Athol Fugard Research Articles

Postcolonial Trauma in Athol Fugard’s the Train Driver

This paper examines postcolonial trauma in Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver. The study designates the core conceptual nuances of trauma and how it intensified in the course of the play. It draws on Fugard’s utilization of the dramatic incidents and the characters’ dialogues as mere incarnations of post-colonialism in South Africa where psychic trauma maturely develops and reaches its highest point. Hence, the study follows a textual-contextual interpretation of the play’s setting, characters, and dialogues which reflect the true essence of hegemonic post-colonialism in South Africa. These elements with the subject of the study’s methodology which applies a close reading of postcolonial trauma via pursuing a textual analysis of Fugard’s depiction of the South African native who suffered from severe apartheid. On that account, Dominick LaCapra’s concept of trauma will be polarized in the analysis for the sake of delving deep into the lurking impetus of the characters’ psychic trauma affected by social circumferences. Such circumferences will be analyzed as the regional setting in which the postcolonial encounter between the colonized and the colonizers takes place. In the long run, the play’s dialogues will be explored as the authentic exemplification of postcolonial trauma since the characters reveal their psychic trauma by dint of their dialogues.

Sizwe Bansi is Dead:

This essay examines the relationship between politics, performance, and identity by entering into dialogue with the play Sizwe Banzi is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. First staged in 1972, the play delves into questions of identity within apartheid South Africa, telling the story of Sizwe Banzi, a migrant worker who must adopt a new identity to secure a work permit in Port Elizabeth. After tracing the play’s origins, the essay provides a detailed analysis of its plot. This is followed by a brief theological exploration of the play, considering its enduring relevance in contemporary identity discussions, both in South Africa and globally.

Metadramatic Features in Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972)

Metadramatic Features in Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972)

Sports and Dance in Reconciliation of Binary Oppositions: “Master Harold” ... and the boys (1982) and “Invictus” (2009)

The purpose of this study is to critically examine the play Master Harold"… and the boys (1982) and the film “Invictus” (2009) with a focus on their role in reconciling the division between ‘other’ and ‘self’ through sports and dance. Grounded in the scope of postcolonial studies with an interdisciplinary approach, the study benefits from Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space and Gayatri Spivak’s interpretation of the Subaltern as its theoretical frame. The film “Invictus” (2009) is predicated upon the narrative of Nelson Mandela and his endeavour to forge unity among the populace of South Africa, facilitated by the national rugby team known as the Springboks. Within the confines of South Africa, the institutionalized racism known as apartheid had starkly delineated the white Afrikaners from the black populace, who were relegated to a status deemed inferior, devoid of equitable human rights. Athol Fugard’s theatrical piece, "Master Harold"… and the boys (1982), unfolds against the backdrop of 1950s South Africa, where apartheid holds sway, thereby fuelling the binary opposition between white and black, alongside the institutionalized animosity directed towards the latter. Nevertheless, the dynamic between Sam and Willie, two middle-aged black servants, and Hally, their young master, exhibits promise, as they engage in candid dialogue concerning life and ballroom dancing. Clint Eastwood’s cinematic interpretation and Fugard's play both illuminate interstitial spaces that destabilize the binary dichotomy of ‘self' and ‘other’ upon which racial divisions are predicated. The two productions demonstrate that these liminal spaces are cultivated through the mediums of sports and dance, subverting the delineations imposed by such systems and creating a shared national identity. The study concludes that through their ability to transcend barriers and create inclusive spaces, sport and dance serve as powerful tools in reshaping social dynamics.

Scars of a Colonial History

Central to virtually any indictment of South African literature, its historiography, or otherwise culturally and politically influenced modes of representation persist themes of social, political, and racial inequality. That is not to say that all South African cultural productions revolve around a centrifuge of racially focused social commentary; rather, that when historicizing a work of South African aesthetics such themes inevitably arise because of the nation’s colonial history and the Eurocentrism that have pervaded its modern socio-political foundations. When examining South African aesthetic/cultural representations (in this case, a literary text) it is thus crucial to properly locate the work in as full a historical context as possible. My research therefore aims to link South Africa’s history of colonization with the damaged race relations that ensued in the twentieth century as represented in a prominent work of South African theater: Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … And the Boys. My essay traverses the history of British and Dutch colonization in South Africa and seeks therein to register foundations for the Eurocentric, whitewashed ideologies which would eventually translate into official state policy in 1948 and which precipitated the broken race relations that Fugard’s semi-autobiographical play interrogates. I discuss Fugard’s depiction of white privilege while systematically linking such representations back to their colonial foundations, and ultimately assess Fugard’s play as a condemnation of white supremacy and as a plea for the recalibration of prejudiced racial hierarchies.

