Without further ado, then, here is The JRB\u2019s Top 10 most read articles of 2019\u2014a year marked by the sad loss of many literary greats.<\/p>\n
The JRB Top 10 of 2019<\/h2>\n10. Toni Morrison, 1931\u20142019, RIP<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/toni-morrison-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nToni Morrison, celebrated novelist and Nobel Laureate, died on 5 August, aged eighty-eight.<\/p>\n
Morrison passed away at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.<\/p>\n
Morrison\u2019s family issued a statement through the publisher, saying she died after a brief illness.<\/p>\n
\u2018Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,\u2019 the family announced. \u2018She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who revelled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.\u2019<\/p>\n
9. \u2018There is no comfort to be had in fiction. Our history is too raw for that\u2019\u2014Jacob Dlamini reviews Barry Gilder\u2019s \u2018brilliant, haunting\u2019 novel The List<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/barry-gilder-the-list-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Does it matter now?\u2019 asks the character S\u2019bu Dlamini in Barry Gilder\u2019s wistful novel The List<\/em>. Does it matter whether S\u2019bu trusts his uncle William Dlamini, an apartheid agent who used his position as headmaster of a Lowveld school to spot black talent for the Security Police and the National Intelligence Service? Does it matter that the uncle took advantage of his position as an authority figure to recruit his best students to spy on the ANC for the apartheid state?<\/p>\n8. This is how we lost him\u2014Bongani Madondo and Rofhiwa Maneta remember K Sello Duiker<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/k-sello-duiker-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe JRB: What do you remember most about Kabelo?
\n<\/strong>
\nBongani Madondo:<\/strong> His silence and madness\u2014meaning his beautiful eccentricity, singularity even. I remember his laughter and how we finished each other\u2019s sentences. He was my doppelganger (although he was five years younger than me). He was a reader. He got me into Ben Okri and I got him into African spirituality and magical realism.<\/p>\nHe was always stronger than me and assured me that we would become major writers and make films. He loved his aunt with whom he lived in Berea. He worked on large chunks of The Quiet Violence of Dreams <\/em>at his aunt\u2019s place, as well as at my apartment, 20 Olympia Mansions on Yeo Street, Y\u2019ville. I had the fool\u2019s fortune of reading it as a work-in-progress, which is rare because writers, at least this writer, are not in the habit of sharing their works before they\u2019re done. To this day I cannot bring myself to read it as a finished book, if you know what I mean.<\/p>\n7. <\/a>[Fiction Issue] \u2018Mad About the Boy\u2019, a new short story by Zanta Nkumane<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Zanta-Nkumane-300x225.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nHe comes to me one night, draped in his glowing skin, resolute eyes and imposing voice. Come home with me? he asks, after spending the night wooing me, his largeness sequestering us in the corner of the bar for countless hours. He is beautiful. It\u2019s always the beautiful ones. They are the ones that peel us away from the humdrum of our safe lives and reintroduce us to the risky, smouldering parts of ourselves we have cremated. Without thinking about it too long, I say Yes. I say yes because the loneliness tells me to. I say yes because I have recently been left and had to leave my home because he found someone whose hands touch him more thoughtfully. I say yes because we all promise to try new things after leaving. I say yes because a beautiful boy thinks me worthy to take home. I say yes because he says I am unlike other boys. I clasp my hand to his and allow him to lead me, wherever. I notice his desperate, choking grasp, as if he believes I will change my mind and run back to my friends.<\/p>\n
6. Hugh Lewin, 1939\u20132019, RIP<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/hugh-lewin-1-300x217.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nJournalist, author and anti-apartheid activist Hugh Lewin died on 16 January, aged seventy-nine.<\/p>\n
In July 1964, when he was twenty-four years old, Lewin was sentenced to seven years in prison for his activities in the African Resistance Movement. During his years in prison, Lewin secretly recorded his experiences and those of his fellow inmates in the pages of his Bible, and on his release these writings were published in London in 1974 as Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison<\/em>. Hailed as a classic of prison writing, the book remained banned in South Africa for many years, until it was published by David Philip in 1989.<\/p>\n5. Dry like steel: A wrecking ball of a book\u2014Wamuwi Mbao reviews Adam Habib\u2019s Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Adam-Habib-Rebels-and-Rage-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe work of mythology is to guard against things being forgotten. What is thought to be in danger of slipping from view must be inscribed. Mythology does not deal with what is true and what is false: it deals with what is important. In this regard, it does the heavy lifting for inchoate things like feeling and sentiment. It preserves. But preserved things are not the same as their originals. A pickled olive is not an olive growing on the branch.<\/p>\n
4. Sandile Dikeni, 1966\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Sandile-Dikeni-300x225.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nPoet and activist Sandile Dikeni died in Cape Town on 9 November.<\/p>\n
