Have You Seen Us?

Athol Fugard was born in 1932 in Middelburg, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. His father was an Englishman, while his mother was an Afrikaner, a member of South Africa’s White minority population whose mostly Dutch ancestors colonized the country in the 18th century. After attending but not graduating from the University of Cape Town, Fugard worked outside South Africa in 1953 and 1954, during which time he began writing. After returning to South Africa, Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners’ Court—a court where White judges passed judgments on Black South Africans—and came to realize how racist South Africa’s laws and society were. Fugard married the actress Sheila Meiring in 1956, and the couple settled in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1957. In the late 1950s, Fugard wrote several plays that examined racism in South Africa, and he worked with Black South African actors to produce them. From 1960 to 1962, while also writing his famous early play The Blood Knot (1961), Fugard drafted the novel that would become Tsotsi. He did not try to publish it, however, and after ceasing work on it refocused on his playwriting. In 1973, the National English Literary Museum (NELM)—a museum for South African literature in Grahamstown, South Africa—began collecting Fugard’s manuscripts and papers. NELM’s Fugard collection ultimately included the unpublished drafts of Tsotsi. In the late 1970s, a South African English professor named Stephen Gray found Tsotsi in NELM and persuaded Fugard to let him revise it for publication. Tsotsi was finally published in 1980. Although Tsotsi is Fugard’s only novel, Fugard has continued writing plays continuously from the late 1950s through the present day.

In Have You Seen Us?, alcoholic protagonist Henry Parsons refers to himself as “one of Bill’s friends.” Henry is using a euphemism to describe himself as an Alcoholics Anonymous member, using a reference to Bill Wilson (1895–1971), an American soldier and stock speculator who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bob Smith (1879–1950), an American surgeon. Wilson and Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 1935. In 1939, Wilson—with contributions from other AA members and editors—published Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. This book contains an explication of AA’s famous “twelve steps” to recovery from alcoholism, which include references to asking for aid from God or some other higher power. (Arguably, Henry receives aid from a “higher power” at the climax of Have You Seen Us? when Solly tells him that God will forgive him, though in that moment Henry is attempting to recover from ugly inherited prejudices like antisemitism rather than his alcoholism.) While AA began in the U.S., the organization now estimates that it has more than 2 million members worldwide, with AA groups in an estimated 180 countries.

In Have You Seen Us?, protagonist Henry Parsons is a former professor of medieval literature. He mentions having taught Beowulf (c. 700–1000 CE), an Old English epic poem about a warrior named Beowulf who fights a rampaging monster named Grendel. Henry also references The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), a Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) about diverse Christian pilgrims telling one another stories while traveling toward a shrine in Canterbury. In the context of the play, Henry’s investment in these Old and Middle English poems suggests that he is out of step with contemporary culture. Meanwhile, when South African Henry assures the Mexican waitress Adela that he won’t report her to immigration officials, he tells her that he experienced “enough of that back home in the old days.” Henry is presumably referring to the South African apartheid-era “passbook laws,” according to which Black South Africans were required to carry an identity document called a passbook everywhere they went. This moment may be a subtle allusion to one of Athol Fugard’s earlier plays, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), which represents its protagonist, a Black South African man named Sizwe Bansi, stealing a murdered man’s passbook so that he can work to support his family. Finally, Have You Seen Us? is among other things a play about the experience of immigrating to the U.S. Other famous plays on that subject include Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), about an Irish American immigrant family in Connecticut, and David Henry Hwang’s FOB (1980), about a Chinese American immigrant family in southern California.