Lindy Stiebel: "Lewis Nkosi’s Durban – a city in flux"

Lewis Nkosi, the late exiled South African writer, and the city of Durban, an extended urban space of an estimated 3 million inhabitants, are incontrovertibly linked. This sprawling Indian Ocean town is where Nkosi started his life at birth, where he was educated as a small child, where he started his working career, and where he was finally buried on 10 September 2010.

Born in 1936 in Chesterville, a black Durban township which lies in the valley behind the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Nkosi’s peripatetic and extraordinary life led him to other cities in Africa, the USA and Europe. His wish to be buried in Durban was, however, remarkably realised as, during one of his periodic visits back to his home country, he suffered a stroke followed by a slow decline and died in Johannesburg. His body was moved to Durban for burial, in obedience to his wishes. As with his grandmother, to whom Mating Birds is dedicated, and his mother before him, Nkosi’s grave is thus in Durban – in his case in Stellawood cemetery, historically reserved for ‘white’ burials in the apartheid era. Nkosi, a lover of irony, would have found his burial in a previously ‘whites only’ cemetery cause for his characteristic laughter.

Given the centrality of Durban to Nkosi’s life story, it is unsurprising that this city periodically appears in Nkosi’s writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as geographical ‘setting’ but also as symbol of political change in South Africa. This paper, then, begins an evaluation of the role of ‘Durban’ in the life and work of Nkosi, drawing from his novel Mating Birds, and also from a little known  article published in a Swiss newspaper, translated into German. Durban emerges from these various sources as a city in flux, a place of startling contrasts, a melting pot of peoples and a dream space called ‘home’ for this celebrated writer.

Lindy Stiebel is Professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Professor Stiebel’s research interests are the South African colonial and post-colonal novel with a special focus on the relationship between writers and place. Further spheres of interest of hers are colonial cartography with a special focus on the maps of Thomas Baines, the 19th century painter and explorer; Rider Haggard and late 19th century British novels of empire; and literary tourism.

She is the author of Imagining Africa: landscape in H. Rider Haggard's African romances (Greenwood Press 2001), Thomas Baines and the 'Great Map' (Campbell Collections 2001); and co-editor with Liz Gunner of Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi (Wits University Press 2006).  In 2009 a commissioned volume on Rider Haggard was published by Pickering and Chatto as part of their Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series. Her most recent book is Thomas Baines: Exploring Tropical Australia (with Jane Carruthers, National Museum of Australia Press, 2012). In addition, she has published articles on South African literature, spatial discourse and literary tourism.