adopt Xhosa as Wakanda's language and to learn entire scenes in the language despite no prior study of it. Kani's son Atandwa played a younger version of the same character in Black Panther. In 2019, Kani voiced Rafiki in the photorealistic animated remake of The Lion King and played Colonel Ulenga in the Netflix film Murder Mystery. He reprised the role of Colonel Ulenga in Murder Mystery 2 in 2023 and appeared in Mufasa: The Lion King.

Kani serves as executive trustee of the John Kani Theatre Foundation, founder and director of the John Kani Theatre Laboratory, and chairman of the National Arts Council of South Africa. The main theatre of the Market Theatre complex in Newtown, Johannesburg, has been renamed the John Kani Theatre in his honor. Among his many recognitions are the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation Award for 2000, the Olive Schreiner Prize for 2005, a SAFTA Lifetime Award received on 20 February 2010, and the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, conferred in 2016 for his contributions to theatre and to the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic South Africa. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Cape Town in 2006, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2013, and the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020. In 2021 he was conferred as the Da Vinci Laureate by The Da Vinci Institute, and in 2023 he received an Honorary OBE from the British Government for services to drama.