Book 7 of 54: "I Speak to the Silent" by Mtutuzeli Nyoka

About the author

Mtutuzeli Nyoka was born in 1960 to a black medical doctor father (a rarity in Apartheid South Africa) and nursing sister mother. He grew up in Port Elizabeth and was an excellent athlete. He played cricket, rugby and soccer.

Nyoka went on to study medicine and in 1993 became the first black otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat) surgeon in South Africa. 

I Speak to the Silent is Nyoka's first novel. He started writing it in 1998 as a way to deal with the atrocities he had witnessed and experienced in Apartheid South Africa in the 70's and 80's. Snippets of his life are contained in his second book, Deliberate Concealment: An Insider's Account of Cricket South Africa and the IPL Bonus Saga, which deals about his time as a cricket administrator and his fight against corruption in Cricket SA and the sport in general.


I Speak to the Silent (South Africa):

I finished this book about two months ago but I have been struggling to write about it. I think it is because it is a book about South Africa: her past, her present, her future and how they are all so interconnected. This book touches on so many experiences (most of which are very painful) I have lived personally and through others and so it has been difficult to sit down and reflect on these.

I Speak to the Silent tells the truly tragic story of Walter Hambile Kondile, a self-described "simple man, a Xhosa and an African, whose life is of no significance to the world." Kondile was born and raised in Apartheid South Africa to be a "good native" and to believe that "it was God's design for the white man to rule over" him.

He is an obedient servant to his English master and tries his very best to teach his daughter, Sindiswa, to be subservient and to know her place. He fails at this: his daughter becomes a committed struggle activist who joins the armed struggle.

Kondile's life gets turned on its head when his daughter flees the police because she has become a vocal leader who is good at organising the masses. The events of the book unfold so that Kondile goes looking for Sindiswa in exile and discovers that his daughter's dreams and aspirations for freedom have been betrayed in unimaginable ways.

I found out about this book from Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola's seminal work Rape: A South African Nightmare in a chapter where she discusses violent displays of masculinity and how they cultivate the conditions for rape culture in South Africa. Gqola notes that  one of the things that this novel shows us is that to undermine and undo rape culture, men have to "break ranks with patriarchy" and challenge its conventions and police the patriarchal privilege that we as men enjoy.

Perhaps one of the reasons rape  is so prevalent in South Africa is because of our violent past and our inability as a society to deal with "rape histories, entanglements and violent masculinities." I Speak to the Silent is one of very few works that attempts to do this.

In October this year, an article appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper about women freedom fighters telling their experiences of sexual abuse in training camps like that of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). The men that committed these acts of violence never accounted for their crimes and went on to become some of the most powerful men in democratic South Africa.

When I was watching the announcement of the new leadership of the ANC recently, I could not help but think back to the crimes that the outgoing and incoming ANC presidents committed before they were elected in a democratic South Africa. Neither one of them have accounted for these crimes and both became the most important political figure in South Africa. This saddens me deeply.

In Nyoka's novel, Kondile reminds us that "it is a truism that the suppression of the truth, or of dissenting views, does not mean that they cease to exist. Their suppression merely creates a facade of compliance, a false sense of calm, which will from time to time be violently disrupted as the indestructible desire for liberty asserts itself."

Book 6 of 54: "Ghana Must Go" by Taiye Selasi

About the Author


Born in London to a Nigerian mother and a Ghanaian father, Taiye Selasi has spent a lot of time challenging the idea of what it means to be 'from somewhere'. In her 2014 TED Talk titled "Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local", she tells the story of how, during her international book tour to promote "Ghana Must Go" she cringed every time she was introduced: 'Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria,' or 'Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States.' This was a lie, she says. Yes, she was born in England and grew up in the United States of America. Her mother was born in England and raised in Nigeria and currently lives in Ghana. Her father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony at the time, raised in what then became Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in Saudi Arabia. As a result, her introducers also viewed her as 'multi-national', a term Selasi does not like because it immediately makes one think of international corporations.

Nationality, she says, is a human invention based on arbitrary borders that are not as absolute as we like to think. Countries are not fixed points in time and geography; countries are born, develop and some die; and borders and territories expand and contract continuously. The idea of using nationality as a basis for identity, Selasi says, is one that does not make sense to her.

