Wilma's 'My Children! My Africa!'

Once more, across the race and generation gaps

DAN ROTTENBERG

Back in the 1980s my two daughters separately attended two highly regarded Philadelphia high schools with radically different educational philosophies. At Girls High School, the guiding mantra was: “The world is a jungle, and we’re going to teach you to survive in it.” At Germantown Friends School, by contrast, it was: “The world is a jungle, and you’re going to improve it.”

The characters in Athol Fugard’s 1989 drama My Children! My Africa! communicate across a similar philosophical divide. To the dedicated black schoolmaster Mr. M. (Glynn Turman), knowledge is a tool to vanquish fear, and “Respect for my authority is my only teaching aid.” But before his eyes, his prize pupil, Thami (Yaegel Welch), is evolving into a black revolutionary.

To Isabel, a precocious and competitive white student (Meghan Heimbecker), exposure to Mr. M. and his rich African culture represents the ultimate intellectual stimulant; but to Thami, Mr. M. represents acceptance of the racist status quo. “Yours were lessons in whispering,” he tells his old mentor. “Now new people are teaching us to shout.” And since this story takes place not in Philadelphia but in apartheid South Africa in 1984, these conversations concern not abstract philosophical issues but matters of life and death.

The villains remain offstage

Fans of Athol Fugard will sense that we’re on familiar ground here— too familiar, for my taste. As in Fugard’s Master Harold….and the Boys (1982), once again we have a three-character cast consisting of two blacks and one white; once again the black world is represented by a mentor and his pupil; once again the sole white character is an adolescent who fancies himself/herself an avatar of a liberated new color-blind world; once again, the catalyst is the preparation for a forthcoming competition (in this case, a debate, engineered by Mr. M., in which Thami and Isabel will function as a team); once again, Fugard demonstrates how a racial caste system debases blacks and whites alike; and, once again, the real villains of the piece— the whites who perpetuate the oppression of South Africa’s black majority— are nowhere to be seen.

This is all well and good as far as it goes. And the actors in the current Wilma Theater production are uniformly excellent. (I found it a kick to see Glynn Turman, whom I last viewed as a sensitive teenager in the 1975 film Cooley High, cast now as the authority figure). The problem with My Children! My Africa! lies with Fugard’s talky script, which tends to get in the actors’ way and ultimately doesn’t go very far. There’s a lot more telling than showing in this play: We’re told, for example, that Thami and Isabel have become good friends before we’ve seen any evidence; we’re also told that friction is developing between Thami and Mr. M. before we’ve noticed it ourselves. Several times the characters engage in long monologues that require another actor to stand immobile for minutes on end, listening raptly without responding.

Beating a dead horse?

Beyond these technical dramatic concerns lie some larger substantive questions that Fugard’s script neglects to address. My Children! demonstrates clearly the ways in which injustice can fuel frustration, bitterness, rage and ultimately violence. But we are left to wonder: Why did Mr. M’s generation tolerate this injustice, while Thami’s generation rebelled against it? Why, for that matter, did two generations of Russians tolerate communism before a third generation threw it out? At what point, precisely, does injustice become intolerable in any society, and why? Fugard’s exposure of apartheid was indeed courageous and timely in 1989, but it today it smacks of beating a dead horse.

Fugard’s script suggests that injustice inevitably leads to violence. But given what we know about subsequent events in South Africa— not to mention the non-violent overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe— one can ask: Why was the downfall of apartheid followed not by bloody recriminations and vengeance, but by a spirit of inquiry and forgiveness exemplified by farsighted leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu? Where did they get such strength of character, if not from mentors like Mr. M? Now, there’s a subject worthy of examination by a serious playwright. Fugard, maybe?



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