Tatamkulu Afrika was a South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

n poet and writer.

Writing

His first novel, Broken Earth was published when he was seventeen (under his "Methodist name"), but it was over fifty years until his next publication, a collection of verse entitled Nine Lives. He won numerous literary awards including the gold Molteno Award

The Cape Tercentenary Foundation

The Cape Tercentenary Foundation was set up in 1950 by brothers Edward and Harry Molteno, pioneers of the Cape fruit industry. The influential exporters were great appreciators of music and the arts, and were deeply concerned about the natural environment...

 for lifetime services to South African literature, and in 1996 his works were translated into French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

.

His autobiography, Mr Chameleon, was published posthumously in 2005.

Life

Tatamkhulu Afrika was born in Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

 and came to South Africa as a very young child. He was orphaned when both his parents died of flu. His father was Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

ian who married a Turkish

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 woman.They lived in Cape Town's

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

 District 6

District Six, Cape Town

District Six is the name of a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa. It is best known for the forced removal of over 60,000 of its inhabitants during the 1970s by the apartheid regime....

, a mixed race inner-city community, with Afrikaans foster parents. District 6 was declared a “whites only” area in the 1960s and the community was destroyed. With an Arab father and a Turkish mother, Afrika could have been classified as a “white”, but he refused to be classified as a “white” and also became a Muslim.

In 1984, he joined the African National Congress

African National Congress

The African National Congress is South Africa's governing Africanist political party, supported by its tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party , since the establishment of non-racial democracy in April 1994. It defines itself as a...

, which led the struggle against apartheid, and in 1987, he was arrested for terrorism and banned from speaking or writing in public for five years. He wrote under the code name of Tatamkhulu Afrika, which enabled him to write.

He spent 11 years in prison and was only two cells away from Nelson Mandela. He was released in 1992. That was when he came back to District 6 to find it destroyed with no shops as promised. That was what his poem Nothing's Changed is about. The anger he felt towards what had happened to District 6 and his home.

Death

Tatamkulu Afrika died shortly after his 82nd birthday, from injuries received when he was run over by a car two weeks before, just after the publication of his final novel, Bitter Eden. He left a number of unpublished works, including his autobiography, two novels, four short novels, two plays and poetry.

Poetry

• Nine Lives (Carrefour/Hippogriff, 1991)
• Dark Rider (Snailpress/Mayibuye 1993)
• Maqabane (Mayibuye Books, 1994)
• Flesh and the Flame (Silk Road, 1995)
• The Lemon Tree (Snailpress, 1995)
• Turning Points (Mayibuye, 1996)
• The Angel and Other Poems (Carapace, 1999)
• Mad Old Man Under the Morning Star (Snailpress, 2000)
• Au Ceux (French translations) (Editions Creathis l'ecole des filles, 2000)
• Nothing's Changed
  Nothing's Changed
  Nothing's Changed is a poem by Tatamkhulu Afrika.Nothings changed is set in district six,Chapetown against the background of the apartheid and racism...
  
  (2002)

Novels

• Broken Earth (1940)
• The Innocents (1994)
• Tightrope (1996)
• Bitter Eden (Arcadia Books, 2002) An autobiographical novel set in a prisoner-of-war camp during WWII. The novel deals with three men who see themselves as straight but must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in the male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life and the strange loyalties and deep bonds between the men are depicted.

External links