Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He wrote apartheid for the stage — often with the actors who lived it — and made it impossible for theatre audiences anywhere to claim they had not been told.
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard grew up in Port Elizabeth, the son of an Afrikaans mother and an English father, and took a job as a clerk in a Native Commissioner's Court in Johannesburg, where he watched pass-law cases processed at a rate of one every two minutes. He has said it was the most formative thing that happened to him.
He wrote The Blood Knot in 1961, about two brothers of the same mother with different skin, and performed it himself opposite Zakes Mokae — a white actor and a Black actor on stage together, which was illegal to watch in a mixed audience. The government withdrew his passport for four years.
With John Kani and Winston Ntshona he made Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, devised in rehearsal rather than written in advance because a script could be seized, performed in township halls and then in London and New York. Master Harold and the Boys, staged in 1982, put his own worst memory on stage: a white schoolboy spitting in the face of the Black man who raised him. It was banned in South Africa.
He wrote more than thirty plays, directed and acted in many of them, and was the writer through whom most of the world outside South Africa first understood what the place actually was, at the level of two people in a room. He died in 2025.
He wrote The Blood Knot in 1961, about two brothers of the same mother with different skin, and performed it himself opposite Zakes Mokae — a white actor and a Black actor on stage together, which was illegal to watch in a mixed audience. The government withdrew his passport for four years.
With John Kani and Winston Ntshona he made Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, devised in rehearsal rather than written in advance because a script could be seized, performed in township halls and then in London and New York. Master Harold and the Boys, staged in 1982, put his own worst memory on stage: a white schoolboy spitting in the face of the Black man who raised him. It was banned in South Africa.
He wrote more than thirty plays, directed and acted in many of them, and was the writer through whom most of the world outside South Africa first understood what the place actually was, at the level of two people in a room. He died in 2025.
Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we will check it.