MC: Yes, this is an honour. The Book Prize was instituted as an encouragement to researchers to pursue what in the humanities, at least, is still the internationally recognised benchmark: not the article, but the monograph. The National Department of Education research system doesn't give much encouragement to the book-length study. It is heartening, therefore, that UKZN acknowledges the book.

E'skia Mphahlele

1919 -- 2008

E'skia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele died on 27 October at his home in the Limpopo province, South Africa. Tributes have been deservedly forthcoming: he is described as the grand old man of African literature; as the father of modern black South African writing.

Tribute

1922 - 1996

Douglas Livingstone 

I met Douglas Livingstone in 1977 at the Berea Road Hotel in Durban. At the time, I was researching his poetry for my Masters study. He treated me warmly, generously, not as a student but as a colleague who shared his devotion to the human and natural landscape of southern Africa.

Over lunch he explained to me the intricacies of the Indian Ocean tides as analogies of poetic rhythms, and when my thesis appeared in book form, Douglas Livingstone: a Critical Study of His Poetry (1981), he presented me with a bottle of dry white and the latest edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

OBITUARY

SIPHO (SYDNEY) SEPAMLA

1932 - 2007

Born in West Rand Consolidated Mines Township near Krugersdorp (Mogale City), Sipho Sepamla - a trained school teacher - contributed to the return of a black protest voice after the suppression of dissent and the banning of black writers in the ‘silent decade' of the 1960s.

OBITUARY  

Tribute: Mazisi Kunene

1930-2006

The editors wish to express sadness at the passing on Friday, 11 August, of Mazisi Kunene. He was a great poet in both isiZulu and English, in his home country South Africa, his continent Africa, and his places of dwelling in the world during his years of politically enforced exile.  Mazisi Kunene - born in KwaZulu-Natal - was educated at the former University of Natal in Durban.

If you don't know the taal  then stay out of the kombuis

Michael Chapman on Kannemeyer on Heywood

[Litnet, 50.  18 Feb. 2005: 1-3]

www.litnet.co.za/indaba/chapman_heywood.asp

Christopher Heywood's A History of South African Literature (CUP, 2004) - misleadingly announced on the blurb as the ‘first critical study of its subject' - has elicited from several Afrikaans critics ‘vies' reviews.  I know the vies review having had its venom spat at my own literary history - it predates Heywood's - Southern African Literatures (1996;  2003). 

[Sunday Tribune 14 July 2002]

 
Why should Mbongemi Ngema remind me of Roy Campbell?  Ngema's anti-Indian song, 'AmaNdiya', is certainly in the news.  Campbell is also on my mind, this year being the 100th anniversary of his birth.  Like Ngema, Campbell said some outrageous things.  Like Ngema, he claimed artistic licence for his opinions, even his prejudices.  If Durban for Ngema is a place where Indian South Africans shamelessly exploit African South Africans, Durban for Campbell was, unflatteringly, a grocer's paradise, its dullness relieved only by the inexplicable fact of his birth in the backwater.

In Pursuit of African Scholarship

[Workshop on African Scholarship, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005]

The new, merged University of KwaZulu-Natal wishes to be a premier institution of African scholarship.  What is ‘African scholarship'?  An idealistic interpretation emphasises essentialism, or what Ali Mazrui calls ‘romantic gloriana':   there is an African genius in the bones, in the blood, in the spirit;  a genius unaffected by the circumstance of history.  The argument is that, before colonialism, Africa had mathematics, architectural acumen (Great Zimbabwe), powerful kingdoms.