"Master Harold" ... and the boys: Athol Fugard and the Psychopathology of Apartheid

"Master Harold" ... and the boys: Athol Fugard and the Psychopathology of Apartheid ERROL DURBACH In this play, dredged outofAthol Fugard's painful memories of a South African adolescence, at least one event stands out in joyous recollection: the boy's exhilarating, liberating, and ultimately transcendent experience of flying a kite made out of tomato-box slats, brown paper, discarded stockings, and string. From the scraps and leavings of the depressingly mundane, the boy intuits the meaning ofa soul-life; and he responds to the experience as a "miracle." I "Why did you make that kite, Sam?" (p. 29) he asks of the black servant whose gift it was - but the answer is not given until much later in the play. Nor can Hally recollect the reason for Sam's failure to share in the experience of high-flying delight: HALLY . .. You left me after that, didn't you? You explained how to get it down, we tied it to the bench so that Icould sit and watch it, and you went away. I wanted you to stay, you know. I was a little scared of having to look after it by myself. SAM (Quietly) I had work to do, Hally. (p. 29) In the final moments of the play Sam provides the simple explanation: the kite had been a symbolic gift to console the child against the degrading shame of having to cope with a drunken and crippled father - an attempt to raise his eyes from the ground of humiliation: That's not the way a boy grows up to be a man! .. . But the one person who should have been teaching you what that means was the cause of your shame. If you really want to know, that's why I made you that kite. I wanted you to look up, be proud of something, of yourself. .. (p. 58) The second question has an answer more readily understood by one familiar with apattheid's so-called "petty" operations: 506 ERROL DURBACH I couldn't sit down there and stay with you. It was a "Whites Only" bench. You were too young, too excited to notice then. But not anymore. If you're not careful . .. Master Harold . .. you're going to be sitting up there by yourself for a long time to come, and there won't be a kite in the sky. (P.59) This, in essence, is the psychopathology of apartheid. Growing up to be a "man" within a system that deliberately sets out to humiliate black people, even to the point of relegating them to separate benches, entails the danger of habitual indifference to the everyday details that shape black/white relationships and, finally, pervert them. It is not merely that racial prejudice is legislated in South Africa. It insinuates itself into every social sphere of existence., until the very language of ordinary human discourse begins to reflect the policy that makes black men subservient to the power exercised by white children. Hally, the seventeen-year-old white boy whose affectionately diminutive name is an index of his social immaturity, is "Master Harold" in the context of attitudes fostered by apartheid. And the black man who is his mentor and surrogate father is the "boy" - in all but compassion, humanity, and moral intelligence. This, finally, is the only definition that the South African system can conceive of in the relationship of White to Black; and Hally, with the facility of one habituated to such power play, saves face and forestalls criticism by rapidly realigning the components of friendship into the socio-political patterns of mastery and servitude. Like quicksilver, he shifts from intimate familiarity with his black companions, to patronising condescension to his social inferiors, to an appalling exercise ofpower over the powerless "boys" simply by choosing to play the role of "baas": Sam! Willie! (Grabs his ruler and gives WILL~E a vicious whack on the bum) How the hell am I supposed to concentrate with the two of you behaving like bloody children! [...] Get back to your work. You too, Sam. (His ruler) Do you want another one, Willie? (SAM and WILLIE return to their work. HALLY uses the opportunity to escape from his unsuccessful...