Photos Symbol Analysis

In Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, photographs represent Black South Africans’ dreams—dreams that South Africa’s white-supremacist apartheid government cannot destroy, although it can make their realization uncertain. The play introduces the symbolism of photography through the character Styles, a self-employed Black photographer. Before becoming a full-time photographer, Styles worked for six years at an automobile factory under a racist white boss, Bradley, who made him feel like a “tool” and a “circus monkey.” Though Styles’s family didn’t understand his dream of becoming a photographer, he chased it because he suspected being his own boss would make him feel like a “man”—and indeed, in the present of the play, he seems far more fulfilled than he was in the automobile factory. Having fulfilled his own dream, Styles believes the purpose of his photographs is to document and memorialize other marginalized people’s dreams: he takes photos to commemorate the late-life educational certification of a man who didn’t receive good schooling as a young person; to document the 27-person extended family of an elderly patriarch who always wanted to own a family photograph; and to illustrate the triumph of Sizwe Bansi, an unemployed man who wants to support his wife and children and finally gets a job after stealing a dead man’s passbook, which contains a work permit. In each case, the characters’ dreams are somehow uncertain or compromised. The man with the educational certificate wants to become a “graduate, self-made” through correspondence courses, which, given his late middle age and full-time work, may not happen. The elderly patriarch dies before Styles has developed the family photos. Finally, Sizwe may not be able to get away with stealing a dead man’s identity for very long. Thus photos represent both the persistence and the vulnerability of Black South Africans’ dreams under apartheid.