Master Harold

“Master Harold”… and the boys is a real-time play written by Athol Fugard, a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director. First published in 1982, the play itself set in 1950, the complex plot is dominated by the racial relationships among its three main characters: two black waiters, Sam and Willie, and school boy Hally, gone by as “Master Harold”. Hally is a white teenager on the verge of manhood who forms a bond with two black workers under his mother’s employment, despite society’s persistent urges to keep the races apart.
The play takes place in coastal town Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The city has just entering into a 42 year long oppression among social classes, instituted by the government. During this span, South Africans

Along this, the play zooms out, showing that racism and abuse can be color bind as well. For example, the reader learns right from the beginning that Willie’s dance and romantic partner, Hilda, has left because he gives her a “hiding” whenever she messes up the dance (6-7). To add onto this, he admits his earlier dance partner, Eunice, ran away from the same treatment (7). The role of abuse does not fall only on the two black characters, but the white teen as well. This is exposed when Hally is a victim of physical abuse at school, where he is given blows with a ruler when he misbehaves (14). Hally’s depiction of being hit with a ruler prompts Sam to describe how black South Africans are held by the ankles with their pants down and their shirts over their heads to receive “strokes with a light cane” in prison (15). Verbal abuse is also apparent by Sam describing the guard “talk(ing) to you gently and for a long time” between each stroke (15). Sam presumably speaks from personal experience, and reveals that even the systems of punishment are

Hally is so oblivious of his society’s prejudice that he finds it acceptable, as a member of the superior white race, to the point where he argues with Sam about who is a more appropriate role model for black freedom and equality (20-21). The play goes on to reveal other blatant examples of racism, such as Hally’s proposal that dances like the waltz, that Willie practices so dedicatedly, has replaced the “war-dances” of their black ancestors (43). Hally goes on to say he jokes about black people back at home, revealing he laughs at them with his father (55). Racism has a range of more subtle examples, both in Hally’s character and in the main plot of the play itself; two black men working for and waiting on a white boy who assumes, often ignorantly, to be their social worth, moral, and intellectual superior because of a societal status derived from the color of his