Achmat spent much of his limited “free” time in the early mornings, evenings and on weekends writing. In a 2010 interview he said: “I write on weekends, through the generosity of my wife who takes on an inordinate share of domestic chores, including the care of a five year old son and a year old beagle puppy.”

Achmat also enjoyed drawing and almost always had a notebook at hand. When he was asked, circa 2017 “Q & A with the author”, if he kept a diary, he responded: “Yes, but in the form of poems that reflect what’s happening around me and in the world. Someone may want to publish it when I am no longer alive?” In another interview he said: “I never kept diaries, but I have made notes over the years – they’ve helped keep the memory strong, strong enough to create living characters.”

Achmat read widely and over the years accumulated an extensive book collection. Audrey Elster explained that Achmat “was the kind of person who could survive with almost nothing. He wasn’t interested in possessions, in acquiring anything … but books he never compromised on that. He always bought books.”

Achmat’s friend, and editor of his novels Kafka’s Curse and Bitter Fruit, Ivan Vladislavić described his reading interests as “unusual”:

“Achmat’s reading interests were unusual for someone with his activist background, especially in the eighties and nineties. It always struck me that he had a different frame of reference: the writers he drew on were not the ones most people were talking about in the more political quarters of the literary world, that is, writers more obviously concerned with political issues. Of course, this is a complicated matter, because what’s political and what isn’t is a much more subtle question than is generally allowed. In Aix-en-Provence [in 1997], for instance, I remember him talking about Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Angela Carter – not the expected pantheon of writers in those years. His admiration for Camus is well known.”

Achmat was often asked questions about South African literature in interviews. In the “Q & A with the author”, the interviewer asked him which book he would say had changed his life to which he replied:

“‘Cry The Beloved Country’ by Alan Paton: I was 15 when I read this book. Born and bred in Newclare, a township that endured all the Apartheid evils, including the forced removal of my next door best friends, Pitso and Dikeledi, I grew up thinking all white people were racist apartheid supporters. Paton’s novel made me realise that our country, indeed the world, was not simply ‘Black and White.’”

The interviewer wanted to know if there was a book that had “ever changed (his) mind about something”. Achmat’s reply was: “Again, I would say Alan Paton’s ‘Cry the Beloved Country’ about the perceived simplicity of race and how complex our country is.” In the same interview, Achmat was asked to identify his favourite fictional hero. He responded: “Difficult, but I choose ‘Bride,’ a young African American woman in Toni Morrison’s 2015 novel ‘God Help the Child’, she overcomes racial and gender prejudice, and a dangerous environment.” The best book he had received as a gift was, he said, a signed copy of Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present’, which she had given him for his birthday “the year before she passed away”. Achmat thought that the most challenging South African-born writer was “undoubtedly” JM Coetzee. He elaborated: “Here is a writer who has transformed that potentially self-corroding expatriate sourness – how I love to hate my country – into great literature. As the cliché goes: you can love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him.”

Achmat also stressed the importance of Sol Plaatje’s work and dedicated his own book Strange Pilgrimages (2013) to Plaatje whose novel Mhudi (1930) Achmat valued particularly highly:

“Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi – Oh? God – is a book I always keep by my side because it reminds me about that complexity. How Setswana people were allies with the Afrikaner pioneers in their war against the Nguni who were expanding across Southern Africa. How the Setswana spoke Afrikaans, and the whites learned to speak Setswana and the cultural mix. Not that ultimately the Afrikaner establishment didn’t exploit their black allies, because that’s power relations. But our history is far more complex than simply black-white, victim-non-victim.

Achmat, believed that the work of several South African writers was “under sung rather than underrated”. In an interview by Andrew van der Vlies conducted around 2015 he listed some of those he thought were “under-sung”:

“Under-sung, rather than underrated, are writers like Mandla Langa, Justin Cartwright, Imraan Coovadia, Zakes Mda, Damon Galgut, Mike Nichol to name but a few. They stand on the threshold of local and international success. Hopefully some confluence of the fates, an improved global economy, publishers able to see the enduring commercial value in real books, readers willing to explore a country and its people as a reality and not a metaphor for miraculous success or failure. But there is another, historical dimension to the neglect of South African writers. We seem to have consigned to ‘twilight’ invisibility writers like Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi.

To this list Achmat added Sol Plaatje and again stressed the importance of Mhudi:

I recently re-read Sol Plaatje’s “Mhudi,” and was struck by its groundbreaking themes, conflict and reconciliation, pioneering black tribes encountering pioneering white settlers, the opportunities missed that could have shaped our history very differently. And all of it narrated with understated lyricism, through the eyes of a character whose conceptualisation would today have earned Plaatje fulsome praise. A woman rising above the gender neutralising concept of faithful, docile ‘heroine;’ one that the reader ultimately discovers as prophet and pioneer in her own right. Yet, is “Mhudi” on anyone’s classics publishing list, is it prescribed for schools? No. We ignore our literary history at great peril. How many contemporary writers will join their forebearers in the twilight – books out of print, not fashionable to be taught, invisible even on the internet?

