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Concept
Tatamkhulu Afrika
Summary
Ismail Joubert (7 December 1920 – 23 December 2002), commonly known as Tatamkhulu Afrika, which is Xhosa for Grandfather Africa, was a South African poet and writer. His first novel, Broken Earth was published when he was seventeen (under his "Methodist name"), but it was over fifty years until his next publication, a collection of verse entitled Nine Lives.
He won numerous literary awards including the gold Molteno Award for lifetime services to South African literature, and, in 1996, his works were translated into French. His autobiography, Mr Chameleon, was published posthumously in 2005.
Tatamkhulu Afrika was born Mogamed Fu'ad Nasif in Egypt to an Egyptian father and a Turkish mother, and came to South Africa as a very young child. Both his parents died of flu, and he was fostered by family friends under the name John Carlton.
He fought in World War II in the North African campaign and was captured at Tobruk. His experiences as a prisoner of war featured prominently in his writing. After World War II he left his foster family and went to Namibia (then South-West Africa), where he was fostered by an Afrikaans family, taking his third legal name of Jozua Joubert.
In 1964 he converted to Islam, legally changed his name to Ismail Joubert, and spent some time in prison. It was here that he first experienced forms of homosexual sex being employed in a state context to intimidate political prisoners, which would go on to become a major theme of his later literary work, as tensions between homophobia and homoeroticism feature largely.
He lived in Cape Town's District 6, a mixed race inner-city community. District 6 was declared a "whites only" area in the 1960s and the community was destroyed. With an Arab father and a Turkish mother, Afrika could have been classified as a "white", but refused as a matter of principle. He founded Al-Jihaad to oppose the destruction of District Six and apartheid in general, and when this became affiliated with the African National Congress' armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, he was given the praise name of Tatamkhulu Afrika, which he adopted until he died.
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