Watch an interview with Achmat conducted by Shannon de Ryhove, of Creamer Media TV, about his 2013 collection of short stories Strange Pilgrimages:

Watch an interview with Achmat with Leanne Manus, of SABC’s Morning Live about Strange Pilgrimages:

Watch an interview with Achmat conducted by Sane Dhlamini, of Creamer Media TV, about his 2017 book Dikeledi Child of Tears, No More:

Watch another interview of Achmat regarding Dikeledi Child of Tears, No More and broadcasted on SABC morning live on 5 November 2017:

In 2010 Achmat was in his third year as CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Sometime around June 2013 he retired but was asked to take up a short term (two year) position as the head of Ford Foundation’s Southern Africa office. He was also involved in work at the Nelson Mandela Institute in the Eastern Cape and was a Trustee on the Board of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. For Achmat, it was another intense period of work. His friend Glenn Moss recalled:

“Achmat is very well known for his institutional and organisational work, the Children’s Fund, the Mandela Foundation, which was very consuming and very, very, demanding at various times … they were really demanding and took a toll on him and his relationships and I think his health and during the Mandela Foundation period, he would talk about the fact that he would very rarely get a night’s sleep, because half-way through the night, there would be a phone call and a man with a deep gruff voice on the other end of the phone. He was concerned about what that did to his overall life.”

Despite the pressure, Achmat continued to attend literary events and produce new short stories published locally and abroad. His short story collection Strange Pilgrimages and novel Dikeledi: Child of Tears No More were published in 2013 and 2017 respectively. He also made considerable progress on his memoir. In 2015 he won a Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. To learn more about Achmat’s activism and working life visit Era 7 and Era 8, please click on the buttons below.

In 2009, Casa África in collaboration with publishers Ediciones El Cobre published Trilogía de Z Town, the Spanish translation of The Z Town Trilogy. The following year, in September, the Salón Internacional del Libro Africano (SILA – International Conference on African Literature) invited Achmat to be a keynote speaker on African Literature. He gave an overview of South Africa’s history and literature from colonial to democratic times. Achmat’s 44 minute keynote address can be viewed here: https://www.casafrica.es/en/mediateca/video/3-intervencion-de-achmat-dangor-escritor-y-presidente-de-la-fundacion-nelson-mandela

Ben Williams, who had also been invited to the conference wrote in a 2020 tribute about Achmat’s keynote address:

“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).”

Ben recounted his memories of time spent with Achmat during the conference:

“One of the evenings, after the day’s programme had concluded, the two of us went for a stroll around Puerto de la Cruz, the town where we were staying. We looked in on shops and markets, passed desultory comment on some of the writers at the festival (a brave and outspoken Equatoguinean, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, had made an especial impression), sat on a bench and enjoyed the exotic gathering gloom of foreign islands, the murmurings of people on their nightly errands, the bustle of a town settling down. Just me and one of Africa’s—the world’s—baobabs, chatting into the dusk, until we retired to our hotel. I’ve never lost the warm memory of that night.”

During the conference, Achmat was interviewed about Bitter Fruit and The Z Town Trilogy:

“[Question] The characters in your latest novel, Bitter Fruit, still suffer from the unresolved problems of Apartheid. Is it still so present in the daily lives of South Africans?

[Achmat] The space for memory has opened up now. Before everything was clandestine, there was a lot to hide, too much. In the novel, as in reality, everything opens up again and with the opening comes the expectation that we will be able to forget and forgive. But first we have to remember and that’s the difficult part. In the book, for example, the protagonist refuses, she doesn’t want to remember because it makes her suffer.

[Question] In contrast, in The Z Town Trilogy (1991), which many consider the novel of Apartheid, you write: “The history of Z Town had no memory of itself and could not perpetuate itself.”

[Achmat] Indeed, that is the change that South Africa has experienced. The Z Town Trilogy is about the creation of memory, and Bitter Fruit is about how to deal with it. How to confront it and overcome it, because sometimes the easiest thing to do is to forget.”

