book review - The African Mirror

Sep

2021

Book Review | Black and feminist in SA

SINDI-LEIGH MCBRIDE SURFACING: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is a radiant presentation of the diversity of being a Black woman in South Africa. The book is aglow with the radical possibilities of art, activism and critical theory – easily illuminating diverse intellectual spaces, from divinity and dance to photography and philosophy. Ainhehi Edoro accurately described Surfacing as an “immersive experience” and “feminist utopia”, but it is also so much more than that – offering groundbreaking work. The editors – feminist theorist Desiree Lewis of the University of the Western Cape and poet and feminist scholar Gabeba Baderoon, who is based at Penn State University…

May

2021

By The African Mirror

Book Review | Cuddling men and tailoring scissors

LITERATURE

MEGAN ROSS THE Madhouse is a work of dazzling complexity, a pan-African tribute to art and artists alike that explores the strange lives of a family of four. Setting the novel against the political uncertainty of Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, author TJ Benson takes his readers on a hallucinatory journey spanning decades and time zones with the titular character – an old asylum-cum-family home – as a portal into the secrets, dreams and yearnings of brothers André and Macmillan, and their parents Sweet Mother and Sharriff. The Madhouse calls to mind the energy of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and…

May

2021

By The African Mirror

Book Review | 69 Jerusalem Street

LITERATURE

KARABO KGOLENG LINDIWE Nkutha has small feet. For the longest time, she coveted a pair of All Star takkies but she couldn’t find a place that sold them in her size. One day, her partner – raised in Pretoria – suggested they go to Marabastad to look for them. They found the shoes in Marabastad’s Jerusalem Street, a place that evoked for her an atmospheric combination of Diagonal, Bree and Noord Streets in Johannesburg. Anyone familiar with these streets knows they are sites of enterprise, bustling with crowds of diverse people on different missions, hooting taxis and the obligatory dodgy,…

Apr

2021

By The African Mirror

Book Review | Remnants of Miriam Tlali

LITERATURE

BARBARA BOSWELL EDITED by esteemed feminist literary critic Pumla Dineo Gqola, Miriam Tlali: Writing Freedom presents a kaleidoscopic view of Miriam Tlali’s life and writing. The book’s most significant contribution may be that it renders into print, for the first time, a previously unpublished play by the pioneering writer. The text of the play, Crimen Injuria, landed fortuitously with Gqola after a chance encounter at the State Theatre in Pretoria, where a stranger offered it to her, having found it at the theatre. Understanding Writing Freedom’s significance hinges on understanding the significance of Tlali in South African literature. Born in 1933 in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, Tlali…

Mar

2021

By The African Mirror

How apartheid denied a Black golf champ

LITERATURE

BARRY COHEN SEWSUNKER “Papwa” Sewgolum began playing golf with a syringa stick but went on to win the Dutch Open and several South African tournaments before the apartheid government banned him. Papwa, the early days Papwa Sewgolum’s parents had come to South Africa in 1860 along with many other indentured Indians from North India via Calcutta to work in the sugarcane plantations on the Natal North Coast. They hoped to make a new life in the land of milk and honey, and prosper, and to get away from their grinding poverty and punishing colonial taxes (which would eventually lead to…

Oct

2020

By The African Mirror

“They see savages, even when we wear their suits, speak their King’s English and worship their God.”

LITERATURE

WILLIE CURRIE LADY Florrie returned to Johannesburg in February 1906. She was met at the station by her husband, Lord Sudden, and the new Governor of Transvaal Colony, Lord Selborne, who had replaced Lord Milner. The Rand Mines Native Band was playing the Radetzky March with gusto, and the gathered crowd was in a festive mood. As had been expected of her on arrival, she had greeted the Rand Mine managers and their wives, as well as a number of members of Milner’s Kindergarten, who had stayed on after his departure to assist the new governor. Among them were Lionel…

Oct

2020

By The African Mirror

Book Review | Tennis for the people

LITERATURE

KELLY FLETCHER THE first lawn tennis matches were played on hourglass-shaped courts. But not for long. Three years after Walter Wingfield was granted the patent for his “portable court” and began selling his lawn tennis sets, the first Wimbledon tournament took place in June 1877 on a rectangular court. The shape of the court and the scoring system from that inaugural Gentlemen’s Singles tournament is still used today. In other ways though, lawn tennis has changed immensely, as David Berry shows in A People’s History of Tennis. Tennis is still seen as a sport for the privileged by many today and…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

Book review | The blood politics of a warring ANC

LITERATURE

JAN BORNMAN GREG Ardé’s War Party: How the ANC’s Political Killings Are Breaking South Africa is a cautionary tale of how the murderous rot in one province is damaging an entire country. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the then province of Natal and the KwaZulu bantustan bore witness to extraordinary violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front (UDF), which was allied to the ANC. The violence spread via migrant worker hostels to Johannesburg. By the early 1990s this violence, estimated to have cost up to 20 000 lives and often described as a regional civil war, threatened to destabilise and…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

Book Review | Femicide in South Africa

LITERATURE

PUMLA DINEO GQOLA FEMICIDE is a South African preoccupation. News headlines have made names and faces familiar with such frequency that only the most delusional among us deny that women are being killed at an alarming rate. Nechama Brodie’s Femicide in South Africa enters this fray to raise the quality of public debate on femicide and illuminate why a proper diagnosis of the situation remains so elusive. Many raise the country being broadly homicidal as one way of putting femicide into context. But generalities only deepen the crisis because femicide “carries such distinct features that, if we were to try and understand…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

“This is one of those books that makes you shed tears”

LITERATURE

KHULU MBATHA WOMEN IN SOLITARY: Inside the female resistance to apartheidBy Shanthini Naidoo I recently attended the launch of a publication on the life of anti-apartheid struggle veteran Rita Ndzanga at the Phiri Community Hall, in Soweto, Johannesburg. The launch was organised by the Lawrence Ndzanga ANC Branch of Senaoane and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, which produced the booklet. Rita Ndzanga, was one of the accused at the notorious 1969 ‘Trial of 22’. The names of the 22 trialists were: 1. Lawrence Ndzanga; 2. Rita Ndzanga; 3. Winnie Madikizela Mandela; 4. Shanthie…