Elleke Boehmer (1961 - ) was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa in 1961. She was educated in South Africa and at Oxford University. She taught at the School of English at Leeds University and has published four novels: Screens against the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000) and Nile Baby (2008). She has also published short stories in magazines, journals and anthologies. Her research is in postcolonial writing and theory, feminism and the literature of empire, and at the moment she is the Hildred Carlile Professor in Literatures in English at the University of London. Amongst her non-fiction works are Altered state? (1994); Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995), Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial,1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction (2002). Boehmer edited the anthology Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870-1918 (1998), Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship by Robert Baden-Powell (2004) and Cornela Sorabji’s India Calling (2004). She produced a special edition in the journal Kunapipi on the writings of the Anglo-Boer War (1999) and her study Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation was published in 2005. Boehmer is also the author of Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008), part of highly popular Oxford University Press series.

(Sources: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/English/about- us/Staff/Boehmer/EllekeBoehmer.htm, 27.06.05 ; http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/15829.html, 27.06.05)

Selected Work

Excerpt from An Immaculate Figure (1993):

Sipho took up the story-telling thread from Rosandra. It was a good thread, he said, but maybe he could bring it down to earth. He told a story of his grandmother, an upstanding fierce old woman who was a devout Catholic and yet went about the amulets of her ancestors’ faith sewn into the hems of her church dresses. This woman, Lindiswe Frances Nyembe, lived in a township close to the place where the old Indian prophet, the man who believed in justice and peace, what was his name, Gandhi, once set up a communal centre. She used to tell the children in that area – there were many children, many houses in all directions – about this old prophet. She would tell them that his spirit still lived there in that place and they should honour it. But as the years went by the pressure on that land grew very great. There were so many people, so little land, and so much anger in the people that it became more and more difficult to tell them to show respect for that special piece of earth and the spirit of the man who onced lived there. And so the day came, Sipho said, that the people were so severely pressed against the walls of their shacks and – even though their bellies looked like balloons – so hungry, that they moved and built their tin-can homes and cardboard-box shacks even where the prophet’s house had been. And so they forgot about him. And then the grandmother, feeling the anger and distress of the people but also the distress and sadness of the spirit of the place, asked why in this land must everything that was good and strong and long-lasting be trampled into the earth? Why could the prophet’s place not be preserved while at the same time giving room to the people? She asked her children and her grandchildren this question, over and over again, and she went also to the city authorities and asked it there. People could not completely ignore her because she was an old woman and demanded respect. Every so often – to this day, Sipho imagined – she went into town to visit the municipal offices and ask these difficult questions, and every day she prayed, and so she tried to keep a piece of history surviving on the land. (pg. 205)

Bibliography

Fiction
1990. Screens against the Sky. London : Bloomsbury.
1993. An Immaculate Figure. London : Bloomsbury.
2000. Bloodlines. Cape Town : David Philip.
2008. Nile Baby. Ayebia Clarke

Non-fiction
1994. Altered state?
1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors
2002. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial,1890- 1920: Resistance in Interaction
1998. (Editor) Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870-1918
2004. (Editor) Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship by Robert Baden-Powell.
2005. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation
2008. Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction

Roy Campbell (1901 - 1957) was born in Durban, the son of Dr Samuel George Campbell. Roy Campbell co-edited (with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post) the magazine entitled Voorslag in 1926. Campbell is the author of a long poem entitled The Flaming Terrapin (1924), as well as poetry collections entitled Adamastor (1930), Flowering Reeds (1933), Mithraic Emblems (1936) and Talking Bronco (1946). He wrote long satirical poems entitled The Wayzgoose (1928) and The Georgiad (1931) on the South African way of life and intellectual climate. Campbell's autobiographical works include Broken Record (1934) and Light on a Dark Horse (1951). He lived in England and Spain before settling permanently in Portugal where he died in a car accident at the age of fifty six. Campbell was fluent in Spanish and translated poems of St John of the Cross, Baudelaire, Lorca, Paco d'Arcos and novels by Ea de Queirs.

He also wrote critical studies entitled Lorca (1952) and Wyndham Lewis which was completed in 1931 but first published posthumously in 1985. His non-fiction works on travel and social commentary include Taurine Provence (1932) and Portugal (1957). Campbell also wrote an adventure story for children entitled The Mamba's Precipice (1953). Literary studies on Campbell include David Wright's Roy Campbell (1961), Rowland Smith's Lyric and Polemic: The Literary Personality of Roy Campbell (1973), John Povey's Roy Campell (1977) and Peter Alexander's Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography (1982). Joseph Pearce is the author of a well received biography and literary study of Campbell entitled Bloomsbury and beyond: The friends and enemies of Roy Campbell (2001, Harper Collins), in which he affirms Campbell's merits as a poet and portrays him as having been greatly under-rated in literary circles.

Thanks to The Guardian/NPG for permission to reproduce Jane Brown's 1951 portrait of the author.

Selected Work

The Zebras from Adamastor (1930)


From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-keep among the scarlet flowers.
The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
Flashes between the shadows as they pass
Barred with electric tremors through the grass
Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.
Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,
With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight,
Engine of beauty volted with delight,
To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.

