An late obituary for South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus which functions as a near comprehensive biography.
Best known as founder of Sanroc, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, as a rival to the official committee Sanoc, he became a familiar figure in the corridors of Olympic power. Sanroc's brilliantly-conducted campaign persuaded individuals and international sports federations that to compete in South Africa, or even against South Africans, was to condone apartheid.
After the historic transition from rule by the National Party (NP) to the African National Congress (ANC), Brutus was virtually written out of the history of the period, because he had only for a time, while living in England, been a paid-up member of the ANC. Though he had worked closely with Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders, he prided himself on his independent base in Sanroc.
Author Thando Mgqolozana is unapologetic about writing A Man Who Is Not a Man, which is based on the Xhosa initiation ritual of circumcision.
Even though talking about what happens on the mountain while boys undergo the snip is taboo, he dares any traditionalist or Xhosa man to challenge him and defend this ritual at this year’s Time of the Writer Festival.
“People are dying every circumcision season and nobody is allowed to say anything. I am inviting Xhosa men to come out and tell everyone what it is that circumcision teaches. So-called custodians must account and they must give society a reason to let a culture that goes against fundamental constitutional principles of life, healthcare, dignity and so on space to continue existing,” Mgqolozana said.
At the Cape Town launch, last week, of Sunnyside Sal, Werner Pretorius of the Book Lounge welcomed Anton Krueger, the award-winning playwright, poet, academic and lyricist.
Krueger started the evening by reading Church Square, 1987, the hilarious (and openly autobiographical) account of his be-wigged 15-year-old self getting arrested while larking at a protest march in a flamboyant orange Hawaiian shirt and bearing an irrelevant – yet still irreverent – cardboard placard. Krueger’s expansive stage presence had the audience in fits as he read.
Toast Coetzer, a multi-faceted author in his own capacity, assured the audience that the book was full of “amazing incidents like that”. Early on in the book the author acknowledges that the fiction is based on a true story, with certain minor characters created as amalgams. “This is a coming of age novella that covers the last years of apartheid. Salvatore Malan, growing up in Pretoria, traces the times from Std. 2 onwards. There are girlfriends, drugs, more girlfriends, and more drugs against the political changes happening in South Africa. Why did you decide to write a memoir, rather than a fictional novel?”
Krueger said the book started off as a homage to a friend who was no longer around any more, remembering their shared crazy adventures. “I didn’t consider my own involvement initially, but I also end up being implicated, and rather embarrassingly so.” He reflected that his father, after reading the back cover, said he was not too interested in reading about his son’s sex life. “Twenty years on, I’m not that person any more.”
This distance has given him time to evaluate that period of his life. He said, “It’s the first time I’ve written something so personal, so close to the bone. And yet, it doesn’t quite feel like the real me.”
Coetzer asked how he decided which events to exclude from the narrative. “How did you think about supporting the narrative tension by what you left out?”
Krueger, not answering entirely directly, reflected on Spike Milligan’s epigram to one of his war memoirs, where a quote appears from Thucydides, after the Peloponnesian War: I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others. Milligan, echoing Thucydides, added: I have just jazzed mine up a little. Krueger, similarly, is extending the riff.
He said the structure was not, in fact, that of a novel, but rather that of a novella. There are two section of the book, with the second part finding a more contemplative, less funny tone. “I wrote this quite quickly about five years ago and tried to get it published on a yearly basis. With each rejection, I’d rewrite it and reconfigure it. Each time it was a complete rewriting.”
Coetzer reflected on publisher Deep South’s range of books, which includes the experimental novels of Paul Wessels and Lesego Rampolokeng, as well as the genre-breaking poetry of Joan Metelerkamp, Bernat Kruger, Nadine Botha and others.
He said, “Robert Berold, my publisher and editor, is a poet who appreciates the idiosyncrasies in language. In working with the text, there wasn’t a flattening out, a making white bread out of it. He runs a small operation, and while there may still be a couple of typos, there’s an authenticity about his range which is very appealing.”
“The cover image’s arresting artwork has a curious literary background,” said Coetzer. “My first association was with the Waterkloof Vier.” Krueger said it was a multi-media piece: a full size car door, painted on by the Grahamstown artist, Anton Brink (son of André P), and belonging to his personal collection.
