Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
Athol Fugard, the renowned South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director, best known for his searing critiques of apartheid, died on Saturday, March 8, aged 92.
Fugard refused to stage plays for segregated audiences. His works did more than expose racial injustice; they probed authoritarianism, poverty, and the human cost of repression.
In Idi Amin’s Uganda of the late 1970s, reading Fugard was a rite of passage—an initiation into the brutal realities of power, not just in distant South Africa but right at home.
The most revered Fugard work in Ugandan classrooms was “Blood Knot” (published in 1961). The play follows two half-brothers—one light-skinned (Morris) and one dark-skinned (Zachariah)—living under South Africa’s racial segregation. It dissects internalised racism, familial tension, and societal division.
Uganda had no apartheid, but we immediately recognised Blood Knot’s portrait of fractured communities. In Amin’s era, favoured ethnic groups got the seized shops of expelled Asians, letters approving foreign currency at Bank of Uganda rates 10 times cheaper than on the black market, and, in the darkest moments, immunity from the fate of those whose bodies were dumped in Namanve forest. Who lived and who died was often a function of factional privilege.
The play’s themes of personal betrayal mirrored Ugandan realities. State informants—an omnipresent terror—shattered social trust. Even at meagre family meals, especially when relatives and friends came over, politics was avoided. You never knew who had been turned.
While Blood Knot was the classic, my favourite was Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (published in 1972). The title still grips me. Co-written with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, it tells the story of Sizwe Banzi, a Black man forced to assume a dead man’s identity to survive South Africa’s oppressive pass laws. The play lays bare identity loss, bureaucratic violence, and the compromises forced upon the powerless.
In Amin’s Uganda, survival, too, was an intricate dance. Ordinary Ugandans made grim calculations. Couples—strategic and pragmatic—agreed that the wife should become the mistress of a senior military officer to secure a government supply contract or access the Army Shop for scarce goods.
In cases where the couple owned a store, the wife stood at the counter, smiling at boorish soldiers. The husband sat in the back, counting money and swallowing the humiliation of his wife being hit on.
By “The Island” (published 1973), Fugard’s outlook had shifted slightly. Again co-written with Kani and Ntshona, the play follows two Black prisoners, John and Winston, held on Robben Island. They rehearse Sophocles’ Antigone, the tale of a woman who defies a king’s decree to bury her brother, a supposed traitor.
In Fugard’s hands, Antigone became a searing allegory for resistance, incarceration, and the power of art as defiance. The prisoners endure beatings and exhaustion, but their spirits survive through humour, memory, and performance. Over his lifetime, Fugard wrote nearly 40 plays and four books. Now, decades later, his works still speak to Uganda.
A surveillance state, censorship (Facebook remains officially banned nearly five years on), police brutality, safe houses, military detention, electoral manipulation, abductions, and the privileging of a class that gets first dibs on national “groceries”—all too familiar. On some days, “The Island” plays out in real-time.
Presidential aspirant Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi), a musician-turned-politician, wields art as resistance. His song Tuliyambala Engule (We Shall Wear the Crown) became an anthem of defiance, though his concerts have been banned since 2019. Like Antigone, his voice persists, banned but not silenced. Poet and activist Stella Nyanzi, through her provocative verse, has challenged the regime and paid for it with jail time.
Fugard is gone. But in Uganda, he lingers.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
X (Formerly Twitter): @cobbo3
