aid officials and the un are saying up to 6 million people in yemen are being denied desperately—needed aid because houthi rebels are blocking it. the houthis, supported by iran, have been fighting the government backed by saudi arabia, the us and uk for five years. china's leader has made a public appearance to highlight the government's efforts to combat the coronavirus. speaking to medical workers, xi jinping called for "more decisive measures" to combat the outbreak. at least 1,000 people have died so far, 42,000 cases have been confirmed. the us state of new hampshire is in the spotlight as voters get ready for tuesday's primary election. analysts see this as a vital moment for former vice—presidentjoe biden, and some of the other democratic candidates, to boost theirflagging campaigns to become the party's nominee to fight donald trump for the presidency.

it is about liz30am, you are pretty much up—to—date. now on bbc news, stephen sackur speaks to south african actor john kani on hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. for a generation of black south african artists who came of age in the apartheid era, art and activism were intertwined. the liberation struggle was their life force. but now? well, a quarter of a century after mandela became president, things are more complicated. my guest is a giant of south african theatre. john kani's career spans five decades of acting and writing. he's been in hollywood blockbusters and is currently starring in his own west end play. so how hard is it to tell south africa's post—apartheid story?

john kani, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much. right now, here in london's west end, you have your own play on. kunene and the king. yes, kunene. i saw it last night and it's great, but, it strikes me that it is full of ambivalence and doubt about today's south africa. is that a right way of seeing it? yes, indeed, it's a critical review of the 25 years of our democracy from two perspectives.

what would a black person say the 25 years have meant, how would the black person merger — the changes better or worse to his or against his own advantage? and then you get a white south african who's lived the same time, and then, what do they think has been the new south africa? what does this democracy mean? so what i was trying to do was to find these two people who have lived through most of their lives in the apartheid time and they are now evaluating where they are. they begin like poles apart into what they think has happened. and i guess one of the points of this play is that these two individuals, the ageing white actor and the black man who is a senior nurse and comes to the home of the white man to offer him end—of—life care, basically. yes. the point is that in today's south africa, in the ordinary run of life, these two individuals

would never cross paths. it's only because of the particular circumstance of the terminal illness that life forces them together. absolutely. i mean, in any given situation, the elderly people still harbour the memories of the past. it's the new generation that sometimes is incredibly unaware of what's going on, what had happened, or even how they got to where we are. so these two would not normally come into this kind of close contact to a point of living together. you wrote this play and you clearly put a great deal of thought into it. to many outsiders, not in south africa today, it is perhaps shocking to see a white man who's not an out and out xenophobe or racist, but a white man who was brought up under the apartheid system, who still harbours such profoundly racist and also ignorant views about black people. is that your perception of many

white south africans today? actually, more than being racist, it's ignorance, and the unwillingness to adapt to change, and the way south africa was structured with this segregation of residential areas, that there was soweto on one side, and then there's the city part and the suburbs. so these people would not normally interact. they would meet at the factory because they work in the company. at five o'clock, the black man, or black person, has to travel 12—15—20 kilometres to their residential areas in the township. so in the evenings, really, south africa becomes black and white. and that's not really changing in your view? look, it's not, and you have to try as much as you can and break the berlin wall, that has circled around each black community and white community.

oh, there is a crossover, lots of black affluent people who've made a little bit of money, are buying houses in the what, so—called former white areas. but that's still a tiny drop in the ocean because there's over a million people living within soweto alone. and you talk about that geographical dislocation, you talk about the ignorance, i am fascinated that you put it in the context also of culture. because this play, it's almost a play within a play because it's very much a reflection on king lear and shakespeare, and what it means both to the ageing white actor, but also what shakespeare reaches in the black man as well. some might see shakespeare as white man's culture and that for you as a black south african, perhaps, there was a temptation when you were first were exposed to shakespeare, to dismiss him as part of a cultural imperialism that had no relevance in your life, but it's your message that shakespeare can't be put

into pigeonholes like that. of course, you see, i was born in port elizabeth. port elizabeth! therefore... you're elizabethan! i'm elizabethan! laughter and that the 1820 settlers, the british, when they first landed, they landed in my town and the first responsibility was to educate the native so that the native could be able to serve them in whatever form or way. so in my primary education in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, was english. we were taught to speak english with the english, the queen's accent. there was an affinity and a love for shakespeare, a love for through bantu education which was dim, which was de—educating and indoctrinating. the only relief was when you'd get a shakespeare play which was prescribed

by the department for education. so in that we could imagine. and also that the african is a descendant of great kingdoms. so that is a relevance in shakespeare when you look at what he writes about or what our lives and what we have been. and that comes through so clearly in the way you have depicted the use of shakespeare in your play kunene and the king because i want us to both look now at a clip of the play in which jack, the white ageing and dying actor is encouraging kunene who's there to nurse him, to recall the shakespeare he learned at school. let's have a look at this. when i was in high school, one of our set works wasjulius caesar. oh, i liked that play. i did it a couple of years ago, the title role. we used to walk around the schoolyard reciting some of the words in the play. speaks in xhosa.

