ABSTRACT
Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in the dusty Karroo town of Middelburg in the Cape Province, South Africa, the son of a general dealer. Later the family moved to Port Elizabeth, eking out a living keeping a boardinghouse and later acquiring the St. George’s Park Tea Room. After his matriculation year, Fugard secured a scholarship to the University of Cape Town, enrolling for a B.A. in philosophy. It was here that he was equipped with the knowledge to understand Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. He did not complete his degree, however, as he decided to hitchhike through Africa, with the poet Perseus Adams as his companion. They were arrested in Cairo for illegal entry into the country and deported to the Sudan, where they were promptly jailed for the same offense. Upon their release, the two men parted ways. In Port Sudan, Fugard was offered a job on a steamer, the S.S. Graigaur. His experiences on the ship, especially those relating to his fellow crew members, had a lasting impact upon him; in fact, it was on this ship that Fugard crossed the divide between the racially bound South African he was then and the cosmopolitan humanist he was to become. This would help him relinquish the shackles of convention and allow him to enter those seedy bars and illegal taprooms in his native land where he would meet people who would be recreated as characters in his plays. Eventually, with financial assistance from his mother, he returned to South Africa, where he wrote freelance articles for the Port Elizabeth newspaper, the Evening Post. In 1954 Fugard wrote a play, Klaas and the Devil, which he followed with The Cell (foreshadowing his later The Island). On September 22, 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, an actress and former fellow student whom he had admired but who, he felt, had not taken any notice of him.
