Introduction: Fugard, women, and politics - Athol Fugard Issue

Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa! opens during a formal debate between Thami and Isabel at Thami's township school. In his concluding statement Thami argues that women cannot do the same jobs as men because they are not the equals of men physically and psychologically, their proper role in the family and society is "totally different to that of a man's," and therefore "education of the little ladies [must take] these facts into consideration." He appeals to his black schoolmates on the basis of tradition, arguing that sexual exploitation and the need for women's liberation are the foreign ideas of "the so-called Western Civilization that has meant only misery to Africa and its people" (3). Isabel replies that the Western civilization "so scornfully rejected" by Thami would do well to learn from traditional African society, but that "Africa no longer lives in the past," one does not need muscles "to operate the computers that control today's world," and with sexual differences go strengths as well as weaknesses. She concludes that "The argument against equality for women, in education or any other field, based on alleged 'differences' between the two sexes, is an argument that can very easily be used against any other 'different' group. It is an argument based on prejudice, not fact" (5).

Stage directions tell us that Thami's position "is outrageous and he knows it and enjoys it" (2). But he properly makes as strong a case as he can for the position he represents. In debate, consciousness is raised when a position is well expressed and defended, and exposed to sharp attacks on it. Thami's teacher, Mr. M, is pleased that his students overcome their loyalty to Thami and vote for the position represented by the visiting white student, Isabel. One assumes this is because Mr. M. believes Isabel's position on its merits should prevail.

That also seems to be Fugard's belief. In an interview in 1992 with Lynn Freed, Fugard expressed his admiration for the extraordinary women of South Africa, going back to Olive Schreiner, who was an activist for women's rights, through the anti-apartheid campaigner Albertina Sisulu and the human-rights advocate Helen Suzman, to the Black Sash--women standing with black sashes draped over their shoulders, keeping "the flame of decency alive in the darkest years of apartheid."

I think in the new South Africa, women are going to have an infinitely more creative role Young white women--I've met them, and there's no way that they are going to take from their peers and from their equals the nonsense that their fathers and their uncles are handing out. And the same is true in terms of black South Africans, African, Colored and Indian, whatever you'd like to think of--since those Soweto boycotts, gender has not been a significant factor.

And hand in hand with . . . the breaking down of race, has got to be the gender barrier. It has been there as viciously in black society as it has been in white. I know some of my black friends outdo my white friends in male chauvinism. But I think the people at the top of the political movements realize . . . women have got to be recognized as an equal force. ("Fugard's Treaty" H23)

Fugard acknowledges that his life has been "sustained by women," the first of whom was his mother, "an Afrikaner, who I don't think passed Standard Four in the little Karroo village where she grew up, could barely sign her name. But a woman of such moral probity!" He adds that "Whatever sort of human being I am now in terms of political convictions and attitudes to things like people of different races, I owe to the dialogue I had with my mother" ("Fugard's Treaty" H23).

One finds a number of vital roles for women in Fugard's plays: Hester in Hello and Goodbye, Milly in People Are Living There, Lena in Boesman and Lena, Frieda in Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act, Elsa and Helen in The Road to Mecca, and even the down-to-earth Praskovya in A Place with the Pigs. "For some reason I don't understand," he told Mel Gussow, "I lodge the affirmative note, the ostensible act of courage, with the woman" (90). Over twenty years ago he jotted in his Notebooks that he had come to "A sudden and clear realisation at the table of how, almost exclusively, 'woman'--a woman--has been the vehicle for what I have tried to say about survival and defiance--Milly, Hester, Lena . . . and even Frieda in a way" (198). Lena is perhaps the most impressive among these, a "coloured" woman (to use the South African word for a person of mixed race) who, along with Boesman, struck Fugard "as being archetypal South Africans." Gussow notes that Fugard "was able to transform his impressions into a play when he realized that except for their color and their station Boesman and Lena could be a version of Athol and Sheila." And he quotes Fugard saying, "It's an examination of a relationship between a man and a woman in which the man is a bully and a chauvinist. . . . I think my wife has been on the receiving end of a lot of that sort of greed and selfishness. We've got past that. I'm a feminist now--and the play is dedicated to Sheila" (70).