South Africa’s giant playwright Athol Fugard, whose searing works challenged apartheid, dies aged 92

In a review of one play in 1980, TIME magazine said Fugard’s work “indicts the impoverishment of spirit and the warping distortion of moral energy” that engulfed both Blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa.

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 of my life. I first went in there as the result of an accident. I suddenly encountered township life.”

This ignited Fugard’s longstanding urge to write. He left the University of Cape Town just before he would have graduated in philosophy because “I had a feeling that if I stayed I might be stuck into academia.”

Fugard’s theater experience was confined to acting in a school play until 1956, when he married actor Sheila Meiring and began concentrating on stage writing. He and Meiring later divorced. He married second wife Paula Fourie in 2016.

He took a job in 1958 as a clerk with a Johannesburg Native Commissioner’s Court, where Black people who broke racial laws were sentenced, “one every two minutes.” Fugard said he was broke and needed the job, but it included witnessing the caning of lawbreakers. “It was the darkest period of my life,” he said.

He got some satisfaction in putting a small wrench in the works, by “shuffling up the charge sheets,” delaying proceedings enough for friends of the Black detainees to get them lawyers.

Later in life, Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, the film “Tsotsi,” based on his 1961 novel, won international awards, including the Oscar for foreign language film. He won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

More recent plays include “The Train Driver” (2010) and “The Bird Watchers” (2011), which both premiered at the Fugard Theatre named after him in Cape Town. As an actor, he appeared in the films “The Killing Fields” and “Gandhi.” In 2014, Fugard returned to the stage as an actor for the first time in 15 years in his own play, “Shadow of the Hummingbird,” at the Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut.