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Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Dennis Walder
Yet, as the impact of the township plays and their black casts at home and abroad has shown, Fugard was right. Their impact has varied, according to the abilities and experiences of those involved, the nature and extent of their collaboration, and its shifting relationship with the changing history of the country. In the two Sophiatown plays, the brash but vital inner-city mix of jazz and booze, humor, poverty, and religion which characterized the multi-tribal, pre-apartheid township can be felt even within these early plays' limited, naturalistic scope. And as a series of moderately successful revivals since 1974 has proved, they continue to exert a certain force. But by then, the narrower, more sterile experience of the postwar "model" apartheid township New Brighton, set up on the outskirts of the Port Elizabeth industrial complex for which its labor was required, and inhabited by a single tribe, the Xhosa, had--paradoxically--provided the setting for the freer, more urgent and creative kind of collaborative theatre represented by Sizwe Bansi and The Island. For Fugard this development was in part the result of the influence of the European avant-garde, especially of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski; but for John Kani and Winston Ntshona it had more to do with the surviving influence of indigenous African traditions of storytelling and response, revealed in plays like Witness Thamsanga's Buzani ku Bawo ("Ask Father"), a popular Xhosa play in which they took part under the direction of their history master at Newell High School, New Brighton.(2)
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The resulting synthesis of indigenous and Western traditions had a radical impact upon prevailing assumptions about the nature of theatre in South Africa, and its role in a situation of oppression. The achievement of the New Brighton plays can lead to an underestimation of the earlier work, written by an apprentice playwright engaged in his first encounters in the townships. The Sophiatown plays nevertheless reflected the aspirations, violence, and vitality of urban black people, offering a window into the world of the correspondence student, she-been queen, tsotsi (gangster), and rural migrant, for predominantly white, liberal audiences. They may now also be seen to have helped to legitimate everyday urban black experience--the experience of the majority of South Africans--as a subject, for blacks as well as whites.
Fugard's understanding of that experience was profoundly affected by the only job the hopeful young playwright could find at first in Johannesburg in 1958--as clerk in a "Native Commissioner's Court," where pass-law offenders were tried and jailed every few minutes. Few white South Africans knew, or cared to know, what went on in such places. His sense of the evils of apartheid was deepened into a lasting pessimism. Yet at the same time Pogrund introduced him to a remarkably talented group of people in Sophiatown, including Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, Ken Gampu, and, most important of all, an untrained bit-part film actor, Zakes Mokae. Fugard cast Mokae as a township thug in No-Good Friday, and then wrote the role of Blackie, Queenie's crippled and violent hanger-on in Nongogo, especially for him, and this, Fugard said, "was the start of one of the really rich working relationships of my life" (Benson "Keeping" 78). Fugard and Mokae actually met through the nonracial artists' equity association, the Union of South African Artists--or Union Artists, as it became when it acquired Dorkay House, the ex-clothing factory where township talent was presented before mainly white audiences in Johannesburg during the late 1950s. Johannesburg-born and bred, Mokae had attended St. Peter's Anglican school in Rosettenville, where he came to know the Superintendent, Father Trevor Huddleston, on whom Father Higgins in No-Good Friday was modeled, and who had formed a jazz band to which Mokae, an accomplished tenor saxophonist, belonged as a founder member (Hugh Masekela was another). The success of a farewell concert for the much-loved missionary ("Makhilipele," undaunted leader, they called him), in the Bantu Men's Social Centre in 1954, had stimulated the growing interest among white entrepreneurs in township culture, and shortly after the appearance of Fugard's township plays, Union Artists' enormously successful township opera King Kong led to a series of glossily packaged South African musicals such as Ipi Tombi touring abroad under white management.
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