NONI JABAVU A Stranger at Home
WiSER invites you to a book discussion
NONI JABAVU
A Stranger at Home
Introduced by Makhosazana Xaba & Athambile Masola
Noni Jabavu was the first black South African woman to publish books on her life. Her memoirs Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People have been compared to Zora Neale Hurston's work. A cosmopolitan, free-spirited woman, she returned home in 1977 and wrote a weekly column in the Daily Dispatch. This book is a compilation of these insightful, historically rich and often hilarious columns for a younger audience of empowered women.
Speaker: Makhosazana Xaba
Respondent: Nthabiseng Motsemme
Makhosazana Xaba is an essayist, poet and writer of short stories. She has published three collections of poetry, These hands, Tongues of their Mothers and The Alkalinity of Bottled Water and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Wits University. Xaba published her recent book Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018 while she was a Research Associate at WiSER. Last year she co-edited Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele and a fourth poetry collection The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace - a novel - published in December 2021.
Nthabiseng Motsemme is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, Sociology Department. She previously served as Academic Director at the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), and Postgraduate Director at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, while also holding research associate positions at the University of South Africa and Nelson Mandela University.
A recent collaborative article on their struggles to get this book published can be found here
Makhosazana’s WiSER podcast on Noni Jabavu can be found here
Wednesday, 5th April 2023
1pm
WiSER Seminar room
RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za