Before the publication of her debut novel, Selasi was perhaps most famous for writing an essay in 2005 seeking to define an identity for Africans whose parents are of different nationalities and cultures and who live and work across the globe titled "Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)". In the essay, Selasi attempts to 'privilege culture over country', fussing different experiences across the world where one can feel a sense of belonging based on shared rituals and not necessarily on perceived shared geographies.


Ghana Must Go: Ghana

"Ghana Must Go" tells the story of the Sais: a Nigerian-Ghanaian family of six living in America. The parents, Kweku and Fola, leave the African continent 'in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad'. Kweku becomes a world-class surgeon, the best in his field, and Fola gives up an opportunity to study law at an ivy-league university to raise their four children: first born son Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo and 'the baby' Sadie.

Then one day tragedy befalls the family in the form of a grave injustice to Kweku. Ashamed, he abandons his family and returns to Ghana leaving the family to fragment and spiral out to different parts of the world: New York, New England, London and Ghana.

The book opens with Kweku's death, which forces everyone back together to try and heal the wounds of the past.

The title of the book refers to the Nigerian phrase directed at incoming Ghanaian refugees during political unrest in the 1980s. It speaks of xenophobia and it speaks of immigration: both forced and chosen. It speaks of leaving a home you have established with assets and rituals and giving it all up to start afresh elsewhere.

Kweku and Fola have a 'conversation' towards the end of the book which relates back to the title and how it fits into the narrative. Kweku asks himself why he left his family.

"I also left you," Fola says to him. "We did what we knew. It was what we knew. Leaving...We were immigrants. Immigrants leave."

 The narrative comes full circle back to Ghana, to Africa, form where Kweku and Fola left many years ago, where each of the Sais must learn how to 'do their work' in order to heal, so that they can come together again as a family.

My favourite thing about this book is Selasi's command of language. The language of the book is poetic not only in its use of figures of speech but also in the rhythm that it employs.

Consider the following passage from the third part of the novel:

'The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray, with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. The weather in December is like this in Ghana: an in-taken breath held until the world spins, trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.'

If you have not already noticed the rhythm that Selasi establishes, then read the passage again in a different format below:


'The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, 
sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray, 
with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, 
breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. 
In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, 
the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; 
the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; 
the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. 
The weather in December is like this in Ghana: 
an in-taken breath held until the world spins, 
trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, 
the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.'

The fact that the entire book is written like this is a remarkable achievement. Granted, there are parts of the book where the poetic rhythm fails, but one has to conclude that Selasi did this on purpose, as is evident in a reading she did from the book on the tour promote it.

"Ghana Must Go" is a meditation on the ideas of identity that go beyond nationality, something I myself have never considered. I look forward to reading it again and encourage you all to get a copy.

A Black Power Solution to a Bluest Eye problem

"Think about it. Barring Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that's who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye  problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in the rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman's privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. . ." excerpt from 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi

I think the politics black hair have not been written enough about. Hair means different things to different people.

To some it matters not whether their hair is long or short, kinky or straight, coarse or soft: hair is just one of those things we all have for practical purposes, like hands or a nose. To others, hair is very political, and to them, how you choose to wear it is a reflection of your beliefs about beauty standards and the oppression of black people.

I know black women who find themselves and others ugly with their natural hair unrelaxed with harmful chemicals. For some of them its not about ugliness as much as it is about having to wake up every morning to do battle with a curly afro: it's just easier to have smoothe, relaxed hair that can be managed easily at the start of the day.

I had a friend once who always got braids a week before exams because she found examination periods such a stressful time. The only way to help relieve the stress of waking up after a long night of studying was the assurance that she got to tie her hair in a ponytail and was ready to go.

I know other black women and girls who see their hair as battle grounds where the ideals of black identity are fiercely debated.

