Taboo-breaking playwright Fugard dies

SA writer and theatre director Athol Fugard was acclaimed at home and abroad for plays that exposed the injustices of apartheid and challenged its racist taboos, including by putting black and white actors on stage together.

- 

Fugard, who died on Saturday aged 92, wrote more than 30 plays over seven decades, his most important in the darkest days of apartheid, touching on the raw themes of the cruel and dehumanising regime that ended in 1994.

"His work helped expose the inhumanity, injustice and blind stupidity of the system to audiences around the world," The Guardian newspaper wrote in 2012 of the "fearless, flinty, obdurate Afrikaner".

In 2006, the film Tsotsi, based on a novel he completed in 1961 and published in 1980, won the first Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.