Author Zukiswa Wanner shares her thoughts about motherhood in this charming profile:
Back to the basics, what’s your family dynamic? I am a single mom to a four year old son (soon to be five).
Domestic goddess or working outside the home? I am very much a domestic goddess but that’s because my work as a writer is flexible enough to allow me to work when I want to.
What do you do? I am a writer. A poor one who is trying to make the profession work to pay the bills.
Cody, Iowa City: Maxine, you were part of the International Writing program in Iowa. How was your time here? Could you tell us about the people you met? And anything that was noteworthy?
Maxine Case: Everything was memorable … in a word “awesome”, which came to typify the Iowa City experience for all of us. As I mentioned before, I have begun packing for my return to South Africa and came across notes I had made after meeting Marilynne Robinson, although meeting is an overstatement, I attended one of her lectures. I ended up writing about this experience yesterday, months after meeting her. It is always wonderful to meet one of your idols, and she was definitely one of mine! On a lighter note, I acquired serious poker skills while in Iowa City and had a drink named after me at the Foxhead.
Pascal, London, U.K.: Where do you draw your ideas from? When and how do you usually write?
Zukiswa Wanner: I draw my ideas from society. I could be walking around and I will see something that gets me and I will think ‘hey, good idea.’ Some of my best ideas have also come from discussions I have overheard on public transport or among my family members (please don’t tell them, they might sue me for my measly royalties:-0) I write whenever inspiration hits. I make it a point to walk around with a pen and a notebook and if something gets me I will write about it later.
It’s 2010, and we know the national pass rate for matrics is down, we know there’s a mess in Mpumalanga and we know that almost half of first-year university students fail. It is time, as a recent op-ed in the Mail and Guardian put it, for our government to “grasp the nettle” that is our nation’s education system – which means addressing the full range of problems, not just one or two particularly salient issues.
The system’s masters could do well by starting with Graeme Bloch’s The Toxic Mix, which gives a comprehensive overview of what’s wrong – and suggests ways to start fixing things.
The M&G op-ed has attracted a huge amount of comment, and has been followed up by a second, equally cogent piece that makes the point that the matric pass rate is not the only barometer of our education system’s success or failure. The two articles make for essential reading for all those concerned with South Africa’s future:
Grasp the nettle
Right, class. The education minister told you on Thursday that it is “pleasing to note” our exam system is “maturing” and “stabilising” and “we have seen some positive gains in the results of the class of 2009″: “There is an increase in the number of passes over 40% and an increased number of bachelors passes from 18% to 32%,” she said.
Did you get that, class? Well, no. With more than half a million pupils, and untold numbers of their relatives, sweating to hear the results of the most stressful exams they will ever write, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s first statistical salvo on Thursday morning was gobbledygook you’d have to be a professor of education to have understood. Maybe.
One of the major weaknesses of South Africa’s now-discarded matric qualification, the Senior Certificate, was its diminished value as educational currency. A bunch of F symbols earned you a pass. As a grade 12 learner you did not have to know much, or demonstrate much of what you had learned, to get through.
Even if the symbols allowed entry into a university most tertiary institutions could not rely on what they said about a learner’s ability to succeed and quietly reassessed them with informal methods they had developed over time.
In short, by 2007, the last year the Senior Certificate was written, it had become significantly devalued.
For those who were out of town when the final Sunday Times of 2009 hit their doorsteps, Julius Malema beat out the likes of Robert Mugabe to win the newspaper’s top annual anti-accolade:
There was a burp. A very loud burp. By now the citizens of the province of Youthigia knew what this meant. The ever-conquering leader, whose words drip like dribble down the chin, was about to speak.
So they ran off to the Green Hill, a tall mound of Heineken cans, the Youthigians’ beverage of choice, which had been set up as the royal court. This was where the great one would put forth his wisdoms.
Once they had all gathered, there was another huge burp.
So here I am in Sun City. I could tell you about all of them in my sleep but, I won’t. Well not a lot. I would rather tell you about the guy who landed me here.
