Lewis Nkosi
South African writer and essayist (1936–2010)
Lewis Nkosi (5 December 1936 – 5 September 2010) was a South African writer and journalist, who spent 30 years in exile as a consequence of restrictions placed on him and his writing by the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s.
Quotes
editThe Rhythm of Violence (1964)
edit- Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!
- My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture.
Mating Birds (1986)
edit- For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write.
- In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…
- we were lovers in everything but in name.
- Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways.
- ...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined.
- Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?
- Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?
- No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens.
Underground People (2002)
edit- The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!
- Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer.
- Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!
