“He did not suffer fools gladly and hated ‘triumphalist’ and ‘nationalistic’ propagation of literature and other arts that lacked sincerity and theoretical vigour. He had an immense understanding of literature as a craft and an expression of a people’s experience.” – Sandile Ngidi, Nkosi’s local agent for his last book, Mandela’s Ego.
The ninth edition of Wordsetc is out. It leads with a heartfelt profile of Lewis Nkosi who died late last year. Nkosi was the last of the much-celebrated crew of Drum journalists of the 1950s. After Drum, he went on to conquer the world of academia, lecturing posts at various universities during his exile from South Africa. He is regarded as a perceptive, if sometimes pugnacious, essayist and literary critic who had no qualms speaking his mind. His famous book is Mating Birds, an explosive novel about miscegenation that won both praise and criticism. In this warts-and-all profile Nkosi comes alive as a man with a bohemian streak and a man of letters who relished a good intellectual fight. Early in 2008 he exclusively wrote a weighty essay for Wordsetc on how he writes. We are proud and humbled to feature it for the first time in this current edition.
The edition’s other contents are equally absorbing. Mike Sager, our California-based editor at large and novelist, goes to a banquet in honour of Gay Talese, a pioneer of New Journalism. Amanda Patterson reflects on her writing career and how she started her successful writing course. Meanwhile, Kimon Neophyte assesses Tolstoy’s legacy a hundred years after his death, while Pumla Dineo Gqola delves into slave memory and how it affects South Africa today. Matthew Freemantle relives the horror of a bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg with two border jumpers. Cynthia Jele tells us how she writes her novels while Prof Kole Omotoso looks at Nigerian literature fifty years after independence. Botswana novelist Lauri Kubuitsile relates the experience of taking up an exceptional writers’ residency in Egypt. There’s also a delightful short story by Carly Brown. In our appraisal section Joe Thloloe pays tribute to Alf Kumalo, a world-renowned photographer he describes as “a poet with a camera”.
Enjoy.
For more, visit www.wordsetc.co.za.
