Following on from its best-selling predecessors, Spud and Spud – The Madness Continues, the third instalment of Spud Milton’s schoolboy diaries charts his diabolical stagger through adolescence and the mayhem that ensues during his year in boarding school as a senior. Spud, now 16 and in his own words “practically a man in most areas”, has to cope with a vindictive arch enemy, a garrulous Malawian, and the crazy antics of his friends – the group of misfits known to all as the Crazy Eight. Along the way he also has to deal with eccentric school masters, an unpleasant discovery concerning fried fish and Wombat (his grandmother), and the trials and tribulations of his semi-arid love-life. In coping with these and other challenges thrown up by boarding school, Spud leads the reader on a hilarious journey through teenagerdom, complete with his own candid observations of his physical, sexual and social development. Spud’s teenage angst is set against the background of 1992 South Africa, where, despite the unmistakable scent of radical change in the air, Spud fears the return of “a government of twelve seventy-five-year-olds in safari suits” and is determined to convince his conservative parents to Vote Yes for Change in the upcoming referendum. South Africa’s bumpy road to redemption mirrors Spud’s comic journey as he finds his way through another trying year and takes his first cautious steps towards manhood.

I first met Dennis Brutus in the early 1980’s when I attended an African Literature Conference, held in the United States. Being in exile, he was happy to meet a fellow South African. He remembered my husband,  Herby,  as they were at  Fort Hare together.  We were very happy to renew our friendship when he came back to South Africa after 1994. He would speak of “the return of the native” - an amusing reference to one of Thomas Hardy’s novels.  Dennis was a consummate patriot and a world citizen – he did not give up fighting for a just democracy, both locally and globally.