Tatamkhulu Afrika

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Tatamkulu Afrika (Xhosa: "Grandfather Africa") (December 7 1920 - December 23 2002), was a South African poet and writer. Sometimes his first name is spelt Tatamkhulu.

He volunteered to fight in World War II and was taken prisoner during the second fall of Tubruq (Tobruk). He was a prisoner of war in Italy for a year, and in Germany for two years. During his period of imprisonment he wrote a "surreal" novel about life in the prisoner-of-war camps. This novel was found by a guard on duty and destroyed, a traumatic experience for the author, who later likened it to "killing my own child".

On his return to South Africa, after the war, he was accepted as a son by a politically conservative Afrikaner family, and after his adoptive mother died he assumed the name (and politics) of this new family, now being officially known as Jozua Francois Joubert, although he was still known by the diminutive of his earlier middle name, Charlie. He moved to South-West Africa, where he spent more than a decade, working as a barman, a drummer and on a copper mine. He formed an intense friendship with a black man, and also befriended a "coloured" man who was passing for white, and who later committed suicide.

Afrika moved to Cape Town, in South Africa, where he worked as an accounting clerk. For a time he lived in District Six. He later became a member of the African National Congress, and founded an armed resistance group, Al-Jihaad. He also became a Muslim, assuming the middle name Ismail, and had himself re-classified in terms of race as 'Malay.' After his political acts were discovered by the apartheid authorities, he was twice imprisoned, and began to write poetry as a form of catharsis. As an affiliate of the ANC, he was given the praise name Tatamkulu Afrika, which translates as grandfather or great father of Africa.

His first novel, Broken Earth was published when he was seventeen (under his "Methodist name"), but it was over fifty years until his next publication, a collection of verse entitled Nine Lives. He won numerous literary awards, and in 1996 his works were translated into French.

He died shortly after his 82nd birthday, from injuries received when he was run over by a car two weeks before, just after the publication of his final novel, Bitter Eden. He left a number of unpublished works, including his autobiography, two novels, four short novels, two plays and poetry.

His autobiography, Mr Chameleon, was published posthumously in 2005. The original typescript is housed at the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, South Africa, and was typed by Robin Malan from the original version, consisting of a nearly-blind man's handwriting on a range of surfaces: partly-printed newsprint, used envelopes, the backs of old manuscripts.

In his autobiography, Afrika refers to a number of intense relationships with other men, although these are not referred to in terms of consummated sexual intercourse. Direct sexual approaches generally elicit reactions of revulsion. Interestingly, women barely feature as romantic partners. Deep bonds with men are forged at various stages of his life. One that Afrika made during the Second World War forms the emotional bedrock of Bitter Eden. Afrika's sense of masculinity contains elements of homophobia and misogyny, because of his own complex and unspeakable desires and anxieties. Afrika was befriended by a gay couple, who concluded from the histrionic parting from Paddy Deane, and from Afrika's knowledge of gay argot (familiar to him from the PoW camps' theatrical circles) that he was himself gay. He was faced with the quandary of how to respond, part of him mentally hissing, "Don't fence me in, you goddam buffoon! I'm a shiftless drifter that needs room--lots of room--to do my hyenaing in!". Significantly, here Afrika does not claim a heterosexual identity, even though he resents the straitjacket of being placed in a category.

He died on December 23 2002 after being run over by a car.

Poetry

• Nine Lives (Carrefour/Hippogriff, 1991)
• Dark Rider (Snailpress/Mayibuye 1993)
• Maqabane (Mayibuye Books, 1994)
• Flesh and the Flame (Silk Road, 1995)
• The Lemon Tree (Snailpress, 1995)
• Turning Points (Mayibuye, 1996)
• The Angel and Other Poems (Carapace, 1999)
• Mad Old Man Under the Morning Star (Snailpress, 2000)
• Au Ceux (French translations) (Editions Creathis l'ecole des filles, 2000)
• Nothing's Changed (2002)
• The Beggar

Novels

• Broken Earth (1940)
• The Innocents (1994)
• Tightrope (1996)
• Bitter Eden (2002) An autobiographical novel set in a prisoner-of-war camp during WWII. The novel deals with three men who see themselves as straight but must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in the male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life and the strange loyalties and deep bonds between the men are depicted.

References

• Nothing's Changed, Brief biography (Powerpoint format)
• "Mother, Missus, Mate: Bisexuality in Tatamkhulu Afrika's Mr Chameleon and Bitter Eden," English in Africa 32,2:185-211. Cheryl Stobie, 01 October 2005, Rhodes University, Institute for the Study of English in Africa.