Lewis Nkosi - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Lewis Nkosi (born 1936 in Durban) worked for many
years as a magazine editor and broadcast journalist in
Durban (Ilanga lase
Natal), Johannesburg (Drum),
London (The New African), and the U.S.
(NET). He is the author of several
collections of essays, including Home and Exile
(1965), The Transplanted Heart:
Essays on South Africa (1975), and Tasks and Masks:
Themes and Styles of African
Literature (1981); two plays, The Rhythm of
Violence(1964) and The
Black Psychiatrist (2001) ; and the novels Mating
Birds (1986) and Underground People (2002),
originally published in
Dutch in 1994. His latest book Mandela's Ego is due
for release in 2006. His career as Professor of Literature has
included positions at
Universities in Africa (Zambia), the USA (Wyoming,
California (Irvine)), and
Europe (Warsaw, Poland). Now resident in Switzerland,
Lewis Nkosi frequently
travels to literary seminars and conferences as an invited
guest. He has revisited
South Africa regularly since 1994.
Selected Workfrom Mating Birds (1986)
In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither
shocks nor frightens me. What I feel most frequently now
is a kind of numbness, a total lack of involvement in
my own fate, as though I were an observer watching
the last days in the life of another man.
Every
morning I
stand at this small grilled window, gazing at the sky,
which is a marvelous blue at this time of year; the air is
as clear, as hard as frost, and the
sunlight has a soft shimmering quality to it: it blinds
the eye; it dazzles.
Sometimes a flock of birds will ascend the sky, wings
beating wildly; often
a pair will mate up there in freedom and open space,
clinging to each other
joyfully in the bright air as though for dear life. Then,
no longer able to
restrain himself, the male will attempt to inject his
sperm into the female
and he, of course, as often as not, will miss so that you
can see his pale
seed dripping through the air while the female giggles
wildly, as is the
habit of her sex.
zoom
Durban Beachfront
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The scenario is the same every
morning.
The mating birds caw, they whir and whirl outside my
window and the smell of fresh spring sharpens the air
with its lush, acrid
promise. All the same, it is mostly the birds pairing in
the open sky that
remind me with a vivid poignancy I rarely feel these days
why I'm locked up
in this tiny cell, awaiting death by execution. I move my
hand toward the
window and the sunlight, and try to imagine the colors of
the Indian Ocean
in the early morning light when the water is already
flecked with brilliant
sunspots or in the early afternoon when, hardly moving at
all, the water
turns into shiny turquoise.
I can see it all quite
clearly: the beach, the children's playgrounds, the
seafront hotels,
and the sweating, pinkfaced tourists from upcountry; the
best time of all is
that silent, torpid hour of noon when the beach suddenly
becomes deserted
and, driven back to the seafront restaurants and the
temporary shelter of
their hotel rooms, crowds of sea bathers suddenly vanish,
leaving behind
them not only the half-demolished cheese and tomato
sandwiches but sometimes
an occasional wristwatch, an expensive ring, or a finely
embroidered
handkerchief still smudged with lipstick from a pair of
anonymous lips. Not
infrequently, the tourists leave behind them an even
worthier trophy - a young
body lying spent and motionless on the warm white sands to
be gazed at by
us, the silent forbidden crowds of non-white boys in a
black, mutinous rage.
That, after all,
is how I first saw the English girl one afternoon, lying
on an empty stretch
of Durban beach as though washed up by the tide after an
all-night storm:
she was a golden statue, lovely and broken among the ruins
of an ancient
city, and yet for all that, she was shockingly alive,
dripping suntan oil
and glowing with the sun that beat upon her elongated
body. Her flesh was
surrendered, as it were, to the hungry gaze of African
youths who combed the
beach every day for lost or discarded articles.
zoom
Lewis Nkosi at Snake Park beach
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Bibliography1964.
The Rhythm of Violence.
1965. Home and Exile and Other Selections.
1975. The Transplanted Heart: essays on South
Africa
1981. Tasks and masks: themes and styles of African
literature.
1987. Mating birds
2001. The Black Psychiatrist
2002. (1994 in Dutch) Underground People.
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