Women Authors From South Africa

"'I had been waiting in Harare for five weeks and had been vetted and grilled. In the end I received a call telling me I should be at State House in half an hour. I arrived at 10am and three hours later His Excellency - "HE" as everyone calls him - received me.'"

"I think he granted me the interview because he feels he is getting old and it's time to put certain things on the record. But he expects to win the election and probably will.'"

"I would stand to one side of her pulpit in front of the Coloured community, and Ouma and I and the entire congregation would end up in tears as hymn after heart-stirring hymn was sung."

""Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It's the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) "saw things directly and just as they were"."

"Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about "it" and her almost overwhelming temptation to "tell"."

"Her judgments are full of novelistic insight, pushing into the biographical material to substantiate her hunches, tracing patterns and repetitions in these writers’ emotional lives and in their work."

"This kind of racism was rife in the early years of our democracy. It relegated whites to "second class citizens", unable to state a fact if any black person might be offended by it. This warped logic has thankfully diminished somewhat due to many (black and white) South Africans rejecting it for the nonsense that it is."

"Her Divided Lives, a moving memoir of her own childhood in South Africa and relationship with her beloved mother – who was intelligent and spiritual, struggling all her life with illness – feels like a source book for the preoccupations underpinning Gordon’s writing on literature."

"'I needed help in understanding how events in Mugabe's life, including his childhood, had impacted on his internal narrative.' By the time Mugabe was 10, his father had left home and his older brother had died. 'Mugabe has a thin skin and shaky self-image. When rejected or humiliated, he turns to revenge. His relationship with the British government has the intensity of a family feud.'"

"There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn't. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of "The Soul's Superior instants"."

"The story of [Zuma's] actions on that fateful night last year is a sad reflection on the former deputy president's morals and code of conduct. Zuma is not fit to lead a country where women's rights are high on the agenda, where the fight against Aids is, or should be, an urgent national priority and where the protection of the weak and vulnerable is the duty of the powerful. South Africa deserves a president who can lead by example. Jacob Zuma has shown he cannot do that."

"The Cape Town-born poet and fiction writer, Finuala Dowling, published her New and Selected Poems, Pretend You Don’t Know Me, with Bloodaxe last year. Her work, already highly acclaimed in South Africa, has proved a rewarding new discovery for British readers."

""Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey review – lifestyles of the remarkably privileged". The Guardian. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2025."

"Her technique may appear effortless, and suggest the audience-friendly colloquialism of spoken word poetry, but there is crafted precision in her writing. Her monologues avoid the performance poet’s frequent over-reliance on cliches and catchphrases, and there’s always an edge of sharp self-awareness to the humour."

"Ostensibly structured in the form of interchanging letters between middle-aged Vita living in Mudgee and her former benefactor, an elderly American named Royce, the novel gives way to more conventional storytelling as the narrative progresses, exploring how art, and the individual artist, can reckon with a brutal colonial past."

"We’re not beholden to the political whims of a billionaire owner. No-one can tell us what not to say or what not to report."

"The dual narratives converge in fascinating ways. Vita's chapters wrestle more explicitly with the function of art in post-apartheid South Africa and how inherited guilt shapes an approach to the subjects of her documentary films."

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

"We’re not desperately seeking your attention for its own sake: we pursue the stories that our editorial team deems important, and believe are worthy of your time."

"“It was the great unsolved mystery of her field, why the things that make us happiest also make us unhappiest. Like alcohol. And family. And spouses. And children.”"

"Dovey also loosely bases another character on Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who was also at college when she was, but the narrative skirts around one Frederick Reese. Why exactly he inspires such loathing among his peers is not given much airplay."

"Life cannot be scooped up like a fish."

"With the demise of apartheid, it not only became possible for writers of all races to express themselves freely for the first time, there were also many stories by talented authors waiting to be told."

"It is in Pompeii, in fact, that the novel's deepest irony is found: the humans preserved after the ancient Mount Vesuvius eruption are afforded greater respect and dignity than the more recent victims of settler colonialism."

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

"During her husband's presidency, Marike was the leader of the National Party's women's wing.[8] She also founded the Women's Outreach Foundation (WOF), an organisation that focused on the upliftment of rural women."

"FW de Klerk later said: "She was deeply distressed by all the chopping and changing which she interpreted as a calculated attempt by Mandela himself to humiliate us... This latest humiliation became too much for her to swallow. She became very critical of Mandela and did not hesitate to voice her criticism."

"In 1990 de Klerk called for women to play a more active role in the political process.[9] In 1993, she was awarded the Woman for Peace Award in Geneva, Switzerland for promoting the well being and development of rural women."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"Davids, Nadia (3 July 2017). "'It began with a burial site': Nadia Davids on her new work, What Remains, a play about slavery and the haunted city". The Johannesburg Review of Books. Retrieved 4 April 2025."

"“It’s good to know that we can have an effect on people across the street as well as those across the ocean,”"

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"“We are seldom used to seeing people outside of our cultures.”"

"At the end of 2014, she began writing her play What Remains – about slavery at the Cape, "and the haunted city, about ghosts and property developers, about archives and madness, about history, memory and magic, about paintings, protests and the now"[28] – which was staged at the Main Festival at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in 2017, directed by Jay Pather, and featuring Denise Newman, Faniswa Yisa, Shaun Oelf and Buhle Ngaba."

"Allowing as many people as possible to read quality journalism from around the world – especially people who live in places where the free press is in peril."

"I would not dare approach anything on that scale today…the audacity of youth! As an adult, when I write about a political landscape, its usually within the context of intimate relationships."

"Davids' work is disseminated through a variety of forms – journal articles, live performances, published play texts, film documentaries, a novel – to a range of audiences (commercial, academic/educational)."

""As a child, performance and reading were my preferred modes of imaginative play. ...I staged lots of plays with my sister and the neighbourhood kids. In my final year of high school, in 1995, I took my first play to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown."

"AT HER FEET [22 Nov - 8 Dec 2018]", Baxter Theatre. Retrieved 4 April 2025."

""It was a devised work using South African poetry, projected photographs, dance and narration to chart the country’s transition from Apartheid to democracy."

"The conversations are set under the covering theme of Love, Loss and Life, because these are broad topics. Guests get to share their experiences with loss, life and what they have learnt"

"My grandmother was able to raise 11 kids, providing for them while also holding down different jobs (as a domestic worker and in a shop)"

"I hope each question I ask my guests, viewers can ask themselves so they can stop and think and consider their own journeys"

""Just as the nominations for all the categories were finished to our utter astonishment Babette’s face filled the screen again and it was announced that she had WON a special CHAIRMAN’S AWARD for her work with Persona Doll Training. Shocked, my brother, Peter Brown and I approached the stage to collect her award."

"There is a lot of pressure (in society) to be more than what you are and, in the process, we are not having conversations that matter"

"I think subconsciously seeing my grandmother work so tirelessly and being a happy woman influenced me to think that I can do a bunch of things and demand more out of life for myself"

"I talk to the person (guest) behind the art. Not about what you do, but who you are. And I think some of these women have been longing for a space where people can be interested in who they are outside of the drama of fame"