Widely regarded as one of the most significant dramatists of the twentieth century, Athol Fugard (1932—) was born in Middleburg, South Africa, to white parents (of English and Afrikaner [Dutch] heritage). His childhood years in Port Elizabeth in the Cape Province would prove to be fertile soil for many of his dramatic responses to the apartheid regime, which dictated racial relations in his native land. Fugard’s boyhood experiences filtered directly into a series commonly called “The Port Elizabeth Plays,” which include the semiautobiographical “MASTER HAROLD”... and the boys, as well as The Blood Knot (1960), Hello and Goodbye (1965), and Boesman and Lena (1969). In Fugard’s own words, MASTER HAROLD is a play to “exorcise [the] personal guilt” he felt for failing to challenge the inequalities of the oppressive system of apartheid as a youth (Fugard in Jacobus, p. 1464). The play centers on the comradery between a white teenager and black workers which suddenly explodes to reveal racism born of a lifetime under apartheid.
Nationhood and the beginning of racial separation. Racial tension in South Africa is not just a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon.
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