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Sankofa

Anna grew up in England with her white mother and knowing very little about her West African father. In middle age, after separating from her husband and with her daughter all grown up, she finds herself alone and wondering who she really is. Her mother’s death leads her to find her father’s student diaries, chronicling his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. She discovers that he eventually became the president – some would say the dictator – of Bamana in West Africa. And he is still alive.

She decides to track him down and so begins a funny, painful, fascinating journey, and an exploration of race, identity and what we pass on to our children.

Animal

I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig.

That’s a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man.

Do you see how this is going? But I wasn’t always that way.

I am depraved. I hope you like me.

The Other Black Girl

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and the micro-aggressions, she’s thrilled when Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events cause Nella to become Public Enemy Number One and Hazel, the Office Darling.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realises that there is a lot more at stake than her career.

Dark, funny and furiously entertaining, The Other Black Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last twist.

The Wanderers

Ruru’s father, Phaks, joined the anti-apartheid struggle in exile before she was born but never returned, preferring to stay in Tanzania. Years later, though he has passed away, Ruru goes in search of signs of his life in his adopted country.

She finds it in his widow and his ‘pillow books’ – journals he kept, coming to terms with his mortality.

Struck by the parallels with her teenage letters to her late mother, she reads to find answers to her questions: Who was he? Why did he not return?

When Secrets Become Stories

She was asking for it.
She should have known better.
Bekezela (persevere), she was told.
It’s because I love you, he said.
It’s not that bad, she told herself.

In sharing their experiences from girlhood to the boardroom, from Cape Town’s suburbs to the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, women from different walks of life show how chillingly common male violence against women is. Together, their voices form a deafening chorus.

Gender-based violence feeds on shame and silence but in this extraordinary collection, brave women reclaim their power and summon the courage in others to do the same. In speaking out, sharing what was once secret, shame’s hold is broken.

With contributions by Lorraine Sithole, Desiree-Anne Martin, UCT vice-chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng, Shafinaaz Hassim, Cathy Park Kelly and Olivia Jasriel, who as a child was sexually abused by tennis star Bob Hewitt.

Heart-rending at times, it is the honesty and courage of the writing that truly inspires.

Why We Read with Mphuthumi Ntabeni

In this final episode of the season, we look at stand out reads from 2021, featuring a conversation with Mphuthumi Ntabeni, author of The Wanderers.

Jess’s favourite picture book of the year so far is The Rock From the Sky by Jon Klassen, while the book that has meant most to Colin this year is The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr, and Luami’s stand out read is a spec fic novel, Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

Hosted by Vasti Calitz. Produced by Andri Burnett.

Listen Now: Why We Read with Mphuthumi Ntabeni

Long Division

Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson; but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called…Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.

City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).

Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In

The title of the book is inspired by a South African phrase made famous by the legendary musician Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song, Istraight lendaba.

Like the legend who inspired the book title and the song from which the name of this poetry collection was selected, Putuma wanted to build on the themes she explored in her first book, Collective Amnesia, and go straight to the heart of tackling the legacies of black femme erasure from society as well as in the arts.

The success of Collective Amnesia, a bestseller that has sold over 6000 copies and been translated into eight languages around the world, saw Putuma perform for audiences across the continent as well as in Europe.

“In writing Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come in, I wanted to reflect on my personal experiences of travelling and performing outside of South Africa and more specifically, Europe. I wanted to understand different aesthetics and forms of memory, documentation, performance, hyper-visibility and erasure. I wanted to look at how those things frame our understanding of women in the archive, legacies of archiving, celebration, fame, culture and black women on and off the stage,” Putuma says.

The book is divided into four chapters dealing with subjects related to history, the erasure of black women from the archive and more personal poems where Putuma resuscitates the stories of women in her lineage who have had an influence on her life.

“I wanted these excerpts to serve as a conversation between the poems and an archive of sorts, an archive of black women (living and dead) who are looked at, celebrated, uncited, erased and exploited. I wanted to make visible the words of black women who have had to navigate the complexities of a constant gaze that often renders the “looked at” invisible. In my quest, I wanted to further understand and challenge my own methods of citation, documentation and seeing, and in doing that, invite others to do the same,” she says.

Female Fear Factory

Female Fear Factory by Pumla Dineo Gqola is the eagerly anticipated follow up to the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award winner, Rape A South African Nightmare. Like the previous book on which it builds, Female Fear Factory fuses intellectual rigour and extensive research. Gqola, a rockstar of South African feminism, brilliantly traces the construction and machinations of the female fear factory by exposing its myths, lies and seductions. It is an insightful and sobering account of global patriarchal violence but also offers a hopeful vision through the eyes of an unapologetic feminist.

The ongoing explosion of sexual violence demands more space for the development of the female fear factory concept as well as its possible antidotes. Where Rape: A South African Nightmare introduced strategies for disrupting rape culture at an individual level, Female Fear Factory offers an even bolder vision for collective action against all cultures of sexual violence. ~ Prof Pumla Gqola

Languages of Truth

Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, including several never previously in print, Languages of Truth chronicles a period of momentous cultural shifts. Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, Rushdie shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison, and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life.

Always attuned to the malleability of language, Rushdie considers the nature of truth, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. Written with the author’s signature wit and energy, Languages of Truth offers pleasure and insight in equal measure, confirming Rushdie’s place as one of the most original and important thinkers of our time.

Down Memory Lane with Robert Hamblin

In this episode about memoirs, we bring you a conversation with Robert Hamblin about his just-published book, Robert: A Queer and Crooked Memoir for the Not So Straight or Narrow, and staff recommend their favourite memoirs.

Megan’s favourtie is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Luami loved Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, and Carmen’s recommendation is Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway.

Listen Now: Down Memory Lane with Robert Hamblin

Into Dark Water

Major General Jeremy Vearey, exMK cadre and bodyguard to Nelson Mandela, was until recently deputy provincial commissioner of the Western Cape SAPS (a role we hope and trust he will return to soon). He starts his ‘police memoir’ where the old apartheid police and fighters from the liberation movement meet, distrusting each other deeply, but having to merge into a single police service. The action ranges from Operation Saladin to antigang policing and the recovery of the sale of confiscated weapons to gangsters and the hunt for the killer Mowers. Underworld figures and gangsters loom large, as does the constant fear of death.

While Into Dark Water presents a wideangle portrait of policing, politics and criminality in the Western Cape, it is also a more intimate account of what it has meant to reach the highest ranks of policing and go from being a revolutionary to a senior actor in state security, law and order. The submerged narrative or ‘dark stream’ that runs beneath the text is the price that the author has paid for following his calling.