What goes into the making of a public intellectual life, one in which academic passions merge positively with social and civic life?
Tony Morphet was born in the small town of Kokstad on 1 April 1940, the youngest child of immigrants from Yorkshire. His farm upbringing left him with a deep respect for the harsh realities of rural labour, close observation of the natural world, especially of birds, and also a strange (for some) fascination for the complex machinery of tractors.
Once retired, he took informal lessons to improve the isiXhosa he had learnt as a boy.
Academically, his studies took him to the University of Natal and a degree in English in 1959. The contours of his political conviction were visible from an early age. At 17, he joined South Africa’s short-lived Liberal Party, where he worked closely with the writer Alan Paton.
He died after a short battle with cancer; h
e was 69.
Friends and colleagues in the industry remember Ball as an incredible man and a brave publisher.
Jonathan Ball, who established the publishing house carrying his name, has been labelled as an extremely brave publisher, independent thinker and straight talker.
Ball, who went into publishing in 1976, died on Saturday afternoon following a short battle with cancer. He was 69.
Eugene Ashton, chief executive of Jonathan Ball Publishers, confirmed to News24 that Ball died in Cape Town just after 15:00, and was surrounded by his family.
Ashton said Ball had established one of the great liberal publishing houses in South Africa, which published several books challenging the current government as well as the Apartheid government.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
The history of conservation in South Africa counts many success stories, among them the saving of the white rhino from the brink of extinction. It also has a dark underbelly, one marked by apartheid exclusion and the dispossession of communities from their land to make way for wildlife.
Take for example the sharecropper Kas Maine, the subject of the magisterial biography The Seed is Mine by the historian Charles van Onselen. As the Pilanesberg game reserve and Sun City were being developed in the Bophuthatswana “homeland”, Maine was incredulous at the notion that he had once again to move off the land, but not for the usual reasons that had disrupted his life many times before in the face of modernity’s advance.
As a black South African, Jacob Dlamini, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, has brought an important perspective to conservation and natural history issues. Dlamini’s focus is the social history of the Kruger National Park, a history riven by complexity and conflict. He examines a range of issues: the politicisation of nature, migrant labour, the “Bantustans” and the largely neglected history of black tourism to the park under colonialism and apartheid.
One of the ironies of the Bantustans or homeland system uncovered here is that the park had to find ways to accommodate the tourists drawn from them as they had to be treated as international travellers. “… there is no doubt,” Dlamini writes, “that homelands helped to hasten the demise of apartheid by making it difficult for the KNP, for example, to maintain petty apartheid”. The largely forgotten experiences of Indian and coloured tourists to the park under apartheid are also brought to life.
I am seven years old, my exiled South African family living in independent Zambia, when my teacher asks everyone in class to share a song or a nursery rhyme or a proverb. One kid sings a song in the Bemba language. Another child stands up and performs a dance that is popular at the time. He rolls his little hips lewdly, and we all giggle.
When it is my turn, I stand in front of everyone and command their silence with the seriousness of my facial expression. I am stock-still, cradling an imaginary rifle. I crouch and sway from side to side, hissing through my teeth to intimidate my audience. I drop to the floor and begin to crawl, my “gun” slung across my chest. Suddenly I jump up, aiming the weapon at my alarmed schoolmates. The class is transfixed as I draw myself to my full height. I slowly put the gun down and clench my right fist; then I raise it above my head and make the universal Black Power sign. Locking eyes with my audience of enemies, I bark a set of instructions.