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Remembering Zindzi Mandela, the writer

Remembering Zindzi Mandela, the writer

NTOMBIZIKHONA VALELA ZINDZI Mandela comes from a family of writers. Although her parents were not writers by profession, this craft was a crucial way of keeping their family together. Mandela was barely 18 months old when her father, Nelson Mandela, was arrested on 5 August 1962 after being a wanted man for his role in South Africa’s liberation movement. His life sentence following the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial in 1964 was served on Robben Island, which meant he could only communicate with his wife, freedom fighter and social worker Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and children through writing letters. These initial circumstances…
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How women’s untold histories shaped South Africa’s national poet

How women’s untold histories shaped South Africa’s national poet

ARETHA PHIRI, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University UHURU PORTIA PHALAFALA, Lecturer, Stellenbosch University KEORAPETSE Kgositsile, the South African-born poet who passed away in 2018, lived in exile in the US from 1962 to 1975 and was at the centre of the country’s 1960s and ’70s Black Arts Movement. Informed by his South African and Tswana background, the poet makes a case for multiple inflections of voices, geographies, and histories in the making of transnational black modernity. Analysing his work offers ways in which African poetry can disrupt dominant thinking on Black Atlantic studies, particularly Paul…
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