Epilogue

During the early 1980s, Prime Minister (later State President) P. W. Botha introduced a series of limited reforms – the relaxation of some ‘petty apartheid’ laws, for example, and the creation of the tricameral parliament – aimed at modernizing apartheid while maintaining white minority control. Yet instead of stabilizing the system, these measures – seen by many as mere window-dressing – fuelled protest and internal resistance. Botha met the ensuing unrest with expanded police, military, and security forces. But apartheid as originally envisaged by its architects was to all intents and purposes already finished.

In the historic 1992 referendum, ordinary white voters were finally asked by President F. W. de Klerk to support a reform process ‘aimed at a new constitution through negotiation’.2 Annette Strauss, ‘The 1992 referendum in South Africa’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 2 (1993): 339. Despite opposition from right-wing Afrikaners, the overwhelming majority voted ‘yes’. And so their government resumed the uncertain process of reform that finally led to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Had white Afrikaners finally heeded Louw’s historic warning against ‘the last temptation: to believe that mere survival is preferable to survival in justice’?3 ‘die laaste versoeking: om te glo dat die blote voortbestaan verkieslik is bo die voortbestaan in geregtigheid’. Louw, ‘Liberale nasionalisme’, 462. Campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote in 1992, the National Party had placed an advertisement in which it pointed out that ‘only by negotiating from a position of strength’ was it possible to ‘secure a democratic constitution which would prevent domination, offer security to those who had much to lose, and protect the right to political, religious, and cultural freedom, property, language, values, savings, investments, and pension funds’.4 Strauss, ‘The 1992 referendum’, 346.

It is plausible that many of the white South Africans who voted ‘yes’ in the 1992 referendum did so primarily out of self-interest: to ensure that they remained in a position to shape the transition and secure the most favourable outcome for themselves. Individual motivations, however, were far from uniform. Lifelong National Party supporters may simply have trusted their party leaders as they had always done. Others may have seen no viable alternative, may have welcomed the end of isolation and wished that the nightmare of low-level civil war would end. Yet at least a small minority embraced the idea that apartheid had to be dismantled – however gradually – because it was morally indefensible.

Certainly, between 1948 and 1994, there was a perceptible shift in white and Afrikaner consciousness that helped pave the way for democratic reform. By the late 1960s, a distinction was being made between verligte (enlightened, progressive) and verkrampte (conservative, reactionary) Afrikaners, with the former generally younger and better educated, among whom exposure to liberal drama and literature was more likely. The efforts of directors like Schiess and Fourie – consistently working to expose Afrikaans audiences to European plays, among them Frisch and Dürrenmatt – can be seen as part of a broader current that contributed to this shift.

This book does not claim that the productions discussed had a direct and measurable impact on the political landscape – that, for example, members of the Armed Resistance Movement derived from Biedermann a rationalization of violence that inspired their own actions. Rather, in my readings of Frisch’s and Dürrenmatt’s plays, I have sought to show the sparks generated between them and the historical context of apartheid South Africa, sparks that invite reinterpretations of both.

Having sidestepped the cultural boycott and evaded the censors to play to the Afrikaner mainstream, Frisch’s and Dürrenmatt’s plays did not necessarily succeed in challenging their audiences. The very ambiguity that allowed them to flourish in South Africa may have prevented them from doing so. After all, in 1963, when Schiess wrote to Frisch about the success of the first Die Brandstigters, he argued that performing Swiss plays was an urgent necessity ‘because those who have eyes will see what is meant’.5 ‘denn jene, die Augen haben, werden sehen was gemeint ist’. Schiess to Frisch, circa 1963. It was a subtle challenge, and subtlety rarely unsettles those who have much to lose.

Those audiences consisted largely of people for whom not seeing carried psychological comfort and social reward. Speaking with me shortly before his death in 2021, the elderly Pieter Fourie remembered how every day in the turbulent final years of apartheid contained a growing threat. ‘And you must make your people aware of it, but they aren’t aware of it. They don’t want to be aware of it’, he says.6 ‘En jy moet jou mense bewus maak daarvan, maar hulle is nie bewus daarvan nie. Hulle wil nie daarvan bewus wees nie.’ Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020. In its attack on voluntary blindness, he saw Die Brandstigters as the perfect vehicle. ‘That was my goal for doing it. Eye-openers, eye-openers, eye-openers’, he says, thumping the table between us to accentuate each word. ‘If you can’t think, look. Try to understand it. And in the process, your eyes will be opened.’7 ‘Dit was die doel waarom ek dit gedoen het. Eye-openers, eye-openers, eye-openers. As jul nie kan dink nie, kyk. Probeer dit verstaan. En in die proses sal jou oë oopgaan.’ Ibid.

The notion that the intimately visceral experience of live theatre might indeed promote change in the thinking – and doing – of an individual was one persistently interrogated by Fugard, the playwright who had initially unequivocally supported the cultural boycott. In 1962, he wrote in his notebook:

Fugard’s reflections are inseparable from his often-agonising examination of the playwrights’ boycott he helped kindle. In particular, he grappled with the cost of compromising his personal convictions in order for his plays to be staged in the first place. Looking back from the late-life vantage point of eighty-eight, Fugard was still deeply conflicted about the decisions he had made. He remembers the cultural boycott as ‘a very difficult time’ during which ‘you felt guilty no matter what you did’:

Fugard eventually decided to stage his plays in front of segregated audiences, arguing that if he refused to do so, he would be silenced. ‘But that’s like banning myself’, he pointed out, ‘and that means doing Vorster’s job for him’.10 Sowden, ‘Atholl [sic.] Fugard explains’. Despite the constraints of apartheid censorship, Fugard’s plays went on to reach and profoundly affect the individuals who saw them. In challenging prevailing racial attitudes, fostering empathy across segregated audiences, and cultivating international awareness of South Africa’s oppressive policies, they exerted tangible influence in the real world. Shortly before his death, Fugard felt rather differently about the power of theatre than he had in 1962, pointing out that it gains its power from staging ‘the most fundamental arena for human change: where two individuals encounter each other’.11 Athol Fugard, conversation with the author, 17 July 2024.

Whether exposing bourgeois complacency in the face of impending disaster (Biedermann), probing the dangers of racial stereotyping (Andorra), staging a clash between communism and Christianity (Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi), or unsettling established views on sex and religion (Der Meteor), Frisch and Dürrenmatt’s plays staged such encounters between individuals, inviting white Afrikaans audiences to generate their own, new meanings. Yet for many, the possibility of seeing may have been foreclosed not by the plays themselves, but by the surrounding cultural insulation that rewarded blindness.

The story told here raises important questions about the effectiveness of cultural boycotts. In the South African context, those playwrights who persistently refused to grant performing rights in the hope of compelling the government to allow multiracial audiences overestimated the political impact of their actions. In practice, their refusals contributed to the very insularity that reinforced the complacency and outdated worldview of ordinary white South Africans, locking them for decades into the fever dream that was apartheid. There is a cautionary lesson here for contemporary efforts to isolate and punish what in the eyes of many are pariah states like Russia or Israel through cultural boycotts: while intended to signal moral outrage and mobilize political change, such measures risk reinforcing existing divisions and insularity, cementing audiences into entrenched world views rather than challenging them.

After all, as Fugard points out: ‘Without ideas, nothing’s going to happen.’12 Fugard, interview, 11 November 2020.