I have an abiding image of Lewis Nkosi stepping off a plane and leaning into a brisk Cape Town north-easter as he crosses the tarmac, chocolate-brown Stetson pulled low over his eyes, long camel-hair coat flapping about his ankles. A stylish man, not of here. A man of the world.
Nkosi was a lonely child. His mother died when he was seven; he never knew the father who died before his birth. This left a deep scar on the sensitive boy.
Nevertheless, he seemed to have enjoyed his days in boarding school, judging by the semi-autobiographical early part of his third and last novel, Mandela’s Ego.
A scholarship to study at Harvard in 1961 marked the end of his journalistic career at Drum magazine and the beginning of his exile. He did not return until the early Nineties and always just for short periods — until early 2009 when he came back to do research for his memoirs, not realising that it would be final and permanent.
In the meantime he had been exposed to different cultural environments. The experience of always essentially remaining an outsider must have contributed to his acute sense of irony and the uncanny understanding of human nature he displays in his novels. In Mating Birds, his debut novel, written in the mid-Eighties when things were strictly seen in black and white, there is none of the expected oversimplification. Instead, both characters, a white woman and a black man, are presented with equal insight.
Nkosi’s long academic career abroad — as professor of literature he taught at universities in the United States, Zambia and Poland — sharpened his keen intellect and resulted in an unusually broad perspective on writing and a profound knowledge of world literature, classical as well as modern. It was a delight to listen to him airing his views on Tolstoy, James Joyce or Zoë Wicomb. What an enormous loss that he never completed his memoirs. He intended to write not so much about himself as about the great figures he had known, local and international — writers, intellectuals, artists, musicians — and the exceptional events he had lived through, in broad terms.
All these experiences left their mark. The last of the Drum generation of writers, he, too, often partied too much, liberating a little devil of recklessness. Yet, despite his sometimes headstrong behaviour, you could not stay angry with him. He was too disarmingly charming, too delightfully naughty. You simply accepted that he lived by different rules.
But in the end he paid a price for his destructive behaviour. Institutions became wary of inviting him to conferences and symposiums and with age his health deteriorated. His friends did not abandon him, however, and he was blessed in 1995 to meet Astrid Starck, a Sorbonne professor eight years his junior. Three years later he moved from the US to join her in Basle, Switzerland, his last home. He was equally blessed to have fathered twin daughters who were at his side with Starck when he died on Sunday September 4.
I’ll remember Lewis Nkosi for his wit, well-concealed gentleness, impishness, intelligence, even-handedness and lack of pomposity. And his great style.