Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains by Luli Callinicos (David Philip) is a massive, thoroughly researched and highly engaging biography, and the first substantial account of the life and work of one of the most important figures in the struggle against apartheid. Drawing on numerous oral testimonies, primary sources and published material, Callinicos, one of the most distinguished and popularly accessible exponents of the new social history in South Africa, recounts Tambo’s life from his youth as a herdboy in the Transkei to his education at mission schools and Fort Hare University, through his career as teacher and lawyer in Johannesburg, to his leadership of the African National Congress in exile.
Completed shortly before she died, and skilfully edited by academic and former activist Raymond Suttner, All My Life and All My Strength by Ray Alexander Simons (STE) is a lively and well-written autobiography of the veteran trade unionist and ANC activist. Born and raised in Latvia, Alexander became involved in the socialist movement from her youth. On emigrating to Cape Town she became a trade unionist and member of the Communist Party of South Africa. Married to Professor Jack Simons, she became an adept researcher and writer on labour and anti-apartheid politics both in the country and in exile, where their classic history Class and Colour in South Africa was completed.
Far more emotionally complex was the life of Manilal Gandhi. In Ghandi’s Prisoner?: The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal by Uma Dhuphelia-Mesthrie (Kwela Books), Manilal’s granddaughter, a historian at the University of the Western Cape, examines through a biography of her grandfather the often vexing question of whether the saintly exponent of non-violent resistance and one of the liberators of India was a “bad” father, as some historians have claimed. Gandhi’s relationship to his sons was certainly complex — Harilal, the eldest, reacted strongly against his father’s stern asceticism and became, in essence, an alcoholic. Manilal was the loyal son, who stayed on in South Africa, running Gandhi’s Phoenix settlement and continuing in the tradition of protest politics his father initiated. The author writes with a combination of warmth and a critical historian’s eye.
Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest by Piers McGrandle (Continuum Press) is in some ways a slight disappointment. There is very little new material, particularly on his Sophiatown days, about the life of one of South Africa’s best-loved priest-activists, although the author does reveal some perhaps lesser-known insights into Huddleston’s lifelong struggle with serious depression. It is, however, well-written, and moves at a fast pace, making it a very easy introduction to the life of an Englishman who felt more at home in Africa, a fairly traditional Christian priest with a fairly radical politics, an Anglican monk who often found community life unbearable, but most of all one of the most persistent and tireless campaigners against apartheid.
Another Englishman, Anglican priest and anti-apartheid campaigner Canon John Collins played a different yet no less important role in our history. White Lies: Canon Collins and the Secret War Against Apartheid by Denis Herbstein (James Curry/HSRC Press) recounts how this canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, set up and ran the International Defence and Aid Fund (Idaf). Originally a legal aid fund for treason trialists, Idaf became a secret conduit of funds to the families of imprisoned activists — drawing on a fiendishly clever network of private correspondence (in effect “penfriends”) from ordinary people in a number of countries to families in South Africa. This system, so simple when one thinks of it, proved impossible for the Security Branch to crack. Herbstein’s book reads at times like a thriller, yet it is a valuable contribution to part of the “secret history” of the struggle.
The Closest of Strangers (Wits), edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, offers a refreshing take on the representation of women. Subtitled “South African Women’s Life Writing”, it offers a selection of autobiographical writing from South African women across racial and social strata — from Emily Hobhouse to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Helen Joseph, Bessie Head and Antjie Krog — arranged according to significant historical periods in South Africa, from 1985 to 2000. It is an interesting topography of women’s lives against the backdrop of history.
Such a historical figure is Miriam Makeba, and Makeba is her story, told by the diva herself, with Nomsa Mwamuka (STE). It updates and expands her earlier autobiography, in coffee-table-book form, chronicling Makeba’s life from her early days growing up on the Rand, her Sophiatown years, to her exile from this country and fame overseas, up to her triumphant return — singing, always singing.
Another kind of musical icon was Johannes Kerkorrel, whose tragic suicide last year highlighted his impact on the South African music scene. In Kerkorrel (Tafelberg), journalist Willem Pretorius tells his story.
Gerard Sekoto: “I am an African” by N Chabani Manganyi, with a foreword by Es’kia Mphahlele (Wits) deals with one of South Africa’s greatest artists. This biography is informed by the discovery, after Sekoto’s death, of a “suitcase of treasures”, which contained previously unknown musical compositions, letters, and a large quantity of notes, writings and private documents, adding significantly to Sekoto scholarship.
John Schlesinger was a British movie director who made some great British movies (Sunday Bloody Sunday) and some great American ones (Midnight Cowboy). He was a sometimes contradictory figure, but always fascinating, and his story is told in Edge of Midnight, the authorised biography by William J Mann (Hutchinson).
Actor Ian Holm came to the attention of a new generation as Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, but over his half-century career he has played Napoleon (thrice), King Lear, Hercule Poirot and both Lewis Carroll and JM Barrie — never mind an android in Alien. In Acting My Life (Bantam), Holm recounts his triumphs and his disasters on the stage and in film.
But the autobiography of the year must be that of Nobel-winner Gabriel GarcÃÂa Márquez, author of the most-famed Latin American novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. His Living To Tell the Tale (Penguin) covers a slightly shorter span: from his birth in 1927, up to the beginning of his writing career.
A different kind of autobiographical document is provided by Denis Hirson in I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (Jacana), in which he follows the example of Georges Perec, who wrote a book in which every paragraph began “I remember …” Hirson recalls the South Africa of the 1960s and early 1970s in all its telling detail — and with a poetic touch.
For those still obsessed by Britain’s biggest band, The Beatles: Ten Years that Shook the World (Dorling Kindersley) is the biography of a pop group and an era, told by the world’s best music writers and illustrated with a plethora of period photos and other memorabilia.
Sinatra by Richard Havers (Dorling Kindersley) does a similar thing for the man regarded as the greatest interpretive vocalist ever.
Pat Cavendish O’Neill was born into a world of enormous riches, eccentricity and intrigue. In A Lion in the Bedroom (Jonathan Ball), O’Neill tells the story of her charmed life among the glittering names of the 20th century — and the day everything changed for her, when she was presented with a tiny lion cub and she entered a world more magical and inspiring than anything she had known before.