Death of Athol Fugard and a conversation.

Athol Fugard, the South African playwright whose work exposed the truths of apartheid to an international audience, died on Saturday night at his home in Stellenbosch, a town near Cape Town. He was 92.

Here’s a conversation I had with him in 2006.

Ramona Koval: And now we're off to San Diego, to speak to one of South Africa's most eminent playwrights and cultural figures, Athol Fugard. At the age of 74, he splits his time between Port Elizabeth in South Africa and the USA. He was born in 1932, the son of English and Afrikaner parents, and many regard him as the father of South African theatre. He grew up in the grim industrial city of Port Elizabeth, and he returned to Port Elizabeth in the late 50s, after he spent some time in technical high school and in the merchant marines. And it was at that time that he began to work with a group of amateur black actors producing plays for little or no money in people's houses and in abandoned buildings.

His only novel has been called a masterpiece. It's Tsotsi and it's just been published for the first time here by Text, to coincide with a powerful film version which has been making waves all over the world and we heard some music from it just then.

Tsotsi is an Afrikaans term for a hoodlum or a gangster, and the story follows a gang of young men who've turned to crime in a desperate attempt to survive in the streets of 1950s Sophiatown. The leader of the group has taken on the name Tsotsi, after a childhood trauma leaves him with no memory of who he is or where he comes from. But after he inadvertently kidnaps a baby, his humanity slowly is awakened. This is a lost classic by one of the world's greatest living writers, and Athol Fugard is on the line now. Welcome to The Book Show.

Athol Fugard: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Can we talk about the wisdom of cooking a book, or cooking a project, as it were. This one had a long gestation. It was written in 1961 and first published in 1980. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?

Athol Fugard: Well, in terms of writing it, that period, that hiatus between when I actually and its first publication was because I just assumed the manuscript had been lost, and I never made any attempt to sit down and rewrite it. I'd written the book partly in London and partly in South Africa. My wife and I, way back then, had travelled over in the hope of being able to work in theatre, which we were both passionate about, but didn't get a chance. And so we returned to South Africa.

In fact we returned to South Africa to give birth to our one and only daughter. And also, because of the Soweto massacre, which disturbed us greatly in London and we just felt we had to be back home. And in that period I put the manuscript aside and somehow or other it disappeared, and I thought it was just irretrievably lost. And in any case, I didn't ever think of myself as a prose writer. I might have once, but as time passed and my plays became the centre of my life, writing plays, which is now all I've done in the intervening years.

And then it was suddenly discovered again.

Ramona Koval: By a couple of students...

Athol Fugard: That's right. And a very, very generous—generous is the right word—Stephen Gray, a South African academic, read it. It was all hand-written on scraps and bits of paper, actually; discarded catalogues from a carpet firm that my wife had worked for as a temp typist in London (while I was house-cleaning and trying to get into theatre). And he read it, and he thought, no, this actually deserves to be seen in print. And he approached us, my wife and myself, and I was terrified of how bad it would be, I did not read it. I left it to my wife to read it. He'd typed it out, he'd typed out a rough draft of what I had on paper. She came back to me and she said, you know, you should actually let him go ahead. It's good.

Ramona Koval: Did you read it then?

Athol Fugard: No. It took me some years to pluck up courage and read it again, I'm afraid. But my wife's judgment is impeccable, and acting on her advice, I said to Stephen, go ahead, and he published it.

Ramona Koval: And so when you read it again, what did you think?

Athol Fugard: I was amazed. I was amazed. What I realised was at that point in my career—and I hadn't yet written my first play, that first play to get me any success overseas, which is called Blood Knot. I'd written a couple of little apprenticeship plays in South Africa, but not yet the one that was in a sense the breakthrough play. The play, you know, that one work when a writer knows he's discovered his voice. That he is saying something which nobody else can say. With Blood Knot I knew I was doing that. But I realised, when I read what I'd written, that I actually could have stayed with prose if I'd wanted to. I don't think I could have combined the two. I don't know of many novelists who are also successful playwrights. There are certainly a few poets who've tried. You know playwriting is a very, very specific craft. And I'm passionate about it. Passionate about theatre, passionate about the way it communicates, the way it works, the magic of it. I think that a lot of the extraordinary drama of South Africa in terms of its change and starting in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released from jail—you know, theatre made quite a contribution to all of that happening, to South Africa finally realising it had to turn around and go in a different direction.

