Tatamkhulu Afrika was a South African writer, poet, novelist, anti-apartheid activist, and bookkeeper. He also worked variously as a bartender, drummer in a band, shop assistant and laborer in copper mines.
Background
Ethnicity:
Tatamkhulu Afrika was born as Mohamed Fu'ad Nasif to an Arab father and a Turkish mother.
Ismail "Tatamkhulu Afrika" Joubert was born in Sallum in Egypt as Mohamed Fu'ad Nasif to an Arab father and a Turkish mother on 7 December 1920. His parents relocated to South Africa in 1923 where they died from Asian flu leaving him orphaned at the age of two. He was then taken care of by friends and family before being given to a Methodist couple who renamed him, John Carlton. In 1964, he changed his name to Ismail after conversion to Islam.
Education
Afrika's foster mother taught him at home until high school, that he left in 1938. Later, Ismail attended military college near Pretoria, South Africa.
Career
At the age of seventeen, Afrika dropped out of school to write his first novel, Broken Earth, a 300-page "tour de force of juvenile conceit," as he later called it in an interview for Books. The novel, an English romance written in three months, is set in the bushland of southern Africa's Northern Transvaal, a region he loved. Soon after Broken Earth was published, Afrika joined the South African military and went to Egypt during World War II. He was captured by the Nazis and held in prisoner-of-war camps in Italy and Germany for three years. While in the camps, he wrote a second novel, using a Red Cross pencil and paper. His sleeping bunk provided the only private space he had in which to write. Near the end of the war, however, as the prisoners were being moved to another location, Nazi guards found the nearly completed manuscript hidden in his clothing and ripped it to pieces in front of him.
When Afrika returned home, he learned that the London publisher's warehouse containing his first novel had been bombed during the Blitz and its contents destroyed. Devastated that his two novels had been casualties of the war, Afrika stopped writing until 1991. Two copies of Broken Earth were later found and are now housed in the Grahamstown Literary Museum and the Johannesburg Central Library.
After World War II and his release from the prisoner-of-war camp, Afrika returned to Africa and was taken in by an Afrikaans family, changing his name to Jozua Joubert. He worked at several jobs in Namibia, including copper mining. He moved to Cape Town in the early 1960s and was jobless and hungry for six months before he was taken in by a Muslim family in the poverty-stricken District Six. At that time, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Ismail. He also founded the activist and charitable organization Al-Jihaad, to battle apartheid and help the poor in the district.
Afrika's work with Al-Jihaad led to his arrest as a "terrorist" in 1987, and for five years he was banned by the government from writing and public speaking.
His imprisonment and the daily exposure to the poverty of those around him were a catalyst for Afrika to begin writing again. He started with poetry, publishing two prize-winning volumes, Nine Lives and Dark Rider in 1991 and 1992. These were followed by five more books of poetry; a novel, The Innocents, based on his years with Al-Jihaad and featuring a homosexual security policeman; and Tightrope, a collection of novellas revolving around a petty criminal who takes refuge in a homosexual relationship - all published during the 1990s. In 2001, his final book of poetry, Mad Old Man under the Morning Star, appeared. In 2002, on the author's birthday, the novel Bitter Eden - destroyed by Nazi prison camp guards and rewritten from memory fifty years later - was finally published. Just two days later, Afrika was hit by a car on the streets of Cape Town and died within two weeks.
Religion
In 1964 Afrika converted to Islam and changed his name to Ismail.
Views
Afrika wrote in his verse about the stark contrast between towering new office buildings and shacks standing in tall grass in Cape Town - and the contrast between the citizens who occupy each.
Quotations:
"Over the last eighteen months, I realized I was writing more, not about the joys of old age, but the agonies. When I looked at what I'd written I found it had formed a sequence about an old man under a morning star. I read the poems right through and found they have a cumulative effect, as does old age."
Personality
Afrika, whose name means "old man of Africa" or "Grandfather Africa," lived an astoundingly simple and financially impoverished life. He had five different legal names in his lifetime, having been born Asian, reared English, converted to Islam, and adopted by the Cape Town "colored" community.
During his time in District Six, Afrika had himself classified as "Malay" instead of "white" so that he could stay among the poor in the district. During the South African struggle for independence, Al-Jihaad, an anti-apartheid and charitable organization, which he had founded, became affiliated with the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and his African comrades gave him the "praise name" Tatamkhulu Afrika, which he kept for the rest of his life.
Afrika rode a bicycle everywhere he went until he was in his seventies and then walked - even until shortly before his death when he was 70 percent blind.
Quotes from others about the person
"His poems have rigorous integrity, whether describing the lyrical beauty of the moon setting over Signal Hill or the sordidness of being mugged or molested. 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." - Keith Gottschalk
Connections
Ismail was married and had one child.