Correspondence: Linking the Private to the Public in Lewis Nkosi’s Novels

Abstract

On 5 September 2010, Lewis Nkosi died in a hospice in Johannesburg as a result of a slow decline occasioned by a debilitating fall he had sustained the previous year. At the time of his accident, Nkosi was working on a novel after which, he assured us, he would start on his memoirs provisionally titled Memoirs of a Motherless Child. The fact that these memoirs did not get written is a greater tragedy than the unfinished novel as there is no one from the Drum era that one can think of who had as rich and long an intellectual life as Lewis Nkosi. Recently, others too have bemoaned the fact that Nkosi’s memoirs were not written – various Letters to the Editor written in response to the profile on Nkosi which appeared in Wordsetc (Third Quarter 2011) make mention of this:
I was fascinated by the small details of his [Nkosi’s] personal (rather than literary) life. […] I had been aware of Nkosi’s iconoclastic status but reading the profile has created a thirst for the larger and longer story. Surely, someone needs to pick up Nkosi’s unfinished Memoirs of a Motherless Child, and take it through to publication. It would be tragic if no one ever does.
It is a pity that we shall never get to hear him speak of himself since his memoir remains incomplete.
(Ndabezitha 7)