Boesman and Lena is a play by South African playwright Athol Fugard. The play was inspired by an incident in 1965 when Fugard was driving down a rural road in South Africa. He noticed an old lady walking along the road in the boiling-hot sun, miles from anywhere, and offered her a lift. She was overcome and cried with gratitude. She told him that her husband had just died and she was walking to another farm. If Fugard hadn’t stopped, she would have spent the night on the side of the road. (It was a common practice in apartheid South Africa for farmers to evict worker’s families when the worker died).