Zakes Mokae, Tony Award Winning Actor Dies at 75

Zakes Mokae, apartheid activist and Tony Award winning actor for Master Harold...And The Boys died on Friday of complications from a stroke in Las Vegas at age 75.  The South African actor additionally appeared on Broadway in The Song of Jacob Zulu, Blood Knot, and A Lesson From Aloes.  His work was largely focused on bringing attention to the brutality of the apartheide. Mokae also suffered from Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and later a resident of Great Britain and the United States, Mokae emerged as a leading industry force alongside his creative collaborator, playwright Athol Furgard in the 1960s. The collaboration began in South Africa when they were both members of a drama collective. Their collaboration on The Blood Knot led to the first performance in South Africa wherein white and black performers appeared together on stage. It was later filmed for television starring Mokae and Matthew Broderick. Socially rebellious as it was, it launched both mens' careers internationally. Continuing the tradition of exploring the sociopolitical and psychological effects of racial separatism, the pair hereafter collaborated on such famed works as Boesman and Lena (Off-Broadway starring Ruby Dee and James Earl Jones), Master Harold...And The Boys (for which Mokae won the Tony for featured actor in 1982) and A Lesson From Aloes.

In 1993 Mokae received a second Tony nod for Featured Actor in a Play for his role as an imprisioned black man in The Song of Jacob Zulu by Tug Yourgrau.  As Mokae commented to the New York Times at the time: "If you're a black man in South Africa and you've never been in prison there's something wrong with you." 

"Tug hasn't been in prison a lot with black folks, so I had to talk about it with him," Mr. Mokae said. "It's true that when they count you at night they walk on your face with their boots. And they do it all night. All night, somebody's being beaten. Somebody's screaming. That stuff to me, it's real. You have to tell a white person, ‘That's what it is,' so that he gets it, the filth and the stink, the kind of poetry that comes out of that."

Mr. Mokae's films include "The Comedians," "Darling," "Cry Freedom" and "A Dry White Season."

Mokae moved to Great Britain in 1961 after being banned from South Africa after the Blood Knots' London premiere. He did not return until 1982 to witness his brother's execution by hanging, having been accused of murder.

He is survived by his wife, Madelyn, whom married in 1966, divorced in 1978 and remarried in 1985, his daughter Santlo Chontay Mokae, three grandchildren, and two sisters and two brothers in South Africa.