memoirists-from-south-africa

"In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being: he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a "child of darkness" who is equal and complementary to the more obvious "child of light." Whether we know it or not we all have within us a natural instinctive man, a dark brother, to whom we are irrevocably joined as to our own shadow. However much our conscious reason may reject him, he is there for good or ill, clamouring for recognition and awareness and a fair share of life just as the less conscious black man of Africa is struggling and clamouring for life, light and honour in our societies. I need not emphasize how the rational, calculating, acutely reasoning and determined human being that Western man has made of himself has increasingly considered this side of himself not as a brother but as an enemy, capable, with his upsurges of rich emotion and colourful impulses, of wrecking conscious man's carefully planned and closely reasoned way of existence."

"The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is."

"Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption."

"What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous — he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole."

"The educating of the parents is really the education of the child: children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves."

"The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird."

"By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life)."

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."

"This is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa."

"The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass, like the lion's imperative roar and the elephant's long, somnambulistic stride, has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love."

"Of all man's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than the love in him. Everything else accepts defeat and dies, but love will fight no-love every inch of the way."

"Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents, toes well dug into the final ocean of one hemisphere, rising to its full height in the graying skies of the other; head and shoulders broad, square and enduring, making light of the bagful of blue Mediterranean slung over its back as it marches patiently through time."

"There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living: a way in which life itself is sheer knowing."

"Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril."

"It is the not-yet in the now, The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist Hanging the blossom on the bough."

"Men are never alone because that which, acknowledged or unacknowledged, dreams through them is always by their side."

"We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place."

"fiction projects today’s reality into the future much better than nonfiction"

"the people who colonized us used religion as an excuse, as an entry point, into this country."

"So they used religion – Christianity to be more specific – to deceive us"

"I still believe that the liberation theology movement did make an impact"

"Yes. Christianity, to many black people – especially in KZN1 which was then Natal or Zululand – was an escape"

"We pretend that queerness or homosexuality is a new phenomenon. It’s always been there. It’s there in our songs and historical books but it’s something that we’re, like, ashamed of"

"another stereotype – at least in contemporary society – that is associated with queer men, is that they are more feminine, which again is not true"

"I wanted to explore black people’s presence in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Because in all the texts that I’ve read, both nonfiction and fiction, black people are absent, so I wanted to bring that"

"If I want to tell a story successfully in a manner that is going to grab my readers, I have to be competitive, I can’t write as if I’m writing back in the 1960s"

"You have to be very careful as you are writing. Not too much preaching or teaching at the expense of entertainment. At the same time, you don’t want to be superficial."

"Migration impacted the lives of black people a lot in South Africa – forced migration – because it was always against our own will"

"I’ve seen some historical novelists playing with facts, that is just distasteful, disrespectful as to history"

"I find it works to draw people because history can be intimidating. But if you infuse it with some humor, it becomes more palatable in a way"

"I am not a reporter, I write opinions"

"We’re a country that is trying to find itself as a nation. We are not a nation"

"We have yet to formulate or to forge a common identity that says “South Africa""

"If you were a foreigner coming to South Africa, and you read the books, you will think black people do not exist"

"Being that young, I had to navigate the precarious space of being a colleague to these men, but also to be a child to them. When they were wrong on editorial matters, it was difficult for me to categorically tell them they were incorrect. I had to find euphemisms to put my points across. I didn’t always succeed"

"South African history, particularly that which has been forgotten or generally unknown, into the forefront so that it may not disappear into the past…to reignite unfinished conversations around issues of race, identity and land, for example"

"Writing a novel is like running a marathon"

"Contrary to popular belief, writing a short story is more difficult than writing a novel. A short story needs a clear focus, from beginning to end. In a novel there can be unnecessary deviations — which you can’t afford in a short story"

"systematically and deliberately tackle heavy subjects in my writing"

"As a novelist, I am concerned with the ways in which communities transform their historical experience into the symbolic terms of myth, and then use mythologised narratives of the past to organise their responses to real-world, present-day crises and events"

"Historical fiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of a writer who is also an activist"

"My job as a novelist is to record what happened back then, but to also raise a flag, to caution that the country still has some unfinished business"

"If we don’t resolve the issue of land redistribution decisively, and in a manner that takes full cognisance of the extent to which the majority was robbed, it may come to haunt us. It happened to our neighbour, Zimbabwe."

"Historical novels show us how the origins of many present-day problems lie in the past; they are vehicles for the necessary journeys that nations must take to be healed; they help us reimagine ourselves in the present day"

"The South African publishing industry is still largely in white hands."

"I have realised that the so called writer's block comes when the writing muscle does not get exercised as often as it should be"

"If you go to a Catholic Church in South Africa, it’s a far cry from what you are familiar with in France or Europe"

"We dance! This is Africa"

"the priests have been guilty of many, many things in their private capacity, not as representative of the church per se – you know, the child abuse and all those things"

"The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either."