Dikeni was the author of three collections of poems, including the seminal Guava Juice<\/em>, (Mayibuye Books, 1992), which he followed with Telegraph to the Sky<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2001) and Planting Water <\/em>(UKZN Press, 2007). He also published a collection of his articles from the Cape Times, Soul Fire: Writing the Transition<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2002).<\/p>\n3. [The JRB exclusive] Read \u2018Mothers and Men\u2019, OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay, a sensitive chronicle of rape, secondary victimisation and motherhood<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/OluTimehin-Adegbeye-Mothers-and-Men-The-Heart-of-the-Matter-Gerald-Kraak-Anthology-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe JRB presents this year\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay. The prize honours African writing and photography that \u2018provokes thought on the topics of gender, social justice and sexuality\u2019.<\/p>\n
The judges: \u2018were taken by the fierce intensity of \u201cMothers and Men\u201d, a meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. The essay explores the fragility of healing with a rare sensitivity and insight. OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s voice walks the fine line between heartbreak and redemption, casting new light on questions of rape and secondary victimisation in ways that are new and important. Adegbeye is an urgent and timely voice and both her substantive interests and her prose and befitting of a prize that exists to champion human rights and complicate the framing of what it means to be African today.\u2019<\/p>\n
Read the essay:
\n<\/strong>
\nMothers and Men<\/p>\nWaking up the day after my mother\u2019s death, I recognised the dazed confusion I was feeling as a throwback: On a humid morning five years prior, I had gone to school in a body that had been recently broken into, and everyone had seemed so \u2026 normal.<\/p>\n
Keep reading at the link above<\/em>.<\/p>\n2. \u2018I will always love Africa, because from the minute I arrived it treated me like a white girl.\u2019\u2014Author Adam Smyer reflects on his visit to the Open Book Festival<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/adam-smyer-300x195.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nI\u2019ve never been anywhere. Half my life ago I relocated from one coast of the United States to the other, but that\u2019s it. And that\u2019s fine. I have no interest in spending my vacation days sampling the nuances of anti-blackness around the globe. There\u2019s enough on my plate here in the US. And my lifelong Emergency Overseas Survival Plan of yelling \u2018I\u2019m an American!\u2019 until someone whisks me to safety has been dubious for a while now. Yeah, no. My home is the devil I know. Even in my novel Knucklehead I described a certain film as \u2018a tribulation, a rite of passage, kind of like I imagine my first trip to Africa will be\u2019. That pilgrimage has always seemed doomed to fail.<\/p>\n
1. Binyavanga Wainaina, 1971\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/johannesburgreviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Binyavanga-Wainaina-300x215.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nKenyan author and activist Binyavanga Wainaina died on 21 May, at the age of forty-eight.<\/p>\n
Wainaina was born in Nakuru, Kenya, in 1971, and studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa from 1991. He moved to Cape Town in 1996, where he worked as a travel and food writer and professional cook. In 2002, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for his short story \u2018Discovering Home\u2019.<\/p>\n
Wainaina was the founding editor of Kwani?, a journal of experimental writing, which he established in 2003, and which became an important and vital source for new African writing. He completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010. In 2012, his satirical essay \u2018How to Write About Africa<\/a>\u2019, published in Granta magazine, attracted wide attention, and in 2012 he published a memoir,\u00a0One Day I Will Write About This Place<\/em>, to great acclaim.<\/p>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nToni Morrison, celebrated novelist and Nobel Laureate, died on 5 August, aged eighty-eight.<\/p>\n
Morrison passed away at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.<\/p>\n
Morrison\u2019s family issued a statement through the publisher, saying she died after a brief illness.<\/p>\n
\u2018Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,\u2019 the family announced. \u2018She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who revelled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.\u2019<\/p>\n
9. \u2018There is no comfort to be had in fiction. Our history is too raw for that\u2019\u2014Jacob Dlamini reviews Barry Gilder\u2019s \u2018brilliant, haunting\u2019 novel The List<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Does it matter now?\u2019 asks the character S\u2019bu Dlamini in Barry Gilder\u2019s wistful novel The List<\/em>. Does it matter whether S\u2019bu trusts his uncle William Dlamini, an apartheid agent who used his position as headmaster of a Lowveld school to spot black talent for the Security Police and the National Intelligence Service? Does it matter that the uncle took advantage of his position as an authority figure to recruit his best students to spy on the ANC for the apartheid state?<\/p>\n8. This is how we lost him\u2014Bongani Madondo and Rofhiwa Maneta remember K Sello Duiker<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe JRB: What do you remember most about Kabelo?
