Vusumuzi R Kumalo

A powerful literary biography uncovering Dugmore Boetie's erased legacy, blending archival research, oral history, and decolonial critique to challenge apartheid's racial and cultural erasures.

A powerful literary biography uncovering Dugmore Boetie's erased legacy, blending archival research, oral history, and decolonial critique to challenge apartheid's racial and cultural erasures.

Bloke of All Ages is an expansive reflection that offers refreshing new insights into the works of one of South Africa's most important literary, intellectual and artistic figures, William Bloke Modisane. Born in Sophiatown, Modisane was a remarkable author, playwright and actor, and a leading member of the DRUM generation in the 1950s. The contributors trace Modisane's intellectual and cultural journey from his early years in South Africa to his exile in the United Kingdom, East Africa, North America, Italy, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Through a comprehensive and diverse exploration of Modisane's body of work, they offer critical literary essays on his early short stories, his autobiography Blame Me on History, his journalism as well as his writings while in exile. The volume also includes little-known and previously unpublished essays by Modisane, written during his time in exile. Bloke of All Ages highlights the relevance and resilience of Modisane's intellectual and cultural contribution by situating his work in the broader historic context of South African creative arts.

From Plough to Entrepreneurship is motivated largely by the fact that Africans were deprived of economic and political autonomy by white government in South Africa. This marginalisation lies in the complex and interconnected processes of displacement and dispossession by which Africans were first dispossessed of their own land; then deprived of independent productive opportunities. The increasing scarcity of land as scarce commodity and African land ownership in Evaton, best explains the history of African local economic independence. For the local residents, land possession in Evaton provided a space where a moral economy that fostered racial pride and solidarity was forged. This richly sourced monograph develops the logical explanation that sticks together all forces that constrained Africans to give up labour to an industrial economy in Evaton. It provides the reader and student of racialised inequalities in South Africa with an understanding steeped in historical ethnography on how local Africans struggled for economic independence, and how whatever independence their struggles yielded, changed over time in Evaton.