Only last year, we saw girls at a number of former model-C (read: former white) schools in South Africa protesting the rules that governed how they could and could not wear their hair. These young women (and many across the country who had and had not gone through similar experiences) felt that the way these rules were written and enforced targeted anyone who did not have silky, smoothe and straight white-girl hair. These rules were seen as oppressive an unaccommodating of black people in a country where close to 80 % of the population is black.

This was a polarising issue, with some people feeling that as school learners, these young women had to abide by the school rules and their protest was seen as them wanting to do as they pleased in a school environment.

No matter your stance on the hair of black people, this much is clear: we still have a long way to go in terms of the identity politics of hair.

"Ghana Must Go": A jewel of literary achievement

I'm currently reading "Ghana Must Go" by the incomparable Taiye Selasi.

"He wants her to be satisfied." Selasi writes. " He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.     She is like no woman he's known.

Or like no woman he's loved.
     He isn't sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he's loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having forgotten what they wanted promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He'd never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
     They were dreamer-women
     Very dangerous women.
     Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, 'brutal, senseless,' etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become."

This short passage makes me wonder about what it means to find happiness with someone in a relationship when you are a dreamer. How do you take care of  someone who isn't a dreamer? Do you fight with them to become better than they are? Is that worth all that energy? What if they are happy being with who they are and where they are in their life? Will you only ever be happy with another dreamer? Even then, dreaming with someone else can be exhausting!

Before my current relationship, I was single for the longest time (six or seven years) and was never with anyone for more than a week or so. I always accredited it to my knowing exactly what I wanted in a partner (or more accurately, what I did not want) and all potential partners just not making the cut.

After reading this passage in Selasi's book, I identify a little with what she says.

I self-identify as a dreamer, as defined above: I see the world as it should be and work very hard in an effort to make this vision a reality. I stand so firm in my belief of how things should be that I tend to be too hasty in my dismissal of people who disagree. In the past this has included friends, mentors, family members and potential partners.

Book 5 of 54: "Queen Pokou" by Véronique Tadjo

About the Author:

Véronique Tadjo is the daughter of a French painter and sculptor and an Ivorian civil servant. She was born in Paris and raised in Abidjan (the economic capital of Ivory Coast and the most populous French-speaking city in Africa).

A Fulbright scholar, Tadjo has a BA from the University of Abidjan and a doctorate from the University of Paris. She has lived and worked in many African countries and travelled all over the world. She sees herself as a pan-Africanist and much of these travels come out in the subject matter and imagery in her work.


Queen Pokou: Ivory Coast

Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist, essayist and an artist. What she tends to do in her writing is fuse different genres and styles to challenge the borders between different literary forms. She refers to her literary works as 'texts' or, more correctly, in French 'récits', which are pieces of writing whose genre is not defined.

This is no different in "Queen Pokou", which cannot be classified as a novel.

The book starts off with a prelude in which Tadjo tells of how the story of Queen Pokou kept coming up at different times in her life, essentially haunting her until she wrote it.

Pokou was a princess of the powerful Ashanti nation, who saved her people by sacrificing her baby. She threw him into a river so that her people could cross safely. After crossing the river she is said to have repeated the word 'baouli', 'the child is dead' and the people she saved decided to call themselves the Baouli in honour of her sacrifice.

In the rest of the book, Tadjo writes what could have happened if things had gone differently. What if she had refused to sacrifice her son, she and her people had been sold as slaves and shipped across the Atlantic to the cotton fields of America? What if the baby's father had protested to his son being thrown in the river? What if they had not crossed the river, but seeked refuge in a village nearby?

All these 're-imaginings' make the reader question this history/legend that Tadjo and her people grew up taking for granted. It also makes one as a reader question the oral stories/legends/histories that one grew up with as well.

The poetic language of the book makes one think of epic poems and and oral story telling traditions that formed a big part of some of our upbringing. With the continuous re-telling of this well-established legend in Ivory Coast, Tadjo re-appropriates this story and insist that open-ended stories can teach us a great deal about our own damaged and imperfect humanity.

Book 4 of 54: "The Screaming of the Innocent" by Unity Dow

About the Author

Unity Dow was Botswana's first female High Court Judge and has been a prominent human-rights activist in that country. With law degrees from the University of Botswana, the University of Swaziland and the University of Edinburgh, Dow has had an illustrious career in the legal fraternity.

