“I describe myself as a South African bastard - half English, half Afrikaans. I’m a writer and a man of the theatre. But finally I’m a South African. The proudest thing of them all.”

This is how the renowned playwright, Athol Fugard, described himself at a talk he gave to students from Stellenbosch University in the Neelsie Cinema last Friday.

Fugard, who now resides in America, is widely known as the author of the novel, Tsotsi, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film.

As a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) he has been staying in Stellenbosch for the past few months. The Student Representative Council and Listen, Live and Learn invited him to tell students more about his life and interests.

Fugard, however, shied away from giving a prepared talk and turned it into a question-and-answer session.

He revealed that he is busy writing his first Afrikaans play during his stay at STIAS.

When asked why he chose theatre as medium he said that theatre chose him. He said that the best theatre works are when you don’t know you’re getting a message at all.

“It’s when not just your head, but your heart gets affected. Theatre is there to do two things: to excite my head and to affect my heart.”

When he is writing, he leaves behind every negative feeling the human heart is capable of. “What I take to the table is love. It’s the only energy I use.”

He referred to a few of the plays he wrote during the Apartheid era, but focused mostly on Master Harold and the Boys. The play is based on his childhood relationship with Sam, a black man that worked in their Port Elizabeth home in the Eastern Cape, where he grew up.

His Afrikaans mother had to support the household, because his father was disabled and an alcoholic. Fugard, being a young boy, needed a man to look up to and Sam was that man. “He was everything I wanted my father to be.”

According to Fugard creativity is the nearest one can come to being a god. He said that it is the power within us to transform our own experiences that can in turn affect other’s lives.

He told the students that they hold the future of the country in their hands. By looking at them, his pride in being a South African is reinforced. “You are the future. If anything goes wrong, I’m going to come back and blame you,” he said.