The Casa África’s Letras Africanas (African Letters) programme hosted an event as part of the conference at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where Achmat addressed about 400 students and academics. Setting aside a carefully prepared eight-page speech titled “The Silence of My Kind”, he replaced it with one he called, “My Hope for Africa”. He said: “remember the past, but without letting ourselves be held back by it” and urged his audience to “think about what you can do to make the world a better place”. He called on writers to “free their imagination” and to leave behind pessimism about Africa’s future:

“It’s time to start thinking in a different way about what we can do. Africa can do it, and the change will come from younger people who are open to new ideas and do not operate in terms of race or nationality, who see the humanity in others. In this sense, literature is powerful.”

In 2012 Achmat’s short story “Lost” was translated into Spanish under the title “Perdido” and featured in the anthology Todos Cuentan: Narrative Africana Contemporánea 1960-2003 (translates as Everyone Tells Stories: Contemporary African Narrative) edited by Charlotte Broad and published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Achmat’s collection of short stories Strange Pilgrimages was edited by Jane Bowman and published by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa in 2013. The dedication is headed “For my family” followed by: “My wife Audrey for her patience and support, my children Justine, Zain and Zachary who have helped me think about the future even as I recall the past.”

The collection consists of two parts, the first of which is titled “Africans Abroad” comprising four short stories. Two of these — “A Reason to Love” and “Skin Costs Extra” — had been published previously. The other two are: “The Poppie of 42^nd Street” and “Goodbye, Goodnight”. The second part called “Interregnums” is made of five short stories: “History is a Sexually Transmitted Disease”; “Bury Babu on Sandy Bay”; A Christmas Story”; “A Strange Pilgrimage”; and “Venus in my Eye”. The book concludes with “Author’s notes and Acknowledgements” in which Achmat expresses gratitude to “Jane Bowman, Andrea Nattrass and Valda Strauss for their very different reading of the manuscript, attention to vital detail and illuminating advice.” He also wrote:

“In imagining and reimagining these stories I have been inspired by the work of a number of writers:

Boer War Diary Sol Plaatjie

Fruits of the Earth André Gide

The War of the End of the World Mario Vargas Llosa

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote

Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie

‘Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (poem) T.S. Eliot

‘Since Nine O’clock’ (poem) Konstantin Cavafy”

Ariel Dorfman’s appraisal appears on the front cover of Strange Pilgrimages: “Rarely has the loneliness that besieges men and women after a successful revolution been treated with more tender and bitter honesty.” Nadine Gordimer’s endorsement on the back cover reads:

“Achmat Dangor speaks of ‘man’s puny attempt to re-imagine life’ in literature. With these enlightening, bold stories he reaches in search of discovery of life beyond and below the surface – which is the mark of the real writer, out of reach of the imagination alone. He is that writer.”

Andrea Nattrass, from Pan Macmillan, who worked with Achmat during the book’s publication, said at the Johannesburg Review of Books event commemorating Achmat and celebrating the first anniversary of the publication of Bitter Fruit, that Gordimer’s description of Achmat as “the real writer” resonated with her:

“… because they spoke to my impressions of Achmat, as a person and as a writer. He himself, humbly described both “Bitter Fruit” and “Dikeledi” [both published by Pan Macmillan South Africa in 2017], as novels that explore through the eyes of ordinary people, the unresolved legacies of our troubled past and in my experience, he was someone who was interested in knowing people’s stories and hearing more about their lives.”

Andrea continued, noting how Achmat generously gave of his time and was very supportive of Pan Macmillan’s work:

“Achmat often made the effort to attend Pan Macmillan’s book launches and he would apologise profusely, whenever he missed an event. He would also engage me in discussions about the Pan authors he had read recently and was always interested to know what I thought of a particular author’s voice and why Pan had published that person… I’m truly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him as a “real writer”, yes, he undoubtedly was that, but also as someone who gave so generously of his time and his skills, to develop that broader literary landscape that he cared so deeply about.”

In a September 2013 interview, postcolonial literary scholar Aghogho Akpome asked Achmat where he would place Strange Pilgrimages “in the metamorphosis of engagement with South Africa’s current realities?” Achmat replied:

“I think almost unconsciously I try to build bridges between the past, present and the future. In some of our minds, the past is one of glorified struggle. We forget our flaws, how the liberation movement made mistakes. How, for example, the liberation movement was infiltrated by the apartheid security police through coercion or bribery or whatever it was. And so, we weren’t all the saints that we thought we were. And why would we assume that suddenly – you get one government out and another one in – our government is going to become a lot of saints walking around with haloes?

