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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
Thank you for this opportunity to be self-indulgent. I'm going to talk at a personal level about some of the problems I find myself dealing with as a playwright, and as a playwright from South Africa.
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At the beginning of this year I returned to South Africa, more specifically my home in Port Elizabeth--a little windswept industrial town on the eastern seaboard of the country--after a six-month stay in the United States, during which I had directed two of my plays: The Road to Mecca at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and a tryout in New York at the Perry Street Theatre of my latest play, My Children! My Africa! I was desperate to be back on South African soil again, as I always am after an extended absence from it. Returning home has always been a complex and emotional experience for me. I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death. I know it would mean the end of Athol Fugard the playwright, that any creative energies I have would wither away and die. Everything that I am, good and bad, as man and artist, I owe to that country. In fact, I sometimes think of my writing as an attempt on my side, hopelessly inadequate, to acknowledge, to pay back, something of the colossal debt that I owe to South Africa. I said once I think the most important thing a human being does with his life is how he loves in the course of it. The little or the lot that I know about loving was taught to me by South Africa and South Africans, and you can't have a more profound tie to any place.
In recent years my return to native soil, while losing nothing of its emotional complexity, has begun to Change subtly in terms of the mood in which I step out of the aircraft and take my first steps across the tarmac. In the past, particularly during the seventies, my returns were made with a very heavy heart. There seemed to be no end in sight to the nightmare of apartheid, that appalling scenario of oppression and injustice that is associated with my country. The change that has taken place in my returns to South Africa is that I step off the airplane with a much lighter heart.
The last half of the eighties was one of the most bewildering periods I have known in my country. On one hand, the policy of apartheid continued to brutalize millions of South Africans simply because of their black skins (in fact, this period saw some of the worst atrocities). On the other hand, in response to external, and most important of all, internal pressures, the whole edifice of apartheid was slowly starting to fall apart. I think a lot of people erroneously see the recent dramatic changes in South Africa as a response just to the external pressures that have come by way of sanctions and boycotts and everything else that the concerned and caring communities outside the country have brought to bear. Those did have an enormous influence on events. What is not always appreciated is that within South Africa itself there were pressures, not just from blacks in the form of active resistance, but increasingly from brave white South Africans who had begun to read the writing on the wall. These white South Africans recognized the total monstrous injustice of the system, and had started to talk, and lobby, and attempt to defy it.
I'll mention some examples of things that happened during the last half of the eighties, prior to the tremendous drama of this year. The Mixed Marriages Act was abolished--that was the odious piece of legislation which made it a criminal offense for people of different racial categories to be lovers. Also, the dreadful Immorality Act, as it was known, was abolished--a piece of legislation that provided the background to my play, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. Another piece of legislation that disappeared in the latter half of the eighties was that governing the odious passbook. All black men and women over the age of eighteen were forced to carry that awful little document, which controlled their lives. The passbook law was the background to another play of mine, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead.
I think that toward the end of the eighties the government was still involved in cosmetic work, trying to convince the outside world that changes were taking place, whereas the really big issues hadn't been addressed yet. But as part of the cosmetic attempts at cleaning up the South African image, the situation regarding the arts began to be relaxed. In the last few years there was no segregation in theatre. All the theatres in our country, the stages as well as the auditoriums, were completely open. You could mix your cast, and anybody who had the price of a ticket could sit down in one of those theatres and see the production. So all these factors taken together left me with a sense that something was trying to happen in South Africa. And whereas in the past I had always found myself returning and sounding like a prophet of doom, I was now going home with a measure of desperate hope. There appeared to be some justification for believing that I had been wrong in thinking and saying that white South Africa had run out of time.
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