It always began with emails.
“Dear Mr. Dube,
I am a journalist from New York Times/Times/Newsweek/Le Monde/The Guardian” etcetera etcetera. Then there are the flattering platitudes about how the journalist loves my first work of fiction, Township Stories. And then, inevitably it ends, “I will be in Johannesburg from ____________ to ____________ and would love to interview you as one of the literary torchbearers in post-apartheid South Africa.”
Sometimes it would be a male journalist. Most of the time she would be a female, trying to understand how I survived ‘growing up under apartheid’ and trying to show me and the rest of their readers in the Global North just how liberal they are. “There is this absolutely awesome South African writer, Sifiso Dube, you should read him” trying to sound more knowledgeable than the people around them at a dinner party. When it was a female journalist, I would fuck. It seemed inevitable – the price I paid, or the prize I received, depending really on how good the sex was, for fame.
Danie Marais het met die kunstenaar Diek Grobler saamgespan om van sy gedigte met animasie te illustreer.
Jy kan die animasie-video van Marais se gedig “In Duitsland waar die wolke in gelid marsjeer” op NB-uitgewers se YouTube-kanaal kyk. Marais dra die gedig voor, terwyl Grobler se tekeninge op die skerm lewend word.
Hierdie video is vroeër vanjaar gebruik as deel van die vertoning Hoe Sekel die Maan. Dit gee beslis ‘n nuwe dimensie aan die gedig.
Zubeida Jaffer’s memoir Our Generation is now available in the UK. To mark its appearance there, her old schoolmate and activist friend Janice Warman reminisces about the heady, terrifying days of the late 70s at Rhodes University. An unforgettable piece featuring some unforgettable characters – including Marion Sparg and Guy Berger – in The Observer:
In 1979, three middle-class students in the Eastern Cape joined the ANC’s war with Apartheid. They were tortured, jailed and branded traitors. Thirty years on, they are national heroes.
For heaven's sake,” my father said, seeing me off at the airport, “don't get drunk, don't get pregnant – and don't get involved in politics.” He was right to be concerned. Rhodes University in the late 1970s, with its Sir Herbert Baker-designed campus and its lush green lawns, looked prosperous and sedate. But the Sunday papers had been full of the escapades of its notorious drinking clubs and loose morals; the Eastern Cape was, after the riots of 1976, a place of turmoil and desperate poverty; and the campus was thought by most conservative parents to be a hotbed of political activity.
Nearby, the Nationalist policy of forced removals meant thousands of black people had been moved from the cities into the black “homelands” of Transkei and Ciskei, and dumped there with only a standpipe and a couple of huts for company; two out of three children died of malnutrition before the age of three .
I arrived in 1977, the year after the Soweto riots, to study journalism. Months later, Steve Biko was murdered in custody. The campus tipped over into turmoil. There were demonstrations and hunger strikes. For most of us, Rhodes was a revelation. We had been brought up to respect authority. Here, we could forge a whole new identity, personally and politically.
I arrived in 1977, the year after the Soweto riots, to study journalism. Months later, Steve Biko was murdered in custody. The campus tipped over into turmoil. There were demonstrations and hunger strikes. For most of us, Rhodes was a revelation. We had been brought up to respect authority. Here, we could forge a whole new identity, personally and politically.
Out of that class of 1979 came two women whose identities merged with the painful birth of the new South Africa: two journalism students whose journey was to take them through defiance, imprisonment and torture during the apartheid years. One of the quietest girls in the class, Marion Sparg, joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), trained in exile in Lusaka, and was eventually convicted of bombing two police stations. An Asian journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, was imprisoned and tortured for her writing and union activism, yet ultimately chose not to prosecute her torturer.
The Mail and Guardian poses some interesting questions to Nthikeng Mohlele, author of The Scent of Bliss. The book journeys with Q, its narrator, and paints an ambitious portrait that fuses death and history, social justice with the dogma of sexual and religious morality, and the effects of State power on the lives of individuals:
Describe yourself in a sentence.
