Athol Fugard
Appearances
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Oh, that's very important. You really are touching on one of the most... One of the major factors in the psychology of the white South African is the operation, the presence of, the genesis of, the hoped-for elimination of guilt. Major, major factor. God knows, I think that... I mean, I lived with that as one of the most potent factors in my psychology. As I've said before, 53 years old now.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I must admit that as I'm getting older now, I'm getting a bit tired of being guilty, of feeling guilty. And I'm beginning to ask myself just how guilty am I? Haven't I in fact laid a lot of those guilts on myself? Am I as guilty as I thought I was? And, well, let me just leave it at that. Let me just say that I'm in the process of really addressing the question of my guilt.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
And I think that possibly a lot of my writing in the, some of my writing in the future might be an examination of that fact.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
True guilt, the admission of true guilt, is very important and can only be productive. To act out of false guilt is stupid and pointless.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Very interesting. You are absolutely right. I mean, I would go along with what you have just said 100%. It's very interesting actually to sort of examine in what respects racism in the two countries, racism in South Africa and America, are similar and dissimilar.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
the way racism in South Africa, because it is institutionalized, because it is in a sense the system, it is built into the system, the way in a sense it frees the individual of having to, you know what I mean is, South Africa has never produced a lynch party. You get my point? The lynch mob is something unknown in South Africa for the simple reason our system does it for us.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Our system hangs them. We don't have to get together as a mob and go out after the black man.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I suppose it's a question of my continued existence as a writer. I just couldn't see myself writing about any other place or any other time. I have on occasions in the past described myself as a regional writer, not meaning to be falsely modest or anything like that, but a regional writer in the sense I think that Faulkner was a regional writer in America and my region is South Africa.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I would never leave South Africa. I'd like to believe I would never leave South Africa. But in making that decision, I mean, I sort of commit my wife to it as well. I haven't quite resolved that one for myself yet.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I think I've become so used to living with that danger, with the danger of censorship. And in some ways, the situation today is a lot easier than it was in the past. I mean, I had to contend with a South Africa that was much more authoritarian in terms of its control over the arts than is the case today.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
where the government has attempted to persuade the outside world that it's moving in a liberal direction by allowing certain things to take place in theatre and in the arts generally, which wasn't the case many years ago. I do not feel constrained. I've learned how to live with that.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Yes, there is a terrible – there is the danger of a terrible sort of snobbery along those lines, you know, that if you haven't been banned or if your work hasn't been censored or let's put it even crudely, if you haven't been to jail at least once – Or if you haven't been raided by the security police and searched in the early hours of the morning, you haven't actually earned your credentials.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Unfortunately, yes, I think a little bit of that does operate back home.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Well, it obviously does have that. I mean, I, for example, I heard a story about a South African woman who had had very, very strong traditional South African attitudes and who for some reason or the other had been at Yale when I was doing Master Harold, who had come along and seen the play and who had been so affected by that production and who had in fact undergone a change of heart.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Now, I have heard of quite a few cases like that in terms of responses to mine and other works of art, other novels and things like that from South Africa. So one has got to reckon with the fact that apparently art can be as profoundly effective as that in terms of people.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Oh, yes. Well, firstly, I mean, just for Zakes and myself to get together as two actors and to go up onto a stage, that had never happened before in South Africa, that a black man and a white man had appeared on a stage, and a black actor or a white actor had appeared on a stage at the same time. We were the first in that regard, and all sorts of complications were attendant on that stage.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I mean, in travelling around the country when we eventually took Blood Knot to different cities. Zakes had to travel third class because he had no other choice. I travelled first class. Life was very complicated. Zakes, on a point of principle, refused to carry his reference book. He wanted to make a political statement in his personal life.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I knew that if we didn't have that book around with us, that we'd be in trouble. Zakes would be in jail and the show couldn't go on. So I carried the book for Zakes and whenever the police stopped us, I presented it and pretended that Zakes was working for me, things like that. Yes, there have been lots of complications along those lines.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
No, you're quite right. Well, no, you've learned to play those games as part of your survival mechanism in South Africa. I mean, you know, many, many times in order to bail Zakes and myself out of a tight spot, for example, with the police. I would put on a heavy Afrikaner act and talk to the policeman as if I was a good Afrikaner and Zakes was my boy, my employee.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
And Zakes knew that I was doing it in order to, you know, to keep the two of us out of jail.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Well, Serpent Players were a group I worked with in my hometown of Port Elizabeth. And Port Elizabeth has always been a difficult area for me because the authorities there have consistently refused to allow me to go into the black ghetto areas, into the black townships. So in order to work with Serpent Players, we had to find a sort of neutral territory area.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
halfway between their black world and my white world, and in fact in one of the twilight zones in Port Elizabeth. And that is where we would get together and rehearse and meet. And I was faced with these sort of... rather an unhappy situation where sometimes I would direct a play and not be able to attend performances of it.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Yes, that did happen. Tragically, regrettably, a moment of... a cauterising, traumatic moment of shame in my life that I still live with, that was there at a point in my childhood coming out of... I can remember the day, a spasm of bewilderment and confusion. I can't remember what had upset me so much that day, but...
