On this day 40 years ago, Bloke Modisane died a lonely death in Dortmund, West Germany. In many ways, his fate mirrored that of other black intellectuals who were driven out of South Africa by apartheid and died in exile. This anniversary invites not only remembrance but a reckoning with estrangement, with the precariousness of lives lived elsewhere, and with the fugitivity of archives that often survive in fragments and omissions. To revisit his life and work is therefore to engage both an individual marked by extraordinary talent and dislocation, and a broader history of loss, recovery and belated recognition in South African letters. It is in this spirit of commemoration and archival return that the present collection takes shape.
This volume of essays is an outcome of the Bloke Modisane centenary symposium held at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in April 2023. Convened against the backdrop of the 60th anniversary of Modisane’s Blame Me on History, which coincided with what would have been his centenary year, the gathering critically reflected on the complex legacy of Modisane’s intellectual arc and offered imaginative insights that have implications for how we understand the rich, albeit fragmented, seam of Modisane’s intellectual life, legacy and varied archive. The collected chapters are stimulated by the restorative impulse to deepen and consolidate the fragmented and uneven critical interest in Modisane’s life and legacy — a drawback which in no small measure has been an effect of the absence of a full-length study on his life and work, and which the present volume modestly attempts to address.
William Bloke Modisane was born on August 28 1923 in Sophiatown to working-class Christian parents Doris and Joseph Modisane. He received his primary school education at the Sophiatown Dutch Reformed Mission School in the 1930s, before earning a junior certificate at Orlando High School in 1943 and a matric at Madibane High School in 1949.
Modisane’s baptism in the world of arts, letters and politics was realised when he worked for the left-wing Vanguard Bookshop in 1947. Under the congenial mentorship of the owner, Fanny Klenerman, he acquired an insatiable love for culture that would launch his long career as a writer, dramatist, actor and broadcaster. Though he formally joined Drum and the Golden City Post as a journalist, cultural editor and fiction writer in 1955, his first Drum short story appeared in 1951 and established his literary career in South African arts and letters during a period of the genre’s development.
In the 1960s, Modisane became entangled in the politics of the Cold War and exploited them for his own ends. He was an unwitting recipient of covert CIA funding
In the late 1950s, Modisane ventured into film and dramatic performance, going on to play leading roles in American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back, Africa and Athol Fugard’s No-Good Friday as a member of the short-lived African Theatre Workshop. Modisane left South Africa in March 1959 after receiving an invitation to work and study in the US. He elected to leave the country illegally through the help of a close network of friends, and his journey saw him cross the borders of Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and finally, Tanganyika, where he got onto a flight to London.
As an exile in London in the 1960s, he was part of a burgeoning and itinerant diasporic intellectual community of artists, anti-apartheid activists and political figures from Africa and the Caribbean. In the 1960s, Modisane became entangled in the politics of the Cold War and exploited them for his own ends. He was an unwitting recipient of covert CIA funding which enabled him to attend the African Writers Conference in Uganda in 1962 and undertake an extensive lecture tour in the US in 1963. In November 1963, following publication of his autobiography Blame Me on History, Modisane applied for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue work he had already begun for a second book. After being awarded the fellowship, he travelled in January 1965 to Tanzania to commence research for a historical monograph on the anticolonial Maji Maji rebellion in the then German East Africa. Based at the University of East Africa, he undertook extensive oral history fieldwork and research, earning recognition and an invitation from the Tanzanian government, in conjunction with the University College of Dar es Salaam and the UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation to present preliminary results of his findings at the first international congress of African historians held in September-October 1965.
About two months after the congress, he travelled to the key flashpoints of the Cold War — the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic — to undertake language training and archival research. This was a period of burgeoning interest in Africa-centred research and geopolitical relations. In the late 1960s, following his spell as a cultural commentator and broadcaster for the BBC’s then “talks department”, Modisane turned his attention to producing radio dramas for the BBC drama department’s African Theatre programme. During this period, Modisane moved from London, spent a brief time in Rome, and later settled in Dortmund.
At the time of his death in 1986, Modisane had not been in his home country for 27 years and he had, since 1966, been banned under the amended Suppression of Communism Amendment Act of 1966. This toxic blend of geographical obscurity and legislative erasure left a gaping hole in the full appreciation of Modisane’s intellectual and cultural contributions. This edited volume seeks to bridge the gap by tracing Modisane’s intellectual and cultural journey, from his pre-exile years in South Africa to his voyage as a cultural practitioner across Europe, Africa and the US. It also examines the critical engagement with his diverse body of work, moving beyond the narrow focus on his autobiography as the sole book he authored.
The title Bloke of All Ages alludes to the timelessness and resilience of Modisane’s work. It also speaks to this publication as a timely intervention to document and memorialise Modisane, born over a century ago. The contributors to this volume are comprised of a cross-section of emerging and seasoned scholars from around the world, including South Africa, the UK and the US. With varied research interests, these scholars have previously demonstrated an interest in Modisane’s body of work in different ways. This edited volume is a modest effort to assemble critical reflections on Modisane’s oeuvre. Thus, Bloke of All Ages: Perspectives on Bloke Modisane offers the most comprehensive and diversified exploration of Modisane’s body of work to date.
This is an edited extract from ‘Bloke of All Ages’, edited by Siyabonga Njica and Siphiwo Mahala.
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