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 Willemien de Villiers writes hauntingly. Long after I’d put down The Virgin in the Treehouse, images from the story kept swimming in my head. A weathered wooden treehouse next to a house with a moat. Dying flowers on a windowsill. A windswept beach. A man drowning in a sea of kelp. A row of cardboard flames leading to a bed.
It is an interesting style, not only for its vivid imagery, but for its chopped up storytelling. The reader is left hanging with one slice of the story while another is offered. Then that, too, is cut short while a separate missing chunk is slotted in. While it sounds like it should be disjointed and confusing, the result is rather like having your heartstrings pulled nearly to breaking, and then released. And then pulled again. |
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 (Inkinsela YaseMgungundlovu translated by Sandile Ngidi)
The novel was written by Nyembezi in 1961, and is set some years earlier in rural Northern Natal - Nyembezi himself was born in Babanango and went to school in Vryheid and at Driefonetin, near Ladysmith. After studying and later lecturing at Wits, he was appointed Professor of Bantu Languages at Fort Hare in 1954, resigning in 1959 in protest against apartheid education policies. He joined Shuter & Shooter publishers - who were later to publish Inkinsela YaseMgungundlovu - becoming chief editor of African languages. Nyembezi died in 2000. |
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 This attractive little paperback contains 30 short contributions by writers with connections to Durban, making up a portrait of the city. It is the fourth book in the series which has already covered Johannesburg, Soweto and Cape Town. The writers’ brief was for fiction, non fiction or creative non fiction, as their fancy took them.
There are well-known names – Imraan Coovadia, Ronnie Govender, John van de Ruit, Ingrid Winterbach and William Zulu among them. Witness links appear with John Conyngham, Peter Machen and Kobus Moolman. It is probably not a book to be read straight through, cover to cover, but once all the pieces have been absorbed, the 30 different cities can be merged into one whole, though there is still no definitive picture. |
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 Fanie Fourie’s Lobola
This is most likely because it was originally written in Sepedi, and then translated into English by the author, Nape ‘a Motana, who retained much of the original colour and flavour in the language usage. What does this mean? Flowery descriptions, emotions bordering on melodrama and plenty of emphasis on ‘this beauty whom the gods of Afrika had undoubtedly blessed with splendid dimples.’ But somehow, it isn’t distracting, and simply adds to the book’s appeal. |
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 Ja, No, Man
Described as ‘a memoir of pop culture, girls, suburbia…. and Apartheid’, Ja, No, Man is Richard Poplak’s story of the first sixteen years of his life, which is special because (as he says), ‘What makes my experience remarkable and my perspective unique is that I lived in South Africa only under the Apartheid regime… My South Africa, the universe I inhabited as a boy, died three months after I left it.’ |
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