No-Good Friday Study Guide

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, he 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 in 1957, they settled in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the late 1950s, Fugard wrote several plays that focused on South African racism, 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 NELM’s Fugard collection ultimately included the unpublished drafts of Tsotsi.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.

No-Good Friday was written and first performed in South Africa under apartheid, a set of segregationist, White-supremacist laws active between the late 1940s and early 1990s in South Africa. Among other things, apartheid law required Black South Africans to carry an identity document called a passbook. It also limited where Black people could live and work. Various characters in No-Good Friday allude to apartheid-era passbook laws: for example, rural job-seeker Tobias lost his last job as an agricultural worker because he didn’t have legal permission to work in the district where it was located, while saxophonist Guy explains to White do-gooder Father Higgins that he can’t report Tobias’s murder to the White police in part because the police would put Guy in jail for living somewhere his passbook doesn’t allow. Moreover, apartheid laws influenced not only the text of the play but also its initial performances. The playwright Athol Fugard, a White man, played the role of White priest Father Higgins in No-Good Friday’s original run, but one segregated theater refused to let a mixed-race cast perform—so a Black actor named Lewis Nkosi had to step in as Father Higgins for Fugard.

Athol Fugard’s No-Good Friday (1958) takes place in Sophiatown, a poor, predominantly Black suburb of Johannesburg that South Africa’s apartheid government destroyed in the late 1950s and early 1960s via forcible removals of non-White residents and subsequent demolitions. The play Fugard wrote immediately after, Nongogo (1959), also takes place in a poor, non-White suburb of Johannesburg in apartheid-era South Africa. No-Good Friday represents the corrosive effects of racial segregation and oppression on both the individual psyche and on legal justice; a play with similar themes from a different national context is James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), which takes place in the segregated U.S. South. Another White South African playwright and author wrestling with the morally corrosive effects of apartheid is Craig Higginson, who may have been influenced by Athol Fugard’s plays. Like No-Good Friday, Higginson’s play The Dream of the Dog (2007) and novel The Dream House (2015) revolve around an apartheid-era murder that is never taken seriously by the police because the victim is Black.