I think that isn’t true. Maybe in some of the stories in my book, I am trying to look into the future. Of course we might be idealistic, and we must be principled, but we also have to be realistic. And there are real contemporary issues that we have to face in this country. When you take a person from an impoverished community with nothing in his or her life, suddenly they are in government and have access to resources. What would it take for them to be the one to say, ‘I won’t touch anything? I won’t do anything that even marginally smells of unethical behaviour’?

So, the stories try to link the past and the future through the notion of people who make journeys. A lot of them are people from exile who’ve come back. They have memories and then suddenly are confronted by reality. Suddenly they find that the memories that they had of the past and of how they had romanticised it wasn’t as wonderful as they thought. There is this one story of a man who discovers that the lover that he had, the woman who helped him and other activists was actually a double agent and he is so disillusioned.”

After the publication of Strange Pilgrimages in 2013, Achmat was invited to several workshops, festivals and conferences. In July, he was invited to speak to writers and students in the creative field at a Mail & Guardian event held before its annual festival. He was asked to speak about the link between creative non-fiction and social sciences but began by announcing that he had changed the title to “Creative Fiction”. Llisten to the recording dated 23 July 2013:

At the end of August 2013, Achmat was asked to present on a panel at the fourth annual Mail & Guardian Literary Festival, which aimed to encourage discussion about political, social and literary revolution. It took Chinua Achebe’s Children: Africa’s Suspended Revolutions as an organising theme and session names were derived from titles of Achebe’s works and were inspired by his thoughts on literature.

Achmat presented in the final session, “Migration: There was a country” alongside Wandile Zwane from the City of Johannesburg’s Migrant Health Desk; NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names; Mail & Guardian journalist Kwanele Sosibo; Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, author of The Bookseller of Kibera; and Christa Kuljian author of Sanctuary.

Journalist and lecturer Pheladi Sethusa, posted an article on her website about the panel describing it as having focussed on “the movement of people in and out of cities and countries” and noting that the presentations drew on the writers’ “experiences of bridging political and personal narratives in their storytelling”. Sethusa recorded that “audience members opened up the dialogue and brought up issues that were left out in the initial conversation”. Photographer Victor Dlamini, for example “commented on people who are migrants themselves taking issue with people who migrate”. He claimed that “Johannesburg is a migrant city.” Sethusa reports that Achmat had responded by agreeing with Dlamini and attributed negative attitudes to migrants to the mechanisms of ‘othering’.

In September 2013, Achmat was invited to attend the Edinburgh Book Festival where he did readings from both Bitter Fruit and Strange Pilgrimages. Katie Reid, Africa in Words co-founder and a freelance editor, reported that he read from Bitter Fruit at the point where Lydia, in Achmat’s words, “says goodbye to all her men, to the burden of her past and indeed her history” and, according to Reid, he “opened a particular framework of hearing from the story collection Strange Pilgrimages – of returning to a bitter past and acknowledging its realities in the present before moving forward.” A discussion followed and in response to Professor Willy Maley’s question about whether we need to remember to forget, Reid notes that Achmat “talked about the necessity of remembering the past in order to heal, taking care to point out the dangers of and the continuing sense of obsession with idealisation, particularly of the struggle years”.

In August 2015, Achmat was invited to speak at the SA Book Fair on a panel about short stories with Masande Ntshanga and Ivan Vladislavić, which was chaired by Siphiwo Mahala.

In October 2015, in a rare post on Facebook Achmat shared a photograph of their dog George with this text: “Our Beagle, ‘King’ George colonising the couch Audrey set out at the back. I’m going to try and reclaim it then pull down my study blinds and get back to work (my 3 year old manuscript is crying out loud).” He was referring to Dikeledi Child of Tears, No More. In the meantime, Achmat was in his last year at the Ford Foundation and had been shortlisted for a lifetime achievement award in literature.

