Just after midnight on Sunday, 18 July 1926, merely hours before he was due to return to the Marico after mid-year break, Herman Charles Bosman killed his stepbrother David Russell at the family home at 19 Isipingo Street, Bellevue East, Johannesburg. Using hunting rifle that he had brought back from the bushveld, he shot the 23-year-old Russell in the bedroom shared by the two men. The consequence of this act for the young schoolteacher was what he later called a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison (Bosman 1949, unnumbered dedication page). He escaped the gallows, had his sentence commuted to 10 years with hard labour, and emerged on parole on 14 September 1930, having served just over four years of this sentence (Gray 2005, 131).

The title of this paper is inspired by a penetrating aphorism from Chinua Achebe's third novel, Arrow of God, uttered by Ezeulu, novel's central character: the world is like a Mask dancing, if you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place (Achebe 46). The masquerade, common in many parts of Africa, is believed in traditional religion to involve temporary incarnation of certain spirits and/or deities by whom human host of mask is possessed, and whose performance is controlled by a spiritual and supernatural force (Isichei 253). The stage for a masquerade's performance is often village square, and unlike performance of controlled actors, supernatural performer is not bound to one location but usually moves about in all directions, making it necessary for audience also to change locations constantly (see Eze 99). Achebe's instructive life simile is particularly fitting for any exploration of selfhood and constructions of identity (whether individual or collective) in contemporary times. This is even more so for postcolonial and postmodernist condition, characterized as they are by multiple subjectivities and sensibilities as well as evershifting, kaleidoscopic contexts.

After the first part of the workshop on Lewis Nkosi, a small number of people who had vivid memories of specific moments in his life came together and shared anecdotes of Nkosi. Our panel was made up of novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, the poet Oswald Mtshali, best known for his groundbreaking collection of poetry Sounds of a Cowhide Drum, and the veteran photographer Alf Khumalo.1 Also present was Anna Hamlyn, who had known Lewis as part of the group of African intellectuals, writers and broadcasters in London in the 1960s. She, too, gave the audience a sense of a moment in his life that would otherwise never have been a public memory. Sandile Ngidi, devoted companion to Nkosi in his later South African years, and himself an editor, translator and literary man, chaired the session with a magisterial joviality which hid, as he put it, his nervousness in being in such eminent company. What we have captured below are moments in this larger conversation. We offer it to the reader in the hope that it provides a series of images, perhaps a screen of dissonant images, where Lewis Nkosi moves before us. We offer it to the reader as a script, incomplete but present.

The purpose of this essay is to present a broad outline of ways in which literary or imaginative texts were circulated and consumed in Natal Colony in the years 1843–1910. It shows how, at least initially, the majority of these texts originated abroad, but how increasingly colonials began to supply their own literary marketplace. While recognising that the thematic preoccupations of Natalian writers potentially offer a fruitful field for further research, these are not my immediate concern. My essay will be concerned instead with reading practices within the colony and those writing practices that aimed to satisfy a local appetite for imaginative texts.

On 5 September 2010, Lewis Nkosi died in a hospice in Johannesburg as a result of a slow decline occasioned by a debilitating fall he had sustained the previous year. At the time of his accident, Nkosi was working on a novel after which, he assured us, he would start on his memoirs provisionally titled Memoirs of a Motherless Child. The fact that these memoirs did not get written is a greater tragedy than the unfinished novel as there is no one from the Drum era that one can think of who had as rich and long an intellectual life as Lewis Nkosi. Recently, others too have bemoaned the fact that Nkosi's memoirs were not written - various Letters to the Editor written in response to the profile on Nkosi which appeared in Wordsetc (Third Quarter 2011) make mention of this.

Mike Marais, Se cretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 249 pp., hardback, ISBN 9789042027121.

The question in the title above is prompted by my being invited to review the recently published 251-page Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945 (2010), by Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie. It is a guide that follows closely on another guide, the A–Z of African Writers: A Guide to Modern African Writing in English (2009), compiled by Robin Malan, and draws upon several earlier sources including the Companion to South African English Literature (Adey et al. 1986) and the extensive files of the National English Literary Museum (NELM).

J. M. Coetzee’s most recent publication in the field of autobiographical fiction, Summertime (2009), opens with a description of a politically motivated murder of South African citizens in Botswana. This murder, we are told, is one in a long chain of political crimes, reported “week after week” (4) by the press, along with denials by the apartheid government that it has anything to do with them. The effect of these reports on the protagonist, John, is to send him into helpless “fits of rage and despair” (5): they constitute a “moral dilemma” from which he can envision no escape (5).

If there’s an archaeology of the book, then the beginnings are deep under the surface, under the soil.(Coetzee, in Scott 95)This essay seeks to explore the question of origins: the beginnings of theliterary career of arguably South Africa’s most significant author, and thedevelopment of a form of authorship that was, at its inception, situated bothlocally and globally. An archaeology of the publication history of the debutnovel Dusklands (1974) can shed light on the emergence of a particularlycomplex form of transnational authorship that J. M. Coetzee came toassume, a form locating itself within the South African literary landscapewhile simultaneously connecting itself to broader international literarycurrents.