Anti Apartheid Activists

"What is the role of the contemporary woman artist/actress, novelist, scriptwriter etc. etc.? Women in the past have been the creators of the race, in the sense of procreation, a very noble and holy purpose I itself, but men have been the creators of culture, in the sense that we understand actress is over. Once you know what your objectives and values are, there can be no compromise. As founder and artistic director of Internationalist Theatre I was fulfilling both these functions. But, let me add, God help you if you are strong minded and an intellectual in England, where they are generally anti-intellectual and petrified of passionately held beliefs. They have given me such a rough ride you wouldn`t believe it. Tant Pis!!!!I`m not ashamed of spending six years at university, and I revel in intellectual discourse. I`m unashamedly high brow. And, as for fighting in a man`s domain, I`m known as the Greek warrioress, ha, ha ha...I come from a family of noble Greek women. My grandmother faced the Nazis during occupied Greece with a gun in her hand, and my mother is a veritable Hecuba, all strength and dignity."

"I called my company "The Internationalist" because there are a lot of actors who are not English and are being prejudiced against, because they come from other countries. I don`t believe in accents or skin colour. My company has a very strong ethic of social justice to it . I try to incorporate actors from as many nationalities as possible.""

"I'm known as the Greek warrioress...I come from a family of noble Greek women. My grandmother faced the Nazis during occupied Greece with a gun in her hand, and my mother is a veritable Hecuba, all strength and dignity.""

"British theatre was xenophobic and tunnel visioned . There was a resistance to using actors from other ethnicities, cultures, and races in production of classics. And a resistance to the non realistic plays like those of Brecht, Genet and Tennessee Williams""

"The great British 1950`s theatre critic Ken Tynnan, described the theatre as “an independent force at the country`s life , a sleeping tiger that can and should be roused whenever the national (or international) conscience needs nudging”. And Griselda Gambaro`s EL CAMPO does just that. It is a savage protest against the indignities imposed on modern man and woman by the impersonal bureaucracies and dictatorships in a language of poetic and startling originality. In the figure of Emma, the tortured artist, the part I played, we find expressed an outcry against the imprisonment of artists and the suppression of artistic freedom."

"The first performance the company staged was Ford`s '`Tis Pity Shes a Whore'. It was well received. I like to choose the play, the directors, the designers.. it`s a total creative act."

"Our first play in 1981 was Jean Genet’s The Balcony , a prophetic choice, set in Paris in turmoil, just as London was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of racial tensions that had been simmering for some time. I insisted on casting a Caribbean actress to play the lead, Irma the Madam of the Brothel."

"At the end of my course I realized there was no place for me in South Africa because I found it difficult to function in a society that considered 75% of population inferior, that my community frowned on me as an actress, and my beliefs for a non-racial society now incorporated a fight for the equality for women an anathema to my conservative Greek community. I did not want to spend my life apologizing for who I was."

"The ground breaking production of the company, and the point at which the cross-cultural casting began to bite, was Brecht’s anti-war play Mother Courage. Just one comment in a review by critic Malcolm Hay jolted us into the realisation that we were making history: Why is an Indian actor playing the Pastor?"

"The breaking of casting cliches also broke boundaries. A short, Latin-looking actress like me playing classical roles such as Miss Julie , and playing them well, made casting directors uncomfortable. It was unheard of that a short, dark-haired actress of Greek temperament could play the aristocratic Miss Julie. Not beautiful or tall enough etc. It proved one of the best productions of Miss Julie ever seen in London."

"I arrived at as an undergraduate with two driving passions: a consuming interest for a politics of justice grounded in a Christian theology and acting, as a ‘revelation of the treasures of the human soul’ not as a form of exhibitionism. My search for justice grew out of the pain I experienced when I saw the ridicule my malformed brother elicited. I became aware of the evil that is prejudice, a form of injustice. My urge to redress this prejudice took a more social dimension during my years as a boarder at St Dominic’s Convent, where the great Barbara Hogan matriculated a year later than me though I only got acquainted with her at Wits."

"Morally, good theatre and film for that matter disturbs and unnerves us, tries to rid us of our cliched reactions to the world around us by expanding our sympathies, stretching our imaginations, and enriches us."

