Paul Sibisi was born in 1948 at Cato Manor, popularly known as Umkhumbane, in Durban, South Africa. Umkhumbane gained historical fame for its residents’ acts of defiance and resistance to the apartheid government. While initially Sibisi chose to depict everyday scenes of urban life, through linocut and woodcut, from the 1980s he increasingly used these mediums in a politically-engaged way to comment on the inequity of life under apartheid.

This woodcut of 1983 appears at one level a simple, if stylistically bold, depiction of two men playing marbles. Yet the hard stare of the baseball cap-wearing player at his opponent who grasps his wrist as he goes to pick up the marbles, suggests that there is more at stake in this particular game than there might at first appear.