UKZN Press

Activist and poet Dennis Brutus died at the age of eighty-five on 26 December 2009. The UK’s Guardian newspaper has just published their obituary:

Dennis Brutus, the poet and anti-apartheid activist, who has died aged 85, had no business reaching that ripe old age. In 1963, he was shot in the back at point-blank range in broad daylight by a white policeman in the streets of Johannesburg.

Brutus told me later in an interview for South Magazine that he did not realise, at first, that he had been shot. He was in the hands of the authorities after trying to flee South Africa via the Mozambique border, where he had been caught by Portuguese secret police and handed back. In Johannesburg, he saw a chance to make a run for it and took it. “I think the policeman deliberately left me unguarded, in the hope that I would try to run away,” he said. “I did. And he shot me.”

• Complete obituary in the Guardian

Book details

• Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus reader by Dennis Brutus, Aisha Karim, Lee Sustar
  EAN: 9781869140809
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini

This letter appeared in last week’s Sunday Times:

DENNIS Brutus, who passed away, was an African political icon, and a global legend.

He was an Ajax, defying the lightning of despotism and an ardent foe of racism. He taught us not to be subservient at the cost of liberty.

If only time can judge the verity of his work, it is equally true that only contemporaries can appraise the verity of his character. While the future will find that his work will speak for itself, those to come will turn to the contemporaries to learn the qualities of this extraordinary man I was fortunate enough to have met years ago.

• Read the complete article

Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini
Book details

• Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus reader by Dennis Brutus, Aisha Karim, Lee Sustar
  EAN: 9781869140809
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Dennis Brutus, who died just before the advent of the new decade, is remembered fondly by a leader in the next generation of South Africa’s civil society activists, Patrick Bond:

Trying to keep up with the octogenarian after his 2005 move to Durban dazed even the most Brutus-addicted staff at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Creative Arts, for which he served as a fixture at the Time of the Writer and Poetry Africa festivals.

At least one overarching impression sings out from the cacophony of warm memories: the Brutus philosophy that genuine liberation – not the half measures won in 1994, when class apartheid replaced racial domination – represents a war to be waged on many fronts, because as one battle is won and many more usually lost, there are still others on the horizon that make an engaged life fulfilling, that keep the fires of social change desire burning long into the night.

In his youth, Brutus was radicalised in part by the denial of opportunities to play sport across Port Elizabeth’s neighbourhoods.

He was restricted to competitions in the black townships, hence his first campaign was for athletic fairness. This was an entry point into revolutionary politics, initially with the Teachers League and then the Congress movement.

• Complete article in the Sunday Independent

Book details

• Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus reader by Dennis Brutus, Aisha Karim, Lee Sustar
  EAN: 9781869140809
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

• Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society edited by Patrick Bond, Rehana Dada, Graham Erion
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781869141417
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Former resistance fighter, qualified nurse, women’s health specialist and, perhaps most off all, poet and a writer Makhosazana Xaba speaks to Andie Miller in a walk through history, poetry and places of inspiration:

In the title poem of her first anthology, These Hands, Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba wrote: “These hands remember / the metallic feel / of numerous guns / when the telling click / was heard. / They recall / the rumbling palm embrace / over grenades, / ready for the release of destruction. … These hands / have felt pulsating hearts / over-extended abdomens, / they know the depths of vaginas, / the open mouths of wombs, / they know the grasp / of minute, minute-old clenched fists.”

I ask her if she would consider writing a similar homage to her feet. She answers with a belly laugh. Perhaps, because her early experiences of walking were anything but poetic. “When I was young we walked because there was no transport.” Growing up in Ndaleni, a rural area close to Richmond in what was then Natal, “we walked everywhere, including to town, which was over an hour [away]. We only got a bus in our area when I was 13. And that was a big thing — ‘Oh, a bus, there’s a bus!’ And if you missed the bus you walked, because it came once in the morning and once in the afternoon. So walking was a way of life, it wasn’t a choice I took actively.”

