The roles of prominent anti-apartheid fighters, trade unionists, journalists, religious leaders, writers – fictional and non-fictional – and artists have been important in the documentation of the public intellectual culture in South Africa. These are sets of people whose efforts and influences enhanced the achievement of a democratic South Africa. However, since the official end of apartheid in 1994, most South African critics have been those in academics. Artists, especially playwrights, have not received as much attention as they should. Also, when playwrights are studied, attention is mostly directed towards anti-apartheid playwrights, and most of these studies are not focused on positioning them within the conceptual framework of the public intellectual. As a way of studying the effectiveness and ultimate worth of the transitional playwright, this paper seeks to engage in a qualitative interrogation of the works of South African playwright and cultural critic, Mike Van Graan by exploring his status as a public intellectual in the era after apartheid. To achieve this, the paper examines one of Van Graan’s plays, Some Mothers’ Sons (2005), and one online essay published in 2020 and shared on his social media pages: Facebook, and Twitter. The extension of this study to social media platforms will enable this paper to adopt a study of Van Graan’s literary and non-literary works and the reactions they have gathered.

著名的反种族隔离战士、工会成员、记者、宗教领袖、作家（虚构和非虚构）和艺术家在记录南非公共知识文化方面发挥了重要作用。这些人的努力和影响促进了民主南非的成就。然而，自 1994 年种族隔离正式结束以来，大多数南非批评者都是学术界人士。艺术家，尤其是剧作家，并没有得到应有的关注。此外，在研究剧作家时，注意力主要集中在反种族隔离剧作家身上，而这些研究大多没有将它们置于公共知识分子的概念框架内。作为研究过渡剧作家的效力和终极价值的一种方式，本文试图通过探索他在种族隔离后时代作为公共知识分子的地位，对南非剧作家和文化评论家 Mike Van Graan 的作品进行定性审问。为了实现这一点，本文考察了范格兰的一部戏剧，Some Mothers' Sons (2005)，以及一篇 2020 年发表并在他的社交媒体页面上分享的在线文章：Facebook 和 Twitter。将这项研究扩展到社交媒体平台将使本文能够对范格兰的文学和非文学作品及其收集的反应进行研究。