Interplay Between African Drama and History in Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot
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Abstract
Many African dramatists have based their plays on historical events. Such plays are referred to as historical plays. This paper critically examines the interplay between African drama and history, with particular reference to Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot. The choice of the text is largely informed by the fact it is inspired by a momentous event in Africa: apartheid, a policy that governed relations between South Africa’s white minority and nonwhite majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites. The study extensively discusses the nexus between African drama and history. Using traditional Historicism, the paper argues that in writing Blood Knot, Fugard’s major literary goal is to expose the plethora of evils of apartheid. The two characters in the play, Morris and Zachariah, in their dialogues and actions, and several incidents in the play, foreground the debilitating effects of apartheid on the black majority during the period of the obnoxious policy. The paper concludes that Fugard’s first-hand experience of apartheid contributes immeasurably to his convincing depiction of the evils of the policy in Blood Knot.
Keywords: African dramatists, Apartheid, historical criticism, history, policy
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