• Read the complete article in the Mail & Guardian

Book details

• Tongues of Their Mothers by Makhosazana Xaba
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781869141448
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

UKZN Press congratulates its author, Mxolisi Nyezwa, who was announced as the winner of the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award for poetry earlier this week.

Nyezwa is author of the collection New Country, published by the Press earlier this year. You can read a sample from New Country here.

More from the Daily Dispatch and The Herald (plus: watch a video of Nyezwa reading at the second link):

MXOLISI Nyezwa, of New Brighton in Port Elizabeth, won the 2009 Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry.

The announcement was made by Pringle Award chief adjudicator Dr Amitabh Mitra, of the East London Hospital Complex, at the Book SA Ban’quet last Saturday.

Nyezwa, author of New Country, was awarded R2 000.

• Read the complete article

“I am very grateful for the recognition of my work,” said Nyezwa, who also received an award from Rhodes University this year.

The interior of his tidy office in Motherwell, Port Elizabeth contrasts sharply with its appearance from the outside – a blue container among the shacks which dominate the area.

“From here I am fighting for the preservation of black poetry”, said Nyezwa, who has devoted his life to poetry, writing and teaching other people how to do so.

“Writing is a way to come to terms with contradictions people experience in every day life,” he said, pointing to the children playing with refuse bags outside.

• Read the complete article and watch a video of Nyezwa reading “In a quiet place”

Book details

• New Country by Mxolisi Nyezwa
  EAN: 9781869141691
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Thanks to Amitabh Mitra, chair of the Thomas Pringle Award for poetry, for the helpful links

Peace versus Justice?: The Dilemma of Transitional Justice in Africa offers fresh insights on the so-called ‘justice versus peace’ dilemma, examining the challenges and prospects for promoting both peace and accountability, specifically in African countries affected by conflict or political violence.

Editor Chandra Lekha Sriram’s book draws on the expertise of many insider analysts, individuals who are not only authorities on transitional accountability processes, but who have participated in them, whether as legal practitioners or commissioners. While the primary focus is on processes in Africa, many of the contributors also draw on lessons from earlier processes elsewhere in the world, particularly Latin America.
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UKZN Press is pleased to be handling the distribution for two new collections of poetry published by Deep South: Robert Berold’s All the Days and Bernat Kruger’s Never.

The poems in Kruger’s book, which is his first, combine hard-edged realism with a wild, visionary spirituality. They range from prose poems to lyrical poems to enigmatic short narratives. The risks Kruger takes with the English language are all the more astonishing given that his mother tongue is Afrikaans.
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You are invited to a reading with Makhosazana Xaba of her latest volume of poetry, Tongues of Their Mothers this coming Wednesday at Wits.

Khosi is particularly hoping for engagement with her poems. There are two copies of her book available for reading in advance at the Wits Writing Centre, otherwise find a copy at Xarra or Boekehuis – or click here to buy it online. Please forward this invitation to anyone you think might be interested in attending.
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Mxolisi Nyezwa’s second collection of poetry, New Country, was launched at the Wellington Deck Tavern, University of KwaZulu Natal, on the fourth evening of the Poetry Africa festival last week.

For many, the softly-spoken Nyezwa became the sleeper hit of the week, with his pared-down coupling of diaphanous abstraction and bare-knuckled beauty, shooting stillness through with gravity in his exquisite verse.

In commenting on the collection, editor Kobus Moolman (himself a poet) described Nyezwa’s work as the “antithesis of instantaneous assimilation, gratuitous information and sound-bytes” in contemporary culture, and applauded the poet’s unavoidable challenge to readers, to “exit themselves and become part of the poem”.
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UKZN Press, in association with Poetry Africa, is delighted to invite you to the launch of Mxolisi Nyezwa’s New Country.

Intensely lyrical and deeply expressionist, the poems from Nyezwa’s latest collection register the intuitiveness of his vision of his land and his life. Nyezwa has carved for himself a voice and a style that is entirely his own and unlike any South African poet before him.
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