Lewis Nkosi’s influence as both writer and critic has been profound as numerous reviews, references to his work and interchanges with his contemporaries confirm. However, given his at times harsh criticism of South African writing during the apartheid era, together with his exile from South Africa, his reputation within the country was for some time less secure than it was in America and Europe. His significance stems from the fact that he was, until his death, one of the very few surviving members of the Drum generation of writers of the 50s, one who continued to write throughout the apartheid and post-apartheid decades. Even into his seventies, he recorded and commented upon an extraordinary period of South African history. Nkosi was also remarkable for using a wide variety of genres to express his forthright views: critical essays, short stories, plays, novels, poetry, even a libretto.
Born in Chesterville, a Durban black township, Nkosi came from a working class, female-headed family. He was educated in various local schools, most notably an English medium mission school in Eshowe. After his first job as a manual labourer, Nkosi became a junior reporter on Ilange lase Natal newspaper under the influential Dhlomo brothers. He soon moved to Johannesburg to work on Drum magazine in 1956 which, though his time there was short, provided an intensely formative experience working in the company of Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Bloke Modisane. Nkosi was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 1961, but was only granted a one-way exit permit to take this up; in effect, his life as an exile began here as his re-entry to South Africa was forbidden. From the United States, he went to London in 1964, becoming literary editor of New African magazine from 1965 to 1968. He was granted British citizenship and took an MA degree in English literature at the University of Sussex in 1976. Interrupting his doctoral studies to take up a lecturing position at the University of Zambia, Nkosi then embarked on an academic career which included tenures at universities in Africa, the United States and Europe. On retirement from academic life, he made Switzerland his base and became a sought-after speaker at conferences, valued as an astute critic of South African letters and politics.
His first return to South Africa since his exile was in 1991 to attend the New Nation conference; his first South African passport was granted in 2003. He was a regular visitor to his home country, however, unlike many black South African exiled writers of his generation, Nkosi flourished abroad making his home in his writing which, in the main, focused on South Africa. Though his name was almost unheard in South Africa during apartheid, his profile in recent years was raised with the publication of two novels (Underground People in 2002 and Mandela’s Ego in 2006), and the re-release of Mating Birds in 2004.
Nkosi’s style is a distinctive one, at odds with much of the naturalist writing that characterized South African black ‘protest’ fiction of the apartheid years. Influenced by the writing of Faulkner, Kafka and Joyce, Nkosi’s style is modernist, suggestive and symbolic. His loyalty to form and to the stringent demands of a modernist conception of art is evident in his critical essays, gathered into three collections: Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart: essays on South Africa (1975), and Tasks and Masks: themes and styles of African literature (1981). One of his best known essays, “Fiction by Black South Africans”, from the first collection, captures Nkosi’s forthright voice and rigorous approach – in it, he lambastes black writers for a lack of imagination, coupled with impoverished style, in their efforts to address the South African condition. His remarks predated the debate on the limitations of protest writing which Njabulo Ndebele and Albie Sachs both raised in 1984 and 1990 respectively. Nkosi did not limit himself to a critique of others’ efforts, but began his own creative writing career with a play, The Rhythm of Violence (1964), which deals with inter-racial infatuation and revolution in Johannesburg during apartheid. Though other plays followed, notably The Black Psychiatrist (1994) which has also been performed in French in Guadeloupe, and German in Switzerland, it is in the novel that Nkosi’s creative efforts have been most noticed.
His first published novel, Mating Birds (1983), related through the eyes of a black man on trial for raping a white woman, won the Macmillan/PEN prize and was widely reviewed and commended for its boldness. Underground People, a novel which looks wryly at the double dealings of those involved in the freedom struggle, followed. Originally published in Dutch as Der Vermissung in 1993, this novel appeared in English in 2002. Nkosi’s third novel, Mandela’s Ego (2006) involves a characteristic symbolic conceit – Mandela’s period of imprisonment parallels the protagonist’s loss of virility. On Mandela’s release, Dumisani is restored, the nation revives.
With Lewis Nkosi’s death, South Africa has lost a distinctive, dissonant but always acutely perceptive critic and creative writer who will be sorely missed.
Lindy Stiebel