The representation of apartheid system of government in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Death

The research assessed “The Representation Apartheid System of Government in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Death”. The research employed Post-Colonial Theory for the study’s framework analysis and utilized qualitative method of data collections through Content-Analysis that make use of the play Sizwe Bansi is Dead couple with the adoption of textual technique process to dissect the play. Other sources of knowledge such as published books, journals and online materials were utilized as secondary data. The study adopted Purposive Sampling method to focus on the play while a thematic method was used to analyze information studied. The study found that the author Athol Fugard make use of multiple dramatic methods that include flashback technique, separation effect method, method of story-within-a-story, minor sets and props technique that were all compressed by utilizing small cast hence cost effective. The research therefore conclude that the play Sizwe Bansi is Death as authored by Athol Fugard is a political protest best applied through theatre and art ignoring violence as means to achieve political change in African environment. The play is considered a success as it has spread the message all over the world. To this effect, the study recommend that contemporary African writers should endeavor to adopt and utilize theatre art effectively as an avenue of exposing government policies that encourages racial segregation, ethno-religious discrimination that engender disharmony and disaccord among multi-ethnic and racial settings in Africa and Nigeria alike.

Resilience and Resistance in Athol Fugard’s Play No Good Friday

Athol Fugard, acclaimed as the greatest South African playwright in the English-speaking world, is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid. In his play No-Good Friday (1958) he presents the burning zeal of an incipient black revolutionary against the exploitation faced by the blacks. At the surface level, the play appears to be a mere representation of the conditions of the blacks; but at deeper levels, it records the helplessness of the blacks in the face of exploitation by their own fellow men during the conditions of the apartheid. Fugard presents the oppressive politics working on the life of the people of Sophia town in various forms by portraying the complex and evolving nature of submissiveness in the face of oppression and how the characters struggle to find a balance between survival and resistance. The play ultimately underscores the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of resistance in the face of oppressive systems.

The Paradox of Freedom and Fear in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

The history of South Africa is characterised by fear that stems from violent colonisation by Europeans who had their own interests and neglected the needs of the original inhabitants of the land. The descendants of the colonisers made matters worse with the introduction of apartheid, which saw the implementation of discriminatory policies that included the forced removals of black people from their own land. This article traces and interrogates the fight for freedom by black South Africans against apartheid, a fight that can be described as brutal and accompanied by fear. This fight is nuancedly represented by Athol Fugard in one of his plays, My Children! My Africa! (1989), in which he links fear with the quest for freedom. Applying postcolonial theory to the play, this article argues that Fugard’s representation of apartheid’s oppression of black people complicates understandings of the concept of freedom by making freedom and fear inseparable.

Shifting sands of the past and the present in drama of the New South Africa: Neil Coppen’s Tin Bucket Drum and Nadia Davids’ What Remains

The experimental pedigree of South African drama of the anti-apartheid period requires no introduction. This pedigree was established during the years of anti-apartheid playwriting of the 1970s and 80s when South Africa’s iniquitous politics of race relations was put under the spotlight on local and world stages. This was achieved through the work of playwrights such as Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa, Athol Fugard and Matsemela Manaka, among others. This paper focuses on the drama of the post-apartheid era to argue that three decades after the formal end of apartheid, some of the most recent plays from South Africa have adopted themes and styles that draw from an atavistic recourse to the stylistics and experimental drama of apartheid era protest plays to address new challenges which are steeped in continuing social injustice. The paper adopts the climatic metaphor of shifting sands to analyse how post-apartheid drama simultaneously crosses and integrates aesthetic borders to create innovative and complex narratives which bring together the craft of African storytelling theatre, dance and choreography that are in turn infused with multi-media as social commentary. The paper focuses on Neil Coppen’s Tin Bucket Drum and Nadia Davids’ What Remains as examples of the continuing provenance of experimental aesthetic border crossing in the drama of South Africa today. This aesthetic border crossing deploys new forms of multimedia as decentring social critique in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper showcases how Nadia Davids and Neil Coppen use the past and the present both literally and metaphorically to craft intriguing contemporary dramas in which incident and character come together as profound metaphors of the country’s on-going struggle to reconcile a troubled past with an imagined future.