So playwriting was my passion, but I realise I could have stayed with prose.

Ramona Koval: Are there things that you can only say in the theatre, do you think?

Athol Fugard: Oh yes, very definitely. Theatre, you know, is a time craft. It shares the magic of the living moment with music. And by music one encompasses opera as well, and ballet. But the theatre is a time craft. The conductor taps the music stand in front of him, the audience is silent, the curtain goes up...and there you are, you've got Mozart; you've got Brahms, you've got Shostakovich or whoever. And the same in theatre.

Ramona Koval: What do you think made you go for the prose, then, in this story—we should say that Tsotsi was a style, wasn't it; gangsters that emulated American 1940s films and wore fedoras and double-breasted suits and wide ties.

Athol Fugard: That's right. Well, you know, it was a time in my life as a writer—you know, I was young—and I was trying to find out what I was, who I was, what sort of writing...I've always known I wanted to be a writer, from very, very early on in my school years. Playing around on paper with language was something that endlessly fascinated me. My favourite reading is still the Oxford English Dictionary. But I tried poetry, you know, tucked away somewhere in my papers are odds and ends of poems I tried to write; short stories. And I might just add that spurred on by the incredible interest that Tsotsi has suddenly aroused, my own response to it—I've actually turned my hand just latterly to a little bit of prose again, and I've had a collection of short stories published in South Africa—which I actually am very proud of, but at this very moment I am back at work on a play. But at that point, way back there when I wrote it, I was trying everything. I think all writers do at a certain point, don't they?

Ramona Koval: What made this a story that you wanted tell—the story of this young man who you introduce in this sense of menace in the first few pages?

Athol Fugard: Oh yes, well, two things contributed to that. A set of wonderful coincidences led to my wife and myself in our first year of our marriage moving from Cape Town to Johannesburg, we found ourselves introduced to a little black ghetto, a black spot, as it was called in terms of apartheid terminology, a black township, a little black community called Sophiatown in the middle of white Johannesburg. And Sophiatown had just been renamed, because it was bulldozed eventually by the government and turned into a white residential area called Triumph. And the new government of South Africa has now renamed it Sophiatown. And it was literally the Harlem of South Africa. It was the cradle of a cultural—both in terms of music, jazz music and literature—all of the most famous names of the apartheid era in terms of black writing come from Sophiatown. Names like Lewis Ncosi, Bloke Modisani, Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, Nat Nakarsa—Oh! Just mentioning their names bring tears to my eyes because those times were so extraordinary and precious and vibrant and alive—because that township was under siege. Under siege.

And we spent more time in that township, my wife and I, than we almost did in white Johannesburg. And I got to know it. I got to know the urgency with which people lived, there. The street gangs that would alert the whole community, stop their own inter-fighting and alert the whole community to the approach of police vans in another raid to try and clear people out of the area. And you know, material like that comes your way as a writer once in a lifetime. I couldn't ignore it. But of course at another level, the story of redemption, it's no accident that one of the most important books in my life was Tolstoy's Resurrection. And that theme has been there in my writing time and time again. Very overtly sometimes, sometimes under the surface. But the fact that human nature is capable of a miraculous change.

Ramona Koval: So the question is really what drives this change. In this story, Tsotsi beats up one of his gang members, Boston, who's more educated than the rest of them, and he found the murder of a man on the train with a bicycle spoke, which is something that they did—he finds this troubling. Boston then asks Tsotsi, after Tsotsi has attacked him, whether he has a soul. Boston asks Tsotsi this. Why does the incident with Boston trouble him so?

Athol Fugard: I suppose it's because he does have one. Every human being—you know, I once said to somebody who was talking to me about my work, that if I ever believed there was a human being on the face of our Earth who was beyond redemption, I'd stop writing. I literally would. And you know South Africa has just come through an extraordinary experience, which was our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And the mystery of forgiving. Of concession and forgiveness and that question of redemption. Tsotsi's change falls into that. There just are miracles within human nature. The possibility of miracles.

Ramona Koval: Yes, in a sense it was written long before Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, of course, but it does mirror that whole societies can be redeemed.

