The Woman Who Touched Us All: Maya Angelou

Dr. Maya Angelou was one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou was a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.

Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture.

As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage.

In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom.

In 1960, Dr. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt where she served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. The next year, she moved to Ghana where she taught at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times.
During her years abroad, Dr. Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. While in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X and, in 1964, returned to America to help him build his new Organization of African American Unity.

Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization dissolved. Soon after X's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Dr. Angelou to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated.

With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to international acclaim and enormous popular success. The list of her published verse, non-fiction, and fiction now includes more than 30 bestselling titles.

A trailblazer in film and television, Dr. Angelou wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia. Her script, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

She continues to appear on television and in films including the landmark television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1977) and John Singleton's Poetic Justice (1993). In 1996, she directed her first feature film, Down in the Delta. In 2008, she composed poetry for and narrated the award-winning documentary The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante.

Dr. Angelou has served on two presidential committees, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has received 3 Grammy Awards. President Clinton requested that she compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993. Dr. Angelou's reading of her poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" was broadcast live around the world.

Dr. Angelou received over 50 honorary degrees and was Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

Dr. Angelou’s words and actions continue to stir our souls, energize our bodies, liberate our minds, and heal our hearts.

Accessed on http://mayaangelou.com/bio/ on 30 May 2014.

Friday Feature:The Life of Joe Slovo

Joe Slove (left), Chris Hani (centre) & Joe Modise (right) were all members of uMkhonto weSizwe.

Joe Slovo was born on 23 May 1926 and died on 6 January 1995. His full name was Yossel Mashel Slovo. He was a South African politician and an opponent of the apartheid system. He was a long-time leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC), and a commander of the ANC's military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe.


Slovo was born in Obeliai, Lithuania to a Jewish family who emigrated to South Africa when he was eight. His father worked as a truck driver in Johannesburg. Although his family were religious, he became an atheist who retained respect for "the positive aspects of Jewish culture". Slovo left school in 1941 and found work as a dispatch clerk. He joined the National Union of Distributive Workers and, as a shop steward, was involved in organising a strike.

Slovo joined the South African Communist Party in 1942. Inspired by the Red Army's battles against the Nazis on the Eastern Front of World War II, Slovo volunteered to fight in the war, afterwards joining the Springbok Legion, a multiracial radical ex-servicemen's organization, upon his return.

Between 1946 and 1950 he completed a law degree at Wits University and was a student activist. He was in the same class as Nelson Mandela and Harry Schwarz. In 1949 he married Ruth First, another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist and the daughter of SACP treasurer Julius First. They had three daughters, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn. Ruth was assassinated in 1982 by order of Craig Williamson, a major in the Apartheid security police.

Both First and Slovo were listed as communists under the Suppression of Communism Act and could not be quoted or attend public gatherings in South Africa. He became active in the South African Congress of Democrats (an ally of the ANC as part of the Congress Alliance) and was a delegate to the June 1955 Congress of the People organised by the ANC and Indian, Coloured and white organisations at Kliptown near Johannesburg, that drew up the Freedom Charter. He was arrested and detained for two months during the Treason Trial of 1956. Charges against him were dropped in 1958. He was later arrested for six months during the State of Emergency declared after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

In 1961, Slovo and Abongz Mbede emerged as two of the leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, formed in alliance between the ANC and the SACP. In 1963 he went into exile and lived in Britain, Angola, Mozambique and Zambia. In his capacity as chief of staff of MK he codetermined its activities, like the 1983 Church Street bombing. Slovo was elected general secretary of the SACP in 1984.

He returned to South Africa in 1990 to participate in the early "talks about talks" between the government and the ANC. Ailing, he stood down as SACP general secretary in 1991 and was succeeded by Chris Hani who was soon murdered. Slovo was given the titular position of chairperson of the SACP.

Slovo was a leading theoretician in both the SACP and the ANC. In the 1970s he wrote the influential essay No Middle Road which stated that the apartheid government would be unable either to achieve stability or to co-opt significant sections of the small but growing black middle class - in other words the only choice was between the overthrow of apartheid or ever greater repression. At the time the SACP's orthodox pro-Soviet and stage-ist view of change in South Africa was dominant in the ANC-led liberation movement.

Being Jewish and a Communist, Slovo was a demonised figure on the far right of Afrikaner society.

In 1989, he wrote "Has Socialism Failed?" which acknowledged the weaknesses of the socialist movement and the excesses of Stalinism, while at the same time rejecting attempts by the left to distance themselves from socialism. Slovo died in 1995 of cancer. In 2004 he was voted 47th in the Top 100 Great South Africans.

It was he who in 1992 proposed the breakthrough in the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa with the "sunset clause" for a coalition government for the five years following a democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides.

After the elections of 1994 he became Minister for housing in Nelson Mandela's government, until his death in 1995. His funeral was attended by the entire high command of the ANC, and by most of the highest officials in the country, including both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

"No matter What Vision one has for South Africa ,the first thing that must be done is to destroy racism" Joe Slovo

Biography Accessed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Slovo on 23 May 2014.

Friday Feature: A Native of Nowhere - Nathaniel 'Nat' Nakasa

"The White man can never really understand what goes on inside a Black man" Nathaniel Nakasa

Names: Nakasa, Ndazana Nathaniel

Born: 12 May 1937, Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape, South Africa

Died: 14 July 1965, New York, USA

In summary: Journalist and author

Ndazana Nathaniel (Nat) Nakasa was born on 12 May 1937 in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape. Nakasa was the second of three children of Joseph Nakasa and his wife, Alvina Nakasa. As a child from a working-class family in an impoverished rural area, Nakasa was forced by poverty to leave school in 1954 without matriculating. He moved to Durban where he worked as a reporter for Ilanga newspaper, published in Zulu and English. He later moved to Johannesburg where he joined Post and later Drum magazine. He also freelanced for publications in Germany, Sweden, the USA and Britain.