\n<\/strong>
\nBongani Madondo:<\/strong> His silence and madness\u2014meaning his beautiful eccentricity, singularity even. I remember his laughter and how we finished each other\u2019s sentences. He was my doppelganger (although he was five years younger than me). He was a reader. He got me into Ben Okri and I got him into African spirituality and magical realism.<\/p>\nHe was always stronger than me and assured me that we would become major writers and make films. He loved his aunt with whom he lived in Berea. He worked on large chunks of The Quiet Violence of Dreams <\/em>at his aunt\u2019s place, as well as at my apartment, 20 Olympia Mansions on Yeo Street, Y\u2019ville. I had the fool\u2019s fortune of reading it as a work-in-progress, which is rare because writers, at least this writer, are not in the habit of sharing their works before they\u2019re done. To this day I cannot bring myself to read it as a finished book, if you know what I mean.<\/p>\n7. <\/a>[Fiction Issue] \u2018Mad About the Boy\u2019, a new short story by Zanta Nkumane<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nHe comes to me one night, draped in his glowing skin, resolute eyes and imposing voice. Come home with me? he asks, after spending the night wooing me, his largeness sequestering us in the corner of the bar for countless hours. He is beautiful. It\u2019s always the beautiful ones. They are the ones that peel us away from the humdrum of our safe lives and reintroduce us to the risky, smouldering parts of ourselves we have cremated. Without thinking about it too long, I say Yes. I say yes because the loneliness tells me to. I say yes because I have recently been left and had to leave my home because he found someone whose hands touch him more thoughtfully. I say yes because we all promise to try new things after leaving. I say yes because a beautiful boy thinks me worthy to take home. I say yes because he says I am unlike other boys. I clasp my hand to his and allow him to lead me, wherever. I notice his desperate, choking grasp, as if he believes I will change my mind and run back to my friends.<\/p>\n
6. Hugh Lewin, 1939\u20132019, RIP<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nJournalist, author and anti-apartheid activist Hugh Lewin died on 16 January, aged seventy-nine.<\/p>\n
In July 1964, when he was twenty-four years old, Lewin was sentenced to seven years in prison for his activities in the African Resistance Movement. During his years in prison, Lewin secretly recorded his experiences and those of his fellow inmates in the pages of his Bible, and on his release these writings were published in London in 1974 as Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison<\/em>. Hailed as a classic of prison writing, the book remained banned in South Africa for many years, until it was published by David Philip in 1989.<\/p>\n5. Dry like steel: A wrecking ball of a book\u2014Wamuwi Mbao reviews Adam Habib\u2019s Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe work of mythology is to guard against things being forgotten. What is thought to be in danger of slipping from view must be inscribed. Mythology does not deal with what is true and what is false: it deals with what is important. In this regard, it does the heavy lifting for inchoate things like feeling and sentiment. It preserves. But preserved things are not the same as their originals. A pickled olive is not an olive growing on the branch.<\/p>\n
4. Sandile Dikeni, 1966\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nPoet and activist Sandile Dikeni died in Cape Town on 9 November.<\/p>\n
Dikeni was the author of three collections of poems, including the seminal Guava Juice<\/em>, (Mayibuye Books, 1992), which he followed with Telegraph to the Sky<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2001) and Planting Water <\/em>(UKZN Press, 2007). He also published a collection of his articles from the Cape Times, Soul Fire: Writing the Transition<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2002).<\/p>\n3. [The JRB exclusive] Read \u2018Mothers and Men\u2019, OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay, a sensitive chronicle of rape, secondary victimisation and motherhood<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe JRB presents this year\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay. The prize honours African writing and photography that \u2018provokes thought on the topics of gender, social justice and sexuality\u2019.<\/p>\n
The judges: \u2018were taken by the fierce intensity of \u201cMothers and Men\u201d, a meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. The essay explores the fragility of healing with a rare sensitivity and insight. OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s voice walks the fine line between heartbreak and redemption, casting new light on questions of rape and secondary victimisation in ways that are new and important. Adegbeye is an urgent and timely voice and both her substantive interests and her prose and befitting of a prize that exists to champion human rights and complicate the framing of what it means to be African today.\u2019<\/p>\n
Read the essay:
\n<\/strong>
