Boycotting Apartheid

By William Steinberger, Dramaturg

Athol Fugard, who spent the early 1950s hitchhiking through Africa and working as a merchant seaman, began his theatre career in 1955 in Port Elizabeth. This was a time of large-scale protest against Apartheid, the legal system that governed South Africa after World War Two. Apartheid, masterminded by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, was grounded in an intractable definition of race, spatial segregation and exclusively White political participation.

The anti-Apartheid movement was at a high point domestically in the 1950s, with frequent bus boycotts. On January 7, 1957, for instance, a boycott began in Johannesburg and quickly spread. This boycott was prompted by a twenty percent increase in bus fare, though it was driven by general widespread frustration towards the government.

Many of these anti-Apartheid marchers ultimately received government banning orders. Under banning laws, individuals, organizations and publications could be fully outlawed; an individual’s rights to travel, speech and assembly were nulled. More than 2,000 people were banned between 1950 and 1990.

Still, the 1957 Johannesburg boycotters persisted. Azikwelwa – “we will not ride” – they chanted. Their protest lasted nearly six months. 70,000 South Africans participated. Finally the government relented, instituting a public subsidy, which in effect cancelled the fare increase.

But the sense of hope among the resistance was short lived. On March 21, 1960, police killed sixty-nine unarmed South African protesters in Sharpeville. This ushered in a time of unrelenting government violence towards non-whites, who were classified as “African” (Black Africans), “Coloured” (biracial) or “Asian” (Indian & Pakistani in heritage).

Fugard began writing A Lesson from Aloes in 1961, wrestling with Apartheid politics as they happened. It took him nearly 20 years to complete. As he writes in his 1980 introduction to the play, “During the next ten years I made several attempts to tell the story of Piet, Gladys and Steve. When the last of these miscarried in 1971 I thought I had finally abandoned the idea. Then, two years ago, and without any apparent external provocation, my memories of Piet, Gladys and Steve returned to me very obsessively and I started working on the play once again.”

Fugard completed A Lesson from Aloes in 1978 and it premiered that year at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, where he was living at the time. He carefully sets the play in 1963, a year at the apex of both his writer’s block and the government crackdown on protesters.

Fugard wrote the play for those who resisted at a time when their activism put them in harm’s way. Many opposition leaders were imprisoned at the time of the work’s premiere; South Africans would live under Apartheid until 1994.

Fugard returns to the idea of a “drought” several times in his notes for A Lesson from Aloes. Aloes, he says, are resilient to drought. They are, he writes in 1980, “distinguished above all else for their inordinate capacity for survival in the harshest of possible environments. In writing this play I have at one level tried to examine and question the possibility and nature of survival in a country for which ‘drought,’ with its harsh and relentless resonances, is a very apt metaphor.”