Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard, South Africa’s preeminent playwright, was born to an Afrikaner mother and an English father in a small town in South Africa’s Great Karoo desert region. He was primarily raised in the provincial capital of Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape. After dropping out of college to hitchhike his way across Africa, Fugard spent two years working on a ship and traveling around the world. Upon returning to South Africa, he married and started working at the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg. This job allowed him to see the apartheid system’s unjust policies firsthand. Next, Fugard went to work at South Africa’s National Theatre Organization, where he learned to produce plays. Soon, he returned to Port Elizabeth and started writing plays of his own and staging them with his multiracial acting troupes, the Circle Players and the Serpent Players. For the next three decades, the struggle against apartheid became the consuming theme and purpose of Fugard’s writing. His first major play, The Blood Knot (1961), won Fugard international recognition but also persecution and surveillance by the South African government. He faced multiple political trials, lost his passport, and was frequently forced to publish his work in England or the United States instead of South Africa. Many of his plays reached a wide audience when they were filmed and broadcast across the English-speaking world. In total, Fugard has written, produced, and performed in more than 30 plays spanning a wide variety of genres but almost always set in South Africa and concerned with the effects of apartheid. Among the most influential are Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island (1972), and “Master Harold”…and the Boys (1982). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with plays like My Children! My Africa!, Fugard began to look toward the future and ask what it would take for South Africans to establish a just, multiracial democracy. He also began to examine his own personal and family history, and he spent long periods of time living and teaching in the United States from the 1990s onward. However, Fugard returned to South Africa in 2012, and he continues to write plays there.