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INTRODUCTION

The first entry in my notebooks dealing with the people and events that would provide me with my main ideas and images for A Lesson from Aloes dates back to 1961. In February of that year I noted the following:

Party at Betty M.’s last night. Tolly, bespectacled and quiet-spoken leftist, communicating a mood of tired defeat. In his fifties. “I tell you, this I believe now. What they want, they must take for themselves. Just take it and forget about the whites or waiting for them to change.”

Opposed in this opinion by Piet V. . . . red-faced, big-hearted Afrikaner. “We must stand together man. Together! Together we can take on the whole world. They need us, Tolly, and we need them. Hell man, when I take my bus out Cadles way at five in the afternoon, I see them. I see them with their backs straight and proud walking home.” He was referring to the boycott of the local bus service by nonwhites. “It’s the people, Tolly! And they shall inherit the earth!”

Piet’s passion is English poetry. He quotes endlessly, relevantly and with feeling, the words sonorous and precise in his Afrikaans mouth. Byron, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Dylan Thomas.

“We come to bury Tolly

Not to praise him.”

Piet was born on a farm in the Alexandria district. “My people were God-fearing. We kneeled at night and our workers kneeled with us and prayed. There was no difference, man. I was brought up to respect and believe in the Christian principles. My friends were the little black children on the farm. Race relations didn’t exist for us.”

He tells the story of Soya, an African friend of his childhood, who returned to the district in the last stages of T.B. and died in the Settlers Hospital, Grahamstown. Both still young men. The hospital authorities phoned him and told him to collect the body.

“I wanted to bury him in a Christian manner. ‘Lord let not this dust ...’ But they were hard times, Tolly. There was a drought in the district. I was building a dairy. I tore down the roof to get wood for the coffin. When we buried him, his people said to me: ‘Inkosi, speak!’ I looked down at the coffin. All I could say was ‘There lies a good man.’ ... and then I walked away into the veld and had a bloody good cry.”

Piet is now a bus driver. He stood as a Coloured representative in the constituency that was at that time claimed to be the largest in the world ... from Bredasdorp in the Cape to Harding in Natal, and Calvinia in the North Western Cape. Incident that hurt him most was when he addressed a meeting in Korsten ... a Coloured area ... “Brothers and Sisters,” and they laughed at him. “Hell man, that hurt.”

Dennis B. his friend, Coloured schoolteacher, followed him around during the election campaign, organizing opposition to Piet. Dennis’s feeling was that if a Coloured could not represent Coloureds, they would rather have no rep. at all.

A Govt. stooge they both despised eventually got in. Dennis thought that Piet, in coming so close to the truth and than compromising it, was more dangerous than the Govt stooge who was obviously a fraud.

In the course of that year the following entries were also made.

May

Piet and his wife Gladys. Their simple little house in Algoa Park. She is English speaking and well educated by comparison with his few years at a farm school. Writes poetry, nothing published. When their house was searched recently by the Special Branch, they found her poems and read them all. This had a traumatic effect on her (rape?), and led to a nervous breakdown. Mentally disturbed for a number of years. Several visits to Fort England mental home in Grahamstown. The last time she had to be taken forcibly after P.’s cajoling, pleading and threats had failed to get her voluntarily into the ambulance.

By contrast, P.’s sober sanity. The feeling he gives that this is indestructible ... that you could destroy him but never drive him mad. She is highly strung, neurotic at her best, really unbalanced at her worse ... the refinements and sensitivities that go with this condition. A qualified shorthand typist but has seldom kept a job for longer than a month because of the recurrent delusion that any new appointment in the office where she is working is a Special Branch spy placed to keep an eye on her and Piet.

September

The ship carrying Steve Tobias away from South Africa on an Exit Permit (the one-way ticket into voluntary exile) was passing out at sea when I walked the dogs at nine tonight. A day of bad weather ... sudden squalls of wind and rain off the sea ... the authentic S’kop spring, tolerable because of the promise that tomorrow will be a good day. Even so, Lisa and I found a break in the weather for a marvelous walk with the dogs.

And so, Steve. His last story, two days ago in Korsten, of interrogation by the Special Branch. He is convinced they tried to drive him to suicide. After one spell of questioning they pushed him into a room and into a chair beside an open window ... six stories up. The policeman with him sat at least fifteen feet away ... smiling all the time. Every five minutes or so the door opened and a captain just stood there, laughing mockingly and gloatingly at him. For Steve a moment of total despair. He did actually contemplate suicide. My last meeting with him in his little house at Schauder Township. A number of elderly Coloured women were there, making us coffee and digging up the plants in the garden.

Steve: The little guaya tree?

Aunt Betty: No, he’s out. Down at Johnny’s place. I planted it there this afternoon.

The African man, Lucas, who came around to say goodbye and offered a ten-rand note. “Buy fruit for the children. They say it’s expensive in England.”

November

An image which defines Piet and a human predicament. Thinking back to the drought, he cries out, “I’m frightened of being useless!” The logos behind his humanity, his politics. He escaped the horror of his impotence on the parched, dying land, by a life of action among men. And then the second “drought” (suspected by all that he is an informer), and again alone, just himself, empty-handed and useless. Piet face-to-face with himself ... the absurdity of himself, alone.

“A man’s scenery is other men.”

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. A year later I went into rehearsals in Johannesburg with A Lesson from Aloes.

In thinking about the protracted history of this play as compared with the others I have written, I am conscious of one thing: the completion of a work has always depended on a correspondence, a relevance, between the external specifics of the play—the “story” as such—and my sense of myself at the time. In the case of A Lesson from Aloes this correspondence occurred significantly for the first time two years ago. Most of the reasons why this was the case are private, but there is one that I am prepared to try to articulate. Aloes are 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.

Athol Fugard

New Haven

2/2/80