Women Authors From South Africa

"Love God with everything you have and everything you are, and love those around you as you love yourself. The rest is just detail."

"Development Theology explores how God sees the poor, what the Bible has to say on the subject, and how we, as a people of God, respond to the development needs around us as an expression of the love of God for his people. I believe that the church has a vital and practical role to play in binding up the broken hearts of the poor and in rebuilding the nation. I am so passionate about this that I set my life aside for this work as an Anglican priest."

"I love Grahamstown. I wanted to move here years ago when I was a theatre publicist, but the time wasn’t right. When my son was awarded scholarships to St Andrews College three years ago I jumped at the chance to move down. My friends thought I would struggle to settle down in a small town, but I’m a very gregarious person. I love having four people hoot “Hello” as I walk down High Street. I am guaranteed to meet at least five friends or colleagues when I go to Pick ‘n Pay, which is our village marketplace."

"Some people find the goldfish bowl difficult to live in – I thrive in it. There is no peak hour traffic. The cathedral bells ring on Sunday and Thursday evenings in the mist. The sunsets are spectacular. You can find a donkey cart (with a set of donkeys) parked neatly in a bay between a BMW and a Golf, and there are often cattle in my street. Cattle have right of way."

"Someone has to do something about the pain and the poverty, and I’ve been given a good set of resources to do it. So I get stuck in and I get very motivated by watching the change take place in people’s lives."

"I married very young – to a brilliant and immensely destructive man whom I met at university. Twelve years of that marriage nearly destroyed me. I chose to end the marriage and to survive."

"As I grew in my spiritual journey and I came to know what true and unconditional love was, I came to see that what I had was not what marriage should be. I chose life. I staggered/crawled away from the devastation and it took years for me slowly to become the person I was meant to be. And life has been deeply rich and rewarding in every possible way since then."

"God is a great recycler – he took a broken, shattered woman and slowly breathed life into her again. I began to trust people enough to make some wonderful friends. I began to believe in myself again."

"The most important thing I’ve learned from motherhood is to love your family and your friends as much as you can and let them know as often as you can. Parenting keeps you humble and grounded."

"As a poet, I am as I am in every other sphere of life. I’m real and flesh and blood. I don’t write to impress people or use clever allusions or references. I did all that when I was still at university, and it was rubbish poetry. Now I write only because the poem needs to be written. And it has its own life and its own personality—with its whimsical little in-jokes and its musicality. And if someone else likes the poem, then it’s probably because, at the bottom of it all, we have a shared human experience."

"When I was a child I used to say, “I am going to write a poem”, and my mother would ask me what it would be about, and I wouldn’t know until it was done. I’d just have a welling-up pregnant feeling inside me. That still happens."

"It is a first collection, and there are no South African publishing houses that can afford to take risks on poetry collections anymore, let alone new poets. I believed in the work and wanted to put it out there."

"There were times during my marriage that I wanted it all to end. I wrote a poem in one of my most tortured moments about the peace I would find if I walked into the sea and breathed. It was years later that I realised how close my life story was to Ingrid Jonker’s. I had been born just after she died. Somehow, I survived, against all odds. I felt connected with her, and wrote about it. I like to think that she knows that I wrote about it."

"I feel injustice deeply. I thought I would get over that as I grew up. I never have. That’s how “Nam” was written. Both of those incidents happened to me just as they are written, and I was unable to forget them. And when I saw the facile comments on the travel show, I had to put my anger down on paper. It just never ends. We don’t learn. As a mother I am now even more outraged by senseless slaughter ordered by men who are never themselves in danger. And whose motives are based on greed and power-seeking."

"People have responded that the collection chronicles a journey through suffering into new life, and that it was thought-provoking. And that is what I wanted to express. That there is hope for new growth, for freedom, for change. For so many people who have suffered. And especially for our country. I really believe that."

"What excites me? Now that I am beloved, I am a joyful and irrepressible woman, I do not laugh quietly and I’m always the last person on the dance floor at one in the morning at university functions. And I am not waiting to be old to wear purple. What inspires me? Humble people who just get on with helping to make a difference in this world. And who do it out of love, not self. So often people help others for reasons that have everything to do with themselves and nothing to do with those they are helping."

"To go back to Venice. My son Michael and I backpacked for three weeks across Italy four years ago, staying in youth hostels. Italy was rewarding beyond description, but Venice was a moving and intense experience. It was fading and old and beautiful and I loved it. I would go back there given half a chance."

