South Africa’s giant playwright Athol Fugard, whose searing works challenged apartheid, dies aged 92

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Athol Fugard, South Africa’s foremost dramatist who explored the pervasiveness of apartheid in such searing works as “The Blood Knot” and “’Master Harold’… and the Boys” to show how the racist system distorted the humanity of his country with what he called “a daily tally of injustice,” has died. He was 92.

The South African government confirmed Fugard’s death and said South Africa “has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation.”

Six of Fugard’s plays landed on Broadway, including “The Blood Knot” and two productions of “’Master Harold’… and the Boys.”

“The Blood Knot” tells of how the relationship between two Black half-brothers deteriorates because one has lighter skin and can pass for white, which ultimately leads to him treating his darker half-brother as an inferior.

“We were cursed with apartheid but blessed with great artists who shone a light on its impact and helped to guide us out of it. We owe a huge debt to this late, wonderful man,” South African Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie said of Fugard.

Because Fugard’s best-known plays center on the suffering caused by the apartheid policies of South Africa’s white-minority government, some among Fugard’s audience abroad were surprised to find he was white himself.

He challenged the apartheid government’s segregation laws by collaborating with Black actors and writers, and “The Blood Knot” — where he played the light-skinned brother — was believed to be the first major play in South Africa to feature a multiracial cast.

Fugard became a target for the government and his passport was taken away for four years after he directed a Black theater workshop, “The Serpent Players.” Five workshop members were imprisoned on Robben Island, where South Africa kept political prisoners during apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. Fugard and his family endured years of government surveillance; their mail was opened, their phones tapped, and their home subjected to midnight police searches.

Fugard told an interviewer that the best theater in Africa would come from South Africa because the “daily tally of injustice and brutality has forced a maturity of thinking and feeling and an awareness of basic values I do not find equaled anywhere in Africa.”

He viewed his work as an attempt to sabotage the violence of apartheid. “The best sabotage is love,” he said.

“’Master Harold’… and the Boys” is a Tony Award-nominated work set in a South African tea shop in 1950. It centers on the relationship between the son of the white owner and two Black servants who have served as his surrogate parents. One rainy afternoon, the bonds between them are stressed to breaking point when the teenage boy begins to abuse the servants.

“In plain words, just get on with your job,” the boy tells one servant. “My mother is right. She’s always warning me about allowing you to get too familiar. Well, this time you’ve gone too far. It’s going to stop right now. You’re only a servant in here, and don’t forget it.”

Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu was in the audience when the play opened in 1983 — at the height of apartheid.

“I thought it was something for which you don’t applaud. The first response is weeping,” Tutu, who died in 2021, said after the final curtain. “It’s saying something we know, that we’ve said so often about what this country does to human relations.”

In a review of one play in 1980, TIME magazine said Fugard’s work “indicts the impoverishment of spirit and the warping distortion of moral energy” that engulfed both Blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa.

Fugard was born in Middleburg in the semiarid Karoo on June 11, 1932. His father was an English-Irish man whose joy was playing jazz piano. His mother was Afrikaans, descended from South Africa’s early Dutch-German settlers, and earned the family’s income by running a store.

Fugard said his first trip into Johannesburg’s Black enclave of Sophiatown — since destroyed and replaced with a white residential area — was “a definitive event of my life. I first went in there as the result of an accident. I suddenly encountered township life.”

This ignited Fugard’s longstanding urge to write. He left the University of Cape Town just before he would have graduated in philosophy because “I had a feeling that if I stayed I might be stuck into academia.”

Fugard’s theater experience was confined to acting in a school play until 1956, when he married actor Sheila Meiring and began concentrating on stage writing. He and Meiring later divorced. He married second wife Paula Fourie in 2016.

He took a job in 1958 as a clerk with a Johannesburg Native Commissioner’s Court, where Black people who broke racial laws were sentenced, “one every two minutes.” Fugard said he was broke and needed the job, but it included witnessing the caning of lawbreakers. “It was the darkest period of my life,” he said.

He got some satisfaction in putting a small wrench in the works, by “shuffling up the charge sheets,” delaying proceedings enough for friends of the Black detainees to get them lawyers.

Later in life, Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, the film “Tsotsi,” based on his 1961 novel, won international awards, including the Oscar for foreign language film. He won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

More recent plays include “The Train Driver” (2010) and “The Bird Watchers” (2011), which both premiered at the Fugard Theatre named after him in Cape Town. As an actor, he appeared in the films “The Killing Fields” and “Gandhi.” In 2014, Fugard returned to the stage as an actor for the first time in 15 years in his own play, “Shadow of the Hummingbird,” at the Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Kennedy reported from New York.