LITERATURE - The African Mirror

Jan

2023

Ernest Cole: South Africa’s most famous photobook has been republished after 55 years

PHOTOGRAPHER Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in the Pretoria township of Eersterust, just before apartheid was formally introduced in South Africa in 1948. Author KYLIE THOMAS, Senior Researcher, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies He was 20 when thousands of people gathered outside a police station in Sharpeville township to protest against being forced to carry passbooks by the white minority government. On that day at least 69 people were shot dead, hundreds were injured, and a state of emergency was declared. The Sharpeville Massacre is regarded as a turning point in the struggle for liberation in…

Dec

2022

By The African Mirror

Dear Comrade President: book highlights ANC leader Oliver Tambo’s role in preparing South Africa for democracy

LITERATURE

MORE than three decades have passed since the apartheid government in South Africa unbanned the African National Congress (ANC), the country’s leading liberation movement, and released its leader, Nelson Mandela, from prison. This launched four fraught years of negotiations and violence that led to South Africa’s first-ever democratic elections. The book Dear Comrade President: Oliver Tambo and the Foundations of South Africa’s Constitution, by South African historian Andre Odendaal, focuses on a dimension ignored in previous histories and memoirs of this period: the ANC’s constitution-framing process, which would help to shape the future democratic South Africa. Author GAVIN EVANS, Lecturer,…

Dec

2022

By The African Mirror

For the love of books: This South African author, publisher is on a mission to get everyone reading

LITERATURE

BONFACE ORUCHO, BIRD STORY AGENCY LORRAINE Sithole credits her passion for books to a family tradition instilled in her by her grandmother decades ago. This meant that early childhood literary success was celebrated and reinforced. "One of the most profound moments for me when I was in primary school was when I was awarded an English book written by a local author," she said. Being recognised and awarded at a time when most of her peers were communicating exclusively in their mother tongue sparked a sense of ownership of her second language. Since then, she's been unstoppable. Years of networking,…

Dec

2022

By The African Mirror

Corruption in South Africa: new book lifts the lid on who profits – and their corporate enablers

LITERATURE

KEITH GOTTSCHALK THE new book The Unaccountables: The Powerful Politicians and Corporations who Profit from Impunity is welcome for the way it contextualises corruption. It shows how politicians and bureaucrats could not implement corruption without their corporate and professional enablers – the accountants, auditors and advocates who make it all possible. The book is the result of a decade of research by Open Secrets and other NGOs. It is edited by Michael Marchant, Mamello Mosiana, Ra’eesa Pather and Hennie van Vuuren (a blend of investigative journalists and activists) and has 11 named contributors. Analytically, it covers four overlapping issues: crimes…

Dec

2022

By The African Mirror

Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review

LITERATURE

THERE are some writers you wish you had encountered years ago. There are some authors you only discover – for many reasons – years after their death. The Afrikaans writer Koos Prinsloo is one such, for me. He wrote during the last violent decade of apartheid – a system of forced racial segregation implemented by the Afrikaans-speaking white minority rulers of South Africa. While the country was undergoing states of emergency and increasing internal revolt, Prinsloo wrote from deep within the dominant white patriarchal culture. But his work spoke directly back to this domination by representing a maligned and repressed…

Nov

2022

By The African Mirror

Juby Mayet, legendary South African writer and journalist, remembered through new book

LITERATURE

SOUTH African writer Juby Mayet passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. She wrote her autobiography in 1997 but it has only now been published, 25 years later. Freedom Writer: My Life and Times finally places the spotlight on an outstanding figure in South African journalism. Mayet was a reporter in Johannesburg from 1957 until 1978, and during those two decades, she wrote for important popular and political publications. These included the tabloid newspaper Golden City Post, the famous Drum magazine, the UBJ Bulletin published by the anti-apartheid Union of Black Journalists, and the anti-apartheid periodical The Voice.…

Nov

2022

By The African Mirror

In conversation with award-winning Nigerian author and director of Ake festival Lola Shoneyin

LITERATURE

BONFACE ORUCHO, BIRD STORY AGENCY. AFRICA is ethnically and culturally diverse. The nature of art and literary works from the continent are equally varied. African writers like Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi, Alain Mabanckou, and Bessie Head, among many others, have elevated African arts to the global space. Still, there is a need to sustain the momentum. Lola Shoneyin, a poet, novelist, publisher, bookseller and festival organiser, is one of the few dedicated to ensuring African literature and art get better recognition and appreciation. When the 48-year-old published her debut novel ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, in 2010, she…

Oct

2022

By The African Mirror

Chibok kidnappings: why it’s important to listen to the survivors of Boko Haram terrorism

LITERATURE

IN 2009 a once quiet local Salafi group called Boko Haram became increasingly violent in north-east Nigeria and border communities of Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Its quest to forbid western education in the heavily Islamic region has led to the kidnapping of many school children, the slaughter of an estimated 2,200 teachers and the burning down of 1,400 schools. But the terrorist group was largely unknown on the world stage until the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the Nigerian town of Chibok in April 2014. The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, used in the international calls for the girls to be rescued, garnered…

Jul

2022

By The African Mirror

The case of the acclaimed South African novel that ‘borrows’ from Samuel Beckett

LITERATURE

RICK DE VILLIERS, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of the Free State PEREANT qui ante nos nostra dixerunt: may those who utter our words before us perish. This lighthearted Latin curse speaks a truth many readers and writers have felt: to have our thoughts articulated by someone else. Coenraad de Buys is unruffled by such a possibility. He is the antihero of Willem Anker’s award winning 2014 Afrikaans novel, Buys. Vagabond philosopher that he is, Buys reflects on the nature of memories. Their substance is flaky; their origin sometimes obscure. You might glimpse them in a glass darkly or…

Jul

2022

By The African Mirror

Wole Soyinka’s life of writing holds Nigeria up for scrutiny

LITERATURE

AKINWANDE Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known simply as Wole Soyinka, can’t be easily described. He is a teacher, an ideologue, a scholar and an iconoclast, an elder statesman, a patriot and a culturalist. The Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet and essayist is a giant among his contemporaries. In 1986, he became the first sub-Saharan African, and is one of only five Africans, to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. This was in recognition of the way he “fashions the drama of existence”. Author ABAYOMI AWELEWA, Lecturer in African and African Diasporan Literature, University of Lagos His works reveal him as a…