Scott, am I not a man a brother?

A homage to SCOTT, written and directed by Morapeleng Molekoa and performed by Sibuyiselo “Sbuja” Dywili at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2026.

SCOTT began in response to a real incident in Cape Town in 2018. A white woman, her dog and her Black employee were involved in a car accident. The woman and her dog survived. Her employee, sitting at the back of the ‘bakkie’, did not.

In the play, Molekoa reverses it. Scott, the dog, dies. Sizwe, the gardener, survives.

That reversal asks an ugly question: why does it feel so believable that a dog could be given more care, dignity and protection than a Black person?

Sitting at the back of the ‘bakkie’ becomes more than a detail. It is an image of where people of colour have repeatedly been placed in South Africa: behind, beneath, serving, but never equal.

The title comes from the abolitionist image of an enslaved man asking, Am I not a man and a brother? Addressed to Scott, as if an equal, in desperation for dignity.

Apartheid is over. The chains are meant to be long gone.

I am not asking that we care less about animals.

I am asking why some of us are still being treated as though we belong at the back?