The seventh edition of Wordsetc, South Africa’s foremost literary journal, has just reached the shelves! The publication continues to showcase the best of South African literature. This time around it focuses on crime fiction as a theme. Guest edited by author and editor Joanne Hichens the edition explores the ins and out of the genre, the motivation of crime writers to write crime fiction, and takes a look too at real-life crime in our society.

Read all about Margie Orford’s success – how she makes crime pay – with her Clare Hart series, in the main profile by Sam Beckbessinger.

There are also illuminating essays by writers such as Hichens, Jassy Mackenzie, Sarah Lotz, Richard Kunzmann, Roger Smith, Helen Moffett, Andrew Brown, Justice Malala, Emma Chen, Thembelani Ngenelwa and Megan Voysey-Braig. It’s a feast of reading for the literati or those who simply can’t get enough of South African literature.

Contents at a glance:

Mains

Personal notes: First loves: Justice Malala remembers the crime thrillers of his youth

Essay: Of heroes and villains: Jassy Mackenzie sizes up different characters in krimis

Real life: With best intentions: Andrew Brown on the humiliation of an innocent man

Feature: Oscar replies: The intrigue of Bubbles Schroeder’s murder continues by Carla Chait

Profile: The queen of crime fiction: Margie Orford lets the blood flow on her pages by Sam Beckbessinger

Essay: A little bit of ultraviolence : Richard Kunzmann finds it unavoidable, even necessary

Essay: Community matters: Novelist Joanne Hichens guards her neighbourhood

Essay: Sex and crime: The portrayal of prostitution in local crime novels by Nora Krüger

Essay: Fictional justice: Sarah Lotz, writer of Exhibit A, ruminates on the growth of the legal thriller

Real life: A letter to my killer: Writer Thembelani Ngenelwa relives the day he was shot and left dead

Real life: Crimes of passion: Poet Fungisayi Sasa ponders this ugly British stain

Perspectives: Crime and punishment: Five South Africans offer their views on the scourge of crime, as told to Phakama Mbonambi

Regulars

Letters: How readers feel about us

Fiction: Burning A short story by Megan Voysey-Braig

Book reviews & etc

A look at the latest local and international reads

Appraisal: A man of our times: How Deon Meyer revived the local crime thriller

Fiction: Poppy A short story by Helen Moffett

How I write: My life of crime: Crime writer Roger Smith examines the “what ifs” in his stories

Lifestyle

Travel: Up the River Niger: Joanne Rushby journeys to Timbuktu the hard way

Travel: A taste of Russia: Bronwyn McLennan’s enchanting visit

Food & drink: Served up the Chinese way: Emma Chen on her life, love for good food and her new book

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Visit us at www.wordsetc.co.za

Subscription is R170 for four editons.

For more information, write to: info@wordsetc.co.za

We’ve got a long list of titles to choose from and reviewers get to keep the book. Our deadline is the end of the month, so write to Flamencomail@gmail.com asap to claim your patch of the next Wordsetc!

“Coovadia’s work hardly shies away from including troubling contemporary issues, including the inevitable twinning of race and political life in South Africa (and the myriad hues in which this link appears); the ambiguous position of Indians living outside of the Subcontinent – their ability to fit between the seams of discord, as well as irritate all sides of a given conflict; and the necessary criminal elements that help forge the bonds within such in-between societies, ensure survival for the time being, and foment plans of escape when necessary.” – M. Neelika Jayawardane

This sixth edition of Wordsetc, South Africa’s foremost literary journal, is out. Hot on the heels of a fantastic edition that looked at the iconic Nadine Gordimer, the latest edition continues to showcase the best of South African literature. It leads with novelist Imraan Coovadia, a young writer on a mission. He also teaches creative writing at the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He has just written his third book, High Low In-between. We explore what makes him tick as a writer, the themes he explores, his literary influences and even the music he listens to.

The rest of the contents are also sizzling.

Contents at a glance

The main profile is on novelist Imraan Coovadia, author of the recently published High Low In-between. We explore his work, the ambiguities that he tackles about Indians in the country.

In the Personal Notes section, activist Zachie Achmat relives the days of his imprisonment at the age of 15 for political activism (“My Father’s Touch”). He has bittersweet memories of his father. A touching read.

Over the years advertising icon Alistair King of King James Advertising has amassed a special collection of rare books. In an eloquent and humorous essay he tells why he frequents second-hand bookstores in search of that rare book (“The Collector”).

Award-winning journalist Kevin Bloom tells us about motivation behind writing Ways of Staying, a book that takes an unflinching view at the state of the South Africa. Some may describe the book as bleak, but deep down, Kevin makes a case of being a realist (“The Realist”).