"The thing I like about having a company is the academic side. Then you forget about the academic side once you`ve done the administration and you start creating."

"...this is not the only time that I have stuck out my neck for a Greek film director. With Nikos Nikolaidis I introduced him to Mr Constantini as well , and undertook to send his XXX-rated movie `Singapore Sling` to two of the top film agents in the UK , Jenny Cassarotto and PDF who have now changed their name on account of a merger. Ms Cassarotto was indulgent, but the other agent was so shocked that he treated me as if I was peddling porn. The things I've done for Greece!"

"Voulgaris asked me to find film funding for what was to be the last but unfinished film project of Elia Kazan,a personal friend of Voulgaris. The subject of the film was the immigration of the Kazan family from the beleaguered Greek minority communities under Turkish rule in Asia Minor to the safe haven of the USA where the Kazan family settled. I arranged a meeting between Elia Kazan and the London based film financier Frixos Constantini of Poseidon Films at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens. What followed from this meeting is that Mr Constantini put Elia Kazan in touch with Martin Scorsese a personal friend of Mr Constantini and who also runs the production company Cappa films. And so it was that these two giants of US cinema met for the first time. It is also because of these meetings that Paqndelis Voulgaris was able to make"The Brides". Elia Kazan was too old to get film insurance , so Kazan instead brought to Scorseses" the Voulgaris film project "The Brides" , and yet I have to this day never have had a thank you from him. So much for his saintly appearance."

"By the time I got a permit I found that I liked being independent, that I like to do productions that I think are valuable . I did not want to feel that I had left South Africa, my parents and a comfortable life to do rubbishy work"

"... without New Testament Greek there would be no Christian Theology, or possibly no Christianity. The Athanasian Creed, the dogma of Christ the Homiousios, of the same essence as the Father , the dogma of Christ, fully God and Fully Human , The dogma of the Holy Trinity , 'that Christ is the incarnation of the indivisible source of the Divine Godhead through the power of the Holy Spirit " could only have been formulated by the Church Fathers within the linguistic structures and concepts provided by early century Greek language and thought., e.g concepts such as the God/man, a concept that which does not exist in the Hebrew and is totally foreign to Hebrew culture. Hence Shelley's assertion that the Greeks /the Hellenes "gave us our religion "."

"A key moment of my spiritual epiphany was the tale told by the property manager of our apartment block, Mrs Marina. Every year on All Saints Day if I remember correctly, she commemorated the death of her son who died from an overdose. She baked some holy bread, antidoro, and then took it to her parish Church as an offering for evening vespers. When I asked Mrs Marina why she was doing this, she replied simply, "So that Christ speaks to my son and takes pity", as it is on this particular day it is believed that the Christ descends once again into the bowels of hell, not to defeat death this time as in Holy Saturday, but to keep company with the so called damned. For mothers like Mrs Marina fearful that their dead children might inhabit this nether world because of their sins, despair of redemption etc, Christ's visit provides some hope- that He might take pity on them and relieve them of their eternal punishment. Christ as the God that Unshackles the power of Hell and Death , the Resurrected Christ that even reaches out to the damned , and not the Christ of Deo Satisfactio of the heretical western Churches is one of the great glories of Greek Orthodoxy and of Orthodoxy as a whole."

"The reason the Internationalist Theatre productions demanded attention was that the directors who had already worked at top theatres like the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company had agreed to take the risk of directing classical plays with multi-racial casts , that the performance was of a very good standard, and furthermore that many prominent members of the arts establishment, Lindsay Anderson, Cameron MacKintosh, John Barton, Richard Eyre, the great casting director Mary Selway, Stephen Berkoff, Nicolas Roeg , came to see performances by Internationalist Theatre."

"I can say that my collaboration with Theatro Technis was a serious milestone in my life. I had the chance to work with George Eugeniou a great director who taught me a great deal"

"Part of my Greek heritage: The call of resistance to the Nazis, when all mainland Europe had succumbed, it was only Greece my Antigone, who resisted and was starved for it."

"Many of the Greek journalists and TV presenters also seem to share this "progressive intellectualism" which leads Greeks to having to apologize for being Orthodox- What a load of rubbish! Prof Yiannaras with whom I have corresponded then continues with the frightening story about 'the predicted and inevitable and desirable Latinization of our Greek alphabet" quoted by an anonymous source in a periodical Samizdat . Let's get this straight both Greece as well as the Balkan countries that have Kyrilic alphabets should fiercely resist Latinization ."

