BOOK Southern Africa

Allan Boesak praat uit oor Afrikaners se eksklusiewe opstand

by Vera on 19 Mar 2010   |   

Allan Boesak praat reguit oor wat hy sien as die Afrikaner se eksklusiewe opstand teen die regering. Boesak meen alle Suid-Afrikaners is kwaad oor dieselfde dinge: armoede, werkloosheid, swak dienslewering en wonder hoekom ons nie saam daarteen baklei nie? Allan se nuutste boek is Running with Horses.

‘Wit mense toi-toi nie,” sê my Afrikaner-vriend in ’n gesprek êrens in 2008.

Ek was toe besig met ’n ronde gesprekke oor die totstandkoming van ’n nuwe burgerlike beweging, ’n soort UDF (waaroor ek sien Max du Preez ook nou die aand in Oos-Londen gepraat het).

Oop, nie-rassig, betrokke, vasberade om ons burgerlike verantwoordelikheid op te neem, die regering en politici vas te vat en tot verantwoording te roep.

Die bedoeling was daadwerklike, nie-gewelddadige optrede op verskillende vlakke, sodat politici gedwing sou word om na ons te luister. Daar was in die algemeen groot entoesiasme vir so iets.

• Lees die volledige artikel in By

Boekbesonderhede

• Running with Horses: Reflections of an accidental politician deur Allan Boesak
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9780980275483
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Helen Epstein, Kevin O'Kelly and Marie Arana Review Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

by Jani on 18 Mar 2010   |   

Verdict: carrot X 3

Reading memoir can resemble a Tolstoyan train ride, one of those satisfying trips during which a passenger, a stranger to the others in his compartment, tells a tale filled with fascinating characters, intimate relationships and detailed pictures of the sociology and culture of his personal world. This month, I’ve been enjoying that kind of extraordinary ride with Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a stranger to me until now.

His tone is conversational, his story compelling, and the Kenya-Uganda train that runs from the port of Mombasa across what was then called the White Highlands of Kenya, a constant presence, a symbol and reality both fearsome and alluring. Built by Indian labor, the railway was an important pathway for colonialism. We glimpse the tracks first in April of 1954 when Ngũgĩ’s older brother Good Wallace, who has joined the Mau Mau, flees the police. They remain a significant part of the landscape until 1954 when, after a rigorous academic exam, Ngũgĩ finally rides the train to Alliance High School, the best high school in Kenya – and ends his memoir.

• Complete review at The World

Further reviews

Kevin O’Kelly in Boston.com:

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir of growing up in British-ruled Kenya, “Dreams in a Time of War,’’ vividly evokes the colonial era as experienced by Africans, and the resulting clash of cultures that produced one of the most significant African writers of our time.

Set against the backdrop of World War II and the nation’s battle for independence, the work covers the period from Ngugi’s birth to his departure from his village for boarding school during his teens.

• Keep reading

Marie Arana in The Washington Post:

Toward the end of his strikingly frank memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Barack Obama describes how his Kenyan grandfather came to marry his grandmother. A ruthless and demanding man, Hussein Onyango was so fussy about his hut that he rejected a number of wives because they weren’t tidy enough, beating them to within an inch of their lives and sending them back to their fathers. The first one he decided to keep was orderly enough, but, as it turned out, she could bear no children. During a night of drinking and revelry in a Nairobi dance hall, his masculinity was so ridiculed that he was prompted to take another wife — as was the country’s custom. He had a beautiful young woman abducted, negotiated a dowry with her father and brought her to live under his roof. This was the president’s grandmother, Akumu. Eventually, as “Dreams From My Father” tells it, Hussein Onyango brought yet a third wife into his hut, bestowing on Barack Obama Sr. an abundance of mothers. The pattern held into the next generation: Obama Sr., like his father, would also take three wives.

• Keep reading

Book Details

• Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
  EAN: 9780307378835
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Douglas Rogers on Traveling and Foreign Cuisine

by Claire on 17 Mar 2010   |   

Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort, is a man who’s been places – he’s been to over 50 countries at last count, and still traveling. Lisa from the Globe Corner Bookstore – “the largest and one of the oldest travel book and map stores in North America” (it’s in Cambridge, Mass.) – caught up with Rogers between travels to find out how he does it, which places he still wants to visit and to chat about his book and the story behind it.

1. First, a preliminary travel preference question: do you take the aisle or window seat? (Please explain.)

Aisle – for stretching and proximity to wine trolley.

