Pinky Khoabane Meets Lewis Nkosi and Calls for Mazisi Kunene’s Poetry to Stay in SA

December 14th, 2009 by Ben - Editor

Alert! At the weekend, VC Netwox Book Club founder Pinky Khoabane turned to matters of literature in her regular Sunday Times column.

She attended author Lewis Nkosi’s recent birthday party – where she observed that the writer’s health and spirits, after a bad fall earlier this year, are not in the best of shape (in some contrast to the statements in a recent press release issued by his agent). There, she met the wife of the late poet Mazisi Kunene, and learned that the latter is considering taking Kunene’s archives out of South Africa, that they might be better preserved.

Between the frail Nkosi and the possibly disappearing Kunene, Khoabane was struck by a feeling that, in South Africa, we’re allowing our cultural heritage to fall into decay. Keep it alive, she says:

Should we be outraged that Mathabo Kunene, the wife of one of Africa’s literary giants and South Africa’s first poet laureate, the late Professor Mazisi Kunene, is contemplating approaching the University of California, where he worked for 19 years, regarding the preservation of his works?
Not out of choice or from a lack of trying to have the material archived here, but because there isn’t the interest and commitment in this country to preserving what should be our treasured cultural property.
Mathabo Kunene made the startling revelation at a gathering to celebrate the birthday of another of our literary elders, Professor Lewis Nkosi, whose debilitating health seems to have been lost to our media. Nkosi fell and injured his head in June and, despite several operations, his speech is affected and he is confined to a wheelchair.