Antigone’s return: When a once-told story is not enough

Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local iterations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his foresight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on the revelatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness.

Comic Interpreting in African Literatures

This article proposes a comparative approach that connects Anglophone and Francophone colonial contexts through an underlying dynamic that hinges on humor. Reading scenes from Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, it examines the fundamental assumptions that transmitters and receivers of messages make about their purpose and authority in an interpreting exercise. This is in order to show how those rules are belittled by interpreters in colonial or settler fiction, when their function is comic. Even so, the humor transcends the colonial encounter. Deliberately or through ignorance, the interpreters studied here create a form of cultural mediation that takes advantage of the disarray created by existing power differentials. They create a new narrative where appearances matter more than accuracy or fidelity and where “official” messages are subverted to the benefit of humor.

Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole

Reviewed by: Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole Carla Neuss Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond. By Catherine M. Cole. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Cloth: $85, Paper: $39.9. 304 pages. 18 illustrations. In her latest book, Catherine M. Cole turns to the role of dance in the ongoing wake of apartheid in South Africa. Situated within the failed promises of the post-apartheid era, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice centers dance performance by Black artists, an area of research that Cole notes is understudied within South African performance scholarship. In centering dance and live art, this book offers a new and compelling archive of performances that extends beyond the conventional, Eurocentric boundaries of theatre to consider how embodied and kinesthetic performance encounters express, challenge, and rewrite the postapartheid era. In bringing these performances to the fore, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice invites larger considerations of the role of dance, and nonverbal performance more broadly, in post- and decolonial contexts both within and beyond South Africa. Cole's introduction sets the stage for her analysis of specific South African practitioners and performances within the profound disillusionment that has followed the failed promises of Nelson Mandela's vision for a united "Rainbow Nation." The ongoing socioeconomic inequality and racial discrimination that characterizes Black South Africans' experience informs her readings of embodied performances that speak to the suspended progress of South Africa's twenty-eight-year democracy. Acknowledging that dance is a new field of analysis for her, Cole argues that this artistic medium offers potentialities untapped by contemporary South African theatre, which she describes as stuck in a "nostalgic trap" (7) of restaging "struggle classics" (8) produced during the apartheid era. Despite this critique of theatre, chapter 1 focuses on a play written by one of the foremost playwrights of the anti-apartheid struggle: Athol Fugard's oft-overlooked [End Page 99] Statements Before and After an Arrest under the Immorality Act, originally produced in 1972. Cole's evocative exegesis of the play's portrayal of a mixed-race couple conducting an illegal affair under apartheid's miscegenation laws demonstrates apartheid's coercive control of the body. This chapter usefully foregrounds the role of the body, which will come to define Cole's subsequent chapters on dance performance; a deeper engagement with the original production's use of blackface as a complicating factor in the play's racial politics, however, would have usefully presaged later chapters' troubling of white South African artists' attempts to perform allyship. Having established apartheid's embodied injustices as enacted through theatre, in chapter 2 Cole turns to contemporary artists of color Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, and Sello Pesa. In addressing the syncretic and entangled influences on their respective practices, Cole offers the lens of "delamination" as "a mode of deconstruction in which the material of the now… fractures in performance into separate layers," offering the "potential to separate valuable from toxic substances" (68). Cole's close reading of Mamela Nyamza's work, artistic genealogy, and intersectional positionality exemplifies this approach. As a Black, Christian lesbian trained in classical ballet, Nyamza is an artist who is navigating the conflicting impulses of liberation and stagnation that characterize South Africa's suspended revolution. In chapter 3 Cole more explicitly turns to questions of interculturalism in the work of Robyn Orlin and Brett Bailey, white South African artists who have garnered fame—and, at times, controversy—in Europe. Cole juxtaposes Orlin and Bailey's work with that of Indian-South African practitioner Jay Pather (who was also discussed in chapter 2) to unwind issues of cultural appropriation across all three artists' work. While pieces like Orlin's Daddy I've Seen This Piece Six Times Already and I Still Don't Know Why They're Hurting Each Other satirize the centering of the white artist-auteur, Cole argues that such pieces may inadvertently reify white supremacy. As an alternative, she positions Pather as having more successfully navigated intercultural aesthetics through his collaborative relationship with the Black performers of his dance company and his...

