Fine Lines From The Box

From the beginniong Fine Lines from the Box traces a journey of the mind and an ongoing exercise of reading and writing by one of South Africa's most incisive commentators. Taken with Njabulo Ndebele's earlier Rediscovery of the Ordinary, this collection challenges, entreats, cajoles and prods one into understanding a range of issues - the loss of innocence in achieving a ' new South Africa', the President and the AIDS question, higher education and the liberal tradition, the place of English in modern South Africa, that African icon Brenda Fassie, the vagaries of journalism, and the time in the life of a country when the oppressed must free the oppressor. Covering a span of eighteen years from 1987 to 2006 these pieces cut to the nation's quick. They provide a sane view of our recent past and explain much about what often seems to a baffling present.

This collection ranges far and wide, as befits the personality and accomplishments of the dedicatee, Geoffrey V. Davis, German studies and exile literature scholar, postcolonialist (if there are ‘specialties’, then Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Black Britain), journal and book series editor.... Themes covered include publishing in Africa, charisma in African drama, the rediscovery of apartheid-era South African literature, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, South African cinema, children’s theatre in England and Eritrea, and the Third Chimurenga in literary anthologies. Surveyed are texts from Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Writers discussed (or interviewed: Angela Makholwa) include Ayi Kwei Armah, Seydou Badian, J.M. Coetzee, Chielo Zona Eze, Ruth First, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bessie Head, Ian Holding, Kavevangua Kahengua, Njabulo Ndebele, Lara Foot Newton, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o/Micere Githae Mugo, Sol Plaatje, Ken Saro–Wiwa, Mongane Wally Serote, Wole Soyinka, and Ed¬gar Wallace, together with essays on the artist Sokari Douglas Camp and the filmmaker Rayda Jacobs. Because Geoff’s commitment to literature has always been ‘hands-on’, the book closes with a selection of poems and an entertaining travelogue/memoir.

Two horsemen have passed, which means that this enemy grain convoy is not far from us. One of the scouts dismounted and urinated and almost found us. If he goes ten steps forward, he will find our 800 enemies lying in the grass like jiaozi, and then we will be exposed. Maybe we can't go back to this cross-border ambush.