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Fugard has remarked that living and working with men of all races aboard the Graigaur liberated him from the prejudice endemic among those with his background. However, he dropped out just before graduation and toured the Far East while working aboard a merchant ship. A scholarship took him to the University of Cape Town, where he studied ethics. He had his first experience of amateur dramatics in secondary school, as an actor and as director of the school play. Fugard attended Catholic schools as a youth. He insisted that the family’s black servants call him Master Harold, and one day, he spat in the face of Sam Semela, a waiter in the Fugard boardinghouse, who was the best friend he had as a child. By the 1930s, Afrikaners- the more uncompromising supporters of segregation than English-speaking whites-began using the term apartheid to refer to their ideas of racial separation.Īs a white child growing up in a segregated society, Fugard resisted the racist upbringing offered him, but could not escape apartheid’s influence. Only 13 percent of the land in South Africa was put aside for blacks, though they formed 70 percent of the population. After slavery ended there in 1833, blacks were required to carry identification cards, and in the early twentieth century, the Native Land Acts of 19 prohibited blacks from owning land in areas of white residence. Fugard credits his mother with teaching him to view South African society with a critical eye.īy the 1930s, legal and social discrimination was firmly in place against South Africans of non-European ancestry.
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His mother-an Afrikaner descended from Dutch settlers who had been coming to South Africa for trade purposes since the late seventeenth century-supported the family by managing their boardinghouse and tearoom. His father, a crippled former jazz pianist of English stock, amused the boy with fantastic stories and confused him with his unabashed bigotry. In 1935, the family moved to Port Elizabeth, which became his lifelong home. Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, on a farm in Cape Province, in the semidesert Karoo region of South Africa. Works in Biographical and Historical Context As his plays make viscerally clear, all South Africans have been the victims of the tragic legacy of apartheid. In his work, Fugard focused relentlessly on the injustices perpetuated by South Africa’s apartheid system of government. A writer, director, and performer, he has worked collaboratively with performers across the racial divide and transformed South African theater. AP images.Īthol Fugard is South Africa’s foremost playwright and one of the leading dramatists of the latter twentieth century.