Jonathan Morgan
Written like a detective thriller, Finding Mr Madini described a swathe of pan-Africanist history through the eyes of 11 people, whose storylines converged like a spider’s legs in Jo’burg in 1999.
When we set out to tell our seemingly disconnected stories we were all homeless but in quite different ways. Sipho was the proverbial street child living in a drain. Robbie and Gert washed in the Westdene dam. Virginia lived in a transitional housing project. I was wandering in what looked like the desert. I’m not saying we were nobodies then and we’re somebodies now, but when we met for the first few times in Rissik Street and called ourselves the Great African Spider Writers and took a long shot at a book I guess that could describe how we often felt.
When the book was published by David Philip last year Sipho was long missing. He only attended a couple of writing workshops, but his contribution was perhaps unmatched. When he disappeared, of course I was sad, but I also recognised that it provided us with the perfect plot a detective thriller kind of search that could take us into all of Jo’burg’s ghettoes, alleys, drains, prisons, mortuaries, deportation centres and margins which would tie together all of our stories.
Somewhere between then and now I did give him up for dead, but I felt good that the book had captured traces of his life and that important people such as John Matshikiza and Andrew Donaldson had called him the group’s finest talent and guiding light. I’m still talking about him like he’s dead and the big news is that not only is he alive but he’s turned up with another book sticking out of his trousers.