Bibliography

1923. The flaming terrapin.
1928. The wayzgoose; a South African satire.
1930. Adamastor.
1930. The gum trees.
1931. The Georgiad: a satirical fantasy in verse.
1931. Choosing a mast.
1932. Taurine Provence.
1932. Pomegranates.
1932. Burns.
1933. Flowering reeds.
1934. Broken record.
1934. Mithraic emblems.
1936. Flowering rifle: a poem from the battlefield of Spain.
1938. Songs of the mistral.
1939. Talking bronco.
1946. Poems of Baudelaire: a translation of Les fleurs du mal.
1951. Light on a dark horse.
1953. The mamba's precipice.
1954. Nativity.
1957. Portugal.
1960. Poems of Roy Campbell. (Edited by Uys Krige)
1985. Wyndham Lewis.
1985. Collected works.(Edited by P. Alexander, M. Chapman and M. Leveson)
2002. Selected Poems. (Edited by J. Pearce)
2005. Selected Poems. (Edited by M. Chapman)

John Conyngham (1954 - ) grew up on a sugar farm on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. He now lives in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands and is an award winning novelist and editor of Pietermaritzburg's newspaper, The Natal Witness. John Conyngham won the 1988 Olive Schreiner award for prose with his first novel, The Arrowing of the Cane (1986) set on the North Coast.

Selected Work

from The Arrowing of the Cane (1986)

The road from Nonoti into the hills rises slowly out of the mugginess of the town, switchbacking its way past deep old houses seething with wispish Indian children, mango trees with their glossy leaves, car and bus carcasses, and fluttering flags on tall bamboo poles. Slowly, reluctantly, the sprawling suburb succumbs to the ubiquitous cane. Labouring under its load, the Land Rover edges into the sighing greenness, rising and falling with its ebb and flow.

Clusters of palms indicate farmhouses hugged to their outbuildings by high hedges. Signs on the verge announce the company's sections - Carrickfergus, Quantock, Umsundu and Kerry Dale - each with its own manager, overseers, sirdars, indunas and army of labourers. Next the polo club, its team once provincial champions, holders of the Waterford Cup, but now fighting relegation to the third division. Then the company hospital with its two white doctors and shuttered wards, and the little St John's Church with its cemetery. Planter families lie neatly in rows while the Indians' crosses wander from the bottom fence into a grove of gums.

Gradually the air becomes more rarified. Coolness jets through the vents. Far below to the left the Umvoti River coils through another finger of KwaZulu which was a hotspot during the Bambata Rebellion. Now overpopulated, overgrazed and rutted, the valley looks idyllic to strangers crossing this neck miles above it. There is a lay-by from which tourists can take photographs of the picturesque hutted kraals. As with anything gross, distance placates the onlooker.

After another steep ascent I reach Manning's Post, the local trading store and bus terminus where each morning one of the gardeners collects the newspaper, and returns in the afternoon for the post. The familiar sign - Rangoon Estate - is on the right, swaying gently from twin chains above the T-junction. Beyond it spreads a neighbour's plantation of bananas, the ripening bunches swathed in hessian.

The wide district road with its harsh all-weather surface bisects the farm and descends to the mill in the valley. Around it capillaries a network of private roads and cane-breaks. Continuing past the mouth of the avenue, I weave along a series of overgrown tracks to the cutting where I consult with the induna. Several men are absent; otherwise all seems to be well. A tractor and loaded trailer move slowly across the row corrugations and I dart ahead of them, doubling back to the avenue.

As I enter the vaulted shadow, a puff adder is crossing the pink gravel, writhing its chain pattern across the open ground. Hideously distended like a length of diseased bowel, it hurries as the Land Rover approaches, entering the path of the right front wheel. To continue would mean popping it, but I decide against it, bearing fractionally to the left as it disappears into the undergrowth bordering the Indians' houses. Why the sudden magnanimity? I ask myself, but the answer isn't forthcoming.

Bibliography

1986. The Arrowing of the Cane. Craighall : Ad Donker.
1990. The Desecration of the Graves. Parklands: Ad. Donker.
1998. The Lostness of Alice. Johannesburg: Ad Donker.

Jack Cope (1913-91), South African novelist, short-story writer, poet, and editor, was born in Natal, South Africa and attended boarding school in Durban, afterwards becoming a journalist on the Natal Mercury and then a political correspondent in London for South African newspapers. At the outbreak of the Second World War, in a state of some disillusionment, he returned to his father's farm and, while working at various jobs, took up creative writing. During the following four decades Cope published eight novels, more than a hundred short stories, and three collections of poetry, the last one in association with C.J. Driver. For twenty of those years, beginning in 1960, he edited Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine that published contributions in both English and Afrikaans. He co-edited The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968) with Uys Krige and, as general editor throughout much of the 1970s, produced the Mantis editions of southern African poets. In 1980 he moved to England, where he published The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (1982) and his Selected Stories (1986).