i love mark antony‘s speech! speaks in xhosa. is that "friends, romans, countrymen? " yes, i'm sorry, i forgot to tell you! we studied the play in isixhosa! so there you go, that's julius caesar in isixhosa! isixhosa, yes! laughter. like jack, i can't do the click, but i do love that clip and it speaks to something about the universality of shakespeare. the delight that your character was taking in the words, the language and the themes of shakespeare. and i guess that's one of the messages of this play, that there is a common humanity in shakespeare that finds people, however big the divide between them. you know, when mandela was on robben island, an indian guy who was one of the prisoners smuggled the complete works of shakespeare covered outside with the hindu hymn book.

so when the warden who is white saw the hindu hymn book, they didn't want to corrupt themselves by learning anything about the hindi, so they passed it through. so then every of the senior political prisoners read the play and they each had to choose which play they liked and what actually moved them. nelson mandela chose "cowards die many times before their death, but the brave taste it only but once". govan mbeki chose "0nce more to the bridge". so this is what circulated on robben island. it became the most powerful document that people could read. my uncle was on robben island. he said he read twelfth night and did not understand what the hell was going on. laughs it is fascinating for me to think of those political prisoners still reading their shakespeare and finding so much of relevance in it. but i want to take you back long before ‘91i, the release of mandela, liberation from the

apartheid's regime. i want to take you back to being a young man in the ‘50s and then in the ‘60s as you chose acting as your career. it was an extraordinary difficult time for yourfamily. your family suffered a great deal under the apartheid regime. why did you want to be an actor? actually i wanted to be a lawyer but then exactly when i was accepted to go and study at the university, my uncle was arrested and sent to robben island and my dad looked at me and said, i'm sorry. i know you wanted to go to university, i don't have the money. and there were i! of us at home. and so i realised that what i would do, i will immediately get a job, put some money together and then go back to university, but it was then in 1965 that i bumped into a group of actors who were doing some dramatic little plays, amateurs, but they were working with a white dude that didn't know that. i thought, these guys are meeting at the place so we're going to go there, they were doing a play,

i couldn't pronounce it correctly, antigohneh, it was antigone by sophocles. so i walked in and there was a white guy and i was black. and i questioned, why are these guys working with a white person? what's going to happen? and i was introduced to this guy by one of the seven players. this is athol fugard, athol, this isjohn kani. and that was the beginning. and athol fugard of course was one of the great radical resistance playwrights. a white man who was, in a sense, telling the black man's story in apartheid south africa, and you and he and collaborators established a tradition of theatre which won big audiences throughout the world, also lead to a huge amount of trouble for you including imprisonment. of course! laughter i win the tony award on broadway so we are so excited and i asked my brother, what's happening in south africa? he says, no, it's one line.

two south africans win a prestigious award in america. actually, it was the afrikaans newspapers that said two south african actors. that time we were not south africans, we're just black people. i arrive in south africa and we're performing in a small town and suddenly the police circled the audience and they've got guns out and i was taken with winston ntshona, late now, from the stage in costume and we were detained, and in the car, driving to the nearest big town where we were going to be entered into and detained, we stopped in the middle of the road and the white man driving said, stop, so they pulled the car out. the white guy comes back and says, shoot him. so, they said, come. so i opened the door. i've never felt so at peace with myself. i said, if this is the day, what a wonderful day for me to die for what i believe in.