Achmat enjoyed listening to music to relax. He said: “I don’t listen to music while I write, but to relax when I take a break. I love classical guitar music by artists like Narcisso Yepez, or classical African music by the likes of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.” However, Achmat, by most accounts, loved stories — writing and telling them — above everything else. Audrey recalled that he “used to eat to live, food wasn’t a big deal for him, though he did like to regale friends with stories as we sat around the dinner table!” His social life included attending cultural events and dinner parties at which he would take on the role of story-teller. Audrey elaborated: “I like to cook and entertain, so we used to have a lot of friends for dinner and he would always be regaling people with stories. He loved telling a great story. That’s maybe why he turned to writing, because stories used to give him such joy. Some real, some kind of half-real, half-made-up, half embellished with his memories or just his desire to make them funny or more entertaining.” Coco Cachalia, Achmat’s cousin and friend, recalled Achmat’s stories:

“Many a dinner party was held, that went on way late into the night. At the dinners, Achmat’s story-telling, his charm and intellect abounded and they are now legendary … what was a total privilege and a real delight for me, was to have that man in person, regaling us with his stories, explaining his characters in ‘Bitter Fruit’, giving us sneak previews of what was to come and discussing literature and politics late into the night. That was just priceless.”

Glenn Moss, Achmat’s colleague and friend, similarly recalls late night dinners:

“My partner and his partner all got on and we would see each other fairly often at our houses and out and about at general social gatherings … we experienced ourselves as close friends, going to each other’s celebrations and birthdays and life events and dinner. That went on for a good number of years. We would see Achmat and Audrey fairly regularly, very often over meals and very often over fairly large quantities of wine. There was a very, very, relaxed friendship. Achmat was a nuanced and complex and multi-dimensional person and that made him very easy to be with, socially intellectually, work-wise and things like that, because one could just range over so many issues and not have to deal with a rigid political correctness, which sometimes limited friendships and engagements.”

Birthdays, public holidays and special occasions were often spent with close friends and family. Audrey’s Scottish heritage introduced Burns Night. Coco remembers:

“Some of the best meals in recent years were in celebration of the Scottish Poet, Robert Burn., So religiously every year, Audrey would organise a Burns night and Rose, Audrey’s Mom, would arrive from Scotland, Haggis in tow. In true Audrey style, she would whip up a feast of Scottish Salmon and other delectables. It was always so funny to watch Achmat with all his eating idiosyncrasies, dodging the Haggis and getting us distracted with the poetry, which neither he nor the young Zach, could do in the right accent.”

When he was growing up, holidays were not part of Achmat’s life but in later years, and when he and Audrey could get away from work, they left the city and holidayed with family and friends. The Christmas festive season break was mostly spent with Jean de la Harpe and her daughter and friends. Jean explained:

“Achmat invited me to go for dinner and I met his wife, Audrey. She and I immediately clicked and became friends and we started seeing each other quite regularly, Achmat, Audrey and myself then started going on holiday together with my daughter. We got into a routine of every Christmas/New Year going on holiday together, over I think over a period of more than 20 years. Achmat and Audrey were like family to me.”

The traditional holidays were mostly spent at St Francis Bay in the Eastern Cape. Jean recalled:

“We used to go to St. Francis Bay and spent time there, we have a boat there, that we used to go up the river and neither Achmat nor Audrey were particularly keen on water and swimming, but we always went on this rubber duck up the river, to go and picnic. The consistent people over the years, was always Achmat, Audrey, myself and my daughter and then of course later in time, Audrey’s mother joined us and of course Zachary. So Zachary, from the time he was a baby, would come along on holidays and in fact, in the early mornings, it was Achmat who got up early to take Zachary for a walk in his pram. And during those holidays, of course we had a lot of fun and we drank wine and we shared many stories and they very much were like family to me. I was very privileged having that close friendship with both of them.”

Colleagues and friends recall that Achmat did have some phrases or sayings that he often used. The one that many colleagues from the Nelson Mandela Foundation will probably be familiar with was: “Well, we’ve got to turn these lemons into lemonade.” In the “Q & A with the author” interview Achmat observed of himself that the phrase he overused was: “Oh God, the history I was trying to get away from …”. However, many of his close associates recalled that he was anything but predictable in “what he would say next”, as his publisher and friend Isobel Dixon observed. She emphasised that “he did not traffic in cliché or platitude or the superficial. In conversation he would come at a thing softly, softly, but clearly, from a surprising angle.” In a tribute to Achmat, Ben Williams who said that he “counted Achmat as a friend” wrote: “Something Achmat never did was don the mantle of his first vocation, that of a writer, without the utmost seriousness—even if he disguised it with his trademark playfulness.” Ivan Vladislavić, speaking at the Johannesburg Review of Books’ tribute, explained why, for him, Achmat appeared as a “person of many different parts”. Vladislavić said:

“As we grew to be friends, I came to understand the he was a person of many different parts and not being able to put them together, to figure out the puzzle, added to the pleasure of knowing him. He was never one thing or the other. He could be reticent, but he was entirely at ease on public platforms. There was often something melancholy or solemn about him and yet he was full of mischief and humour.”

‘Song of Africa’ for Don Mattera by Achmat Dangor

They want some verses
from you, poet,
to sing at the gravesides
of our heroes

speak of their struggle,
speak of their beauty,
oh, do not let this
dry and foreign tongue
choke your African sentiment

Let the rhythm
of your words
tell something
of their lives,
and ours

Let our song be heard
in the havens
of man and god,
you are an African
writing of Africans.

Web source: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=cda4289b0274b20ea0e6577f170f2a88b02c4e57#page=38