Alert! The art of the political biography is not only practised in South Africa. This week, both Uganda and Botswana got in on the act, adding two new weighty tomes to the wave that crested in SA with Mark Gevisser’s Thabo Mbeki, but that still has plenty of distance to go before it glides ashore and begins to ebb. (And then: the next wave starts.)
In Kampala, no less a personage than Jacob Zuma launched the late Brigadier Noble Mayombo’s biography, to much fanfare. Mayombo died, aged 42, in May last year. He was considered a strong contender for taking over Yoweri Museveni’s reins. Meanwhile, in Gaborone, retired politician David Magang launched The Magic of Perserverance, a 700-pager that looks back across what the author would have us believe was a rather phlegmatic life.
Here are two reports on the books, one cribbed from a Ugandan newspaper, and the other sent in specially to BOOK SA by correspondent Monkagedi Gaotlhobogwe of Gaborone:
Zuma launches Mayombo’s biography
SOUTH Africa’s ruling party ANC leader Jacob Zuma has described the late Brig. Noble Mayombo as a revolutionary who played a great role in freeing Uganda from dictatorship.
“At the time of his death Mayombo had served his country in the highest levels. He is recognised for his robust debate and incisive mind, who possessed all leadership skills,” he said.
Zuma was yesterday speaking at Serena Hotel Kampala during the first Mayombo memorial lecture, where he also launched his biography.
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The Magic of Perserverance: Memoirs of a retired Botswana politician
by Monkagedi Gaotlhobogwe
The Magic of Perseverance, a memoir by one of Botswana’s distinguished politicians, David Magang, was launched to a crowd of upper middle class citizens at the retired politician’s exclusive resort, Phakalane Estate in Gaborone.
Mr. Magang is a former MP and a cabinet Minister. He is also the developer of Phakalane Estates, Botswana’s largest and most prestigious private-driven residential, commercial and industrial development.
The over-700-pages autobiography was published by Cape Town’s Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), a Pan-African centre for creating research networks in Africa and its Diaspora.
Noteworthy is the fact that this is only the second memoir by a retired Botswana politician to be published, after the former President Ketumile Masire wrote his two years ago.
The publisher, CASAS, has an interest in promoting the production of African biographical books for cultural, historical and social
reasons.
“Indeed, this volume is the first in a series to be called the African Biographical Library of CASAS. It is a rattling good yarn”, commented a Gaborone based official of CASAS, Dr Joseph Tsonope, who works for the University of Botswana.
Dr Tsonope told the audience at the launch – which included cabinet ministers, chiefs, and hundreds of dignitaries – that the memoir by Magang, “is a lesson on resolve, fortitude and indeed a study on resoluteness. It is an odyssey that chronicles trial and tribulations of Bakwena from the great Sechele the first to what I call Magang the great”, Dr Tsonope said.
Dr Tsonope felt of the book, “The various gyrations, movements and conflicts, the clash between western religious culture, through a close encounter with death, a politician, who is not complacent about Botswana’s gains, and instead laments how short-changed we are with our mineral wealth, tells a story that characterise a very emotional and riveting enigma on his – and his country’s – trials and tribulations.”
The author himself said that he decided that his story was going to be told whilst he was alive, and that it was going to be told not by a historian or any other chronicler, but by his own self.
“A story told by third parties is just short of being fictitious: I believe a story told by the subject himself is the most truthful and therefore the most reliable.”
“To me life is a long journey which may or may not be exciting to the traveler. For that reason I wanted to tell the full truth regarding myself during my journey, about my experiences, my miseries and disillusionments, and my thrills and joys. In other words, I wanted my audience to get these from the horse’s mouth, my mouth”, Magang said.
“I am aware there was hardly anything striking about my life, but I was persuaded that even in the dullest or most inconsequential of experiences there is something to learn. Thus you may find my story rather ordinary or even unedifying. But if you are attracted solely to the content of my character and you deem it worth of emulation, then I will not have told my story in vain,” he said.
Magang’s book also has some significant historical component to it, as he pays tribute to the late Bakwena tribe leader, Sechele I. In the book Magang opines that without Sechele I, who fought and repelled the Boers out of the then Bechuanaland in the famous war of 1852-53, there would have been no Botswana. “We would today be a province of South Africa.”
The book carries a lot of controversies too as the former politician looks back at some political decisions of the government of his time. He is free to call a spade a spade, and his book remains a lesson in resilience, a study of resoluteness of purpose to succeed.
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