Athol Fugard: That's correct. And let's face it, South Africa, and in terms of what has happened over the past fifteen years, is one of the great political dramas of the—or was one of the great political dramas of the 20th century. On a par with the Berlin Wall coming down—you name it. It was a society that had a potential locked up in it, and which is still unfortunately troubling it, a potential for violence. But really for the bloodbath in the fullest sense of the word, for the society which is as violent as any we know on the face of this Earth, whether it's Northern Ireland or whether it's the Middle East or heaven alone knows where else—for a man to come out of jail after 27 of the best years of his life had been taken away from him.

Ramona Koval: It is a remarkable story. You know, your story, Tsotsi—things change for him when a baby arrives. This baby he's inadvertently given, or he takes inadvertently. This baby arrives to heal him, in a sense. Is this the beginning of a Christian message?

Athol Fugard: You know, I can't deny an element of Christianity in my writing. As I talk to you now, I claim to have a very simple Buddhist practice in my life. It came to me about ten or fifteen years ago and I've been following that. But my childhood and my early years—both my mother and my father were church-goers, devout Christians. Not bigots in any sense, but there was a lot of faith in the family. That was there in me, and you know what the Jesuits say, give us the first five, whatever it is, seven years of a child and you can have the rest. It's true. And that essential, absolutely essential Christian concepts I think still do operate in my writing.

Ramona Koval: But you're also interested, in your plays as well, in consciousness. How do we think? How do our emotions affect the way we see the world and what we do?

Athol Fugard: Yes.

Ramona Koval: The consciousness...in a sense the novel is the way to—surely one of the only ways—to describe this kind of idea.

Athol Fugard: Well, you know, what really fascinates me about theatre...I know I explore that to a certain extent in my playwriting and in the plays I've staged and done. But what really fascinates me about theatre is the way, the potency of secrets in our lives. The way in some cases we try to reveal them and we always do it very clumsily. Nobody can unburden himself of a secret locked away in his or her soul without stumbling in the process. Because language is sometimes so inadequate to express what the nature of that secret is. And then we also use language to hide them. It's an interplay, you know, secrets are both revealed and hidden. And I think in my plays more than—one element I'm very conscious of at the moment as being sort of a dynamic and something that really drives my writing—people, scholars might one day find it worthwhile to look at my plays and find more potent dynamos. But at the moment that is the one that I always talk about when I'm given a chance to speak about my writing, is the potency of the secret.

Ramona Koval: What about the potency of the will to live, because one of the most marvellous characters in this book is Maurice Chabalala, who's a cripple. He hasn't got any legs. He has a will to live and he teaches Tsotsi, in fact, that there is a reason for living even though everyone around you may not see what it is.

Athol Fugard: Oh, I so appreciate that observation, because that drive, that is so important to me. Because you know South Africa, apart from everything else, apart from being a lesson in forgiveness, a lesson in confession and all of the other things that went into our political drama—is a lesson in survival. I mean, millions of people, just by virtue of their skin colour had to work out survival mechanisms to deal with a system that brutalised them. And you know, liberal consciences like myself had to somehow evolve survival mechanisms to be able to live with some degree of peace with yourself within that country. It wasn't easy, and you could never be totally at peace with yourself because even if you made an attempt to protest and raise your voice and stand up and be counted, the sense that you were still part of the system that was oppressing the people was almost impossible to shake off.

So survival, and that is a theme that has come up in my plays, I know. There's one play of mine of which I'm very proud, simply because lodged in the character of the—there are three characters in the play and one of them is a woman and her name is Lena, and her instinct to live, both in terms of the fight against the abuse of the system in the country and the abuse of a violent husband, the man in her life, the man who goes with her. My play is called Boesman and Lena. The third character is a black man who comes into their life briefly. But that will to live. You're quite right. Maurice Chabalala's got it, and a lot of my other characters are driven by it.

Ramona Koval: Well, when people in Australia see the film of your book, which opens in cinemas here on April 13, they'll see a contemporised version, of course, and it's sad that they probably didn't have to look very far to find shanty town settings still today.

Athol Fugard: In South Africa—oh, my word. You see, that's one of the things that has surprised me about the film, is that it's made me realise that its story about—and the book, actually is what I'm talking about—what it made me realise is that the book is still relevant. We have the most appalling, appalling squalor...

Ramona Koval: Yes, and it's all there, obviously, in the film and the book, and Athol Fugard, it's been a complete delight speaking with you this morning. As I said, the book, Tsotsi, is published by Text and the film will be in cinemas here on April 13. Thank you very much.

Athol Fugard: Thank you, Ramona.