In November 2015, Achmat received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature at the South African Literary Awards (SALA) founded in 2005 by the wRite associates in partnership with the South African Department of Arts and Culture. Achmat was now a member of PEN South Africa. Other PEN members that won 2015 SALA awards included: Zukiswa Wanner who won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for her novel London – Cape Town – Joburg; Charl-Pierre Naudé was a joint winner of the poetry award for “Al die lifelike dade”; Edwin Cameron was awarded the Creative Non-Fiction Award for his memoir Justice: A Personal Account and Michele Magwood won the Literary Journalism Award.

Achmat said an SABC interview that it was “an honour to be nominated for a lifetime award it’s like someone recognised – well, there is someone who’s dedicated his life to writing and literature but for me and my generation it was more than that.” He stressed that the role of the writer is “not so much about being bold but being true to your imagination and yourself and the way you see the world around you.” The interviewer asked Achmat if he thought there was a place for posthumous recognition. Achmat replied:

“There are some people that we need to recognise if only to introduce their work to this new generation so for example Sol Plaatje I am currently working on a novel that was inspired by his novel Mhudi and I really think that young people should read that novel written originally in Setswana then translated by himself into English and I find it a brilliant novel so people like him need to be recognised.”

Watch an interview with Achmat on SABC news, about receiving the award:

Picador Africa republished Bitter Fruit with the addition of an introduction by Mandla Langa. It was released on 1 June 2017, a few months before Achmat’s new novel Dikeledi Child of Tears, No More. In the NMF’s 2020 memorial for Achmat, Mandla Langa recalled:

“Sometime in 2017, Pan Macmillan, the publisher, asked me to do an introduction to Achmat Dangor’s novel, “Bitter Fruit”. Having always been an admirer of Achmat Dangor, I went into the task with gusto, reading and re-reading his impressive output, the poems, essays, short stories and novels.”

Langa concludes his thirteen page introduction:

“There can be little doubt that Achmat Dangor has made a significant, prophetic contribution towards South African – and global – writing. In our troubled country, people will read books for almost all the reasons one finds in other societies, such as enjoyment, escape, information – and not least, the sheer appreciation of language. Oftentimes, given our history and evolution from the fetid darkness of the past into a featureless and often stormy present, we look to books for clues and answers. This is one of them. Mandla Langa, Johannesburg, May 2017”

In August 2017, in an interview with Mail &Guardian journalist Kwanele Sosibo, Achmat explained why he felt it was important to republish Bitter Fruit:

“I think it was appropriate to [re]publish it because there are issues in the book that we are still dealing with today. Ahmed Timol’s killing is only being truly investigated now, after all these years. Apart from people who suffered like that there must also be families and communities who need an understanding of what happened so they can come to terms with it. Ahmed Timol’s mother gave evidence at the TRC [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission] but there was no follow-up investigation. I think at some point the government just decided, ‘Look, it is time to move on, beyond just dealing with the past …let’s try to plan for the future.’”

Recalling his intention in writing Bitter Fruit, Achmat stressed that he wanted to “imply” that people need to “think beyond what is evident”.

“I don’t know if I had a direct political agenda. My intention, really, was to tell some untold stories … I come from an activist family. The things that my family went through … I remember visiting my brother in detention in solitary confinement. My sister, Jessie Duarte, locked up for in John Vorster Square for nine months, solitary confinement. Some of these stories are based on real stories that I have fictionalised.

I grew up in a place called Newclare, which, of course, was very, very, very mixed. Not only would we look at each other and touch each other when we played but we’d ask each other what was going on inside … what does your language mean? And I grew up that way, trying to interpret what are the inner things that motivate people. [In my writing] I try to avoid clichés, overlong things and too many descriptions. Yes, there is complexity, but what I try to do is imply that there are things people need to think about beyond what is evident.”

An extract from the republished version can be read here: https://readinglist.click/2017/06/05/infidelity-among-mk-comrades-read-an-excerpt-from-achmat-dangors-celebrated-novel-bitter-fruit/

On the 1 September 2017, Achmat’s third book to be published by Picador Africa, Dikeledi Child of Tears, No More was released. The dedication reads: “To Sol Plaatje, for giving us Mhudi”. In a 2012 piece Achmat wrote titled, “Gripping read awakens boy’s interest”, published in the Sunday Times Achmat recalled being introduced to Plaatje’s book.