"My grandmother was a fearless Greek warrioress, and very protective of her land. She literally ordered some Nazi soldiers to get off one of her fields pointing a gun at them."

"the great comedic film director Thodoros Maragos , of the well known film 'Mathe Paedi mou Grammata!' wrote a part specially for me , Ms Ortiki in his 12 part ERT1 television series "Emmones Idees"."

"Theatro Technis in North London, where the issues of prejudice against immigrants, the poor, the illiterate were dramatised , and more urgently the exploration of the war crime that constituted the illegal invasion by the Turkish military of CYPRUS, and for which the USA ( especially the diabolical Kissinger ) and the UK had little concern, as the president of Cyprus was the Orthodox Archbishop Makarios, who had the reputation of being a bit of a red. This was a theatre company that practiced political theatre in its purest form! I found myself performing a Greek Cypriot peasant woman driven from her land in the North of Cyprus and expressing her grief at the loss of her home in front of an audience that included refugees who had suffered the same fate but had managed to escape to London. The tears just flowed naturally. It was also at this theatre that I tackled the Mount Everest of acting parts – Medea(play) by Euripides, and which I performed to great reviews and was the performance that put me on the London map as an actress. The whole play was interpreted politically."

"..the gift of Orthodoxia : The call by the Christ not to be just good moral and ethical beings, which is where the western Churches stop- but to go beyond that , to be 'theanthropic", to reflect the generosity and magnificence and beauty of the Christ."

"Apart from the greatness of Bizos for his role in the dismantling of apartheid, defending Mandela etc , he also manifested a genius in his role as a leading member of the conservative South African Greek community, by drawing historical parallels between the 400 years of slavery that Greece had suffered under the Ottoman Turks and the 300 years or so of repression and cruelty suffered by the Southern African black tribes and mixed race people under the British and then under the Nationalist Afrikaner rule. By using this strategy Bizos was able to balance his fight for justice in South Africa, and synchronously lead the very conservative Greek community in a more progressive direction."

"They`re powerful parts- all the most powerful parts seem to be written for men....Hamlet has this existentialist crisis .I had one when I was 17. Women are not given that kind of philosophy in their parts""

"As an actress I decided that I was not going to accept being cast in token ethnic roles in film or on TV, nor act any parts that I considered demeaned the portrayal of a non-British character. To illustrate this point; after seeing me perform Tatiana in Gorky’s Enemies(play) the well-known TV director, and very nice man, Chris Menaul offered me the role of the main Russian air hostess in a Malcolm Bradbury BBC TV series. He was taken aback when I turned the part down as I didn’t have any TV credits. I gave some excuse ‘that I thought the part vulgar” but the real reason was that Bradbury had portrayed the Russian air-hostesses in what I considered in a cliched demeaning way and involved a little Russia bashing. I have recently sent him a real explanation via his agent."

"I know I`m headstrong ."

"My first tentative efforts in creating my theatre company were mounting John Ford’s `Tis Pity She`s a Whore ”. I asked people for money for my production, even as I found myself canvassing for another cause. This production was not the totally multi-racial cast that I had hoped for but did consist of actors from other cultures and differing accents, and also achieved a very high level of production value and rave reviews. It also provided the springboard for the extremely talented director/ designer couple Declan Donnellan and Nicolas Ormerod, who went onto creating the now world famous Cheek by Jowl company."

"As a little girl my mother used to take me with her to her fittings with her very expensive seamstress. I was dazzled by the beauty of the fabrics and the whole procedure. I still remember the feel of expensive taffeta."

"This is the place (Wits University) where the tension between my parents and myself on account of my political beliefs became pronounced. A photo of me standing at picket line on the WITS side of Jan Smuts avenue during one of the protests appeared in the "Star" newspaper. The local MP from the Nationalist Party Boksburg constituency saw it and made an ominous call to my parents "I didn't know that your daughter was communist!" and put the phone down on them. Of course I wasn't a "communist" but anyone who opposed the regime was automatically labeled as a communist. I ceased my political studies as I didn't wish to cause my parents any extra anxiety or stress ."