\nMothers and Men<\/p>\nWaking up the day after my mother\u2019s death, I recognised the dazed confusion I was feeling as a throwback: On a humid morning five years prior, I had gone to school in a body that had been recently broken into, and everyone had seemed so \u2026 normal.<\/p>\n
Keep reading at the link above<\/em>.<\/p>\n2. \u2018I will always love Africa, because from the minute I arrived it treated me like a white girl.\u2019\u2014Author Adam Smyer reflects on his visit to the Open Book Festival<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nI\u2019ve never been anywhere. Half my life ago I relocated from one coast of the United States to the other, but that\u2019s it. And that\u2019s fine. I have no interest in spending my vacation days sampling the nuances of anti-blackness around the globe. There\u2019s enough on my plate here in the US. And my lifelong Emergency Overseas Survival Plan of yelling \u2018I\u2019m an American!\u2019 until someone whisks me to safety has been dubious for a while now. Yeah, no. My home is the devil I know. Even in my novel Knucklehead I described a certain film as \u2018a tribulation, a rite of passage, kind of like I imagine my first trip to Africa will be\u2019. That pilgrimage has always seemed doomed to fail.<\/p>\n
1. Binyavanga Wainaina, 1971\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nKenyan author and activist Binyavanga Wainaina died on 21 May, at the age of forty-eight.<\/p>\n
Wainaina was born in Nakuru, Kenya, in 1971, and studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa from 1991. He moved to Cape Town in 1996, where he worked as a travel and food writer and professional cook. In 2002, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for his short story \u2018Discovering Home\u2019.<\/p>\n
Wainaina was the founding editor of Kwani?, a journal of experimental writing, which he established in 2003, and which became an important and vital source for new African writing. He completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010. In 2012, his satirical essay \u2018How to Write About Africa<\/a>\u2019, published in Granta magazine, attracted wide attention, and in 2012 he published a memoir,\u00a0One Day I Will Write About This Place<\/em>, to great acclaim.<\/p>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Does it matter now?\u2019 asks the character S\u2019bu Dlamini in Barry Gilder\u2019s wistful novel The List<\/em>. Does it matter whether S\u2019bu trusts his uncle William Dlamini, an apartheid agent who used his position as headmaster of a Lowveld school to spot black talent for the Security Police and the National Intelligence Service? Does it matter that the uncle took advantage of his position as an authority figure to recruit his best students to spy on the ANC for the apartheid state?<\/p>\n The JRB: What do you remember most about Kabelo? He was always stronger than me and assured me that we would become major writers and make films. He loved his aunt with whom he lived in Berea. He worked on large chunks of The Quiet Violence of Dreams <\/em>at his aunt\u2019s place, as well as at my apartment, 20 Olympia Mansions on Yeo Street, Y\u2019ville. I had the fool\u2019s fortune of reading it as a work-in-progress, which is rare because writers, at least this writer, are not in the habit of sharing their works before they\u2019re done. To this day I cannot bring myself to read it as a finished book, if you know what I mean.<\/p>\n He comes to me one night, draped in his glowing skin, resolute eyes and imposing voice. Come home with me? he asks, after spending the night wooing me, his largeness sequestering us in the corner of the bar for countless hours. He is beautiful. It\u2019s always the beautiful ones. They are the ones that peel us away from the humdrum of our safe lives and reintroduce us to the risky, smouldering parts of ourselves we have cremated. Without thinking about it too long, I say Yes. I say yes because the loneliness tells me to. I say yes because I have recently been left and had to leave my home because he found someone whose hands touch him more thoughtfully. I say yes because we all promise to try new things after leaving. I say yes because a beautiful boy thinks me worthy to take home. I say yes because he says I am unlike other boys. I clasp my hand to his and allow him to lead me, wherever. I notice his desperate, choking grasp, as if he believes I will change my mind and run back to my friends.<\/p>\n Journalist, author and anti-apartheid activist Hugh Lewin died on 16 January, aged seventy-nine.<\/p>\n In July 1964, when he was twenty-four years old, Lewin was sentenced to seven years in prison for his activities in the African Resistance Movement. During his years in prison, Lewin secretly recorded his experiences and those of his fellow inmates in the pages of his Bible, and on his release these writings were published in London in 1974 as Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison<\/em>. Hailed as a classic of prison writing, the book remained banned in South Africa for many years, until it was published by David Philip in 1989.