we go to the front of the car and he takes his gun out and look at the lights, there's a horse lying on the road with the pelvis crushed, apparently struck by a truck that didn't stop. so he was asking me to help these guys to pull the horse out. so the shoot ‘him' was shoot ‘it‘. laughs right, you survived that although you did spend a couple of weeks in prison. in the mid—1980s, there was an another extraordinary, horrible incident where you were brutally attacked and ultimately, you lost an eye. yes. it's very hard to see in this studio but one of your eyes is a prosthetic. yes. it was 1982, i got a message from the editor of the world newspaper, very radical newspaper. mr percy qoboza, there's the click again, he said to me, disappear, i've got information, go, they're looking for us. so i said, what's going on? there were about 20 people to be assassinated at a particular

thursday of that week. those names included bishop tutu, winnie mandela, stanley kahn who was a jewish guy working in the community, myself, and i've forgotten quite a number of names. so i disappeared. so it was fine, and then that week went by and i forgot about it. and i was driving home to see my father with my wife and there were lights behind me, just a little bright. and i come to a t—junction and i'm going to turn right. waiting for the car to clear, it went straight in front of the car and rammed the car, and one rammed at the back and the windows burst, with hammers breaking it, pulled me out, and in another 15—20 seconds, i heard them saying, "he's dead, we can go". so i passed out. and went straight into surgery with i! stab wounds, six on my face, on the back of my head. now, my family's looking looking for me, they can't find me. up and down the five floors and until one sister, nurse, says, he's in another ward

because the police came back to look for him. my goodness. these stories are incredible. as you tell them, i appreciate the level of danger and risk that you have to endure, as an actor with a real political message in the ‘70s and ‘80s. i just wonder how you feel today about the south africa you live in. do you feel a sense of disappointment with what south africa has become in the 25 years since liberation from apartheid? not disappointment. a little feeling that we could have done more, by now. but i understand we've done a lot. it is a leap, to take two warring countries that were governed by hate, suspicion and fear of each other, and create a community or a society that is willing to work together towards a better south africa. and with dispensation, what it would mean, and the lack of resources within the entire

country to meet the enormous needs — and the demands, that we inherited from the apartheid government, we inherited from the colonial government — which i put the english in the brackets as well, so now, to try to create a south africa. there's an extraordinary line going back to kunene and the king that really struck me, where kunene says to the white actor, jack, he says, "you voted for mandela in ‘94 in the hope that he would protect the white man..." from the anger of black people. yeah, exactly. and he says, "i voted for mandela for a better future. the truth is, you got your protection from the black man, but i didn't get my better future." yes. that, that does — you wrote that, and that does sound to me like you feel the 25 years of anc rule have not delivered what you had hoped for.

when i write, i do a sort of representative sort of position of the majority of black people. i cannot speak about the individual. because the individual might not represent the larger issues of my country. yes, there are people who are still in the position where they don't see what 25 years has meant to them. and there has been a patience during the five years of nelson mandela, and during the nine years of thabo mbeki. now from these other following years, there has been a sort of... a giving up, that things will ever change, or we need to do something about it. the zuma years? yes, the zuma years. let us be honest, the zuma years and all the talk of endemic corruption, the "state capture" that has been revealed in recent years, the fact that south africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, that in terms of housing, access to education...

education, health, infrastructure, water, electricity... so many south africans have not seen the benefit. yes, because we waited for 25 years. we have been expecting for these changes to take place. they are, but the pace is so slow, or not meeting the true aspirations of the people. butjohn kani, to what extent do you think that one can still see the reasons for that through the prism of the race divide and racial inequality? is that still at the heart of south africa's problem? the situation in south africa, yes, the majority of south africans begin to see south africa as a non—racial, democratic, non—sexist government, and established by a constitution that the world envies, with our democratic sort of chapter nine institutions that are the pillars of our democracy and justice. the separation of power between the judiciary and the state.

those things are the good things about south africa. yes, the crime. because now we opened our borders, now we opened our society to everybody, in fact, now we have, we have been asked to be part of the g22 overnight, to be partners and players in the global economy, when we are actually 70% a third world country, and only 25% so—called first world. so our challenges are enormous. yes, we are one of the most... i don't know this stats, to call ourselves "the most unequal society," because i havejust come back from america and i can still see the areas where black people live and hispanic, sort of, the minority people — i've been in london now since 1973. the property in the streets is alarming to me... no doubt. ..in a country like england. south africa is not the only country wrestling

with inequality and divisions. that's exactly what i'm trying to say. i get that. interesting that you say you've just come back from america. many people watching this from around the world will think your face is familiar, notjust from your work in theatre but also from some blockbuster movies. perhaps best known of late, and certainly a sensationally successful movie, was black panther. let us just look at a clip of you playing the role of... king t'chaka. thank you, king t'chaka. the father of the black panther. who is actually deceased, but comes back in a vision to his son, to advise his son on how best to operate as king of this mythical african nation of... called wa kanda. ..wakanda. let's have a look. tell me how to best protect wakanda. i want to be a great king, baba. just like you.