Cerebral idealist, allergic to sport, unashamedly and obsessively drawn to life; sometimes frustrated by its limitations.
Describe your ideal reader.
Must be true to themselves, free to think and feel whatever they please in response to what I put on to a page.
Fabulously fun and enjoyably entertaining! The launch of Nataniël’s new cookbook, Gatherings, was everything you wished it would be at Exclusive Books Clearwater Mall earlier this week.
The launch featured a festive, petal-bedecked table of this gorgeous new cookbook and a buzzing air of expectation as the guests awaited Nataniël’s arrival.
He was introduced by Marga Collings from NB Publishers as a “national treasure” and “style icon”. Speaking in both English and Afrikaans, Collings described Nataniël as “besonder veelsydig” – a “successful singer, writer, lyric writer, composer, artist, stage personality, playwright, chef and businessman”. She praised him for fitting all this in to his life and yet finding, “time to enjoy gatherings with friends and colleagues, making each one a beautiful occasion in which he combines his favourite things – cooking, eating and friendship”.
She said Gatherings is about “Memorable celebrations and magical get-togethers at Nataniël’s house and garden over the course of a year”.
Bouncing forward, Nataniël had guests laughing within seconds with his opening comments, which included “It’s very strange to do a speech about good cooking within walking distance from the Spur!”. Saying he was born in “the wrong country at the wrong time”, although he has tried rugby, politics and sport, he has come to realise that he “only likes food” and is “obsessed about the culture of eating”.
Describing how he spends time reading books on the history of food “while other people breed”, he took guests through the human journey of discovering a knife and fork. Painting a picture of how we have moved from communal eating out of shared bowls to set places for individuals he said, “the modern way of eating changed everything”.
He joked that eating, and the culture thereof, had changed quite a lot down the generations: “in the 21st century I can have a weight problem!”. He spoke of the pleasurable joys of eating at home. “Before the crime will kill us all, my message is to stay at home and eat!”.
He delighted guests by sharing how his mother was never a good cook – “she will just kill you with her cooking” – but how life was “cholesterol heaven” with his grandmother. She believed “Tomorrow the war will start so let’s eat everything today!”. He told how they ate with open doors at her house. “The entire town was welcome”.
Talking about Gatherings specifically, Nataniël mentioned that it is not a book about how one should cook but about how he ate for a year. He included all the special events in his year – except for a funeral. He tried to inspire people with simple food: “If you can’t cook, dim the lights and drink more!”.
Gatherings is about how you present the food and who joins you at your table, it’s about using “your best every day” and enjoying “your stuff!”
And his final gem of the evening: “Who the hell wants to watch TV if you can eat?”
Nataniël considers a day off or a night at home a blessing, an event, that has to be celebrated by doing three of his favourite things: cooking, eating and seeing his friends.
His new, extraordinarily beautiful cookbook memorably portrays gatherings, celebrations and magical get-togethers at his house and sylvan garden over the course of a year. The events include a Valentine’s dinner, a Hocus Pocus Party, Christmas and Easter Celebrations and impromptu meals with friends and colleagues.
Gatherings is intended as both an inspiration and a tribute to home cooking and entertaining – practical, affordable, elegant, spontaneous, grand, relaxed, formal, informal, fun, opulent or intimate.
About the author
Nataniël was born in Grahamstown on August 30, 1962. He attended Riebeeck-Kasteel Primary School and De Kuilen High in Kuilsrivier. After school he studied music at the University of Stellenbosch. He initially rose to fame as a cabaret star and stage performer but since the 1990s he is also well-known as a writer and food fundi. His publications include Dancing with John (1992), Rubber (1996), Tuesday (2001), Food from the White House (2002), Kaalkop (2004) and When I Was (2008). He has been writing the column ‘Kaalkop’ for Sarie for quite a number of years.
Author Zukiswa Wanner shares her thoughts about motherhood in this charming profile:
