Alert! Perusers of this week’s Mail & Guardian may have noticed that the letters page contains a scathing attack by Paul Trewhela on Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, authors of the new Chris Hani biography, Hani: A life too short.
The M&G hasn’t put the letter online (yet), but a longer version of it has just appeared at Politicsweb – and, like the original, it carries the whiff of serving a dual purpose: first, as an aggressive (not to say openly hostile) act of setting the historical record straight; and second, as a lever for promoting Trewhela’s own book. The shortcomings that he finds in A life too short are remedied, he says, in his treatment of the ANC and SWAPO’s military prison system, Inside Quatro.
Trewhela’s attack appears to boil down to a claim that Smith and Tromp glossed over Hani’s supposed role in secret prison executions. A contest for control over the narrative of the struggle leader’s legacy, then:
There is a serious problem with the recently published biography, Chris Hani: A Life Too Short (Jonathan Ball, 2009), written by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp. Sello M Alcock hints at the problem but does not identify it in his review in the Mail & Guardian (16 October), when he notes that they “manage only to gloss over” certain complex episodes in Hani’s life in exile.
The authors are senior journalists in South Africa, which makes the matter more disturbing.
Smith is an executive editor of The Star, the premier daily newspaper in the country and the leading media organ of the Independent News & Media group. Tromp is a senior reporter on The Star. This year he won the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year award, the CNN African Print Journalist of the Year award and the Vodacom Regional Print News Journalist of the Year award.
Their biography of Chris Hani fails on a most basic criterion, however: integrity to sources.
The result is that complexities in Hani’s life are obscured, and not made properly accessible to the reader.
The crucial chapter concerns Hani’s relation to the mutiny of about 90 percent of the trained troops of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola in 1984, the incarceration of leaders of the mutiny in Quatro prison camp, and their subsequent fates.
South Africa’s Bush/Border War irrevocably changed life for generations – whether for soldiers, fearful parents, or those worried about the spread of die rooi gevaar on the one hand and apartheid terror on the other.
Today, the stories of those who fought on behalf of the National Party-led government have proliferated into their own genre – grens literatuur or “border literature”.
The Sunday Times‘ Aubrey Paton profiles three recent titles:
I learned recently that South Africa has a literary genre all its own — Grens Literatuur (Border Literature) — devoted to accounts, fictional and otherwise, of the Bush War.
Apparently the genre dates back a good 40 years: popular Afrikaans hero Captain Caprivi featured first in the film Aanslag op Kariba and then in Huisgenoot as a “foto comic”, another uniquely South African form.
Like many English-speaking South Africans, I was blithely unaware of this wealth of local writing: in the last decade, however, it has become difficult to ignore the outpouring of books on the war and, curious about a culture I never experienced, I have started to read them.
The Angolan Writers Union (UEA) has published a new collection, Pegadas do Passado, by poet Angolan Carlos Pedro:
Benguela – “Pegadas do Passado” (Footprints of the Past) is the title of the poetry book presented last weekend by the Angolan writer Carlos Pedro, in the southern Benguela Province.
With an initial print of 500 copies, the book contains 29 pages and reflects everyday fundamental aspects, with the key issues being nostalgia, social imbalance and dreams.
The author has told Angop that he chose this title due to his historic and cultural trajectory, having considered the nostalgia, social imbalance and dreaming as “sensible elements which live in humans.”
Percy Zvomuya’s review of my compilation A – Z of African writers published by SHUTER [which appeared in print in the M&G 22 to 28 May 2009 and online at BOOK SA] needs a response to explain a number of points. (more…)
Alert! Books journalist Percy Zvomuya has gone through Robin Malan’s A-Z of African Writers with a fine-toothed comb – and found the newly-launched guide to African writing in English somewhat wanting.
His piece on the book is not so much a review as a first re-penning- Zvomuya’s survey of the continent’s literature draped like an early second draft over Malan’s, making for a rather jagged palimpsest – and BOOK SA has been given permission by the Mail & Guardian to reproduce his critique here in full.
As many will no doubt point out, Zvomuya’s inclusion of Angolan writers Ondjaki and José Eduardo Agualusa in his list may go somewhat against the spirit of Malan’s book, which focuses on original English writing, not translations (both these authors write in Portuguese; then again, Malan also includes Pepetela in his book, who also writes in that language) – but his emphasis on the extant wealth of central African and Nigerian authors calls for less quibble.
Alert! Perusers of this week’s Mail & Guardian may have noticed that the letters page contains a scathing attack by Paul Trewhela on Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, authors of the new Chris Hani biography, Hani: A life too short.
The Angolan Writers Union (UEA) has published a new collection, Pegadas do Passado, by poet Angolan Carlos Pedro:
