Athol Fugard: The Writer Under Apartheid

Athol Fugard: The Writer Under Apartheid

(Extracts from Kader Asmal’s Sechaba Article)

“Without white South Africa realizing what it has done – and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness – there can really be no significant movement.” – Athol Fugard (11 June 1932 – 8 March 2025)

Nothing in South Africa is non-political. Race touches, blights and destroys every aspect of life.

For the black people of South Africa, whose oppression has been long and harsh, the expression of their fear, pain, hope and determination through the arts has been a lifeline. For these 28 (now 58) million, whose political rights (were) denied them, culture has been one of the few forms of creativity, protest and self-affirmation open to them.

In this ‘other’ South Africa, families and communities were broken up by the demand for labour on the farms, on the mines and in the towns of white South Africa. Cultural traditions suffered. Some survived, adapted to the harsh conditions of township life and work with its all-male compounds and its soulless housing. Others were deformed by deliberately preserved for white audiences as examples of ‘native art’.

European culture, imported with white supremacy, elevated the written word and the individual artist to the detriment of the more oral and communal African style, and made ‘literature’ virtually synonymous with ‘English literature’. Church and secular education confirmed this process.

But there have always been counter-currents. Stories and poems have reflected major events and personal responses, and freedom songs have evolved in the struggle for a non-racial society. Writers took part in this struggle, directly and indirectly, and the list of those forced into exile by the middle of the sixties reads, as Anthony Sampson has described it, like “drumbeats for a casualty list”.

…Fugard lived up to his own demand that “the theatre’s major importance in an oppressive society is to break the conspiracy of silence that always attends to an unjust system”. His greater victory was that he was able to involve black actors, and collaborate with them so that his more overtly political plays became indictments of aspects of institutionalised violence. In the magnificent “Sizwe Banzi is Dead”, he presented the pass laws as the single most oppressive aspect of apartheid, because, without a reference book, a Black over the age of 16 did not exist.

In “The Island”, he touched on the pain and humiliation of the political detainee and the triumph of the human spirit which sustained the Mandelas, the Sisulus and the Kathradas of Robben Island and Pollsmoor Prison. For those outside South Africa, it has been the craftsmanship and sincerity of his social vision as reflected in these plays that has gained critical acclaim.

… The theatre, poetry and writing of the democratic forces must be supported. Liberation will come in South Africa, and will free the vast human reserve of energy, passion and creativity in that society. The writer in South Africa has reached a new stage, no longer embattled and alone, but part of the process of liberation.

Kader Asmal, “Athol Fugard: The Writer Under Apartheid”, Sechaba, April 1990.

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