Athol Fugard lives in the bush country just outside the industrial town of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, not far from where he was born one month shy of 50 years ago. In his plays, he has been a burning bush to his countrymen and the world, bearing witness to the curse and the devastating human cost of apartheid.

A diminutive figure with a pepper-and-salt beard, an ascetic mien and a tempered voice, Fugard is no firebrand. His assaults on apartheid have been more elliptical than frontal, but that has not spared him the insidious harassment of South African authorities.

His mail has been opened, and his phone calls have been tapped. In 1967 the South African government confiscated his passport and held it for four years without explanation. As Fugard told TIME'S Elaine Dutka last week: "They said I couldn't leave the country unless I wanted a permanent exit visa. It might have been tempting at that point to leave and establish myself outside--but instead I was forced to stay in South Africa and deal with myself. I don't hold it against the government. In fact, they might have done me a favor. That's not such an extraordinary view. Ask Lech Walesa to leave Solidarity and Poland and see what his answer is."

Fugard does not harbor any assurance that his dramas are instruments of internal social change: "The most my plays do is to sustain a measure of hope and faith in the dignity of people--in the face of a system that denies it," he says. "As to whether they do any good, I am totally without an answer...Sometimes I'm convinced that I'm just preaching to the converted. Theater can be a civilizing influence, but it is a second-degree experience. People can change, but it takes a first-degree experience to bring it about."

Fugard's initial first-degree experience occurred in much the way it happens to the boy in "Master Harold." Says Fugard: "At the age of ten, I spat on a black man...I was deeply ashamed of it seconds after I did it, but it was very difficult for me to emancipate myself from the racial pressures that make South Africa the place it is."

Growing up in Port Elizabeth had its private pressures as well. Fugard's father was a cripple, like the boy's father in "Master Harold," a jazz musician who could not support his family. To make ends meet, Fugard's mother, a dauntless woman, opened a boardinghouse and later a tearoom. Reflects Fugard: "I grew up in a household with two very different cultures and languages. With an Afrikaner mother and an Irish father, I'm a total mongrel by South African standards."

The "mongrel" went on to the University of Cape Town and took a few courses in philosophy but dropped out, fearing the academic atmosphere would prove constricting to his hopes as a writer. He signed on as a common seaman on a freighter that traveled between Japan, India and the South Pacif ic. This proved to be the second phase of his emancipation. He was the only white sailor bunking with an other wise black crew commanded by white officers. He learned to judge men by quality and character instead of color: "Returning to South Africa and apartheid after all those months was very traumatic."

He began to cope with the trauma when he fell in love with an actress, Sheila Meiring, who has been his wife for 26 years and is an award-winning novelist. Through her, he discovered his vocation for theater. What he has tried to do in his plays, and does with a supernal healing touch in "Master Harold, " is to cast out the fear that flowers in hate. Years ago Fugard said, "You can't answer violence with counterviolence...The answer is love. The best sabotage is love."

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