Master Harold and the Boys

Hally is the white 17-year-old son of the owner of the St. George’s Park Tea Room. He is a complicated character with many contradictions. Hally is largely convinced of his own superiority over Sam and Willie. He sees himself as intellectually superior because he is white, and he weaponizes his education to reinforce his sense of superiority. Hally does not see the real injustices of the world around him. While he is pessimistic and expresses “despair for this world” (14), he never voices specifically what about the world he finds unjust. Even though he lives in apartheid-era South Africa, one of the most notoriously unequal, racist societies in recent history, he responds to Sam’s suggestion that South Africa is unjust by arguing that Sam has “never been a slave” (18). Hally has no structural understanding of systems of oppression; the absence of slavery, to him, means the absence of racism. Hally ignores the never-ending oppression that Black people faced during the apartheid era when they were not allowed to own property, live in cities, marry outside of their race, or access a fair and equal justice system. In addition to the outright violence Black South Africans faced at the hands of white employers and police, Hally ignores the day-to-day challenges facing Black citizens in his country. He has never questioned whether his treatment of Sam and Willie upholds systems of injustice.

Over the course of the play, Hally is on an Education and Coming of Age journey where he has two choices. He can either become a man like his father, who is cruel, racist, and actively participates in unjust systems of oppression, or he can listen to Sam, open his eyes, and become someone who challenges and fights back against apartheid. Sam challenges Hally to walk away from the bench, meaning that he has the choice to refuse to uphold white supremacy and confront his own racial biases. Sam wants Hally to grow up into someone he is proud of, but Hally’s major roadblock in becoming this person is his self-centeredness. He can only understand injustices that apply specifically to him and is more upset by the idea of his father coming home and disturbing his peace than he is by the reality of apartheid. His sense of injustice is therefore one that is rooted in selfishness and unexamined bias. Instead of developing genuine solidarity with other people who experience injustice, like Sam and Willie, he believes that no one can understand him or what he is going through and isolates himself from those who show him kindness and care.

When Sam asks that Hally not disrespect him by forcing him to call him “Master Harold,” Hally responds by making a deeply racist joke to reassert his power over Sam. He is not yet ready to take the necessary steps to overcome his racist education and treat Sam and Willie as his equals. The ending of the play leaves him in an ambiguous position and does not clarify if Hally will rise to Sam’s challenge to “stand up and walk away from [the bench]” (60). Here, Hally represents the crossroads that South Africa was at in the 1980s, when Fugard wrote the play. All white South Africans faced a mounting decision: to continue to uphold the apartheid system, or to refuse to accept white supremacy and push for a more just system of government. Sam’s challenge to Hally doubles as Fugard’s challenge to his fellow white South Africans. When the play was published in the 1980s, Fugard did not know what the future would hold for South Africa. Hally’s choice is not revealed because, at the time, Fugard could not know how his country would change. The audience is left hoping that Hally will make the right choice, which also forces them to confront their own complicity in racist systems and question the choices they make.