Novelists From South Africa

"You don't realize the point at which you become evil."

"The loud, pounding rhythm of his drama drummed in her ears day and night."

"I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there."

"when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much."

"You could really say that my writing experience began in Botswana. Everything about the society was magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways of life of the people of this country. It is almost impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing."

"In my novel, A Question of Power, I was extremely bothered to define evil. I was looking for answers all along to questions of exploitation. And I was looking for balances; that is, if we have to live with good and evil we ought to present them as they really are."

"I was born on the sixty of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, in South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplaces was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman.""

"I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself.""

"Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I've just got to tell a story.""

"In a cold and loveless country like South Africa his warmth of heart and genuine friendliness is like a great roaring fire on the white icy wastes of the Antarctic."

"TELL THEM HOW NATURAL, SENSIBLE, NORMAL IS HUMAN KINDNESS. TELL THEM, THOSE WHO JUDGE MY COUNTRY, AFRICA, BY GAIN AND GREED, THAT THE GODS WALK ABOUT HER BAREFOOT WITH NO ERMINE AND GOLD-STUDDED CLOAKS"

"I feel in my heart that our Pharaoh has already been born. It may be that I shall not live to see Pharaoh's day but I want all those who now live in anguish to be comforted. For one day, due to the length of his roots and the depth of his wisdom, all nations shall dwell under his shadow."

"You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap."

"I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently."

"Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it?"

"They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpectedly fling them miles apart."

"People don't fall in love these days. The movies have made that kind of thing stale. They have robbed us of our capacity to feel through feeding us with cheap sensation. Ask any man and he will tell you that he can't kiss his wife because she wants him to kiss her the way Richard Widmark kisses."

"The whole principle of living and learning is dependent on what is going on in the mind. The mind is like a huge, living tapestry. Everything we see, hear, learn and experience gets being imprinted on it. As we grow we begin to see that we can correlate those impressions into a definite pattern and so we call that our life."

"Life's one hell of a joke. It dresses us up with insatiable yearnings and high-flying ambitions and then flings the fact of our insignificance in our faces. Half of us fall for the joke and start the mad rush after the big prizes. Some, like you and me can't fall for the joke. We've been hit too hard at too early an age."

"Above all the necessities of life, human beings need love and it is often the one thing most denied to them."

"You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you."

"Once a man involves himself with women there's always some kind of retribution. They're the most vengeful creatures on this earth."

"There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good."

"The task of the writer is to serve humanity and not party politicians and their temporary fixations. But it's a hard path to follow. I'm having headaches over it because I'm too intensely aware of the pressures and issues and yet at the same time wish to retain my right to think for myself."

"She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing..."

"Life is not in bits and pieces. It is a magnificent, rhythmic, pulsating symphony."

"Life is a treacherous quicksand with no guarantee of safety anywhere. We can only try to grab what happiness we can before we are swept off into oblivion."

"Not now, not ever, shall I be complete; and though the road to find you has been desolate with loneliness, still more desolate is the road that leads away from you. It is as though pain piles on pain in an endless, unbroken stream, until it is the only reality. What do they do, those who love?"

"The only reason why I always admit pain is that it seems the only constructive emotion."

"A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"There were once highway robbers, who said: 'Your money or your life!' Today, they say: 'Your politics or your life!' [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"Who am I? What am I? In past and present, the answer lies in Africa; in part it lies within the whole timeless, limitless, eternal universe. How can I discover the meaning and purpose of my country if I do not first discover the meaning and purpose of my own life? Today there are a thousand labels. One of them is 'crazy crank'. I do not mind being a 'crazy crank', as long as I am sure that I am a crank of my own making, as long as I resist environmental, societal, and political attempts to control and suppress my mind. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"All life flows continuously like water in the stream and I am only some of the water in the stream, never able to gauge my depth. The hours, the years, the eternities slip by too quickly, moving, changing, never the same thing. I move with this current to the ocean only to be flung back again to the stream. The cycle seems unending, repetitive. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The holy order of doing the right thing is incompatible with love, which does all the wrong things. Love can never learn to choose the woman who has the highest price, or whose father possesses the greatest number of cattle. Love strikes the outcast, the beggar, the stranger, and leaves the dull, dead, complacent conformer to his safety. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The body is a positive thing, and love without a body is negative, useless, purposeless. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"A woman is a maker of pottery, feeling life with her hands, keeping it whole, moulding it from the depths upwards. Her vision is constant, unchanging. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

""The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns…The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment"

"“It’s Zulu … I am a Zulu. And he laughed sarcastically at the thought of calling himself a Zulu"

"“the poverty and tribalism of Africa [are] a blessing if people [can] develop, sharing everythingwith each other"

"…the Tswana language [like] the bush, [belongs] to all Batswana people"

"Head’s contention is that socially ascribed identities arefalse, misleading and degrading to the true inner person"

"“they cannot exist unless they can live in the village insuch a way that the changes that they bring about are necessary … in determining who they are"

"it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed"

"When a lady chooses to change her mind, a gentleman would consider it no more than her privilege, and not badger her about it. (The Land of Green Ginger, 1937)"

"The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner is often thought of as being the beginning of South African literature. She stood more or less alone."

"When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her.""

"“On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”"

"“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”"

"“For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.”"