The New African: A History - Softcover

Vigne, Randolph; Currey, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0850366232 ISBN 13: 9780850366235

Publisher: Merlin Press, 2015

Synopsis

The New African was first published in 1962 and survived in Cape Town and in London for 53 issues. The radical monthly introduced to South Africa new writers such as Bessie Head, Lewis Nkosi, Ngugi, Can Themba, Dennis Brutus, Andre Brink, and Masizi Kunene alongside established writers including Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, and Alan Paton. It was "a magazine aimed at opening up debate and spreading the word about the new Africa" in the heady years of African independence. The New African was founded to tell people about this new Africa, a newly born concept to analyze, report on, and rejoice in. It also looked ahead to the ultimate collapse of white racial supremacy and the dawn of nonracial democracies. The journal soon attracted the attention of the South African state and its Special Branch, which raided the offices and confiscated all contents. The editors were forced to flee. Printing restarted in London, and copies were smuggled back to South Africa. The second half of the book includes Cape Escape, a thrilling account of how James Currey enabled Randolph Vigne, the clandestine editor of the New African, to escape to Canada by leaping from a Norwegian freighter in Cape Town docks.

About this title

About the Author:

Randolph Vigne is a founder member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) who played a leading role in promoting the concept of a nonracial democracy and in radicalizing the Liberal Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He wrote for and edited journals such as Contact and the New African, which he cofounded in 1962. He spent 22 years as chairperson and later secretary of the Pro-South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) Namibia Support Committee and as a member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He is still active as a freelance writer, is the author of Liberals Against Apartheid and Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist, and is the coauthor of From Strangers to Citizens. James Currey is a publisher and the founder of the eponymous leading imprint of academic books on Africa. He is the author of Africa Writes Back.

About this edition

• Publisher: Merlin Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0850366232
• ISBN 13: 9780850366235
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 73