He could never explain exactly why he did it. He was only ten or eleven at the time, an ordinary white brat. There had been an argument between him and Sam, one of the two black “boys”, though they were men, who helped in his mother’s tea room in Port Elizabeth. Both of them were in a truculent mood as he closed up the tea room earlier than usual. Sam set off on foot for New Brighton, the main black township in Port Elizabeth. A few minutes later Athol Fugard followed on his bicycle. As he drew level with Sam, making him break his stride, he spat in his face.
Ten seconds later he regretted it. Fifty, sixty, seventy years later, he still regretted it. With slightly changed details, this scene became the climax of “Master Harold…and the Boys” (1982), one of his most successful plays. It could even be argued that his whole career, with 36 plays over 70 years, was an attempt to expiate that moment. When he tried to sum up the general aim of his plays, it was to tease out how human beings dealt with each other. “Blood Knot” (1961), the first piece that brought him fame, was based on a moment of sudden sympathy with the suffering of his own brother. By turning it into a tale of two Coloured siblings, one near-black and one (himself) passing for white, he extended a personal story into the larger traumas of his country.
His was a standard white upbringing, quite hard on occasions. He had an Irish-English father who was musical, disabled and alcoholic, and an Afrikaner mother; he was brought up in Afrikaans but schooled in English, a bastardised identity. English was the supreme poetic instrument for a writer, Afrikaans the tongue of cruelty. His mother, though, was the more liberal and moral of his parents. Good was not all on one side, nor bad on the other.
From his first attempts at writing, his focus was the poor. That meant the black townships of apartheid South Africa: first Sophiatown in Johannesburg (soon demolished for white housing) and then, in Sam’s footsteps, New Brighton. Under apartheid, the law since 1948, blacks and whites could not fraternise. But with his first wife Sheila he roamed among the corrugated-iron pondokkies and shebeens, soaking up the urgency and vibrancy of slum life. He observed the dealings of racketeers and prostitutes, the dandies in their Stetson hats, the fortitude of mothers among their pots and washing lines, and the pathetic “blanket-boys” who came in from the country. In plays like “No-Good Friday” and “Nongogo” he absorbed the rhythms and idioms of township talk, striving to find perfect pitch. Then he set them down for the stage.
For six dark months, too, he was a clerk in a Native Commissioner’s Court, dealing with black workers who had strayed from the areas specified in their passbooks. Each hearing lasted about two minutes; fierce canings followed. He pondered how to help these people. Of course he could throw stones and petrol bombs at the armoured cars. But he had a much better weapon, words, which could get inside policemen’s heads.
This did not necessarily make him a political playwright. He was a storyteller. In “Sizwe Bansi is Dead” (1972), Sizwe tried to resist assuming the identity of a dead man whose passbook, providentially, would allow him to get a better job. It was a sharp satire on a ridiculous system, but mostly played as comedy. Much of the banter in the plays was about oppression, but done lightly: “Just [say] yes baas, no baas, please baas, thank you baas, even when you kick me on the backside.” Oppression as part of life.
His critics wondered how he, a white liberal, could claim to get under black skin. He found it no harder than any other writerly leap of imagination. He had also met actors in the townships, who soon came to illegally collaborate with him. They would act out their stories, and those he shaped into experimental plays. His first troupe was called the Serpent Players, because they met in an untenanted snake pit at the Port Elizabeth zoo. With two hugely talented actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, he co-wrote both “Sizwe” and “The Island”, a piece based on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was interned. The actors became prisoners, cramped on one blanket in their tiny cell, sparring and taunting each other, but also tenderly comparing their injuries after a beating. The climax of the play was a two-man performance of Sophocles’s “Antigone” for the other prisoners. Antigone had defied the law of the land, for which the penalty was to be walled up alive. Winston did the same, suddenly overcoming his reluctance to play a woman. “I go now to my living death”, he cried, “because I have honoured those things to which honour belongs.”
The South African state tried to frustrate Mr Fugard as much as possible. Performances had to take place in theatres with covered windows. Police raided his house, and his phone was tapped. The authorities did not arrest him, because he gradually became too famous both at home and abroad; they just took away his passport for four years. But he did not want to leave South Africa anyway. In the late 1950s he went to London for a spell, but the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 brought him back again. There was nowhere else he knew where right and wrong so energised him and desperation was so existential. Samuel Beckett influenced him strongly. In “Boesman and Lena” a black couple, forced to move from their area, tried to work out in Godot-like fashion how they came to be walking on mudflats under a scorching sun with no idea how they had got there, or where to go.
When apartheid ended in 1994, people wondered what he, too, would do. But the poor remained poor and the country unstable. There were still multiple stories, black and white, to tell. There was still no end of the “pigsties” people made for themselves, whether with drugs, or alcohol (as he had done at one point), or greed for money. But if their spirit was unbroken, they could get themselves out again. Even from an evil regime; even from the burning shame of spitting in a black man’s face. ■