Published by Deep South, 2008.

Robert Berold’s All the Days is his fourth collection of poetry. The collection evinces all the characteristics of Berold’s trademark voice, so tellingly brought together in his last collection, Rain Across a Paper Field – his refined simplicity, his focus upon sharply defined and evocative imagery, a preoccupation with the natural world and the impermanence of the human – but here in this new book he pushes these elements further and deeper; both more deeply personal and less emotional at one and the same time.

      All the Days consists of three distinct sections. In the first part we encounter poems that deal in the main with Berold’s present on his smallholding outside Grahamstown. Poems that bring together the human and the natural world in clear and simple terms: 

      morning half-light, meeting

      two foxes on the farm road,

      crossing the railway line, turning

      to the white moon,

      looking far down to my house,

      seeing the lights on.

            (“Half-light”) 

But this interplay between the human and the non-human world is extended in poems like “To my room” and “Builders”. Here Berold looks at the interface between the interior and the exterior worlds as personified poignantly through the character of his house, and specifically his room: “The trees are coming into leaf today. / I tell you this slowly because you’ve never been outside” (“To my room”).

Forgotten South African novelist

Daphne Rooke, who has died in England at the age of 94, was a South African novelist who is largely forgotten today but was once compared favourably with Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.

An English critic once declared that of the three, Rooke was the greatest.

The then Sunday Times books editor, Mary Morison Webster, dismissed this as “an unfortunate pronouncement” because their styles were “completely dissimilar”.

But she did agree that, as a story-teller, Rooke left Gordimer and Lessing “far behind”.

One of Rooke’s best-known novels, Ratoons, was “the Wuthering Heights of South African literature”, she wrote.

Set on a sugar farm south of Durban in the early years of the last century, Ratoons (first published in 1953 and re-issued in 1990) is a family saga that provides a searing account of race relations in the colonial era, years before the Nats dreamed up apartheid.

Click here to read the full article at The Times ...

John Langalibalele Dube, a founding member of the African National Congress and its first president, was also author of the first novel to have been written in the Zulu language, U-Jeqe, Insila ka Tshaka. Published in 1930 it has never been out of print. An English translation, Jeqe, the Body-servant of King Shaka, first published in 1951, has now been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. 

Dube was born in 1871, the son of an American Zulu Mission pastor, James Dube. He was christened John Dube, with the middle name Langalibalele meaning "bright sun".  

Dube's grandmother, Dalitha, had been the first convert of the Lindley Mission Station in Inanda in the late 1840s while his father, Reverend James Dube who died in 1882, had been an ordained minister. In 1886 Dube's mother, Elizabeth, asked the American missionary Reverend William Wilcox to take her son to America to be educated and Wilcox agreed. In 1887, the young Dube accompanied Wilcox to the U.S. and attended Oberlin College, working at various jobs to support himself. When he returned to Natal he accepted a teaching post, and in 1894 married Nokutela.  

Thanks to everyone who came to our end of year event. 

Book SA have compiled an excellent review of the event at news.book.co.za and the photographs www.flickr.com.