Johan van Wyk - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Johan van Wyk (1956 - ) was born in the small
mining town of Welkom, Orange Free State. His father
worked on the Cabora Bassa dam and Van Wyk went to schools
in Harare, Zimbabwe, and studied language and art history
at Wits before taking his doctorate at Rhodes. When in
1976 the Soweto school uprising exploded against mandatory
instruction in the Afrikaans language, which also happens
to be Van Wyk's mother tongue, and the revolt was brutally
put down by army bullets, some white students at Wits, Van
Wyk among them, marched in sympathy demonstrations with
black pupils. In a political act
more significant than a student march Johan van Wyk
modestly admits to being 'the first white to refuse to go
into the army for political reasons,' which meant
defending the apartheid regime in border wars against ANC
guerrillas in Angola, Mozambique and Namibia.
Van Wyk is well-known for his poetry collections in
Afrikaans: Deur die oog van die luiperd (1976),
Heldedade kom nie dikwels voor nie (1978), Bome
gaan dood om jou (1981), Oe in 'n kas (1996),
and for his literary theoretical work Constructs of
Identity and Difference in South African Literature
(1995). In collaboration with Pieter Conradie and Nik
Constandaras he published the anthology SA in Poesie/SA
in Poetry (1988), and co-edited Re-thinking South
African Literary History (1996). His controversial
thesis on the works of Afrikaans poet, Ingrid Jonker
Die dood, die minnaar en die Oedipale struktuur in die
Ingrid Jonker-teks was published in 1987. In the 1990s
he pioneered multi-disciplinary research in post-apartheid
and post-colonial studies while professor at the Centre
for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages
(CSSALL) at the University of Durban-Westville (now part of the
University of KwaZulu-Natal).
His first English language novel Manbitch,
published in 2001, evokes the raw, post-apartheid reality
of Durban's seedy Gillespie Street.
zoom
Gillespie Street at night.
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Selected WorkLewis Nkosi writes: 'What Johan van Wyk's fictionalised
autobiography reveals is that the effacement of lines that
once divided city inhabitants according to race or ethnic
origins in turn permits the emergence of new characters in
fiction who use the newly deployed space to express new
identities, characters who may be black, white or brown,
homo-, hetero-, or transexual, but who could never have
functioned exactly the same way in the rigidly organized
space policed by apartheid race laws. 'I'm not really sure
whether I'm really white anymore,' Van Wyk tells an
interviewer. 'I'm a South African, a person from the Point
or Marine Parade in Durban. I am proud of the way people
live together there: rich, poor, white, and the full
spectrum of black.''
(Adapted from
Lewis Nkosi's review Manbitch: The World
Of Johan van Wyk.)
from ManBitch 2001
I'm looking down from my flat window. The owner of the
adult video shop XXX with his steel leg makes his way
somewhere. I've never seen any customers going in or out
of his shop. Carnival sounds ('I'll be a bachelor boy till
my dying day') come from the band playing on the veranda
of the Four Seasons Hotel and very late at night there are
the underworldly sounds of a dog barking from the
undercover parking under The Bazaar. Across the street I
see the dwarf with the anguished eyes and wild hair of
Jesus Christ. He is called Three Quarters. He was born
without two arms and a leg. At night the towering Holiday
Inn Garden Court throws its blue glow across the city and
across my dreaming eyelids in my balcony room.
When I returned to my flat on Friday morning the
supervisor complained: 'That girlfriend of yours woke me
up at two last night for the key to your flat.' I found
Mbali in the flat. She had her periods. The madness of
last week's alcoholic indulgence ripened into incessant
vomiting.
In Zulu her name means flower, but she dislikes flowers.
Their withering away reminds her of the slipping away of
life. Saturday morning she left again.
It is Saturday afternoon. There is a roar of cheering from
the Four Seasons Hotel: whistles, shouts, hooting, gun
shots, crowd orgasms: People are watching soccer on the TV
in the Ladies Bar. There was a goal. At the end of the
game the hotel erupts and life returns to the streets. I
walk to the sidewalk cafe, the Costa do Sol and order a
beer. There is not much action. Then I move to the equally
desperate Four Seasons veranda with its Indian band
playing the favourites of the aging and crippled
prostitutes on the dance floor: their clothes as weathered
as their wrinkled and toothless faces.
Johan van Wyk reading from his novel
Manbitch BibliographyPoetry
1976. Deur die oog van die luiperd.
1978. Heldedade kom nie dikwels voor nie.
1981. Bome gaan dood om jou.
1996. Oe in 'n kas.
Literary Criticism
1988. SA in Poesie/ SA in Poetry (Co-editor with
Pieter Conradie and Nik
Constandaras)
Fiction
2001. Manbitch. Durban.
2006. Manbitch (New Edition). Durban.
- Johan
van Wyk's Blog -
- Johan
van Wyk's Website -
- Durban -
- Index -
For more information please visit
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