Athol Fugard
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40 free Athol Fugard trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Athol Fugard spent six decades writing plays that put apartheid South Africa on the world's stages, usually with two or three actors and almost no scenery. Time magazine once called him the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, and his life off the page was just as eventful. This quiz collects the fun facts: the odd jobs and wanderings of his youth, his run-ins with the authorities, the actors who built plays with him in township halls, and the stories behind "Master Harold"...and the Boys, Blood Knot, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, The Island, Boesman and Lena, The Road to Mecca and Tsotsi. It suits students meeting his plays for the first time, theatre lovers, and anyone curious about how one stubborn writer kept working when his own government wanted him gone. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did the young Athol Fugard do with the first book he wrote while working aboard a steamship?
Threw it into the sea
He threw it into the sea after deciding it was terrible. Fugard had hitchhiked up Africa and signed on as a merchant sailor, two years he later turned into the play The Captain's Tiger.
Q 02In the film of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi, what does the hero find on the back seat of a stolen car?
A baby
A baby is in the car he takes at gunpoint, and caring for the child slowly changes him. Two alternative endings were shot for the film, and both survive on the DVD.
Q 03In "Master Harold"...and the Boys, which toy did Sam once build from scrap to cheer up young Hally?
A kite
A kite made of junk was Sam's gift after the two of them had to carry the boy's drunk father home. Sam could not stay to watch it fly: the park bench was for whites only.
Q 04John Kani, co-creator of Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, later played King T'Chaka in which Marvel film?
Black Panther
Black Panther's Wakandans speak Xhosa because of Kani, who taught his first language to Chadwick Boseman, his on-screen son. Kani's real son Atandwa plays the younger T'Chaka.
Q 05What did South Africa's government take from Athol Fugard after the BBC broadcast his Blood Knot in 1967?
His passport
His passport was withdrawn by B. J. Vorster's government and restored only in 1971, after an international campaign on his behalf.
Q 06Which birds name the sculpture-filled house of Helen Martins that inspired Athol Fugard's The Road to Mecca?
Owls
Owls of cement and glass guard the Owl House, among more than 300 sculptures, most of them facing east towards the Mecca of her imagination. The house has been kept as she left it.
Q 07Which ancient Greek tragedy do two cellmates rehearse for their fellow prisoners in Athol Fugard's The Island?
Antigone
Antigone, who defies the state to bury her brother, speaks for the prisoners themselves. At the end the man playing her pulls off his wig and speaks the last lines as himself.
Q 08Which American actor starred in early New York stagings of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena?
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones, later the voice of Darth Vader, played Zachariah in 1964 and Boesman opposite Ruby Dee in 1970. That second staging ran for 205 performances.
Q 09Which animals share a hiding place with a Soviet army deserter in a 1987 play by Athol Fugard?
Pigs
Pigs keep the deserter company for four decades in A Place with the Pigs, drawn from a true wartime story. Fugard played the part himself and called it a parable of his battle with alcoholism.
Q 10Which Academy Award went to the 2005 screen version of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi, a first for South Africa?
Best Foreign Language Film
Best Foreign Language Film went to Gavin Hood's adaptation at the 2006 ceremony. It was also the first African winner of the prize that was not made in French.
Q 11Tsotsi, the source of an Oscar-winning 2005 film, holds which distinction among Athol Fugard's many works?
His only novel
His only novel was written some time before it finally appeared in 1980. In 2022 it was chosen for the Big Jubilee Read, a list of 70 books by Commonwealth writers.
Q 12Which South African city's townships are the setting of the Oscar-winning film of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi?
Johannesburg
Johannesburg's townships also supply the soundtrack: kwaito music performed by the local star Zola, who has a part in the film as well.
Q 13Which pastime are Sam and Willie practising for a big competition in "Master Harold"...and the Boys?
Ballroom dancing
Q 21Which Cape Town neighbourhood, emptied by apartheid removals, became home to the Fugard Theatre in 2010?
District Six
District Six lost more than 60,000 residents to forced removals after 1966. The theatre was built into an old church hall and two warehouses, and Fugard premiered The Train Driver there within weeks.
Q 22In which semi-desert region of South Africa did Athol Fugard keep a village home and reserve his own grave?