"Two years ago, I began to speak to friends who were editors of poetry journals, to get an idea of what was involved. I made the financial decision to go online with a simple, quality website. I do the html coding myself, so it costs me two weekends a year, with no overheads other than the cost of bandwidth. The benefit of online is that I can use images as well, and allow them to interact with the poetry – which has fascinating results."

"We live in a different time than we lived in a year ago. And I wish we were sitting here talking about this dystopian fictional world, and how glad we are that we’re not intent."

"Christian idea of sin — that tragic flaw at the core of human experience provides one of the best tools for understanding the evils of sexism, patriarchy, and traditional sin-talk itself."

"Gender violence should be seen as a patriarchy control mechanism, since it is systemic and rooted in sexist cultural practices and perspectives and it leads women to adjust behavior in order to avoid violence"

"I hope of course that the women will be inspired by the lessons offered by those who are walking the path with them, and that networks of solidarity and connection would develop from this meeting. Practically, I am keen to work on a publication that would capture the insights and wisdom that emerged from the gathering"

"Equip yourself. I believe that knowledge is power. If you want to engage power and authority you need to equip yourself with knowledge. Don’t be ashamed of the knowledge that lives in your body. Equip yourself with book knowledge but also embodied knowledge."

"I went to stay with an older sister who lived in better circumstances. Her son was only three years younger than me so I essentially became like a daughter in the house."

"I became an overachiever because of my experiences of the mud. So I feel that my roots are firmly in the mud because those are the experiences that shape me…I hold the commitments that I have to gender justice, social transformation, to economic justice for women in particular…because of, and not in spite of, the muddy experiences."

"I confronted the man who had abused me. He denied abusing me, so I took him to court."

"I wake up at 4am every day; that is my work ethic. There are many things stacked against women in the workplace so we have to work doubly hard to prove ourselves."

"You have to build your own confidence and you need to do what you are passionate about, that job you would still do even if you were not getting paid to do it."

"Logan said she was separated from her handlers and then assaulted by a mob of men who ripped off her clothes and groped her."

"There’s a code of silence about it that I think is in Lara’s interest and in our interest to break"

"Darwin was hired by somebody to come up with a theory [...] Does anyone know who employed Darwin, Where Darwinism comes from? Look it up; the Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing street. The same people who employed Darwin and his theory of evolution and so on and so on."

"When someone says I was merely groped, I don't forget. And I don't forgive that the truth would be adjusted and then rewritten over time and eventually lost."

"You only have your word The physical wounds heal. You don’t carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan."

"If you want to know why it's called social media, [...] I’ll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of control—that’s all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all."

"And they may think that they're going to become gods. That's what they tell us...You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right? They’re not going to win. They’re not going to win."

"God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of family, and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time. And he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants."

"It is about what is happening within the group of people you have chosen to go with. The teams who failed, very few of them where actually stopped by the mountain. Even the ones caught in the storm they made complacent mistakes that made them vulnerable when things went wrong and then the teams that succeed it’s about the set of intangible tools a real clarity of purpose for your team"

"That thing you did 10 years ago that was significant everyone is doing it now. The thing you did a year ago, you’ve been copied"

"Mt. Everest is now the wealthy executive’s midlife crises."

"My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother. She is the beloved who doesn't love back."

"Sizane, you gave your girls the wrong names. Thulisile means 'quiet one' but she talks, talks, talks..."

"Shame-shame, Thuli's shame, all the same, shame-shame."

"Joe Saviour once told me that every life has a legend. Before the soul comes down to earth, God seals a story inside it. To know your purpose, you need to unravel the mystery of that legend."

"We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we'd never been and thought we wanted to go."

"First rule of writing is to read everything you can get your hands on to fill your head with ideas. And then, once you have your story down, let it rest. Then revise, revise, revise."

"Human is human. We’re blood, bone, emotion, piss, shit, love. Skin colour shouldn’t be what trips you up as a writer – it’s just skin after all, it’s our experiences while we’re here that are important, and all human beings, regardless of race, are equipped with the capacity for empathy and understanding."

"I believe if we know about one another, and focus more on how we are the same rather than how different, we will be less inclined to prove that we have all the right answers, and get on with the real business of living."

"I wanted my writing to offer an account of what it was like to take care of my mother, the details of that experience, the feelings, the lived experience. Women often do work like this that is unacknowledged, unseen. So, I guess I wanted to make it visible – not just my work, but this kind of work of taking care of elderly parents, of a child."

"Winnie was a woman of her times, there was a war and she too was a soldier."

"Let me tell you for nothing it was a great relief to find all my toes in the right order and with the right amount of skin and bone. You miss them fierce when you don’t have them."