you're going to struggle. so you need to surround yourself with people you trust. you're a good man, with a good heart. and it's hard for a good man to be king. black panther is a very interesting phenomenon. it's one of the most successful movies of all time, of course, part of the marvel superhero series. and it was made by a black director with a largely black cast. yes. it raises a question in my mind. you've been going to the united states for many years, since the ‘70s, as an actor. do you think there is a much more open environment for black actors, black directors, than there was a0 years ago? we've just seen the golden globe awards, there was hardly a black person who went up, instead of presenting. that's true. we've just seen the bafta awards. it was an all—white affair, as if there are no black people working in the industry at all. it's just so disappointing that as we move into this fantastic

century, and that whereby we think we should have achieved some kind of sort of normalisation of all industries — for me, the problem is within the judging panels, they have not actually dealt with their own prejudices and their own fears and it manifests itself in the choices they make. just a final thought, then. because i was very intrigued, after ‘94 and mandela and liberation from apartheid, you said "for me as an actor, this is a form of extra liberation, because i no longer have this need, constantly, to do things which are seen to be relevant," i.e. relevant to the resistance struggle. it freed you, artistically? absolutely, but when i tell a story of my life in my country, i cannot neglect and not see the reality that surrounds and that makes me who i am. so when i do that, ijust want to tell a story of two men who have to be trapped in a small space because they need each other, and they both share a wonderful

love for shakespeare, but one is dying, one is looking after the other, and they need each other, and during that process, you reveal the true fears of this emerging so—called non—racial society. and it doesn't have a happy ending, but it has an ending where the humanity of both is acknowledged. as all my life, it's humanity. all my life, is to find that part in you that is human, that i could touch, and we could see me as another human being and we could take both our responsibilities as human beings and give that as a heritage, as an inheritance, to the next generation. we can't leave them with a country or money, but we can give them a boon to both black and white, and that would create a better generation for the future. that is a great thought upon which to end.

john kani, thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you, my good friend! hello. sunday was very much all about the windy weather, thanks to ciara. monday things took a turn for the more wintry, and for today, well, we're left with a combination of the two really. strong chilly winds, gales for some, and some wintry showers feeding in. there is ciara now, sitting across scandinavia. but we've still got lots of isobars on our charts, still noticeable winds and the showers getting blown in with the colder air sitting across us, are likely to be wintry.

just follow the arrows back across the atlantic, and you can see basically that air spilling out of greenland, all the way down from the poles. so a cold start to tuesday and, where we have the wintry showers, there will be the risk of ice around for the first few hours of the day, at least. there will be a lot of sunshine away from the showers. but some of the showers are going to feed in thick and fast and that will mea accumulations of snow, maybe even as far south as the moors of the south—west, across parts of shropshire the mountains of north wales, and the winds still very gusty too. so that will mean blizzards and the possibility of drifting snow. so some dangerous conditions to be found across particularly the northern half of the uk and it is cold. factor in the wind, it will feel a little bit chillier than these highs ofjust 6—8 degrees would imply. through the evening and overnight, things change just subtly. the wind will ease a little but still plenty of showers feeding into the northern half of the uk.

to the south, largely clear skies, again, temperatures in the towns and cities dipping down a degree or so above freezing. but in rural areas there will be a frost. so again, especially where we have had showers, the risk of ice first thing on wednesday. wednesday the winds are a little light right the way across the uk but still a threat of some showers in the north. perhaps a few outbreaks of rain further south. still quite gusty winds but nothing in comparison to sunday, monday and tuesday. but you can probablyjust see it creeping in there, to the south—west of the uk, we have another area of low pressure waiting to come wing its way across us, on thursday. so for thursday, we are back into another spell of strong winds as this low winds its way in from the atlantic, and then, hot on its heels, looks like there will be another one pushing in through friday. perhaps a little break in the weather first thing on friday but again it is setting us up for what looks like will be a potentially even a stormy weekend ahead.

so the weather still set to bring us some challenges, i think, in the next few days but for today, it's a cold wind and wintry showers to look out for.

this is the briefing — i'm sally bundock. our top story: as over a thousand deaths are confirmed in china — the world health organization holds a special meeting to combat coronavirus. campaigning for crucial votes — democratic presidential candidates blitz the new hamsphire state ahead of the first primary election. the un says up to six million people in yemen are being denied desperately needed aid because rebels are stopping its passage. arguments over the very distribution of this life—saving aid millions of yemenis rely on. if this is not resolved soon, more lives could be lost. despite the virus outbreak, the singapore airshow takes off today.