You found during apartheid a strange occurrence from the white folks themselves. There were those who did make a choice to speak out and stand and be counted in the army of human beings who believed in justice. And then there are those who left.
I'd read Shakespeare in school, translated into isiXhosa, and loved the stories, but I hadn't realised before I started reading the English text how powerful the language was - the great surging speeches Othello has.
Acting became a powerful tool for change. You had to tell stories that were important to you.
It dawned on me that theatre is a powerful weapon for change.
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.
'Sizwa Banzi' is the life of the black man. We look at it, laugh at it, re-examine it, but we do not change it.
I couldn't really say that a repressive society would result in creative art. But somehow it does help, it is an ingredient, it acts as a Catalyst to a man who is committed.
I write about the human condition, as a South African. I sometimes see South Africa with the spectacles of the past and there will then be a political content in my writing.
I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles.
In 1973, 'Sizwe Banzi is Dead' and 'The Island,' which I co-wrote with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, transferred from The Royal Court Theatre to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End.
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.