Uhuru's Fire

Uhuru's Fire
Author: Adrian Roscoe
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1977-06-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521290890

First published in 1977, this is an eminently readable introduction to contemporary literature in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. The author examines work in verse, prose and drama, and discusses vernacular language problems, the role of oral literature and tradition and the varied responses to the struggle for freedom and its achievement. He argues that African literature is achieving its own inner dynamic, revealing a rapid spread of influences from one side of the continent to the other and a decrease in influences from the Western world. Part of his argument is based on a discussion of authors not yet known outside East and Central Africa, but whose works shows signs of great promise and originality. Dr Roscoe has close personal knowledge of many of the authors he discusses, as he has worked in East and Central African universities throughout the period of the literary awakening he discusses.

Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus

Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus
Author: Craig W. McLuckie
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780894107696

Poet, activist, teacher, and scholar, Dennis Brutus is an influential figure in African literature. Exploring his life and writings, this volume looks at Brutus's childhood, university days, his arrest and imprisonment, and his eventual return to South Africa in 1991.

Dennis Brutus

Dennis Brutus
Author: Craig Ellenport
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1534462376

Jeter Publishing presents a middle grade series that celebrates men and women who altered the course of history but may not be as well-known as their counterparts. In this biography, meet South African poet and human rights activist Dennis Brutus. Dennis Brutus was a poet and human rights activist whose works centered on his sufferings and those of his fellow blacks in South Africa. For fourteen years, Dennis taught English and Afrikaans in South Africa. As the white minority government increased restrictions on the black population, he became involved in a series of anti-apartheid related activities, including efforts to end discrimination in sports. The government subsequently banned him from teaching, writing, publishing, attending social or political meetings, and pursuing his studies. In 1963, his refusal to abide by the ban resulted in eighteen months of hard labor on Robben Island, alongside Nelson Mandela. Forbidden to write or publish after his release, Brutus left South Africa in 1966 for England and then the United States, and is now recognized as one of the prominent voices in the anti-apartheid movement.

The Dennis Brutus Tapes

The Dennis Brutus Tapes
Author: Dennis Brutus
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1847010342

Poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus recorded a series of tapes in the 1970s which have been edited and annotated by Bernth Lindfors to give valuable insights into Brutus's life and works. Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is known internationally as a South African poet, anti-apartheid activist and campaigner for human rights and the release of political prisoners. His literary works include Sirens Knuckles Boots (1963), Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), A Simple Lust (1973), and Stubborn Hope (1978). When Dennis Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he recorded on tape a series of reflections on his life and career. In addition, he frequently responded to questions about his poetry and political activities put to him by students and faculty in formal and informal interviews that were also captured on tape. Transcripts of a selection of these tapes, as well as reprints of two interviews recorded earlier, are reproduced here in order to put on record fragments of the autobiography of a remarkable man who lived in extraordinary times and managed to leave his mark on the land and literature of South Africa. Brutus was an effective anti-apartheid campaigner who succeeded in getting South Africa excluded from the Olympics. His opposition to racial discrimination in sports led to his arrest, banning, and imprisonment on Robben Island. Upon release, he left South Africa and lived most of the rest of his life in exile, where he continued his political work and simultaneously earned an international reputation as a poet who often sang of his love for his country. The tapes are edited by Bernth Lindfors who has added an Introduction and a transcript of a 1970 interview as well as other transcripts of lectures and discussions. Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures, The University of Texas at Austin, and founding editor of Research in AfricanLiteratures. He has written and edited numerous books on African literature, including Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973), Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Africans on Stage (1999), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009).

The Republic of Poetry: Poems

The Republic of Poetry: Poems
Author: Martín Espada
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2008-04-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393069702

The eighth collection by "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" (Sandra Cisneros) was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. In his eighth collection of poems, Martín Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks.

A History of South African Literature

A History of South African Literature
Author: Christopher Heywood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2004-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781139455329

This book is a critical study of South African literature, from colonial and pre-colonial times onwards. Christopher Heywood discusses selected poems, plays and prose works in five literary traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. The discussion includes over 100 authors and selected works, including poets from Mqhayi, Marais and Campbell to Butler, Serote and Krog, theatre writers from Boniface and Black to Fugard and Mda, and fiction writers from Schreiner and Plaatje to Bessie Head and the Nobel prizewinners Gordimer and Coetzee. The literature is explored in the setting of crises leading to the formation of modern South Africa, notably the rise and fall of the Emperor Shaka's Zulu kingdom, the Colenso crisis, industrialisation, the colonial and post-colonial wars of 1899, 1914, and 1939, and the dissolution of apartheid society. In Heywood's study, South African literature emerges as among the great literatures of the modern world.

Still Beating the Drum

Still Beating the Drum
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401202095

Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground People, shows, with his latest novel due out in 2005. The timing of Still Beating the Drum, a book which intends to highlight and evaluate his extensive and varied oeuvre, is thus appropriate. Given Lewis Nkosi’s life trajectory, this volume will appeal to readers interested in South African and African literature, both in South Africa and abroad. Intended as a important critical resource on Lewis Nkosi, the book is divided into three parts: Part One collects papers from scholars around the world currently working on Nkosi’s work in various genres; Part Two reprints key articles from different moments in Nkosi’s critical writing, together with hitherto unpublished recent interviews with Nkosi; and Part Three provides the reader with a timeline and extensive bibliography for Lewis Nkosi, both invaluable resources for scholars working on Nkosi given the scattered nature of much of his more ephemeral writings in the past. Lewis Nkosi is an important figure in South African literature whose voice has been heard far and wide – this book aims to collect for critical consideration some of the echoes and reverberations his voice has generated.

Selves in Question

Selves in Question
Author: Judith Lutge Coullie
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2006-05-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780824830045

Wide-ranging and engaging, Selves in Question considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa.The twenty-seven interviews presented here consider both the ontological status and the representation of the self. They remind us that the self is constantly under construction in webs of interlocution and that its status and representation are always in question. The contributors, therefore, look at ways in which auto/biographical practices contribute to placing, understanding, and troubling the self and selves in postcolonies in the current global constellation. They examine topics such as the contexts conducive to production processes; the contents and forms of auto/biographical accounts; and finally, their impact on the producers and the audience. In doing so they map out a multitude of variables--including the specific historical juncture, geo-political locations, social positions, cultures, languages, generations, and genders--in their relations to auto/biographical practices. Those interviewed include the famous and the hardly known, women and men, writers and performers who communicate in a variety of languages: Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, and Yiddish. An extensive introduction offers a general framework on the contestation of self through auto/biography, a historical overview of auto/biographical representation in South Africa up to the present time, an outline of theoretical and thematic issues at stake in southern Africa auto/biography, and extensive primary and secondary biographies. Interviewees: Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Valentine Cascarino, Vanitha Chetty, Wilfred Cibane, Greig Coetzee, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Faber, David Goldblatt, Stephen Gray, Dorian Haarhoff, Rayda Jacobs, Elsa Joubert, K. Limakatso Kendall, Ester Lee, Doris Lessing, Sindiwe Magona, Margaret McCord, N. Chabani Manganyi, Zolani Mkiva, Jonathan Morgan, Es’kia Mphahlele, Rob Nixon, Mpho Nthunya, Robert Scott, Gillian Slovo, Alex J. Thembela, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Johan van Wyk, Wilhelm Verwoerd, David Wolpe, D. L. P.Yali Manisi.