By Ben Williams for The Johannesburg Review of Books
Achmat Dangor, one of The JRB’s founding Patrons, died in September. Ben Williams remembers him.
It is a year of elegies, and somehow the acute horrors of 2020 have brought out the best in those left to lead our mourning. At the memorial services, quilted together across time zones via Zoom screens, the speeches are doubly stark and spare, triply wry and wistful. Laughter comes from deeper down, nearer to the diaphragm; tears wobble universally on all the close-up faces.
We learn repeatedly, but do not accept, that during this pandemic time has stopped but death has not.
We do not accept, for example, that we won’t hear, again, Achmat Dangor’s puckish, soft-spoken voice, dispensing humour and wisdom in equal measure to those leaning in to catch his words.
If ever a writer possessed the vocal equivalent of a steel fist in a velvet glove, it was Achmat, who died on 6 September. The sheer scope of the man’s life—he was banned in 1973 by the apartheid state; he wrote a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel; he led the Nelson Mandela Foundation as its CEO; he was a dedicated and beloved father, husband and brother—might have burdened him with the standing of an unapproachable giant, but he wore his experience so lightly that you hardly realised how he apprenticed you each time you interacted with him.
I counted Achmat as a friend and was lucky enough, once, to have his company all to myself.
We had been invited to a literary conference on the Spanish island of Tenerife, off Africa’s north-west coast. I was there to cover it, he was there to deliver the keynote speech, which he’d entitled ‘Literature and Revolt’. This was a decade ago; he talked, in his speech, about black South African writing as still emerging from the imaginative limitations imposed by both the continuous struggle against apartheid and the leaden strangle that was Bantu Education. He predicted a new generation of black writers would rise up and capture an audience ‘that we “establishment” writers have been trying to get to for years’. Achmat was, among other things, a sage—how wonderfully right he was in this prediction (which has years and years to run in its fruition).
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Read more at: The Johannesburg Review of Books
Source: The Johannesburg Review of Books
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