In 1992 she won a landmark case in Botswana that allowed the children of women by foreign nationals born in Botswana to be considered citizens of Botswana. Before this, nationality only descended from the father. She was one of three judges who ruled on the now internationally acclaimed Kgalagadi court decision, concerning the rights of the San to return to their ancestral lands (you can read "Maru" by Bessie Head as a great intro into the racial discrimination and marginalization of the San people in Botswana).

Dow has also done work in other African countries: in 2005, she was a member of a UN mission to Sierra Leone to review domestic application of international women's human rights norms; in 2007 she was a member of a special mission at the invitation of the Rwandan Government and UN special court for Rwanda (the purpose of this mission was  to review the Rwandan Judiciaries preparedness to take over the hearing of the 1994 genocide cases); Dow was also sworn in as Justice of the Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court of Kenya by the Kenyan President to serve in implementing the new constitution in Kenya.

Dow has been a visiting professor of law at Columbia University in New York, Washington and Lee University in Lexington and Cincinnati University in Ohio. She has also been awarded numerous awards for her human-rights activism including the Légion d'honneur de France by then French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the William Brennan Human Rights Award by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the Vanguard Women Leadership Award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world.

She is currently serving as Botswana's Minister of Education and Skills Development.

I don't know how she finds the time, but she has published five books already, each of which deals with the struggle between Western and traditional life as well as issues of gender and poverty in Botswana.

The Screaming of the Innocent (Botswana):

There is a television interview that Toni Morrison once gave where she was asked whether she could/would ever write a novel that was not centered around race. In her response, she mentions that Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Émile Zola wrote about race all the time and how a question about the centrality of race in their works would never be seen as a legitimate literary question. And yet, there she was being faced with that very question.

I saw this video clip a number of years ago, but part of her response that has stayed with me is the following:

"I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books. And the people who helped me most arrive at that type of language were African writers: Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head. Those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans. They didn't explain anything to white people. Those questions were incomprehensible to them. Those questions that I would have as an minority living in an all white country like the United States."

The idea that African writers don't "explain anything to white people" in their writing has never resonated more with me than when I read this book. Set in 1999 in Botswana, "The Screaming of the Innocent" is about the cold case of a ritual murder that took place back in 1994 in a small village in the Okavango Delta. A young woman, Amatle, who has been deployed to the local clinic finds crucial evidence stowed away in the clinic storeroom. This evidence disappeared out of police custody five years before and its resurfacing leads the local villagers to force the police to reopen the case.

I live in South Africa and Botswana is one of our neighbouring countries. The people of Botswana are called Batswana and they speak Setswana. This happens to be my home language and it forms a big part of my cultural identity, and as such, Tswana people in South Africa also call ourselves Batswana. My upbringing, the values with which I was raised and the beliefs of my people have never felt more validated than they did while reading this book. I think this is because the Botswana and the Tswana culture and customs that Dow describes, while in a different country and so far removed from my own lived experience, they are so familiar and I knew exactly what she was talking about: she didn't have to explain anything to me.

In one of the chapters in the book, one of the villagers suggests that they kill the two hostages that they have taken to get the police and the government to co-operate with them. "Your conscious will not allow you to sleep," another villager cautions. This reminded me of something my mother once said. She was telling me about something that someone did to her (I cannot remember what exactly) and I jokingly mentioned killing this person and she turned to me and said the same thing: "Do you not want me to sleep at night?"

Life and its distractions

So... I've been silent for a while now.

As the title of the post suggests, life has been happening to me a lot lately: teaching four grades full time, studying full time, maintaining relationships, drama with my parents, organisinng events for my school, and...and...and...and...

Unfortunately, after finishing my third book, I chose a book that I'm finding very difficult to read: Ben Okri's "The Famished Road". So as life happened around me, I found more and more excuses to 'take a break' from continuing the reading.

Once I put Okri's novel aside, I picked up two very delightful books: "Queen Pokou" by Veronique Tadjo and "The Screaming of the Innocent" by Unity Dow. I finished books today and reviews of both will follow soon.