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I turned on the one person I had in my life, the one true friend I had, and he was a black man, and he worked for my family, he worked for my mother as a waiter in this little tea room we had. I spat in Sam's face. And the moment I had done it, I knew what I had done. A second after I had done it, I knew that I had most probably done one of the truly ugly things of my entire life.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Even though I was only 13 years old, I knew that it was going to be very, very hard for me to ever equal the ugliness of what I had done. Because, I mean, I had sullied, I had dirtied. One of the most beautiful things I had in my life was that friendship. And I've lived with that. I lived with that shame and still do live with the shame of that act. And when it came to... to writing the play.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I didn't write the play just for that reason in an attempt to finally deal with that moment. I'd been trying to write about Sam and another man that worked for the family as well, also as a waiter, a man called Willie. I'd been trying to write about Sam and Willie for a long time in my life just to celebrate them because they were two very, very beautiful human beings. And
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Very instrumental, very important in me finally starting on a process of emancipation from the prejudices of my country, of the traditional South African way of life. I just wanted to celebrate those two men. And when I finally put the little boy in there with him, I realized that I potentially had an opportunity to do both that and also deal with this unbelievably ugly thing that I had done.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
And in writing the play, I thought for a long time that My craft as a playwright would stand me in good stead in that I would not necessarily have to sink so low as to actually have up there on stage a moment when the white boy spat in a black man's face.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
But the deeper I worked myself into the play and the more I developed the play and wrote it, the more I realized that there was just no avoiding that moment.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Yes. I mean, I knew it was... The process of discovering that it was evil and unjust, that it maimed and mutilated people, destroyed them, was something that happened, you know, more or less from the time I spat in Sam's face. That was... But the full extent, the sort of...
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
The moment of certainty, the moment when I realized the extent of what that system was doing, came when I, for a variety of reasons, took on a job in Johannesburg, which... was to be the clerk of a court, of a criminal court that sent, that tried black people for offenses in terms of the passbook that they are compelled by law to carry.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
And it's when I sat in that courtroom five days a week for a period of about six months and watched a black man or woman and sometimes a child being disposed of at the rate of one every three minutes, being sent off to jail, when I saw that tidal wave of humanity being processed by this diabolical machine,
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
that the full extent of the of the of what apartheid meant and does and was doing dawned on me it was brought home to me now that was one of the if I can talk about spitting in Sam's face as being the traumatic personal moment that was the traumatic social moment that was a moment in terms of my political conscience
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
Yes, yes. That is in fact the period when my very first published play was written. I still think of it as an apprenticeship work and it precedes The Blood Knot, a play called No Good Friday. It was also the first play. It marks the first meeting with Zakes Mokai, who is in The Blood Knot with me.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
The thing that you have to live with constantly in South Africa as a white South African who opposes the system is that even in opposing the system, even in doing what you can by way of writing plays or protesting or doing this, your daily life is still rotten with compromise. And you're involved in that very, very dangerous exercise of hoping that
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
that what you do at one level outweighs that, that the way you live, the fact that you live in a whites-only area among affluent white people, you hope that those compromises haven't irremediably stained or poisoned your life, that you somehow are still making some contribution towards an eventual decency in that society. It's a dangerous lifestyle.
Fresh Air
Remembering The South African Playwright Who Defied Apartheid
I mean, but there's no way of avoiding it other than to get out. And if I get out, how am I contributing to anything then? I still have got to believe that being inside that country, inside that society, even though I have to live with these compromises that somehow I still contribute more by being inside and doing my thing than I would be by going into voluntary or enforced exile.