Coetzer said the novella comes across as “a cautionary tale against drugs”. The author said that hadn’t been the intention, “but it’s a good thing if people give them up, in general.”
Chris Thurman, author of Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life takes a closer look at the Natasha Christopher’s “Mine” exhibition currently running at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and Jeannette Unite’s “Headgear” which is being displayed at the Gold of Africa Museum in Cape Town. Both shows ask the question, “What is beautiful?”.
For better or worse, South African history over the last 120 years has been closely tied to the country’s mineral wealth – and, more specifically, to the extraction of that wealth by a combination of entrepreneurial energy and worker exploitation.
The mining industry has produced images that have become iconic: the hard-hatted miner operating by torchlight, the lift carrying workers thousands of meters underground, the gleaming gold bars that emerge from a furnace. Yet each of these is an ambiguous symbol, suggesting both a proud heritage of engineering feats and economic growth, and a shameful history linked to race- and class-based oppression.
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.”
Born in 1930 on a farm near Colenso in Natal, South Africa, Ben Magubane would almost certainly have grown up to be a farm worker had his father not moved the family suddenly to the city of Durban following a clash with the farm owner. In Durban, the family lived in the Cato Manor squatter settlement and Magubane began his education in the Catholic schools that flourished before the imposition of Bantu Education.
In Bernard Magubane: My Life and Times, Magubane relates how as a child he was radicalised by the conditions apartheid imposed on the majority of the country’s people. He became a teacher and rubbed shoulders with many of the country’s great educationists, his passion for learning leading him on to the University of Natal and eventually to the United States of America, in 1961, for postgraduate studies in the social sciences.
As a critical thinker, Magubane was schooled by eminent scholars within the liberal-pluralist paradigm, but he migrated towards an understanding of South African and African history and sociology through Marxism, a journey that shaped him as a leading African intellectual.
Magubane became closely involved with various members of the African National Congress in exile, including Oliver Tambo, and he played a vital role in the anti-apartheid struggle in the United States and beyond.
About the author
Ben Magubane is the Director of South African Democracy Education Trust.
UKZN Press, distributor of Deep South’s Sunnyside Sal, is delighted to invite you to the following series of events to launch Anton Krueger’s book.
Sunnyside Sal is a jauntily narrated novella set in the tumultuous early 1990s, when a whole generation was discovering that everything they’d been taught to believe was wrong.
Fuelled by his reckless bravado and post-punk philosophy, Sal plunges into extreme situations, but his innocent experiments in rebellion lead him increasingly into hazardous realms. Although ultimately a tragic tale, Sunnyside Sal is borne up throughout by an exuberant humour.
Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University and co-editor of Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, Peter Vale cuts a troubled figure as he marks the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Where are we going as a nation? What have we lost and how can we get it back? he asks, in an article that ranges from Invictus to Jawaharal Nehru:
DESPITE the silken promises of the World Cup, South Africa has marked the 20th anniversary of FW de Klerk’s famous speech with distinct bleakness – a torpor close to despair.
To appreciate this requires a viewing of the film Invictus, Hollywood’s account of SA’s victory in another World Cup, rugby’s, 1995 competition. More than anything else, the movie highlights the sense of awe that South Africans felt as they searched for a new identity and their realisation that in order to achieve it, they would have to sacrifice.
Of course, this country is not the first to experience the rush and the excitement of a new national beginning. On the eve of Independence – August 14, 1947 – Jawaharal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, delivered a speech which began with two dramatic sentences: “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
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.
A penetrating exploration of affirmative action’s continued place in 21st-century higher education, The Next Twenty-five Years assembles the viewpoints of some of the most influential scholars, educators, university leaders, and public officials. Its comparative essays range the political spectrum and debates in two nations to survey the legal, political, social, economic, and moral dimensions of affirmative action and its role in helping higher education contribute to a just, equitable, and vital society.
Book details
The Next 25 Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa edited by David Featherman, Martin Hall, Marvin Krislov Book homepage EAN: 9781869141851 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
An late obituary for South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus which functions as a near comprehensive biography.
Chris Thurman, author of 
UKZN Press, distributor of Deep South’s 