Disrupting Undocumentation: Municipal ID Cards against Passport Fetishism

In this article, I interpret municipal ID card programs as disruptions of nation-state practices of documentation and what I call undocumentation: requiring specific documentation in a wide variety of situations, while refusing to issue such documentation to people without legal residency. To understand municipal ID card programs as disruptions of these exclusionary practices, I analyze the relation between nation-states, people, and documents through close readings of two works of literature that dramatize the “fictive” nature of this relation: the dialogue on passports in Bertolt Brecht’s 1940 Refugee Conversations, and Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a 1972 play devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona that explores undocumentation during the infamous pass laws in apartheid South Africa. I argue that these works ironize the fetishization of documentation and undocumentation, which disguises the actual relations between people as relations between passports. I then argue that municipal ID card programs do not institute alternative forms of membership on a local level, or create sanctuaries that offer refuge from the secular world of power, but disrupt the monopolization and fetishization of the means of identification and documentation by nation-states, and reclaim these means for everyday use.

Literature, revolution and healing the society

Literature and revolution are motifs aimed at exploring the enormous contributions and roles played by the study of literature across Africa. This study is mostly centered on the dilemma tales of Ama Ata Aidoo‟s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Athol Fugard‟s Statement Plays (1972). The paper argues that the discipline is far above bibliolatry and it further examines the authority in which the discipline wields in the society. This preconceived power in the discipline is expressed through the study of themes and dramatic techniques as seen in the plays of the two playwrights from different regions of Africa exploring the socio-political wound that led to the reactions and concern of great writers and playwright like Athol Fugard and Ama Ata Aidoo. Fugard‟s Statement Plays (1972) especially the stapled parts appear to be neglected as a result of its complexities and dynamic socio-political situation that may be summarized as “apartheid”. The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) delineates on folk drama in modern theatre. It is a dramatic art of storytelling where by the theatre or environment is combined with eating and drinking, poetry reading and plays. It is the techniques and convention that matter most in this kind of drama where issues of morals are examined. This plays can also be classified as dilemma tale; a tale which poses a difficult questions of moral or legal significance on older and younger generation. The two plays therefore are a response to the various anger and attack of different sorts arising from the social and political upheavals in the society. For proper evaluation and explication of this research the theoretical framework adopted for this study is the post-colonial theory which makes the work more relevant and appropriate for the evaluation of the issues that transcends between socio-political and economic life of Africans and further reinstates that literature uses revolution to heal all kinds of debilitating wounds whether political, social or emotional.

Our skin is trouble: Racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’

The recent incident in Minneapolis, United States, where George Floyd, an African-American man, was manhandled by a police officer has brought about the resurgence of racial awareness as championed by the Black Lives Matter Movement. The concept of race has shaped the lives of so many generations and continues to do so in the 21st century. Racial segregation as well as the public hysteria on racism has had so much influence on societies and has led to discrimination and racial slurs across races. Using Critical Race Theory, this study examines racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’. The analysis of the discourse reveals racial tendencies in the description of the black race through white-black (Self/Other) binary (racial segregation), race-based discrimination and animal metaphors. The paper contributes to scholarship on racial discourses and foregrounds the function of language in depicting the racial orientation of characters in literary texts.

