Zukiswa Wanner

Dear Phil,

By the time you read this letter, I will be dead.

I am not sure how you will feel about my death since you have been killing me mentally bit by bit ever since that day many weeks ago when Terry jumped out of our bedroom window in his underwear. May be you will finally forgive me.

But perhaps society will never absolve me of this final act of wanting to be free or indeed the infidelity that led to this suicide but I felt I owed it to you to explain, thus this note. Read more »

So here I am in Sun City. I could tell you about all of them in my sleep but, I won’t. Well not a lot. I would rather tell you about the guy who landed me here.

It always began with emails.

“Dear Mr. Dube,
I am a journalist from New York Times/Times/Newsweek/Le Monde/The Guardian”

etcetera etcetera. Then there are the flattering platitudes about how the journalist loves my first work of fiction, Township Stories.  And then, inevitably it ends,

“I will be in Johannesburg from ____________ to ____________ and would love to interview you as one of the literary torchbearers in post-apartheid South Africa.” Read more »

Ever since I can remember, I have always written. When I was in my early years, immediately after discovering this art, writing was an outlet as is evident from the many diaries that I look at now that never cease to amuse me; my teenage years were influenced by the readings I used to do and an impotent feeling of injustice, mostly for social or political reasons, thus the horrific lines that I then claimed to pass for poetry that I find myself looking at in moments of mental self-flagellation (yes. The so-called poems are that bad!); and now as an adult, I find myself writing for both these reasons and additionally I write because I find myself feeling , to paraphrase James Baldwin, ‘as a witness of these times in which we live.’

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