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KZN Literary Tourism reviews contemporary South African fiction and poetry. Reviews are done by academics and members of our KZN literary community (contact us if you would like to review for us). View reviews as articles or list.
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Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual |
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Monday, 05 September 2011 14:23 |
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Written by Hlonipha Mokoena
Review by Scott Couper
 Hlonipha Mokoena does Inanda Seminary, her high school alma mater, very proud with her publication of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. At the precious age of twelve, the young Mokoena wrote in her application to the Inanda Seminary, “One day I wish to be a doctor”. This doctor of anthropology achieved her goal. Now ‘Professor’ Mokoena teaches at the Columbia University, the same university from which Pixley ka Isaka Seme, founder of the African National Congress, graduated (1906) and received a doctorate in law (1928). Fuze was related to another founding figure in the ANC, Dr. John Dube, and both were newspaper printers and journalists. Though Fuze was older (b. circa 1840), he, Seme and Dube were contemporaries. Fuze wrote the first book printed in isiZulu (Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona, 1922) and Dube wrote the first novel written in isiZulu (uJeqe, Insila ka Tshaka, 1930). Mokoena’s first book is also the first substantive biography to be written on Fuze. Inanda Seminary has always been and today still is an incubator of bright black female amakholwa leaders. Inanda is the home of Seme and Dube. All of these links make for wonderful literary chemistry. The ingredients do not disappoint. The proof is in the pudding.
With her excellent intellectual history of Magema Fuze, Mokoena reveals that she is a more than able partner with Mwelela Cele, a fundi of amakholwa personalities at the Killie Campbell Collections, and Vukile Khumalo, a fundi of amakholwa literary and intellectual history at the University of kwaZulu-Natal. Yet, like Heather Hughes’ recent biography on John Dube (First President, 2011), Mokoena is wary of the term ‘kholwa’. Hughes is concerned that the term too easily bifurcates those who converted to Christianity from those who did not. The two worlds were far more, as historian Catherine Burns is fond of saying, ‘imbricated’. While the term kholwa can be crudely translated as “believer” (that is, in the twentieth century ‘western’ form of Christianity), Mokoena uses Fuze’s life to adeptly tease out the more nuanced and thus more accurate social and political meanings imbedded within. Mokoena does not present Fuze as a half-baked Christian or a half-baked African. She presents him as an authentic fusion of the two – a new product. Another prominent kholwa, Albert Luthuli, once described this fusion when relating his experience at a mission school, “It was no more necessary for the pupils to become Black Englishmen than it was for the teachers to become White Africans…I remain an African. I think as an African, I speak as an African, and as an African I worship the God whose children we all are. I do not see why it should be otherwise” (Let My People Go, 1962).
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Friday, 02 September 2011 00:00 |
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Written by Ravi Govender
Review by Betty Govinden
 Déjà Vu, composed by Ravi Govender, is a selected collection of his columns that have appeared in the Post newspaper. They are largely reminiscences and descriptions of experiences linked to the city of Durban – in keeping with the title of his column, A Blast from the Past.
It is necessary to see Déjà Vu as a part of the biography of the city of Durban. The descriptions of many different facets of the city that Ravi evokes tell an important part of the life story of the city. We have many writers who have depicted the colourful tapestry of our South African cities, revealing its warp and woof hidden and lost in time.
On the city of Johannesburg, for example, Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavic, among others, have written fiction that brings the city to life, and in Cape Town we have the legendary Richard Rive, writing short stories and drama during the apartheid era, who depicted the many faces of District Six.
Among those Durban writers who have written the city into their fiction are Aziz Hassim [2002;2009] and Sally-Ann Murray [2009]. Hassim’s The Lotus People, depicts life in the Grey Street Casbah and the Warwick Triangle, with its subterranean world of gangsters, among others [see Govinden 2010], while Murray, in her novel, Small Moving Parts, writes of a poor neighbourhood on the 1960’s in Umbilo in Durban. All these writers recall a rich vibrant urban culture, mapping the city from different vantage points.
Through Ravi’s experiences we are able to map out parts of the geography of the city, as we visit vicariously some of its familiar haunts. Reading the collection, we find ourselves tramping a trail from The Butterworth Hotel, to The Britannia Hotel, to The Seabelle Restaurant, and to Selvarani’s and Manjara’s, who are all established household names noted for Indian cuisine. And it is not surprising that reference to bunny chow is an expected staple in writing on the city of Durban.
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Monday, 25 July 2011 10:13 |
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Written by Jenny Hobbs
Review by Jessica Blignaut
 Jenny Hobbs’s latest novel, Kitchen Boy, opens with the death of its protagonist, JJ Kitching, and culminates in his burial. Kitching, or Kitchen Boy, as he was nicknamed by his adoring fans, was a larger than life figure, whose stories ranged from the battlefields of the Second World War, to the battles played out in sports stadiums during his glorious rugby career.
War hero, successful businessman, ex-Springbok rugby player, and family man – Kitching’s death draws different reactions from those who knew him. Now lying dead in a Durban cathedral, Kitching’s life is relived from the viewpoints of various characters as his interminable funeral drags on. Comrades in arms who served with him during the unspeakably awful Second World War; rugby teammates, now retired and watching from the sidelines; his wife and children, reflecting on him as husband and father, and various other minor characters such as the devoted family retainer, interfering aged sister, and cherished young grandson – each character’s viewpoint illuminates a facet of Kitching’s personality, contributing a tile to the mosaic of his life.
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