“This memory comes with an apology to Alan Paton. ‘There is a road that runs…’ not through the green Kwa-Zulu hills, but along the dusty landscape from Mafikeng [today Mahikeng] to a place called Buurmansdrift. I am about nine years old, and being driven with my siblings to a ‘holiday’ on an uncle’s small holding. We know what lies ahead. At nightfall the adults will go and have fun in Mafikeng, leaving us with a minder whose job it is to ensure we don’t get up to mischief. Well, there is not much to do when the candlelit gloom inside is much like the eerie darkness outside. But one night we are surprised. A new minder, Aaron, sits us down around an mbowla and reads to us, from Sol Plaatjie’s novel Mhudi. We are simultaneously scared and thrilled … Did my love for reading truly begin on that ‘holiday’ or is my seductive memory trying to render that dark place and time more lovingly? All I know is over the next few days we sought Aaron out at every opportunity, gently demanding he read to us, not aware enough yet to ask how a well-read man like him ended up being a handyman, driver, child minder. Yes, he read from Mhudi everyday … Soon our family left taking the dusty road back to Mafikeng then Johannesburg. This time the departure was tinged with sadness for me. But it also inspired me to seek out books at home in Jo’burg, even the forbidden ones about sex and politics that my father kept hidden in a wooden chest … I of course have returned to Mhudi by the way. It is the framework for my next novel.”

Achmat was referring to Dikeledi, which he had started writing that year. He wanted to convey “how ordinary people had to endure the politics of our country and how they learned to survive and overcome.” He remembered as a child having witnessed the forcible removal of a neighbouring family. Achmat explained: “the young daughter staring at the oppressors with anger and defiance in her eyes is an image that has stayed with me all this time”.

Ariel Dorfman remembered an exchange with Achmat about Dikeledi:

“Achmat had sent me the Dikeledi book and I wrote to him. I said: ‘Over the last week I have found the time to read Dikeledi and am as always impressed and moved by your work, Achmat. I found it venturesome and daring for you to strike into new territory with the emphasis on all the generations of this black family and the hybrid narrator who kept shifting and multiple voices, I recognise, of course, many of your usual themes, transgressive sexuality, the probing of how the larger politics of the nation affect the most remote citizens, the complexities that accompany the empowerment of women. Interesting how your female protagonist goes off in cars in search of their precarious identity.’ I was speaking there, of course, of ‘Bitter Fruit’, where he was taking the same themes as Death and the Maiden and giving it a very darker, even darker than my play, a South African, twist.

The aftermath of the liberation movement, all of that that he is so interested in. ‘But there was perhaps for the first time in your fiction in ‘Dikeledi’ a real unadulterated sense of optimism and redemption because it comes at a moment of such corruption in post-Madiba South Africa. When strong men like Trump and imitators around the world are on the rise. I have to admit I was a touch uncomfortable with the voice you give the young Dikeledi.’ I made some criticism of that and he answered back saying ‘Thank you so much for your insights.’ That indicates the sort of relationship we had and he had with everybody of incredible forthrightness and of generosity and openness.”

Dikeledi was released on 1 September before the SA Book Festival, which he attended. The book was officially launched at a special event on 14 September at Exclusive Books in Rosebank Mall in Johannesburg.

In the same month, Achmat was invited to attend the seventh Open Book Festival held in Cape Town and spoke at three sessions. According to academic Katarzyna Kubin, who attended the festival: “all the sessions had common themes: the question of patriarchy and gender equality, and how women are marginalized, and it’s important that overcoming marginalization of minorities, of women, and racial justice issues were so prominent during the festival.” Achmat told Kubin:

“I appreciate that the Open Book Festival gives an opportunity to come and speak not only very narrowly about your book that you write, but more broadly about who you are, where you come from, what influenced you, and what you hope to see for the future of our country.”

