I’m promoting the three books I’ve published this year The Love and Wisdom Crimes is a novel based on real experiences. In it Jane returns to South Africa as apartheid ends to unlock the secrets of her past as a young political activist in a police state. My collection of poetry, The Spiral-bound Notebooks contains my early poems that form […]
The colonisation of the spirit
Forceful ideas There are occasions when something is said or written that strikes you with real force. A discussion between Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy over African artefacts in European museums did just that for me. It’s a topical subject right now. Emmanuel Macron is talking of the repatriation of African artworks to their homes in Africa. Way back in […]
Stories about wars that stop us remembering to forget
Black Cowboys in the Wild West and African-American soldiers in WW2 There are facts we don’t know and facts we choose not to know because they don’t suit us. There are facts that are hidden from us by politicians and power-hungry people and there are facts which are distorted by the media, by myth-makers, advertisers and film makers. When it […]
Hop, skip and jump to the heartbeat of life
The Child in the Garden The child in the garden goes hop, skip and jump and sings to herself. She dances her world into being. The garden is dusty, dry sand, withered leaves and sharp-edged stones. The child draws in the dirt. The garden is a clearing in a forest, a marketplace of musical insects, a place where snakes wait […]
What a writer does and doesn’t do all day
All beginnings are hard – just look at the time already! It’s a good morning’s work when I sit down at my laptop in my pyjamas, before breakfast, ignore my husband, begin at once to write, and then carry on for hours. There were many a good night’s work done when, as a single woman, I wrote after supper, then […]