Noni Jabavu: A peripatetic writer ahead of her times

When Noni Jabavu died in June last year, I had just talked about her biography a few days earlier at the Cape Town International Book Fair. I was the only person on that four-person panel whose biography was still ‘work-in-progress’. Her death brought that progress to a pause. It numbed me to inaction in ways I had not expected. I realized then that my emotional connection to her was much stronger than I had acknowledged to myself. Although I had spoken to her only once, for no longer than 5 minutes in 2005, I had carried the story of her life with me for much too long. As I continue to unearth and piece it together I grow in my belief that she was a woman who lived way ahead of her times

Jabavu's journey

This research report is in two sections. The first section comprises a reflexive and theoretical essay that provides the background and introduction to the biographical chapters. The significance and nature of this biography is given. Methods used to collect data are given, problems encountered are explained. Gaps in the biographical sections, results of yet inaccessible data, are noted. The second section is in the creative non-fiction biography genre. It focuses on three distinct periods of Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu’s life: 1961 - 1962 while she was an editor at The New Strand magazine in England; 1977 while she was a weekly columnist for the Daily Dispatch newspaper in South Africa; and the current period starting from her return in May 2002. Each chapter tells the story of her life, providing texture, colour and depth. The first two biographical chapters also delve into Noni’s writings, attempting to understand her from these

Interview: Tongues of their mothers: the language of writing

No Abstrac

Dignity Spills©

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Running and Other Stories

Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition - be that literary tradition, cultural tradition, gender tradition - and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. Bracketed by Xaba's revisitings of Can Themba's influential short story, The Suit, the ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story. By re-envisioning the ordinary and accepted, Xaba is creating a space in which women's voices are given a rebirth