6 hours ago
1
The South African playwright and director Athol Fugard, whose works included the plays Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island and the novel Tsotsi, has died at the age of 92.
A major political dissident playwright of the 20th century, Fugard wrote more than 30 dramas including Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (in 1972) and “Master Harold” … and the Boys (1982). Both of those drew upon the time in the 1950s when he could only find employment as a clerk in one of the courts where black South Africans were charged (and inevitably convicted) of breaches of the “pass laws”, designed to control the movements of a racially segregated population under the apartheid system. There, he witnessed hourly the dehumanisation of those who had chosen the “wrong” streets or people.
Fugard’s cultural and political impact was rivalled elsewhere only by the dramas of Václav Havel in what was then Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Havel was jailed and, when released, abandoned theatre to become the first president of the Czech Republic. Fugard – despite setting up two theatre companies in the segregated black townships and courageously refusing to play to the state-mandated “whites only” audiences – avoided prison, due to being white and therefore not a primary target of the racist government. The worst direct personal persecutions Fugard suffered were the removal of his passport and the occasional banning of plays and burning of books. He was always conscious, though, of benefiting from the immoral hierarchy his writing decried.
The writer’s race would also have made him an impossible political leader in the new Republic of South Africa: its dissident turned president in the Havel manner was Nelson Mandela, who had a strong background presence in Fugard’s plays, especially The Island (1972), set on Robben Island, the penitentiary for political prisoners where Mandela had spent some of his 27 years of incarceration.
Born in 1932, Fugard was the only child of Harold, from an immigrant family of Irish descent, and Elizabeth, whose Potgieter clan were among the early Afrikaans settlers of Dutch stock. A jazz pianist turned shopkeeper, Harold moved his family in 1935 to Port Elizabeth, an urban industrial town that remained Fugard’s main home and most regular dramatic setting for the next nine decades.
During his childhood, the family ran a hotel and cafe in Port Elizabeth where “Hally” (as the young Athol was known) grew up. There, as a teenager in the late 1940s, an incident occurred that would lie at the heart of his psychology and creativity. In published extracts from his notebooks, Fugard explained how Sam Semela, a black employee in the family businesses, became “the most significant – the only – friend of my boyhood years”. But, after a “rare quarrel”, Hally pulled racial rank and spat in Semela’s face.
While confiding to his journal that he would never be able to “deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after”, Fugard made literary recompense with “Master Harold” … and the Boys, its title acknowledging a racist hierarchy between white people and their servants that is overturned by a devastatingly apologetic depiction of how the demon of superiority can rise even in the mind of someone who defines as a liberal: the spitting scene is its climax. One of the dedicatees of the published play is “Sam”, with whom Fugard had been reconciled.
Public admission of this shaming story was typical of Fugard’s personal honesty, but can also be seen as an attempt to forestall any “saint” or “saviour” interpretation of his work. The contemporary pejorative term “white saviour”, with its implication of credit stolen and virtue claimed, was not yet widely used, but, once it was, Fugard faced retrospective accusation.
A complication arose with the working methods of the African Theatre Workshop and Serpent Players, two multi-racial companies Fugard and his wife, Shiela (also a writer) formed either side of 1960, first in Johannesburg and then Port Elizabeth. Early Fugard plays such as No-Good Friday (1958), Nongogo (1959) and The Coat (1966) improvised scenes with actors based on their own experiences and then created a fixed text for performance.
As a major Fugard scholar, Professor Dennis Walder, has pointed out, it was yet another horror of the system that the writer could only work with colleagues of colour at his home by registering them, for bureaucratic purposes, as his domestic staff.
Fugard’s desire to collaborate with the wronged community, rather than writing anti-apartheid stories from an isolated study in a white area (a criticism of some contemporaries), can reasonably be seen as another compensating response to the Sam shame. But a majority black co-operative run by a white man subsequently raised issues of “appropriation” to which Fugard was alert: editions of The Island and its companion play, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972), in which someone takes on the identity of a dead man in order to use his “pass book” (ID papers), have the credit “devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona”, with royalties split three ways.
The circumstances in which Fugard’s early plays were made now sound like something from dystopian fiction. The South African police would raid rehearsals, check scripts and take the names of actors; it became standard for performers to be listed in programmes and on posters under the identities of fictional characters they had previously played.
The end of apartheid and Mandela’s presidency removed, from 1994, what the novelist Nadine Gordimer had called “the only subject” for white liberal writers in South Africa. Fugard, though, wrote plays that effectively reflected the country’s “truth and reconciliation” phase of attempted restorative justice.
In The Train Driver (2010), his strongest late work, the white title character seeks out the family of a black mother and child who died when they stepped in front of his train; in Sorrows And Rejoicing (2001), the family of a dead, white anti-apartheid writer reflect on the evasions of his life.
That Fugard continued as a dramatist even when the driving cause of his first plays was achieved was due to the incompleteness of the victory. Whereas anti-Soviet dramas now have only historical interest – as relative democracy has continued in Russia’s former bloc – the 2021 revival of Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, remained disconcertingly relevant.
While the specific evil it dramatised – the ban on interracial sex in South Africa from 1927 to 1985 – was gone, the play now served a new purpose: a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of opportunity and security suffered by people of colour around the world. The unexpected longevity of Statements continued a paradox that ran through Fugard’s career: situations that he detested as a citizen were his dramatic fuel.
Parents leaving the London production of Statements could be heard explaining to appalled children that the immorality laws had existed in a Commonwealth country during the lifetime of anyone older than 36. That duty of education will keep Fugard’s plays in the theatrical canon, as will the broader lessons of Statements, “Master Harold” … and the Boys and The Island in how racism roots and grows. His 1980 novel Tsotsi, about crime in Johannesburg, was adapted as an Oscar-winning 2005 film, directed by Gavin Hood.
Fugard would have been the first to acknowledge that others, such as Kani and Ntshona, were the theatrical Mandelas of free South Africa, but the man who called himself “a classic example of the impotent, white liberal” was an epitome of the good people who, in Hannah Arendt’s formulation, must act if evil is not to prevail.