Cope's first novel, The Fair House (1955), considers the Bambata Rebellion of 1906 in an attempt to account for the later racial and political conditions in his country. Later novels, including The Golden Oriole (1958), Albino (1964), and The Rain-Maker (1971), chronicle the white man's destruction of black culture and the ensuing struggle by the blacks to regain their pride and identity. However, it is as a short- story writer that Cope demonstrated his finest talent. His stories evoke, according to Alan Paton, 'with a few words the scents and sounds and colours of our country'. In 'A Crack in the Sky' (The Tame Ox, 1960) and 'Power' (The Man Who Doubted and Other Stories, 1967) his moral vision is clear; his third collection, Alley Cat and Other Stories (1973), contains darker themes such as those of alienation and loneliness. Among Cope's main achievements was his influence on South African literature during the 1960s and 1970s, important years in the struggle against apartheid
(From the Contemporary Africa Database - http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/15849.html)

Selected Work

from The Tame Ox

The veranda of the office looked across a square of low roofs, and beyond them other buildings of the Native College could be seen scattered among the wind-swept gum trees, one- and two-storey blocks in plain stone masonry topped with corrugated iron. Beyond the campus again stretched rolling hills of sugar- cane plantations. The College Principal, the Reverend Dr Luke Njilo, descended the steps to the broad red-earth square. Along the left side was a row of huge old mango trees. It was a tropical day of broiling sunshine and limp, hot air. The dust lay still and the flags round the platform were motionless. The mango trees had their feet in circles of deep shadow. By the time the ceremony was due to begin the platform would be mostly shaded.
Dr Njilo went among the people, moving his big body with an ease that was solemn but at the same time youthful. The women fixed on him coy, bashful looks and smiled. He was a great man, but distant from them. That day he was to be honoured by the white race. An honorary degree, a Doctorate of Philosophy - these were strange terms to them. Yet they knew no other man of the Zulu nation had ever before arrived where he had. The word had gone out and the people were coming from long distances to see the white men do honour to the teacher, Luke Njilo.

Dr Njilo had a few words for all he greeted. He put into his own language an unusual preciseness, a stiffness of the printed letter and book as though he had a proprietary right but no pride in it. He turned to his secretary a few times with a remark in English. The women had brought beer in earthenware pots and large gourds covered with a few willow leaves. He could not refuse the customary offering. During the morning he had drunk a good deal and the midday meal had revived his thirst. At first he took the beerpots from the Reverend Gumede's hands, drank a few gulps, standing, and then wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. There was little to indicate his pleasure or approval. Perhaps his eyes lit up if he came on a fine brew, but he silenced his belches in the European manner and merely nodded as if he were making a severe concession in accepting at all.

In the shade of the mango trees an old wrinkled woman, more pagan than Christian, remarked in a cracked voice: 'Teacher, if you stand, the beer has far to travel -it will make a waterfall: The people turned their faces away to hide their smiles, but Dr Njilo burst into a hearty laugh in which all joined. 'A waterfall? Is that where the Amanzimtoti River started?' He had a resonant, bell-like voice.

Sitting on his haunches, he took a good pull at the old woman's beer-pot and handed it back with a compliment. He was speaking more easily; his quips flew, and now there was a ripple of amusement where the solid dark figure moved, clothed in academic robes. The sun flickered in patches between the leaves on his crisp black hair, neatly parted. He was sweating freely in the all-pervading heat and breathed like a strong-chested horse in the traces. His protruding eyes rolled amiably and a healthy pink tongue showed when he threw back his head to laugh.

At one place six elders were waiting for him, all greyheaded men. Some were in European clothes, others in the skins and sandals of tribal dress; one man, creased and dimeyed with age, had on the polished head-ring of the old royal warriors. Dr Njilo did not know them - perhaps grandfathers or great-uncles of students. There was a short awkward pause. They regarded him with the cool impassive bearing of men who are perfectly assured of their own place. The head of the eldest nodded continually and spittle dribbled over his beard. The others looked through dark, half-closed eyes, faintly contemptuous, it seemed. He had been criticised before; the extremists among his own people called him a 'good boy', a 'tame ox'. As editor of the weekly People's Voice, he was on the side of moderation, tolerance. He mixed with white missionaries, Negrophiles like Miss Poynton, liberals, and even men who galled him with their patronage. He glanced at Charles Gumede and back at the old men. They were not the kind to criticise him politically. But they were studying him, weighing up the future that he stood for as if gazing into the clouds to divine what storms or what sunny days were in store.

Bibliography

1948. Marie : A South African Satire
1955. The Fair House 
1958. The Golden Oriole
1959. The Road To Ysterberg : A Novel
1960. The Tame Ox
1964. Albino
1967. The Man Who Doubted
1968. The Penguin Book Of South African Verse (Co- editor)
1969. The Dawn Comes Twice
1971. The Rain-Maker
1972. The Student of Zend
1973. Alley Cat
1973. The Africa We Knew
1974. Lacking A Label
1977. My Son Max
1979. Notes Recorded in Sun
1982. The Adversary Within : Dissident Writers In Afrikaans
1986. Selected Stories
1990. Tales of the Trickster Boy