Survivors include his second wife, Ms. Fourie, his daughter from his first marriage, Lisa Fugard, two children from his second marriage, Halle and Lanigan, and a grandson.
An ‘Ugly’ Experience
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in the late 1950s, and for three months Mr. Fugard took a job as a clerk in a court that tried Black people for violations involving their required identity cards, known as passbooks. The experience, which he recalled as “just so awful and ugly,” found its way onto the stage in “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.”
Two of his earliest plays, “No-Good Friday” and “Nongogo,” were inspired by Mr. Mokae and others he met in Sophiatown, a Black township outside Johannesburg, but they attracted little attention, and the family decided to move to London. There, Mr. Fugard had several plays rejected and ended up cleaning houses to make money. Then, in 1960, when white police in the South African city of Sharpeville opened fire on Black protesters engaged in a peaceful demonstration against the passbook laws, killing some 70 people, the Fugards were moved to return home.
Mr. Fugard wrote a novel, “Tsotsi,” about the moral reclamation of a delinquent, that would be published almost 20 years later and made into a 2005 movie that won an Oscar for best foreign language film. And he wrote “The Blood Knot,” a seven-scene series of conversations between brothers — the dark-skinned Zachariah, a laborer who has lived in a severely circumscribed universe, and the light-skinned Morris, who has traveled about South Africa and elocutes with a far more elevated perspective.
The crisis in the play arises when Zach, encouraged by Morris, begins a correspondence with a female pen pal who turns out to be white, precipitating a bitter — and finally a physical — confrontation in which the brothers are forced to accept the reality that their bond dooms them to misery.
