Copyright © 1981 by Athol Fugard
A Lesson from Aloes is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,
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TCG gratefully acknowledges public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in addition to the generous support of the following foundations and corporations: Alcoa Foundation; Ameritech Foundation; ARCO Foundation; AT&T Foundation; Beatrice Foundation; Center for Arts Criticism; Citicorp/Citibank; Common Wealth Fund; Consolidated Edison Company of New York; Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust; Dayton Hudson Foundation; Exxon Corporation; Ford Foundation; Japan—United States Friendship Commission; Jerome Foundation; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mobil Foundation; National Broadcasting Company; New York Community Trust; New York Times Company Foundation; Pew Charitable Trusts; Philip Morris Companies; Rockefeller Foundation; Scherman Foundation; Shell Oil Company Foundation; Shubert Foundation; Lila Wallace—Reader’s Digest Fund; Xerox Foundation.
A Lesson from Aloes was originally published in the United States
by Random House, Inc.
Frontis: Harris Yulin and James Earl Jones in the 1980 Yale Repertory
Theatre production, directed by Athol Fugard.
On the Cover: James Earl Jones, Maria Tucci and Harris Yulin. All
photographs © 1981 by Gerry Goodstein.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fugard, Athol.
A Lesson from Aloes.
I. Title.
PR9369.3.F8L4 1981 822 80-6040
eISBN 9781559360012
First TCG edition: September 1989
In celebration of
Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter
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