Search results for ""Author Buntu Siwisa""

A shrewd yet soulful novel, Paperless is set in Oxford and revolves around three groups in the university town: the African students who entered the country legally on student visas, the blue-collar South African workers who overstayed their visitor visas and are illegal, and black Britons who are an enigma to the Africans. As the chief protagonist Luzuko Goba navigates these worlds, his relationship with his former political exile father – who has just died – is revealed. This is a book about migrants, legal and illegal, out of time, on the wrong side of the UK’s department of immigration. They are paperless.

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Daniel Dumile Qeqe (1929–2005), ‘Baas Dan’, ‘DDQ’. He was the Port Elizabeth leader whose struggles and triumphs crisscrossed the entire gamut of political, civic, entrepreneurial, sports and recreational liberation activism in the Eastern Cape. Siwisa tells the story of Qeqe’s life and times and at the same time has written a social and political biography of Port Elizabeth – a people’s history of Port Elizabeth. As much as Qeqe was a local legend, his achievements had national repercussions and, indeed, continue to this day. Central to the transformation of sports towards non-racialism, Qeqe paved the way for the mainstreaming and liberation of black rugby and cricket players in South Africa. He co-engineered the birth of the KwaZakhele Rugby Union (Kwaru), a pioneering non-racial rugby union that was more of a political and social movement. Kwaru was a vehicle for political dialogues and banned meetings, providing resources for political campaigns and orchestrations for moving activists into exile. This story is an attempt at understanding a man of contradictions. In one breath, he was generous and kind to a fault. And yet he was the indlovu, an imposing authoritarian elephant, decisively brutal and aggressive. Then there was Qeqe, the man whose actions were not in keeping with the struggle. This story narrates his role in ‘collaborationist’ civic institutions and in courting reactionary homeland structures, yet through all that he was the signal actor in the emancipation of rugby in South Africa.

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