(10 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ARCHIVE: Pretoria, South Africa – 11 August 1997
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1. Various of South African playwright Athol Fugard on stage with Owen Sejake during his play, "The Captain’s Tiger" at the State Theatre
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Athol Fugard, playwright
“I decided that while I was on this ship, I was going to write the Great South African novel. And it was going to be based on my mother’s life. And the Captain Steiger tells the story of the writing of that novel, and it also tells the story of my friendship with a wonderful sailor, a Swahili sailor from Kenya who befriended me and in fact became my big brother and looked after me on board that ship.”
3. Mid of playwright Athol Fugard on stage with Owen Sejake during his play, "The Captain’s Tiger" at the State Theatre
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Athol Fugard, playwright:
“You know, during the 40 years of apartheid, I was a very blinkered writer. I had one focus, which was to try and say as much as I could about that terrible system and what it was doing to people. Now, of course, that is past history. And the Captain Steiger, I suppose, represents an attempt on my side to use the new freedoms that are there for us artists in the new South Africa.”
5. Various of playwright Athol Fugard on stage with Jennifer Steyn during his play, "The Captain’s Tiger"
STORYLINE:
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," has died at the age of 92.
The South African government confirmed Fugard’s death and said the country “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 two productions of “’Master Harold’… and the Boys,” in 1982 and 2003.
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.
"During the 40 years of apartheid, I was a very blinkered writer. I had one focus, which was to try and say as much as I could about that terrible system and what it was doing to people," Fugard said in an interview in 1997.
Fugard became a target for the apartheid 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, 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 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" which ignited his longstanding urge to write.
Fugard hitchhiked through Africa in 1953 with South African poet Perseus Adams, and ended up working as a sailor, the only white seaman on his ship.
Later in life, Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego.
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