"I myself have experienced the volcanic existential depths of the Greek language. It was during a performance of Medea by Tzeni Karezi at the Herod Atticus theatre in Athens ,when she was pleading to the callous Jason to take pity on her and she used the word ' splachniasou'. 'Pity' is too weak a word to describe the emotional and psychological depths ' splachniasou' expresses. 'Splachna 'is the part of the body where a woman carries her unborn children, the very root of ontological existence. How deep can you get!"

"My search for justice grew out of the pain I experienced when I saw the ridicule my malformed brother elicited. I became aware of the evil that is prejudice, a form of injustice."

"On this occasion, we cannot remain silent in the face of the EFF’s [i.e. Malema's] pretentiousness to know more about the history and politics of Zimbabwe than the Zimbabweans themselves. Even more, the EFF has the audacity to dare teach Zimbabweans, even our head of state about the land question in our country."

"Mazzotti and Phillips are no choir boys and you [i.e. Malema] must be aware of it."

"I make a challenge to him today, if you believe what you say around the police not doing their job and being at war with you, I challenge you, Mr Malema, to give up your security detail that is provided to you by the state – you are the only opposition leader who has a SAPS security detail – I challenge you today, to give up your security detail. ... If you are calling on the public to attack police officers, then I think that is a disgrace that you yourself would be sitting with police protection, and expect people to attack the very people that you are relying on to be safe. And I think it is hypocrisy of the highest order."

"When an individual or a political party tables a motion in a meeting or the National Assembly and the motion wins the day by an overwhelming majority, what is the reason for attacking those who voted against it? Is this not intolerance? It is clear that if the EFF won elections, those who voted against it will be in serious trouble."

"It’s time we condemned black people’s racism. Malema prejudicing Trollip on skin colour is nothing but racism. He can make whatever political decision but race is no justification for differentiation in this context."

"My blackness gets questioned by other blacks when I disagree with Julius Malema. I didn't know that my identity as a black man depended on whether I agree with a man who is a communist, gave us Zuma, bankrupted Limpopo and uses race politics to poison the minds of our youth."

"I'm going to say something that I know I will be attacked [for]. We mismanaged the Julius Malema phenomenon. … We were quick to expel people that we should have spoken to them. … If you check the knock-on effect of the members that left us to join the EFF, that's exactly what we have lost in terms of voter participation. People didn't leave the ANC for the opposition, they left for a far left movement or a movement that felt the ANC was not strong enough. … Our incapability to manage internal differences, unfortunately, affected us. For me how we mismanaged those internal differences remains the key part that led us to lose power in those two metros."

"Donald Trump is not saying anything we have not heard from white people. ... I still have to meet a white person who support expropriation of land without compensation. So why are you shocked? ... I don't have time for nonsense, I expected this. And more, backlash is going to come. If South Africans are not ready to expropriate the land because they are scared of sanctions, they are scared of backlash, then don't vote for the EFF. Because you vote for us, we are going to expropriate land. And Donald Trump will come for us, and Britain will come for us, and EU will come for us. ...for everything good comes the pain before. If you are not prepared South Africa to take the pain, then forget about the land. ... We know that the first response will be killing. They will kill us for that. There is a group of white rightwingers who are being trained by Jews in Pretoria to be snipers. ... So we know that death is the first price that we are prepared to pay. The second price we are prepared to pay for this land is poverty. They will close taps. But if there is a conviction, ... and not sloganeering and public opinions, then we must be prepared for everything. It is a war. We must be prepared for Donald Trump and all of them, we are not scared of them. ... There is no white genocide here, it is an absolute rubbish. ... There is black genocide in the USA. They are killing black people in the USA. There is black genocide here in South Africa. Black people are being killed all the time. ... We are not going to be distracted by anyone. Only death will stop us, not Trump, not poverty, not sanctions. ... We know the consequences of what we are asking for. ... So Afriforum is the embassy of the USA. If you want issues to reach USA, then go to Afriforum. Then you shall get a proper response. ... We are not scared of Afriforum."

