RT @nbpublishers: Bekendstellings van Die staat teen Anna Bruwer in Kaapstad en Pretoria http://t.co/hYbP2bbU
Verdict: carrot
Change is a constant for 10-year-old Benedict, from the deaths of his biological parents to the addition of a surprise new sibling.
Now he and his patchwork Malawian family face a new adventure, finding their way as outsiders, makwerekwere, in a close-knit community in Swaziland.
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While reading Sarah Nuttall’s Beautiful Ugly, Olufemi Terry, winner of the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing, was struck by the idea that this title fittingly describes Cape Town.
While the city is often revered for its natural beauty, Terry writes, in an article for Africa is a Country, that this beauty is frequently overshadowed by “the many proofs that Apartheid itself, rather than its legacy, remained in place”.
Upon first relocating to South Africa, Terry, who was born in Sierra Leone, insisted that Cape Town is a “real African City”, contrary to what many people told him. Before long, he stopped this insistence and started calling it a “Creole city” instead.
However, citing Rustum Kozain‘s assertion that “to a large segment of the city, I am a thief; to another segment, I am a racist”, Terry shows how he was eventually convinced that “Cape Town’s past and its predilections render neat formulations like Creole city and European city equally hollow”:
In 2008, while living and studying in Cape Town, I heard, over and over, two observations about the city: it was a place of singular beauty, perhaps even the world’s most captivating city. Visitor and local alike seemed incapable of seeing other landscapes than the physical one, and some claimed that the city’s insularity was a result of the mystical, domineering influence of Table Mountain. The second perception, loosely related to the first, was that Cape Town was not an African city or, at least, not a “real African city.”
I too once held these opinions, and had relocated to South Africa from Kenya drawn by the striking terrain, the possibility of anonymity, of going about on foot, and the allure of a Mediterranean sort of life. And yet, in one respect, Cape Town had seemed, even at the outset, an African, even a pan-African city; while walking along Long Street, the city center’s main artery, I was liable to hear spoken Wolof, kiSwahili, Somali, Xhosa.
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Photo courtesy Cove Park
By Kate Sidley for the Sunday Times:
Gaile Parkin was born and raised in Zambia and studied in South Africa and England. She is a freelance consultant on educational and gender issues. Her new book, When Hoopoes go to Heaven, is out now.
I’ve just read Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, which recently won the Costa book award for best first novel.
Set in Nigeria, it’s the story of 12-year-old Blessing and her struggle to adapt when her father’s infidelity results in her moving with her mother and older brother away from their wealthy life in Lagos to the poverty of her grandmother’s village in the Niger Delta.
Through Blessing’s narration, a wonderfully funny and moving portrait of the complexities of family relationships and tensions between traditional and Western values is painted, while also laying bare the atrocities perpetrated on the people and the environment by the rapacious oil industry.
It has inspired me to re-read the much-loved novel of a family’s uneasy translocation in Africa, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which is set in the pre-independence upheaval of the Congo.
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Met boeke kan jy op wonderlike reise gaan…sonder om jou rusbank te verlaat! Phyllis Green van SARIE het ‘n paar besonderse reisboeke aanbeveel:
As ek ‘n tassie kan pak en êrens heen kan gaan, is ek op my gelukkigste. Dis die begin van die jaar. Dit was Kersfees. En dit was vakansie. Ek is seker daarvan jul beursies is tans net so plat soos myne. Dit beteken ek gaan maar eers my lus vir reis op ‘n meer bekostigbare manier moet bevredig. Ek reis hierdie week in die suide van Afrika, eers na ‘n paar van ons buurlande en dan sommer lekker in die binneland van ons pragtige land. Dit is ‘n heerlike ontdekkingstog wat my ‘n paar keer verras het. Hoop julle is gereed om saam te reis.
Otter Hiking Trail, J.J.E. Liebenberg
Die subtitel van hierdie boek is A Photographic Souvenir en dis presies wat die boek doen, jou op ‘n foto-reis neem op hierdie gewilde staproete. Die landskap op die staproete verander heeltyd en dit word ook in die foto’s weerspieël. Daar is watervalle, woude, berghange, die see, diere en plante. Nie alleen kan jy sien hoe dit daar lyk nie, maar gee die skrywer ook kort en bondige inligting oor die staproete, die geriewe, wat jy kan verwag op elke deel van die roete en dan word die plantegroei en dierelewe ook beskryf. Dis ‘n baie nuttige boek vir enigeen wat die roete wil gaan stap, en selfs al stap jy nie, is dit opwindend om deur iemand anders se oë in die gebied te reis.
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NjabuloNdebele.co.za is, in short, the website of author and public intellectual, Njabulo Ndebele, symbolised by his favourite bird, intinginono, the secretary bird. The site is a way for the former vice-chancellor of UCT to make the products of his writing, speaking and thinking life accessible through the categories of “reflections”, “publications and speeches”, and “current research”. Here is Ndebele’s latest reflection:
Who are we really?
So much has changed in South Africa since 1994, the year of our pact with destiny. We set out to be different in the world: turning oppression and violence into freedom and peace through negotiation. It was a signal global moment, defining us beyond measure.