In December 2017, the Goethe-Institut hosted its “Literary Crossroads” series curated by Indra Wussow and Sine Buthelezi for writers to meet colleagues from other African countries and the diaspora. Achmat was paired with Tsitsi Dangarembga. Since they had last shared a platform at the World Voices Festival in New York in 2005, Tsitsi had published The Book of Not (2006) as a sequel to her first novel Nervous Conditions (1988) and was due to publish This Mournable Body. Achmat had published Strange Pilgrimages, received the lifetime achievement award, republished Bitter Fruit and launched Dikeledi.

In 2017, Achmat embarked on a collaboration with David Goldblatt on a project about Fietas, which sadly was not completed. David Goldblatt died on 25 June 2018 in Johannesburg. Achmat was also asked to contribute to Vimla Naidoo and Sahm Venter’s edited collection I Remember Nelson Mandela, which was launched on 7 June2018 at the NMF. Achmat was one of the speakers at the launch. The following day there was another launch at Exclusive Books. In an interview after the launch, Achmat contextualised some of the anecdotes in his chapter. Watch the interview with Achmat, conducted by Creamer TV, about his chapter in the book:

Achmat’s writing continued to be read abroad. In December 2018, Trilogía de Z Town featured in a “Mamah Africa Gallery Reading Club” event, which was a collaboration between Casa África and La Galería de Mamah Africa.

Achmat continued working on his “childhood memoir”, which he had started when Audrey and he had moved to New York in 2001. In a 2005 interview Achmat had elaborated:

“My uncle Abdul – or Abe – had a Jewish friend Bert. They were gay and lived together in Johannesburg. As a young boy I’d often visit them – go around to their flat and clean for them. My next book is about a boy confronted by this memory of the extraordinary intermingling of cultures.”

By December 2018, he had made considerable progress. In 2018, the Johannesburg Review of Books, of which he was a founding trustee, published an excerpt from the work in progress. To read an extract visit https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/12/05/fiction-issue-the-jrb-exclusive-read-an-excerpt-from-a-work-in-progress-by-achmat-dangor/

When the news of Achmat’s passing, on 6 September 2020, reached the literary community tributes poured in. Some were published in the press and on social media and other shared more privately. Ariel recalled hearing the news:

“Audrey wrote of the devastating news of his heart attack. His heart, his heart burst and I think his heart burst out of commitment, burst out of love for his country and burst out of the darkness he was prepared to go to where so few other people have dared to go. He is an extraordinary example for all of us. He is somebody who I mourn constantly and who I miss all the time but his heart is still with us, his works are still with us and everything he did from the first militant steps he took to the final work he did with the Mandela Foundation and other work he did after that and all the literary work that he did, that will not go away, that will stay with us and it is the greatest legacy that we have of this extraordinary human being.”

In his article posted on the Johannesburg Review of Books’ website, Ben Williams wrote:

“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.”

Ben’s article includes a statement by Ivan Vladislavić:

“Achmat was a treasured friend and greatly admired colleague. He had a streak of magic in him, and a fearless imagination, tackling subjects most writers shy away from. His passing is a huge loss to the writing world. My sympathies to Audrey and Zachary, and to all his family and friends.”

Isobel Dixon posted her favourite photograph of Achmat with a message on twitter (now X):

Mike Nicol’s tribute published on litnet’s website ends with Achmat’s words:

“For 50 years, Achmat Dangor was one of the constant voices of South African literature, a voice that told what it was to live in apartheid South Africa and in the new country as it struggled to gain an identity … Yet, to meet Achmat Dangor was not to meet a man full of self-importance. He was the epitome of the quiet writer. I remember coming across him in a room at the Nelson Mandela Foundation staring thoughtfully out the window at the garden. We greeted one another, but those were the only words I remember. For some five minutes, we stood there in silence, because no other words were necessary … The thoughtful writer who exuded calm when he appeared at book festivals will be missed – most sorely by his family: his wife, Audrey Elster; his children, Yasmin, Zain and Zachary; his grandchildren and his brothers and sister. The last words should be his. This from his poem, ‘Swansong’:

Listen,
do you hear
the wind ransack
the open plains
of my heart,
do you hear
the crack of that bell?”