J. M. Coetzee was born to German and English parents in Cape Town on 9 February 1940. Coetzee spent his childhood in there, as well as in Worcester, a picturesque Western Cape town northeast of the famous South African harbour city. Supporters of the liberal South African party of General Jan Smuts, his parents opposed the conservative Afrikaner nationalists who ultimately came to power in South Africa in 1948, beginning a racist and oppressive apartheid regime.
Born in 1900, Johannesburg Chamile worked as a labourer. He was a member of the Newclare branch of African National Congress which he joined during the Defiance Campaign. The indictment against him in the Treason Trial was squashed in 1959.
Odd one out
Over the years many people have asked me how it came about that I, amongst all the Afrikaners that I grew up with or knew, as a young man in the 1960s and early 1970s, came to an alternative view about racism and Apartheid and took an active role in opposing the South African government of the time.
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The great South African writer and activist, Ruth First, was assassinated by a letter bomb sent by the South African Security Police in Maputo, Mozambique on this day, 17 August, in 1982.
At a memorial meeting for Ruth First, after she was assassinated on the streets of Maputo by South African agents, Ronald Segal, another prominent exile figure and her close friend, described Ruth, as a “journalist, author, intellectual, teacher,” whose “whole life was essentially a political act.”
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Mafika Gwala was a significant South African writer, who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. A prominent activist of that era, he expressed the political needs and aspirations of all those victimised by apartheid. He was closely associated with the Soweto poets, Mongane Wally Serote, Mbuyiseni Mtshali, James Matthews and Mandla Langa. In 1973, he edited the Black Review, and his short stories, essays and poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. His poetry collections include Jo’Liinkomo (1977) and No More Lullabies (1982).
Universal Man: Jonathan Clegg “Sikeyi” (1953-2019). “Sikeyi” is a Zulu dance praise name: “The peg through a yoke that secures oxen in position, from Afrikaans juskei (juk: yoke], referring to the capacity of a formidable dancer to hold his stand.”
