Background

Nkosi was born on December 5, 1936 in a traditional Zulu family in a place called Embo in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Education

He attended local schools, before enrolling at M. L. Sultan Technical College in Durban.

Then he became the first black South African journalist to win a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University to pursue his studies. When he applied for permission to go to United States, he was granted a one-way exit permit to leave South Africa, thus barred from returning. In 1961, accepting the scholarship to study at Harvard, he began a 30-year exile.

Career

Critics enthusiastically praised Nkosi's prose style and narrative structure in Mating Birds, and several have compared the work with Albert Camus's The Stranger. In 1956 he joined the staff of Drum magazine, a publication founded in 1951 by and for African writers. In his Home and Exile and Other Selections (1965), Nkosi described Drum's young writers as "the new Africans cut adrift from the tribal reserve-urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash. " According to Neil Lazarus, the description fitted Nkosi as well. In 1960 Nkosi left South Africa on a one-way "exit permit" after accepting a fellowship to study at Harvard University. Now living in England, he teaches and writes articles on African literature. In addition to the novel Mating Birds, he has also produced several plays and collections of essays, including The Rhythm of Violence (1963), Malcolm (1972), The Transplanted Heart: Essays on South Africa (1975), and Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (1981). Mating Birds tells the story of Sibiya, who spots a white woman across a fence on a segregated beach in Durban. Although the rules of apartheid keep them from speaking to each other, they begin a wordless flirtation across the fence. Soon Sibiya becomes obsessed with the woman and follows her everywhere. He learns that her name is Veronica and that she is a stripper at the local nightclub. One day Sibiya follows Veronica to her bungalow. Seeing him, she undresses in front of the open door and lies down on the bed. Sibiya enters her bedroom and has sex with her. Shortly after, they are discovered, and Veronica accuses Sibiya of rape. He is then beaten, arrested, and sentenced to death. Other commentators, however, attacked the novel's ambiguous depiction of rape. For Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , even the question of whether Sibiya raped at all remains unclear. This causes problems for the reader, as "we are never certain who did what to whom or why. " Sibiya himself is unsure: "But how could I make the judges or anyone else believe me when I no longer knew what to believe myself? . .. Had I raped the girl or not?" Gates responded: "We cannot say. Accordingly, this novel's great literary achievement-its vivid depiction of obsession-leads inevitably to its great flaw. " Sara Maitland further objected to Nkosi's portrayal of the white woman: "

Surely there must be another way for Nkosi's commitment, passion and beautiful writing to describe the violence and injustice of how things are than this stock image of the pale evil seductress, the eternally corrupting female?"

Lewis Nkosi returned to South Africa in 2001, after a gap of nearly four decades. His final years before his death in 2010 were passed in financial difficulties and ill health. He was apparently injured in a car crash in 2009 and spent his time on the bed, slowly recovering from the wounds; however, that never really happened and he drifted towards death. One of the African literary legend's efforts in literature did not give him any economic relief and his friends and fans gathered a charity fund to pay his last medical bills. He died on Sunday, 5 September 2010, at the Johannesburg Wellness Clinic.

Achievements

• In February 2011, wordsetc. co. za published a commemorative volume entitled The Beautiful Mind of Lewis Nkosi.
  
  On 13 June 2011 Nadine Gordimer participated in a colloquium to commemorate the life and works of Lewis Nkosi.
  
  On 12 April 2012 the Durban University of Technology (DUT) conferred on Nkosi a posthumous honorary Doctor of Technology Degree in Arts and Design in recognition of his significant contributions as a prolific and profound South African writer and essayist. The award was accepted by Professor Nkosi's widow, Professor Astrid Starck-Adler, at the graduation ceremony at the DUT Midlands Campus. She was also the guest speaker during the ceremony.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on South African Writing

    (Lewis Nkosi's insights into South African literature, cul...)

  • Mating Birds: A Novel

    (From a prison cell, an ironic, supremely rational young B...)

  • Paringsvlucht, roman uit Zuid-Afrika

    (/ 9026308280 / Literature translated into Dutch / Nederla...)

  • Underground People

    (This much-awaited second novel, following Nkosi's awardwi...)

  • The Rhythm of Violence

    (London 1964 first edition Oxford. South African drama on ...)

  • Le sable des Blancs

Politics

Nkosi faced severe restrictions on his writing due to the publishing regulations found in the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, and he faced severe restrictions as a writer.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Nkosi's whole bearing as a writer, was decisively shaped by the years in Johannesburg working for the magazine. "
  
  Many critics viewed Mating Birds as a commentary on South Africa's system of apartheid. George Packer, for example, observed: "Mating Birds feels like the work of a superb critic. Heavy with symbolism, analytical rather than dramatic, it attempts nothing less than an allegory of colonialism and apartheid, one that dares to linger in complexity. "
  
  "Nkosi's handling of the sexual themes complicates the distribution of our sympathies, which he means to be unequivocally with the accused man, " noted Rob Nixon in the Village Voice. "
  
  "For in rebutting the prevalent white South African fantasy of the black male as a sex-crazed rapist, Nkosi edges unnecessarily close to reinforcing the myth of the raped woman as someone who deep down was asking for it. "
  
  "Despite the novel's shortcomings, Michiko Kakutani concluded in the New York Times, Mating Birds "nonetheless attests to the emergence of. .. a writer whose vision of South Africa remains fiercely his own. "
  
  Similarly, Sherman W. Smith lauded: "Lewis Nkosi certainly must be one of the best writers out of Africa in our time. " Exiled after leaving South Africa to study at Harvard University, Lewis Nkosi has written short stories, plays, and criticism from his adopted home in England. Much of his work, however, deals with African literature and social concerns. "
  
  "As a playwright and short-story writer, he is also the most subtly experimental of the black South African writers, many of whom are caught in the immediacy of the struggle against apartheid, " comments Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the New York Times Book Review.
  
  According to Alistair Niven in British Book News Nkosi is "one of the architects of the contemporary black consciousness in South Africa. "