"The statement by Donald Trump is offensive and undermines our sovereignty, and is a reminder that our reliance on foreign aid and foreign direct investment surrenders us to the will of imperialist[s] who use money to dictate the economic and policy direction of Africa. We want to make it categorically clear to the president of the USA that we are going to expropriate land without compensation and pursue legislative measures to do so and no threat will stop us. His misinterpretation of the expropriation act which is a mild and cosmetic intervention is an assessment of a measure which is going to be pursued through the amendment of our constitution as South Africans and there is nothing he can do to undermine our independence. The EFF reiterates its position that we must build state capacity, build a strong agricultural and industrial nation which will not depend on the West, and intensify trade relations with progressive nations such as China, Russia and nations within BRICS who do not use foreign policy as an instrument to impose their will or bully other nations into submission."

"How do you say you must expropriate land and give people title deeds? Our people ... won't eat title deed. Here is a paper called title deed, yet you remain poverty stricken, and here is a man with money, who says to me: Give me that paper, I give you the money to eat now. They will take the money. You are setting our people up for failure when you talk title deeds. ... Our people are going to use those title deeds as surety, and they will not be in a position to pay their debt. ... So they are going to give you the land, and come to buy it from you, close to nothing. ... RDP houses are being rented out. The owners of the RDP houses went to squat somewhere."

"That man's credentials were supposed to be withdrawn. There are lots of protocol channels that are established for those types of concerns. He could have utilized those channels to go raise his concerns. But to create such atmosphere for our country, to create such doubt and smear our country in a manner he did, and he still has not come out to apologize. ... If there were guns that were given to Russia, it was a good thing. I would have done the same as a president of the Republic. ... Russia must be given a practical support, because when we needed one they didn't give us a non-alignment position, they didn't give us this neutral nonsense position, they gave us arms."

"Russians have not done anything wrong to anyone. You have a problem, go and talk to NATO. It is the one that provoked Russia and Russia it is well within its right to defend itself. So the Russian foreign minister was at home. ... So, we are happy that they saw it befitting to respect us and to come to us as a way of saying we respect you and we want to give you a some form of an explanation as to what is really happening in our country, and all of that. We can't say the same about this one of Treasury of the USA, who was coming to steal our minerals and our wildlife. I don't know what she was doing in those game farms and all of that, and the Reserve Bank, and she came here to monitor their puppet if it's following the instructions of surrendering the sovereignty of South Africa. So, America can never be welcomed here in South Africa and the African continent because we now when they come here, they are coming to check what more can we steal and finish off this continent. So, she was even going to Mpumalanga to go and run some symposiums or something on just transitions, and how renewables work. You can see that she was preparing to indoctrinate our people to abandon coal so that they can enjoy to build their economies with our coal. ... So, she was not welcomed here."

"Comrades, we want to make sure that BRICS is strengthened, and BRICS is an alternative to Europe and America. We are with president Putin, and we want to say to president Putin, it is not us South Africans who refused you from coming into the country, it is Ramaphosa, the coward Ramaphosa, who could not guarantee that we will not arrest Putin. We are Putin and Putin is us, and we will never support imperialism against president Putin."

"Julius Malema is a devotee of the Goebbels/Stalin/Mao rulebook on propaganda which preaches if you tell a lie enough times, people will eventually believe it. Witness the EFF leader’s racist ranting about who should own South Africa’s land [...] stirring murderous thoughts in revolutionary breasts. But Malema’s self-righteous belief that he can force expropriation of legally owned land has been made once too often."

"Sophie Mokoena: The Pan-African Parliament, there has been a contestation Mr Malema, on the powers and the function of the Pan-African Parliament but also whether it is effective enough to deal with issues of governance on the continent. Malema: Well, that's what we are calling for as Pan-African Parliament, that we must have legislative powers, that we must have the capacity to play an oversight role on the executives in the continent, hold them accountable, and we can only do that if countries ratify the protocols which will allow this parliament to become a fully legislative continental body which will hold executives accountable. A lot of presidents aren't comfortable with that because they do not accept being held accountable, and those are some of the people who thrive on violation of human rights, dictatorship and stealing the government money and resources of the countries without being held accountable. They do that with impunity because they know that they control and run those countries as if they are personal properties, but with a continental body like PAP being given legislative powers to hold executives accountable, they will no longer be in a position to do all the shenanigans they are able to get away with now."