Nakasa became assistant editor of Drum, and founded the Classic literary magazine and wrote a column for the Rand Daily Mail. A colleague of Nakasa at the time, well-known journalist Joe Thloloe, says while many journalists of the time were men of the bottle, Nakasa would come to the Classic shebeen where they drank, have his half nip of brandy, and leave. 'Nat was a natty dresser, he would always be neat while we smelled of booze and were unwashed,' Thloloe says. It was after this shebeen that Nakasa named the literary magazine he helped found. Nakasa had a way with words and all who read his work were impressed by his command of the language and his biting criticism of the system of apartheid. In 1964, Nakasa applied for the prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in the USA and was turned down. When the nominated recipient, Eastern Cape Herald parliamentary correspondent D.K. Prosser, could not go, this became Nakasa's break and the beginning of his problems. Government refused him a passport. Nakasa had not expected this. In a letter to the Nieman Foundation curator Dwight Sargent in early 1964, Nakasa wrote: 'As I have never been active in politics except as a journalist, I expect no difficulty in obtaining a passport from the South African government'.

When told he would not get a passport, without even the courtesy of a reason, Nakasa said he was completely bewildered. 'I can only assume that the government has refused me a passport because some of my writings have opposed apartheid - which is surprising after the minister of Justice recently stressed that action would be taken against people who opposed apartheid.'

Nakasa took an exit permit which meant he would never be able to get back to his home country. When he eventually arrived in Cambridge, Massachussets two months after the programme had started, after getting travel documents from the Tanzanian government, he settled into his studies. Nakasa's studies at Harvard included Intellectual History, Social Structure of Modern Africa, History of the American South and Negro History, which he said he had found 'to have direct relevance to my own preoccupations. I found it possible to draw parallels between the Negro's exclusion from the mainstream of society and the more vicious degradation of my own people in South Africa'.

 Nakasa confessed to a tendency to holler whenever people, mainly White academics who were invited to address Nieman seminars, spoke of the problems of race in detached and intellectual fashion. A story is recorded in the Nieman history of how one day Nakasa had challenged a social psychologist for about two hours, in between shouting and screaming about judging civilizations and 'how the White man can never really understand what goes on inside a Black man'. When the programme ended, Nakasa went to New York where he wrote articles for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times. But his mind was in Africa and he was known to brood about home. As it became clear he would never be able to return home, he committed suicide on 14 July 1965 by jumping from a window of a high-rise building. Attempts to bring his body home bore no fruit, and he was buried at the Ferncliff cemetery in upstate New York.

A head - stone placed by the Nieman Foundation 30 years later simply reads: Nathaniel Nakasa May 12 1937 - July 14 1965. Journalist, Nieman Fellow, South African. 1038 (the tombstone number). Nakasa's writings were compiled into a book The world of Nat Nakasa. He was an influential writer and had an impact on many black people and writers. The Print Media Association, the South African Nieman Alumni, and the South African National Editors' Forum have established an annual award for courageous journalism, which is named after him. Its first recipient was Jon Qwelane. Nakasa died on 14 July 1965 in New York.

This Biography was accessed on http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ndazana-nathaniel-nakasa on 16 May 2014.

Friday Feature - Brenda "Mabrr" Fassie Biography

 Biography

Brenda Fassie, born on 3 November 1964 and died 9 May 2004,was a South Africa anti-apartheid Afropop singer. Her bold stage antics earned a reputation for "outrageousness". Affectionately called Mabrr by her fans, she was sometimes described as the "Queen of African Pop".

Fassie was born in Langa, Cape Town, as the youngest of nine children. She was named after the American singer Brenda Lee. Her father died when she was two, and with the help of her mother, a pianist, she started earning money by singing for tourists. 

In 1981, at the age of 16, she left Cape Town for Soweto, Johannesburg, to seek her fortune as a singer. Fassie first joined the group Joy and later became the lead singer for a township music group called Brenda and the Big Dudes. She had a son, Bongani, in 1985 by a fellow Big Dudes musician. She married Nhlanhla Mbambo in 1989 but divorced in 1991. 

With very outspoken views and frequent visits to the poorer townships of Johannesburg, as well as songs about life in the townships, she enjoyed tremendous popularity. Known best for her songs "Weekend Special" and "Too Late for Mama", she was dubbed "The Madonna of the Townships" by Time in 2001.

From 1996 she released several solo albums, including Now Is the Time, Memeza (1997), and Nomakanjani?. Most of her albums became multi-platinum sellers in South Africa; Memeza was the best-selling album in South Africa in 1998.  

Death

On the morning of 26 April 2004, Fassie collapsed at her home in Buccleuch, Gauteng, and was admitted into a hospital in Sunninghill. The press were told that she had suffered cardiac arrest. She stopped breathing and suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen.

 Fassie was visited in the hospital by Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, and Thabo Mbeki, and her condition was front-page news in South African papers. She died aged 39 on 9 May 2004 in hospital without returning to consciousness after her life support machines were turned off. 

Her family, including her long term partner, were at her side when she died.

Recognition

She was voted 17th in the Top 100 Great South Africans.

Her son Bongani 'Bongz' Fassie performed on the soundtrack to the 2005 Academy Award-winning movie Tsotsi. He dedicated his song "I'm So Sorry" to his mother.

In March 2006 a life-size bronze sculpture of Fassie by artist Angus Taylor was installed outside Bassline, a music venue in Johannesburg

 This autobiography was accessed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Fassie on 9 May 2014 :12:36pm.