Drama and politics in a state of emergency: Athol Fugard's 'My Children! My Africa!' - Athol Fugard Issue

Standing ovations are customarily directed toward playwrights and are usually reserved for opening nights. Subsequent standing ovations, if there are any, are typically directed toward the actors. Neither convention accounts for the impassioned standing ovations that nightly accompanied the first South African runs of My Children! My Africa!.(1) In a curious way these ovations were directed toward the audience itself: those applauding so enthusiastically were responding to what they saw to be an affirmation of their own social and political positions and values, which had come under increasing pressure through the 1980s.

Such ardent responses carried over into other areas of the play's initial reception. Though one or two critics struck discordant notes, South African reviews generally adopted the eulogizing manner evident in the concluding words of Stephen Gray's Introduction to his edition of My Children! My Africa!, where he writes of its being "so faithful to the stage in South Africa, so powerfully, undefeatably magnificent" (13). Such descriptions, and there were many,(2) portray the playwright in heroic guise--embattled, resolute, undaunted. That guise accords with the tenor of Fugard's own famous remark that the play was "between me and my country" (Gray Introduction 9). The playwright, the audience, and the reviewers all seemed to share in a ritual celebration of their own intrepid righteousness. In short, the play made them feel good about themselves.

Providing that satisfaction for the predominantly white, predominantly middle-class audiences of Johannesburg and Cape Town may not have been foremost in Fugard's mind in composing the play, which found other audiences and other receptions outside South Africa, it is nonetheless worth asking just what sort of social and cultural intervention is involved in a work that is said to be "between me and my country." The description gives the appearance of placing Fugard on one end of a communication process, with the entirety of South Africa on the other: he the sender, they the receiver. On closer inspection that turns out not to be the case. instead, one segment of South Africa is directly addressed in the play, and another is the object of the address. Put another way, what the audience so avidly enjoys is the experience of having Fugard tell off one segment of "my country" on behalf of another--themselves.

The reception accorded the play by those who felt Fugard to be speaking on their behalf stemmed from what they perceived to be the stance the play takes regarding issues and conflicts thrown up by the political and social context that had unfolded in the years between just before the temporal setting of the play, 1984, and the year in which it was first performed, 1989. The audience's own social composition obviously had a good deal to do with how they responded to that context and its representation in the play. Fugard's audience was drawn largely from more liberal circles of the English-speaking white segment of the South African middle class. For many years this group through its political and cultural spokespersons and institutions defined the boundaries of "legitimate" opposition to the South African government. A comparatively homogeneous social bloc, it dominated the English-language press, the historically white English-medium universities, the main opposition parliamentary party, and the principal cultural vehicles engaged in producing and circulating political and cultural work in English. It seems contradictory to speak of a social bloc which functions in opposition to the state as hegemonic; nevertheless, in the peculiar circumstances of South Africa, that is exactly what this group, in relation to the white English-speaking population generally, paradoxically was. Though outside the channels through which state power was directly imposed (which is not the same as saying it was absolved of all responsibility for the apartheid policies adopted by the state), this bloc shaped and delimited for the bulk of the white English-speaking middle class the terms in which opposition to state power could be conducted, determining what were acceptable and what were unacceptable forms of opposition.

Nadine Gordimer's public break with South African liberalism in 1974 was one of many challenges to the hegemonic status of this social bloc. What made the incident particularly dramatic was precisely that Gordimer was a prominent cultural figure, so much so that it required no less a person than Alan Paton to reply on behalf of the liberal position (see Clingman 145-46, 245n). Before her break, liberal sway over English-language culture in South Africa may have seemed nearly seamless to its adherents. Now its fissures were becoming increasingly visible. The rise of the Black Consciousness Movement in the later 1960s and 1970s and the events and aftermath of June 1976 accelerated the process which brought liberal hegemony under pressure. But the decisive moment at which liberalism found itself in retreat was the founding of the United Democratic Front in 1983. Created initially to oppose the proposed new constitution of P. W. Botha's government, with its token inclusion of "coloured" and Indian South Africans and its deliberate exclusion of Africans, the UDF attracted to its ranks scores of white, middle-class anti-government intellectuals and activists. These recruits to the mass struggle for liberation abandoned Whatever ties they might have had to liberal hegemony and its emphasis on parliamentary opposition to apartheid, identifying instead with the social and political values expressed in the Freedom Charter, the democratic, non-racial politics of the still-banned African National Congress, and the extra-parliamentary mass politics of the UDF. Though there were important divisions within the ranks of what came to be called "progressive" whites, these had more to do with the inherently problematic character of united-front or popular-front politics than with underlying principles. Progressive whites were united in their commitment to the political aspirations of the broad mass of South Africans and drew their sense of purpose and their sense of strength from that commitment.