2. Also, according to your biography you have traveled to over 50 countries. But there is always that tiny Baltic Island whose ferry is never running or that pueblo in Taos that is always closed for an indigenous ceremony – we’ve all got a place where fate won’t let us go. Is there a destination that still eludes you?

Yes, any island off Maine. This will sound pathetic to someone from Boston, but I’ve been planning to visit Maine ever since moving to the US seven years ago and it’s never happened, usually because of poor organization on my part. It’s not easy to get my head around that state because it’s so huge, and the idea of going to the wrong island and being stuck there for a week terrifies me. So a request – can any of your readers advise me on a cool, remote island hideaway to visit in June with my family, how to get there, and where to stay?

• Read the complete article

Book details

• The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe by Douglas Rogers
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868423620
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Alan Yu Interviews André P Brink at the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival

by Chris on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Author André P Brink is a man with a lot to say – as Alan Yu found out at the recent Man Hong Kong Literary Festival. Yu caught up with Brink to chat about South African letters post-Apartheid. It makes for insightful reading:

“Language,” André Brink says, “is the starting point of literature, an invention in and through language.”  As someone who writes in both English and Afrikaans, he should know.  He tells me that since the transition to multi-racial democracy in South Africa, more literature is written in Afrikaans, often seen to be the language of racial oppression.  It is perhaps not so surprising, since Afrikaans was, in the words of Brink, “shaped in the mouths of slaves” which in a process of “creolisation” became the language of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century.

In a wide-ranging, erudite and stimulating lecture at the 2010 Man Hong Kong International Festival, held recently at the University of Hong Kong, Brink talks about South African fiction after apartheid.

He begins by observing that apartheid  has not been eliminated, but is “receding”.  “The road to freedom for the creation of literature,” he says, “still has to be walked.”

• Read the complete article at Alan Yu @ Wordpress

Book details

• ‘n Vurk in die pad deur Andre Brink
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780798149969
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• A Fork in the Road by André Brink
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781846552441
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Ngugi wa Thiong'o's New Book: Dreams in a Time of War, a Childhood Memoir

by Ben - Editor on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Alert! This month, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o releases Dreams in a Time of War, a memoir that publishers Harvill Secker describe as “a mesmerising portrait of a young boy’s experiences in an African nation in flux”.

Said country being Kenya, of course. Here’s more from the blurb:

Beginning in the late 1930s, this moving and entertaining memoir describes Ngugi’s day-to-day life as the fifth child of his father’s third wife in a family that included twenty-four children born to four different mothers. Against the backdrop of World War II, which affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as the apple of his mother’s eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.

As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya at this time begin to impinge on the boy’s life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through telling the story of his grandparents and parents and of his brothers’ involvement on different sides of the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi wa Thiong’o takes us back to a momentous period in Kenyan history, deftly etching a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

The reviews for the book have started to trickle in – watch out for a sampling from the best on BOOK SA later this week.

Book details

• Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781846553776
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini

Pre-London Book Fair Special Offer on Modjaji Books new titles

by Colleen on 16 Mar 2010   |   

Modjaji Books has several new titles coming out in April and May. If you would like to pre-order any of these titles at a special discount price, here’s your chance. It’s also a way of supporting an indie publisher.

The titles are:

Arja Salafranca’s collection of short stories The Thin Line.
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145.
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125

Meg Vandemerwe’s collection of short stories This Place Called Home
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R145.
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R125

Jane Katjavivi’s memoir, Undisciplined Heart
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R170
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R150

Small Publisher’s Catalogue 2010 (Africa)
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R150
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R100

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers new collection of poems, The Everyday Wife
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R130
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R110

Modjaji’s Book of Bed Short Stories
Recommended Retail Price in stores – R150
Modjaji Pre-Order price including postage where relevant: R130

Special Offer if you order all 6 of the titles you pay R690 (an extra R50 off, the already reduced price)

Check out all Modjaji Books titles here ….

Go on, you know you want them and you will be supporting independent publishing in a big way!

For more information about any of the titles click on the links above.

Sunday Read: John Carlin Interviews Fatima Meer

by Ben - Editor on 14 Mar 2010   |   

John Carlin, the author of Invictus, conducted an extensive interview some years ago with author and activist Fatima Meer, who passed away on Friday, as widely reported. The interview appears to comprise part of a series in the USA related either to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, or the release of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Meer was Mandela’s first biographer, writing the story of his life while he was still in prison, and publishing it, as Higher than Hope, in South Africa in 1988.

BOOK SA attended Meer’s funeral in Durban on Saturday.

