Crossing Boundaries: The Genesis of the Township Plays

Abstract

On 18 June 1954, Port Elizabeth Evening Post published an article by an unknown young local freelance writer recently returned from working his way around world on tramp steamer. The article, entitled Drama of P.E.'s Night School For Adults, attempted to explain to its white South African readers why four nights week, month after month and year after year, over 500 African men and women of all ages attend night school New black township on outskirts of city. To engage Post's readers with subject they obviously knew nothing about, writer simply and effectively dramatized stories of some of these men and women of New Brighton, particular, Philip and Lena. For men like Philip, learning to read and write meant keeping out of trouble, for instance by being able to read notices like Europeans Only. It also meant some alleviation of bewilderment and loneliness of urban life, for instance through enabling him to write letters home to his parents in kraal. For women like Lena, worried about having brought her children into a world of learning to read enabled her to share budding learning, well to buy an occasional tin of something special because she can follow directions on side. The author of this small attempt to convey something of lives and everyday experiences of his fellow South Africans across boundaries of race, class, and gender was twenty-two-year-old Athol Fugard. It sounds patronizing today, but article demonstrates how, from his earliest published writings, Fugard was concerned to acknowledge lives, indeed very existence, of those of his compatriots excluded one way or another from centers of privilege and power his society. Although this concern led him to go on and testify to experiences of lost and discarded whites from Hester and Johnny (in Hello and Goodbye) to Gideon Le Roux (in Playland), it has also involved bearing to experiences of black people, from correspondence student Willie Seopelo (in No-Good Friday) to rural migrant Sizwe dictating letter home (in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead), to--how prophetic name of her New Brighton predecessor--the desperate Lena (in Boesman and Lena), stripped even of consolations of motherhood and belonging township. As I have suggested elsewhere (Resituating), idea of bearing witness, which Fugard has used to describe his motivation since 1968, and which has subsequently been echoed by many critics (myself included) to legitimate his work, should not be accepted without question. Certainly it seems an appropriate idea to invoke humanist version of familiar Christian notion of offering oneself testimony to truth of what has been seen or experienced extreme situations. The writer as is type who increasingly appears annals of twentieth-century literature, representing writer's solidarity with doomed, deprived, victimized, under-privileged (Heaney xvi). But who really should bear witness situations of degradation, suffering, even death? Shouldn't victims speak for themselves? And if they cannot, who can legitimately speak for them? In other words, whose voices are heard, whose have been silenced? And how does passage of time change answers to these questions? The passage of time South Africa since Fugard first began his career has now at last produced sound of many voices, previously silenced, belittled, or degraded, demanding to be heard, ANC exile Barbara Masekela remarked historic speech delivered Grahamstown shortly after her return to country 1990. Indeed, battle is going on for space at center of culture for so long dominated by white minority. Masekela attacked English speakers for having been the most exclusive and resistant to genuine national influences, and associated elite, those who work financed cultural institutions, who have fax machines, telephones for instant interviews and time and resources to create, for enjoying a disproportionate access to national and international media, where their voice is often assumed to be our voice, simply because it is only one anyone has heard. …