Women Authors From South Africa

"I had just sat on the edge of the river with my knees right up against my chest and cried because ten is too young to know that sometimes your parents have to do what’s best for you even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts them."

"I breathed in the smoke from my final cigarette. It tasted like acceptance of growing up."

"The Worme Bridge’ stood out for us with its brave story and clear, distinctive voice; it’s a wonderfully dark exploration of the water theme. The story works effortlessly to construct an other kind of reality while grounding itself in the real world. The writing is compelling: the reader is drawn into this family and the strangeness that overtakes them. We found this a powerful piece of writing that continues to haunt the reader afterwards."

"To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors."

"I always imagined poetry is supposed to be beauty, about beauty and pleasant things. Well I sat in a train one day and saw this lorry full of furniture going, coming here... and I wrote a poem about Group Areas ‘Fall tomorrow.’ In the last stanza I wrote, that the government of that time is going to fall [ ]. This was about the anger. Bringing out all the anger of moving and seeing this people moving and seeing people breaking up their wardrobes and their cupboards because it can’tfit through the doors here."

"Rooted in Salt River, Simon’s Town and Ocean View, Gladys Thomas’s narration of the struggle of a nation for freedom challenged the construct of ‘forgotten communities’. She championed the tribulations and triumphs of people who did not have the means to tell their stories in the distinctive and memorable way in which she took up their plight."

"You have been conniving and dishonest in appropriating a sentence from an entire article and placing it as a shout-out for a book that YOU MUST HAVE KNOWN, was the antithesis of what I believe and the complexity that I embrace when analysing historical figures."

"“If our response is to stop people in our societies from saying things they don’t want us to say, we are falling into their trap"

"Anyone feeling vulnerable can feel attracted to the “idealistic world"

"The problem is that it’s all fake because they only respect women’s bodies by restricting them to the house and forcing them to cover up, which is not the same as someone choosing to cover up.”"

"it appears that the appeal is not so much the religious rhetoric but the promise of an alternative to capitalism."

"“When you write a memoir you have to think about your responsibility to your audience that you’d be completely honest, and to people in your life. Your honesty is going to affect them.”"

"“ask questions that they might not be asking of themselves” because as she says,"

"“In the same way, one of the things in common from these very different people who went to Islamic State is the feeling that they don’t know where they belong, they are looking for a sense of belonging and they wrongly think they will only find that in this mythical caliphate that they think has been established.”"

"[On being exiled in London in 1964, aged 12] I was a white South African kid who came from a lot of stress, given that my father had disappeared and we didn't know where he was, and my mother had been in prison. It was a relief to be in England but I had never taken a bus on my own. To learn to find my own way was quite a difficult thing to do."

"The consequences of marginalizing people on the basis of what they wear or what they say is very dangerous."

"“The actions of al-Qaeda or Islamic State can force our governments, and some of us, to give up on some of the hard-won democratic rights which is what makes us different from them. I’m talking about all sorts of things, freedom of expression being one of the most important ones.”"

"Life ought to be about living beyond one self and that despite our own challenges in life."

"I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that."

"“A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.”"

"“The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”"

"“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.”"

"“I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.”"

"Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing."

"I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?""

"“And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief – at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile – at least, they were not Bushmen.”"

"“Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”"

"“…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.”"

"I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”"

"“Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”"

"“Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.”"

"“When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence.”"

"“There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham.”"

"“The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts.”"

"“At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”"

"“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. 135”"

"“That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace.”"

"“Dikeledi could make no secret of the fact that, in relation to men, she often suffered from high blood pressure, except that the trouble with the bloodstream had eventually boiled down to one, unattainable man.”"

"once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'"

"“Maybe he concentrated on his immediate situation. It was African. It was horrible. But wherever mankind had gathered itself into a social order, the same things were happening. There was a mass of people with no humnaity to whom another mass referred: Why, they are naturally like that. They like to live in such filth. They have been doing it for centuries”"

"“The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”"

"I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences."

"And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?"

"By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

"It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt."

"You just have to look different ... then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human being."

"Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there."

"Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down."

"Sometimes a man's God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there are bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon's wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiment. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpath in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom."

"Was he crying now because, for the first time in his life, he was feeling what it must be like to face a tomorrow without any future?"