Here’s Fatima Meer on the Mandelas in the undated interview:

Nelson wrote me a letter in 1971, in which he expressed very strong reservations about writing an autobiography, and I find his reasons interesting and would like to share them with you. I will read an extract from that letter … he wrote in March first 1971:

“The trouble of course is that most successful men are prone to some form of vanity. There comes a stage in their lives when they consider permissible to be egoistic and to brag to the public at large about their unique achievements. What a sweet euphemism for self praise the English language has evolved. Autobiography they chose to call it, where the shortcomings of others are frequently exploited to highlight the praiseworthy accomplishments of the author. I am doubtful if I will ever sit down to scribble my background. I have neither the achievements of which I could boast, nor the skills to do it. If I lived on cane spirit every day of my life I still would not have had the courage to attempt it. I sometimes believe that through me creation intended to give the world the example of a mediocre man in the proper sense of the term (remarkable self assessment in 1971). Nothing could tempt me to advertise myself had I been in a position to write an autobiography. Its publication would have been delayed until my bones had been laid and perhaps I might have dropped hints not compatible with my vow. The dead have no worries if the truth, nothing but the whole truth about them emerge. If the image I have helped to maintain through my perpetual silence was ruined, that would be the affair of posterity, not ours.”

• Complete interview at PBS.org
• More Sunday reads

Image courtesy PBS

Rag Zuma All You Want - But Not About This, says Jeremy Gordin

by Jani on 09 Mar 2010   |   

Last week was a difficult President Zuma, ragged as he was by the British press, which had a field day with the President’s polygamous lifestyle during his visit to the country.

Zuma biographer Jeremy Gordin takes issue with one paper and reporter in particular: Stephen Robinson of The Daily Mail. For those of you who missed it (could you possibly have?) Robinson wrote the now famous words, “Jacob Zuma is a sex-obsessed bigot with four wives and 35 children.” Gordin makes a valid point or two his “hands off” response:

If you do not know about the brouhaha surrounding President Jacob G Zuma and the English newspapers – mainly of the tabloid shape and mindset (for want of a better word) – you must either be poor (for which I'm sorry) or perhaps living in some bizarre, cut-off place such as Hogsback or Cape Town. Yet even in those outlandish places, I understand, the Internet exists.

It’s been great fun, hasn't it, watching the souties (or rooinekke, if you prefer) having a go at the President. The President has, by the way (this info is for those residing in Hogsback) gone to London, with one of his three wives, Thobeka Madiba-Zuma, to see Queen Elizabeth II and a few other handlangers, such as Prince Phillip and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

• Read the complete article at Politicsweb

Book details

• Zuma: A Biography by Jeremy Gordin
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868422630
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Scribd.com book preview:

Zuma: A biography

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Hani: Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp in Conversation with Jeremy Cronin at The Book Lounge

by Claire on 09 Mar 2010   |   

Jonathan Ball and The Book Lounge invite you to a conversation between poet, deputy transport minister and SACP official Jeremy Cronin and the authors of the biography of Chris Hani, Hani: A Life Too Short.

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country?

Come listen to what is bound to be a telling and invigorating talk.

Event Details

• Date: Wednesday, 17 March 2010
• Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
• Venue: The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland
  cnr Buitenkant
  Cape Town | Map
• Guest Speaker: Jeremy Cronin
• RSVP: booklounge@gmail.com, 021 462 2425

Book Details

• Hani: A life too short by Janet Smith, Beauregard Tromp
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9781868423491
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Scribd.com book preview:

Hani: A life too short

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Palesa Morudu Reviews The Honour to Serve: Recollections of an Umkhonto Soldier by James Ngculu

by Ben - Editor on 08 Mar 2010   |   

Verdict: carrot

James Ngculu’s memoirs cover the full uMkhonto weSizwe experience, from leaving South Africa for exile and training in Africa, the Soviet Union and socialist Europe, to playing a frustrating waiting game in Angola – and witnessing the 1984 mutinies and the horrors of camp Quatro:

But a great deal is dedicated to Angola in the book. Ngculu explains how that war-ravaged country dispelled any romanticism about armed struggle.

Although being an MK soldier and understanding the discipline that goes with that is an honour, Ngculu does not shy away from the frustrations and utter despair that many recruits felt in the camps. These had many causes, but two come across quite strongly: idleness and abuse of power. Ngculu writes: “The most traumatic thing in the camps was waiting. This waiting became the source of all our frustrations and feelings of despondency.”

• Complete review in the Mail & Guardian

• The Honour to Serve: Recollections of an Umkhonto Soldier homepage

Book Details

• The Honour to Serve: Recollections of an Umkhonto Soldier by James Ngculu
  EAN: 9780864867339
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!