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SOUTH AFRICA'S PLAGUE: ONE VIEW OF THE BLOOD KNOT Two BROTHERS,MoRRIS AND ZACHARIAH PIETERSEN" are living in a oneroomed shack in Korsten, an African location in Port Elizabeth. One brother is black: the other light enough to pass as a white man; their world is a room in South Africa. And yet, despite the setting and the pigmentation of the play's two characters, The Blood Knot, is not merely a dramatisation of the evils of apartheid: of course the play is firmly embedded in a particular and specific environment, but Athol Fugard has transcended the immediate and topical issues of political and racial injustice by writing a play that has universal resonances. This, to me, is the greatness of The Blood Knot: it speaks both to South Africa and to Everyman. The play's universality, however, does not weaken or disable it as a commentary upon contemporary South Africa; indeed both the play and its author are deeply engaged with that world: in fact, The Blood Knot can be seen as an allegory of politics in South Africa; and Fugard himself, though abhorring apartheid, has publicly stated his int~ntion of continuing to live in the country of his birth. In an article in Black Orpheus Lewis Nkosi has expressed his disappointment at the 'documentary' quality of much South African fiction; he has complained that too much of this literature is only journalism; that the characters and themes of these stories are oversimplified and the complexities and ambiguities of the human situation -of any human situation-are ignored by writers in South Africa. Patently, however, The Blood Knot is an exception to Nkosi's generalisation : it is a triumphant proof that the creative writer can lift his eyes above his immediate environment and place apartheid in a wider context. Fugard's eyes are not closed: it is simply that the playwright's protest against racial injustice is only one strand in a very complex play. Morris and Zachariah, then, are not typical or representative South Africans: they are, first and foremost, men-two human being involved in a complicated relationship that is made more dramatic and tense-more public, as well-by the undertones of colour prejudice. Fugard himself has spoken very clearly about this problem-about the relationship between Art and Politics, Theatre and Nationalism, between specifically The Blood Knot and apartheid. In his reply to an interviewer's question about a writer's committment, he said that the moment I start to function as a writer on this level (i.e. as a political pamphleteer), I think flatly, I think superficially-the 331 332 MODERN DRAMA February rnagic goes out ... the moment I get on a social level I function flatly, superficially. And he went on to say that the seeds of his plays were not a wish simply to protest against South African injustices, but rather an image, a picture of one particular human being. Another playwright involved in a 'protest' movement, W. B. Yeats, made a similar point sixty years ago: I am a Nationalist.... But if some external necessity had forced me to write nothing but drama with an obviously patriotic intention, instead of letting Iny work shape itself under the casual impulses of dreams and early thoughts, I would have lost, in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any theme. For both these playwrights, then, their starting-point was an image: Cathleen ni Houlihan, a eulogy of Irish Nationalism, began in Yeats's dream of the firelight in an ordinary peasant cottage; The Blood Knot, Fugard tells us, began with the image of a man walking alone along a road and "he was a Coloured man. He was possibly even myself, confused, going somewhere." This was the man who was to become Morris Pietersen. This image of the lonely traveler, which inspired the writing of The Blood Knot, is a useful one: not only because it recurs several times in the play, but also because it is really a symbol of Fugard's deepest concern as a playwright-the theme of human loneliness. (It may be' pertinent to mention here that in both Fugard's published plays, The...

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