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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
Desperate hope: I think that is a reasonably accurate description of what I felt when I arrived back in Port Elizabeth on Friday, the second of February, this year. I am very specific about the date because it is one which I, and the rest of South Africa, have every reason to remember. As my plane touched down at two p.m. at Port Elizabeth's small airport, President de Klerk was standing in Parliament in Cape Town, five hundred miles away, making the speech in which he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and all the other exiled black political movements, the lifting of all restrictions on the press, the suspension of the death penalty for political offenses, and, most dramatic of all, the imminent release of Nelson Mandela and other black political leaders. If you had told me three months earlier that the government would do all of this in one fell swoop, I would have shaken my head and smiled at your naive and totally unrealistic optimism. I am not exaggerating when I say that I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the newspapers that evening and the following day, and then listened to the radio broadcasts and watched the news on television. For us South Africans the speech on that Friday, and the events of the next few weeks, gave us a small taste of what it must have been like to look through that extraordinary wave of liberation that had swept across Eastern Europe in the preceding months.
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The press coined the phrase "freedom euphoria" to describe the atmosphere in the country in the first few weeks after that speech, and that is certainly what it felt like. It was an extraordinary time. In the course of the next three months I saw my country try to turn its back on the past and move, very uncertainly and very confusedly, toward a new identity. At first people had a justifiable measure of skepticism about the sincerity of the government. I certainly was skeptical, and I said so in no uncertain terms. I have to eat my words now. I think most people now will agree with Nelson Mandela that President de Klerk and his closest associates appear to be sincere. They appear to mean what they say when they say they are genuine in their desire and determination to build a truly democratic South Africa.
I have started my talk with this bit of political history because it helps me to focus on a perception of my work that I find very frustrating. It is a perception which has led to me being labeled in a very narrow sense a "political playwright." Because of the interest in South Africa and what has taken place there in the past few months, during which I have been here in America involved in the production of my plays, I've had more than my fair share of encounters with the press. Some variant of a certain type of question keeps coming up. I'll give you a few of the main variations: "Haven't de Klerk and Nelson Mandela put you out of business, Mr. Fugard?" That's one. "Aren't your plays now out of date?" "What are you going to do for subject matter when South Africa's apartheid system is in fact abolished?"