Editor's Note: Harold Pinter's Pandemic Aesthetics: Pinter, COVID, and Black Lives Matter

Editor's Note: Harold Pinter's Pandemic Aesthetics: Pinter, COVID, and Black Lives Matter

Making Theatre during COVID-19

ABSTRACT Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic prevents audiences and actors from interacting in what used to be the normal way of making and sharing productions. Actors, directors, and designers faced numerous challenges throughout rehearsals while creating “something-that-isn't-exactly-theatre” to livestream Athol Fugard's Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. Focused on an interracial affair obliterated by South Africa's apartheid laws, Fugard's drama eerily evokes dynamics in today's America: structural racism; government regulation of private behavior; the chasms of understanding—even those we love—across lines of race; all of which occurred against the backdrop of Breonna Taylor's killing in Louisville, the city where the actors and directors had first met and worked together. While most of these dynamics were familiar to us, the novel challenges of virtual work were not. However, by the end of rehearsals, tech, and two virtual performances we had learned to appreciate intrinsic attributes of this new form.

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERTEXUALITY AND ADAPTATIONS WITHIN THE DIASPORIC CONSTRUCT

Drastic socio/political and economic changes in the world have perhaps led to global mass migration, transcontinental transport or scattering of people away from their established or ancestral homeland. This obviously explains the vitality that has characterized the creative impetus of intertextuality and adaptation mechanics used by certain Nigerian diaspora dramatists over the years as group identity formation and social pattern of identity politics and cultural belonging in expressing universal human concerns. The question however is; has the adaptation of classical or historical plays to the dawn of modern play texts by Nigerian diaspora dramatists reinforced the Nigerian culture? The condition is foregrounded on the mind-set of most literary critics, who now seek to know where ‘home’ actually is, or what ‘rights’ and/or ‘entitlements’ an indigene-settler within the diasporic framework can celebrate in terms of human diversity or uniformity as they provide an insight into a world that is different from their own. It is this conceptual and cross platform reflections on themes and context within the diasporic construct of trans-textual adaptation, cultural citizenship vis-à-vis national or global idea of developing culture across borders that the paper attempted to interrogate. Using adaptation theory as its framework, the paper adopts a qualitative method of investigation. It is assumed that, the likes of Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, J.P. Clark, Femi Osofisan, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Athol Fugard, Efua Sutherland and a host of others had adapted foreign play texts in order to engender socio/political interrelatedness based on their diasporic experiences and worldviews. The paper, therefore, concludes that; Diaspora formations have actually influenced theatre practice in Nigeria nay Africa through play-texts adaptation paradigms as vehicles that can be supportive of constructing peaceful societies.

TRAUMA AND TESTIMONY IN ATHOL FUGARD’S PLAYLAND

The plays of Athol Fugard, one of the most influential contemporary South African playwrights, focus on ex-centric and marginal characters who strive to establish meaningful identities in the midst of absurdity imposed by the apartheid. Despite the fact that the apartheid, as a type of colonialism, defined whites and blacks as superior Others (colonizers) and subordi- nate others (colonized), Fugard’s plays tend to show that this system ruins all of its participants irrespective of their skin color. This paper analyses Playland, in which the conflict between a white and a black person is particularly prominent, through the characters of Gideon le Roux, a former white soldier who comes to the amusement park wishing to forget the murders from the war, and Martinus Zoeloe, the Playland’s black night watchman, who is haunted by his own trauma related to the murder of a white man he committed in his youth. Relying on the theo- retical concepts of trauma studies defined by Felman, Laub, Caruth and LaCapra, we will try to show how the protagonists’ perceptions of the self are largely determined by these traumatic events. The aim of the paper is to show how the confrontation of Martinus and Gideon leads to mutual testimony, which, according to the theory of trauma, is the only way to externalize trauma and rebuild the traumatized self as a dialogic construction. In the act of testimony, both Martinus and Gideon move from the position of colonial O/other to the position of the ʻother as a listener necessary to transform traumatized memories into a meaningful narrative. Despite the imposed happy ending, the oblivion that would bring the final healing of the protagonists is questionable, which alludes to the long-lasting consequences that the apartheid left in the years following its abolition.

Athol Fugard interviewed by Peter Davis

Athol Fugard interviewed by Peter Davis