Barely 20 years later we are asking ourselves: who are we really? We ask this question because what we see of ourselves appears not to measure up with what we expected.
So, what do we see? A kaleidoscope; a random rather than a purposeful unfolding. Can we characterise this randomness? What messages are yielded by it?
However, the website also blurs at the division between public and personal with photographs and videos that accompany the writing and aim to reveal more about Njabulo Ndebele, the man:
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Image courtesy NjabuloNdebele.co.za
Verdict: carrot
In a speech to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce earlier this year, Dambiso Moyo said she had “no interest in controversy at all”.
If that’s so, the Zambian-born former Goldman Sachs economist could hardly have done more to court it. The central tenet of her provocative treatise is that decades of capital misallocation, uncompetitive education standards, increasing debt, tax and political systems, which encouraged the creation of unsustainable consumerist economies, have put the west (and the US, in particular, feels the sharp end of her pen more than Europe) on a downward spiral.
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South Africa’s eminence terrible, Rian Malan, fires a broadside at the teenage South Africa and its old, broken uncle, Zimbabwe, from atop RW Johnson’s South Africa’s Brave New World and Peter Godwin’s The Fear. Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe receive the lion’s share of Malan’s scorn – but he reserves some for author Stephen Chan, a “modish chap with shoulder-length hair”, whose Southern Africa: Old Treacheries and New Deceits he finds weak medicine indeed. The coda to Malan’s new yet not unfamiliar lament features – who else? – Julius Malema and Kenny Kunene:
The central problem of writing about South Africa is that it is almost impossible to explain the country’s slow-motion catastrophe in terms that make sense to foreigners. Consider these headlines, culled from just a fortnight’s newspapers. Johannesburg’s City Press reports that the head of the ruling party’s Political School—set up to nurture “revolutionary morality” among thieving civil servants—is declining to explain how he has come to own two new BMWs and a Maserati. South Africa’s Sunday Times alleges rampant corruption in the administration of Northern Cape province. The same paper reports new attempts to silence a trade-union leader who likens the nation’s rulers to “hyenas” who feed off the poor. Elsewhere, we have FAILED BILLION-DOLLAR EDUCATION PROGRAM; WHISTLE-BLOWER MURDERED; WIFE OF NIA CHIEF ON TRIAL FOR SMUGGLING COCAINE, the NIA being our CIA. And finally, the story of the hour: The National Prosecuting Authority has abandoned its investigation into the whereabouts of $130 million in bribes generated by South Africa’s notorious 1990s arms deal.
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Scribd.com book preview:
Verdict: stick
John Vidal gives a soft stick to Zambian Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost. In the same review, Vidal includes a reading of Chandran Nair’s Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism, a book about which he is more optimistic:
Dambisa Moyo is a young Zambian-born economist who made her money at Goldman Sachs and her name with Dead Aid, a provocative book about Western aid that claimed that rich countries make things only worse for the poor.On this basis she was picked by Time magazine to be one of its 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. That was absurd and should have been enough to end any promising career, but she has soldiered on and has now written a post-wreck treatise examining how the United States economy has collapsed.
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Olufemi Terry, winner of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing, talks travel with the Sunday Times:
Where did you spend your last holiday? I spent a weekend in Berlin last October. I’d heard lots of hype and wanted to see it for myself.
What was the best thing you did while there? Checking out the Helmut Newton museum.
What was your best holiday ever? A lust-fueled weekend getaway to Lamu. I’ll say no more.
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Alert! On Saturday 4 September, Penguin Books South Africa announced the winners of its inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing at the Mail & Guardian Literary Festival.
They are Pius Adesanmi in the non-fiction category and Ellen Banda-Aaku in the fiction category, for their manuscripts You’re Not a Country, Africa! and Patchwork, respectively.
The authors win R50 000 and publication by Penguin. Adesanmi hails originally from Nigeria and Banda-Aaku from Zambia, but both writers currently live outside Africa – a detail that will doubtless raise eyebrows in some African writing circles.
More information on the winning works from the Penguin press release:
In this groundbreaking collection of essays Pius Adesanmi tries to unravel what it is that Africa means to himas an African, and by extension to all those who inhabit this continent of extremes. This is a question that exercised some of the continent’s finest minds in the twentieth century, but which pan-Africanism, Negritude, nationalism, decolonisation and all the other projects through which Africans sought to restore their humanity ultimately failed to answer. Crisscrossing the continent, Adesanmi engages with the enigma that is Africa in an attempt to make meaning of this question for all twenty-first century Africans.
[...]
Destined from birth to inhabit two very different worlds – that of her father, the wealthy Joseph Sakavungo,and that of her mother, his mistress – this emotive tale takes us to the heart of a young girl’s attempts to come to terms with her own identity and fashion a future for herself from the patchwork of the life she was borninto. Beautifully constructed, warm and wise, [Patchwork] is a novel that will transport the reader to a world in which we can all become more of the sum of our parts.
BOOK SA extends congratulations to both winners – we look forward to reading your works!
Apr
