Academy honours ‘misfit Afrikaner’

JANIS KINNEAR

Staff Reporter

playwright and director Athol Fugard has been awarded the English Academy of South Africa gold medal for excellence in literacy and language.

Marking the academy’s 50th year, Fugard was awarded the medal yesterday at its International Golden Jubilee conference at the Cape Town Peninsula University of Technology city campus.

He gave a talk titled “Millstones or milestones? The journey of a South African bastard”. Fugard recalled his literary journey as a young writer, honing his craft through political turmoil during apartheid and going on to win international acclaim.

“I have often likened myself to a tightrope walker with two safety platforms at either end – the personal and the political – and my writing as the precarious balancing act I performed out there on the wire,” Fugard said.

He said he had spent 54 years mastering the craft of playwrighting, which he described as his most significant milestone.

Fugard attributed his love for the English language to his father but also paid tribute to his mother, who was an Afrikaans-speaking woman from the Karoo.

“I am a bastard… a misfit Afrikaner writing in the English language,” he said.

He said he would die a South African, describing the country as having “stark and disturbing polarities” – told through his long list of plays and stories.

Fugard said young writers overseas often claimed their political world was “grey” but there were no moral ambiguities in this country.

“Yes or no. Those were the operatives during the brutal years of apartheid,” he said.

“There was a time when I thought the new South Africa was going to be a grey area for future young writers, but certainly I don’t think that any more.

“When you have a government that was prepared to enact legislation that would in effect have muzzled the press, then obviously the time for yes and no is still very much with us.”

He said his first major dramatic milestone was Blood Knot. “It was the play in which I discovered my own voice and by that I mean it was a story which only I knew how to tell.

“Together with Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena– I think of them collectively as my PE trilogy – I defined myself as a regional playwright, the one label I’m happy to have tied around my big toe when I lie in the morgue.”

janis.kinnear@inl.co.za