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Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Dennis Walder
As Fanon long ago observed, the colonial world is a world divided, a world cut in two, and nowhere more obviously than in South Africa (29). For Fugard, the task has been to cross the divide, a move which, like all serious transgression, involves difficulty, even danger, producing fear and guilt on one side, but also anger and resentment on the other. Modisane's view of the Sophiatown collaboration came to be echoed in some of the remarks about the New Brighton work made later by Kani and Ntshona, upset at the fact that
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In a company of four or five black men and one white man, working harmoniously on an equal basis . . . the outside onlooker immediately identifies the white man with the leadership of the group, irrespective of the part of honesty of the white man in the company. So black people will always be the rough material but not the finished product. . . . So people seeing this white man in the company of Serpent Phyers immediately assumed that he was the director of the group, the manager of the group, the founder of the group, which is not so. ("Art and Africans" 1413)
In earlier interviews Fugard's initiative, direction, and control are simply accepted: "You see, Athol taught us that we need our art, not propaganda," as Kani summed up in 1974. "Athol reminds us that the story is enough and the message will take care of itself" (Kani and Ntshona "Separate Fables"). But the near-total hegemony of the white minority created by apartheid has meant that white liberals and other dissidents such as Fugard are part of the structures of domination they oppose, although a distinction must be made between their various forms of protest, and the willing submission to the system of most whites over the years. It is understandable that they should be criticized.
Fugard's own view of the New Brighton phase has generally been positive, although immediately afterward he felt his energies had been "hijacked" (Notebooks 222), and he retreated to the privacy of writing plays like Dimetos (1975), an uncertain study of the potential for corruption of the isolated artist. It was in fact from this kind of privacy, after his return home from the London production of The Blood Knot in 1963, that he was first drawn into collaborative work by a New Brighton visitor, Norman Ntshinga, who had heard about the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg (and perhaps seen his black Godot, as well as The Blood Knot, both of which were performed on tour in New Brighton during the preceding twelve months). It was "the old, old request," Fugard confided to his notebook. "Actually it is hunger. A desperate hunger to do something that would make the hell of their daily existence meaningful." Ntshinga's presence made the white playwright realize that he had lost touch with the realities of his country; he felt "bitterly guilty," and thought his work (currently on People Are Living There) tainted with "self-indulgence" (81). The New Brighton men--Ntshinga's next visit brought George Mnci, Mulligan Mbiqwana, Simon Hanabe, and Michael Ngxokolo--wanted to create a local branch of Union Artists, and it was their persistence which finally persuaded Fugard to get involved. He found the drive and enthusiasm of the group as it developed--school teachers, a bus driver, a clerk, and women domestics by day, actors by night--quite "incredible"; they were more "responsible" than the Rehearsal Room group, whose initiative had been "sapped away" by the "patronage and 'help' of well-meaning whites" (96).