<\/p>\n The work of mythology is to guard against things being forgotten. What is thought to be in danger of slipping from view must be inscribed. Mythology does not deal with what is true and what is false: it deals with what is important. In this regard, it does the heavy lifting for inchoate things like feeling and sentiment. It preserves. But preserved things are not the same as their originals. A pickled olive is not an olive growing on the branch.<\/p>\n Poet and activist Sandile Dikeni died in Cape Town on 9 November.<\/p>\n Dikeni was the author of three collections of poems, including the seminal Guava Juice<\/em>, (Mayibuye Books, 1992), which he followed with Telegraph to the Sky<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2001) and Planting Water <\/em>(UKZN Press, 2007). He also published a collection of his articles from the Cape Times, Soul Fire: Writing the Transition<\/em> (UKZN Press, 2002).<\/p>\n The JRB presents this year\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay. The prize honours African writing and photography that \u2018provokes thought on the topics of gender, social justice and sexuality\u2019.<\/p>\n The judges: \u2018were taken by the fierce intensity of \u201cMothers and Men\u201d, a meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. The essay explores the fragility of healing with a rare sensitivity and insight. OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s voice walks the fine line between heartbreak and redemption, casting new light on questions of rape and secondary victimisation in ways that are new and important. Adegbeye is an urgent and timely voice and both her substantive interests and her prose and befitting of a prize that exists to champion human rights and complicate the framing of what it means to be African today.\u2019<\/p>\n Read the essay: Waking up the day after my mother\u2019s death, I recognised the dazed confusion I was feeling as a throwback: On a humid morning five years prior, I had gone to school in a body that had been recently broken into, and everyone had seemed so \u2026 normal.<\/p>\n Keep reading at the link above<\/em>.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never been anywhere. Half my life ago I relocated from one coast of the United States to the other, but that\u2019s it. And that\u2019s fine. I have no interest in spending my vacation days sampling the nuances of anti-blackness around the globe. There\u2019s enough on my plate here in the US. And my lifelong Emergency Overseas Survival Plan of yelling \u2018I\u2019m an American!\u2019 until someone whisks me to safety has been dubious for a while now. Yeah, no. My home is the devil I know. Even in my novel Knucklehead I described a certain film as \u2018a tribulation, a rite of passage, kind of like I imagine my first trip to Africa will be\u2019. That pilgrimage has always seemed doomed to fail.<\/p>\n Kenyan author and activist Binyavanga Wainaina died on 21 May, at the age of forty-eight.<\/p>\n Wainaina was born in Nakuru, Kenya, in 1971, and studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa from 1991. He moved to Cape Town in 1996, where he worked as a travel and food writer and professional cook. In 2002, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for his short story \u2018Discovering Home\u2019.<\/p>\n Wainaina was the founding editor of Kwani?, a journal of experimental writing, which he established in 2003, and which became an important and vital source for new African writing. He completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010. In 2012, his satirical essay \u2018How to Write About Africa<\/a>\u2019, published in Granta magazine, attracted wide attention, and in 2012 he published a memoir,\u00a0One Day I Will Write About This Place<\/em>, to great acclaim.<\/p>\n8. This is how we lost him\u2014Bongani Madondo and Rofhiwa Maneta remember K Sello Duiker<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/strong>
\nBongani Madondo:<\/strong> His silence and madness\u2014meaning his beautiful eccentricity, singularity even. I remember his laughter and how we finished each other\u2019s sentences. He was my doppelganger (although he was five years younger than me). He was a reader. He got me into Ben Okri and I got him into African spirituality and magical realism.<\/p>\n7. <\/a>[Fiction Issue] \u2018Mad About the Boy\u2019, a new short story by Zanta Nkumane<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n6. Hugh Lewin, 1939\u20132019, RIP<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n5. Dry like steel: A wrecking ball of a book\u2014Wamuwi Mbao reviews Adam Habib\u2019s Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n4. Sandile Dikeni, 1966\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n3. [The JRB exclusive] Read \u2018Mothers and Men\u2019, OluTimehin Adegbeye\u2019s Gerald Kraak Prize-winning essay, a sensitive chronicle of rape, secondary victimisation and motherhood<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/strong>
\nMothers and Men<\/p>\n2. \u2018I will always love Africa, because from the minute I arrived it treated me like a white girl.\u2019\u2014Author Adam Smyer reflects on his visit to the Open Book Festival<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n1. Binyavanga Wainaina, 1971\u20132019, RIP<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n