Writer Tatamkhulu Afrika, who died on December 23 last year aged 82, holds at least six South African records.
He is the only South African to bunk school in matric to write a novel — and get it accepted by an international publisher while still a teenager. He is the only South African writer to have had, legally, five names. He is the only South African who has won every literary prize for which his works were eligible. He is the only South African to have published fiction over a span of 62 years.
He also fought for freedom in both the Union Defence Force in World War II and in Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in our war of liberation, and was a prisoner of both the Axis and apartheid’s Special Branch.
He is the only known person in 20th-century South Africa, classified as “white”, who demanded, not for marriage but as a matter of principle, to be reclassified “non-white”. Decades before anyone coined the clichés “roots”, “identity” or “African renaissance”, Afrika went out and did those things, in five stages symbolised by his five names. These experiences profoundly marked his life and his writings.
His life began on Africa’s northern coast, in As-Sallum in Egypt. Born of an Egyptian father and Turkish mother, he was named Mogamed Fu’ad Nasif. The Asian flu epidemic orphaned him at two. At the other end of the continent, family friends fostered him as John Charlton. At 17 he wrote his first novel, Broken Earth, published by Hutchinson’s in London.
This novel got remaindered when the Luftwaffe bombed the publisher’s warehouse during the Blitz. A copy survived in the Johannesburg Public Library, beyond the reach of the Third Reich’s censorship. The author volunteered for the South African army, and was with thousands of others captured and interned at Tobruk.
Bitter Eden is Afrika’s recent novel about the usually unspoken realities of being a prisoner of war. He told me that two SS guards silently tore up the manuscript in front of him. A half-century later, he reconstructed it from memory. Had his first novel contained what Bitter Eden contains, no publisher in the United Kingdom would have dared touch it. Very unusually for a religious author, much of it focuses on how straight young men, imprisoned for years with their testosterone but without their women, make do, for both material necessities like soap — and for relationships. Afrika skilfully writes about both the trauma of being taken captive and the paradox of utter disorientation when you are suddenly freed from captivity.
After the war John Charlton left his foster family and got jobs in Namibia, where he was adopted by an Afrikaans family as Jozua Joubert. In 1964 he reverted to the Islam of his blood parents as Ismail Joubert, and moved to District Six. He founded Al-Jihaad to oppose the destruction of that area, and to fight apartheid in general. When the organisation affiliated to MK, his African comrades gave him his isikhahlelo (his praise name) — Tatamkhulu Afrika, Grandfather Africa, which he kept till he died.
Afrika shot to prominence in the South African literary scene with his first collection of poems, Nine Lives, in 1991, for which he won the Thomas Pringle Award and the CNA Debut Prize. It was followed a year later by Dark Rider, which won the Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry. His 1996 volume, Turning Points, won a Sanlam Literary Award, a prize he received once more in 2000 for Mad Old Man Under the Morning Star. His poems have a rigorous integrity, whether describing the lyrical beauty of the moon setting over Signal Hill or the sordidness of being mugged or molested. In a remarkable surge of late-blooming creativity, Afrika published several more collections of poems, the novels The Innocents and Bitter Eden, as well as the collection of novellas Tightrope.
Fellow poet Peter Horn wrote of Afrika that his work contained “an insight that makes the silence of the page speak, an understanding of what it is to be human, here and now, to be a poet with a ‘hole in the heart that does not heal’. What is so convincing about his poetry is that it does not attempt to appear more than it is: the voice of a human being, who has been involved in the struggle, which we all know, and who has observed and described incidents and people he met in this life he has lived, discovering love and humanity even in the gutter, discovering lust under yellow plastic covers, discovering human pain, where other eyes persuaded themselves to perceive no feeling at all. But that is the sign of the poet, that he has no eyelids to hide behind, that he has to see it all, joy and pain, stench and death.”
Tatamkhulu Afrika; December 7 1920 to December 23 2002