The Karoo
The Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda was his retreat. He wanted his gravestone to carry the words a child once called out to him on an uphill run there, urging him to keep going.
Q 23Which practice in South African theatres led Athol Fugard to back an international boycott in the 1960s?
Ballroom dancing gives the play its central image. Sam describes a dance floor where no couple ever bumps into another as his picture of how the world could be.
Q 14Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys unfolds on a rainy afternoon in which kind of family business?
A tea room
A tea room in St George's Park was run by Fugard's own mother, the family breadwinner. He called this his most immediately autobiographical play.
Q 15Which actor was the first Willie in "Master Harold"...and the Boys and later starred in the film Boesman and Lena?
Danny Glover
Danny Glover won a Theatre World Award as Willie, then returned to the play on Broadway in 2003 as the older man, Sam. On screen he played Boesman opposite Angela Bassett.
Q 16Which city, officially renamed Gqeberha in 2021, was Athol Fugard's childhood home and the setting of Blood Knot?
Port Elizabeth
Port Elizabeth is the setting of so many Fugard plays that three early ones were published together under the city's name. He was born inland, in the small town of Middelburg.
Q 17Which 1958 job showed Athol Fugard the pass laws at work, as black South Africans were jailed before his eyes?
Court clerk
Court clerk was his job in a Native Commissioner's Court that tried pass-law offenders. Years later the memory fed his play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.
Q 18In Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, what does Sizwe take from a dead man so he can stay and work in town?
His identity book
His identity book carries the work-seeker's permit Sizwe lacks, so he takes the dead man's name, Robert Zwelinzima. The price is that Sizwe Banzi must officially die.
Q 19Which acting honour did John Kani and Winston Ntshona share in 1975 for two plays devised with Athol Fugard?
A Tony Award
A Tony Award for Best Actor went to the pair jointly, an unusual move, for both Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. Fugard's own came in 2011, for lifetime achievement.
Q 20Which South African general and statesman did Athol Fugard play in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi?
Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts and Gandhi were adversaries who respected each other. Before leaving South Africa in 1914, Gandhi gave the general a pair of sandals he had made himself.
Segregated audiences
Segregated audiences left white theatre with every dignity except human dignity, he wrote. Backing the boycott brought him new restrictions and surveillance.
Q 24Which former jazz saxophonist acted opposite Athol Fugard in Blood Knot at its 1961 premiere and on Broadway in 1986?
Zakes Mokae
Zakes Mokae had played in Trevor Huddleston's band before he turned to acting. He and Fugard went back to the same two roles on Broadway 25 years after creating them.
Q 25Which pointless task do two prisoners mime at length in the opening scene of Athol Fugard's The Island?
Shovelling sand
Shovelling sand onto a pile at the other man's feet means neither heap ever shrinks. The punishment is designed to exhaust the body and break the prisoners' morale.
Q 26Which kind of business does Styles run in New Brighton township in the opening scene of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead?
A photography studio
A photography studio is where Sizwe comes for a portrait to send to his wife. Before he arrives, Styles tells a comic story about his old job at the Ford Motor Company.
Q 27Which apartheid law, broken by the play's two lovers, is named in the full title of Athol Fugard's Statements?
The Immorality Act
The Immorality Act banned sex between white and black South Africans from 1927, was widened in 1950 and lasted until 1985. The play opened Cape Town's Space Theatre in 1972.
Q 28Which hardy succulent plants does Piet Bezuidenhout collect in Athol Fugard's 1978 play about a suspected informer?
Aloes
Aloes thrive in the harshest conditions, which is the point of A Lesson from Aloes. Piet stays rooted in South Africa while a friend just out of jail leaves on a one-way exit visa.
Q 29Which American university's repertory theatre gave "Master Harold"...and the Boys its world premiere in 1982?
Yale
Yale Repertory Theatre made it the first Fugard play to open outside South Africa, where it was at first banned. Two more of his plays had their premieres there later in the 1980s.
Q 30Which Irish playwright, a Nobel laureate, did Athol Fugard revere and echo in his spare two-character dramas?
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett's bare stages and stranded pairs run through Fugard's plays, and his township actors staged Beckett in the 1960s. Fugard also said Bach's cello suites taught him more than any writer.