Literary critic and writer Karina Magdalena Szczurek profiles seven of our top writers in South Africa. She specifically looks at how these writers hang on to their full-time jobs and still manage to write creatively (“Writers’ other lives”). A very illuminating feature.

In the Appraisal section, researcher and academic Joy Watson offers a rich narrative about the legacy of Ruth First as a writer and champion of social change (“Her words”).

For the past two years Victor Dlamini has been taking gorgeous photography of some of our remarkable artists, including writers. Across a spread of six pages, he shows readers his awesome work (“Capturing creative spirits”).

In the How I Write section, acclaimed novelist Angelina Sithebe details how the writing business happens for her.

Lindiwe Nkutha’s wonderful play called Woman In Transit is captivating in telling of a young woman from the countryside who comes to Johannesburg in the 1950s to find a city full of degradation, and her ultimate defiant stand against injustice. We publish an extract of the play.

In our new Poetry section, Seni Seneviratne, an acclaimed poet and performance artist from Britain, tells us about the central role poetry plays in her life.

In our Bookshelf Series, Absa’s marketing head Happy Ntshingila talks about the writing of his new book Black Jerusalem in which he reminisces about the heady days of crafting winning advertising pitches in his earlier life as a founding partner at Herdbouys advertising, the first black-owned advertising agency in the country.

There’s all this and more – literary travel, short story, book reviews, a restaurant review and listings pages. As with previous five editions, this issue is jam-packed. It will satisfy literature lovers and those keen to know more about the state of South African literature at the moment.

For an interview with publishing editor Phakama Mbonambi, or to excerpt any of the stories from Wordsetc, please contact him on 083 287 1955 or Flamencomail@gmail.com.

See website at www.wordsetc.co.za or Facebook group called Wordsetc – A South African Literary Journal.

Outlets

Wordsetc is available at bookshops (Exclusive Books, CNA and many independent bookstores such as Boekehuis, Kalk Bay Books, Clarke’s Bookstore, Protea Books and The Book Lounge) and various alternative distribution points such as DVD Gurus, Absolutely Fabulous DVD Nouveau (Morningside), Service Station Café and Wild Olive Food Store (Greenside) and Michael Stevenson Gallery (Cape Town).
Price

The journal retails for R49.95. Subscription is R170 for four editions. Back copies are available. Just write to Flamencomail@gmail.com.

Book details

• High Low In-between by Imraan Coovadia
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  EAN: 9781415200704
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Nadine Gordimer: Fifth edition of Wordsetc hits bookshelves

“Gordimer’s extraordinary achievement is that for a period of some sixty years she has been providing us with (in Stephen Clingman’s telling phrase) a history from the inside.” – Tim Keegan

This fifth edition of Wordsetc, South Africa’s foremost literary journal, is coming out on Monday, 18 May 2009. After dedicating the entire fourth edition to analysing US President Barack Obama, the current edition is back on familiar territory – sampling the best in South African literature. True to its founding mission, it predominantly features works of emerging but exciting new writers, proving that South African literature has a bright future in the hands of emerging writers. But we also remember icons who have been in the field for longer. Our main story is on Nadine Gordimer, our very own Nobel laureate and one of our country’s foremost intellectual. Novelist André Brink has also contributed a fascinating essay.

Contents at a glance

In a captivating and thoroughly researched main profile on Gordimer, novelist Tim Keegan (Tromp’s Last Stand and My Life with the Duvals) pays tribute to Gordimer. Meticulously, he goes through her entire body of work and finds a lot to savour, exploring Gordimer’s world in fiction and in real life. In the end, Keegan implores all serious readers of literature to read Gordimer. In the same profile, fellow novelist and friend Dr Mongane Wally Serote, chips in about a woman he has known for many decades, someone who has had a profound influence on him.

Veteran novelist André Brink also makes an appearance in our pages with an essay on a decisive importance of a title. This is an extra essay that did not make it into his new memoir A Fork in the Road/’n Vurk in the Pad. It appears here for the first time.

In an eloquent personal essay, sensational new Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah (author of An Elegy For Easterly) reflects on how she became a keen reader, a writer and a lawyer. She especially singles out her autodidactic father for praise. Moving.

Writer and poet Dr Helen Moffett laments about the neglected art and craft of editing in South African publishing. She details the pain and offers a heartfelt advice to publishers and writers.

In an innovative feature written in letter form, Carla Chait discusses a mysterious murder of a young, vivacious girl (“From Mimsy”) in the 1940s. Chait’s elegant and masterly style of writing belies her background in Science.

In “I’m Elliot”, writer and journalist Jeanne Hromnik draws on real life to tenderly reflect on a bittersweet relationship she has with her gardener, Elliot, where something always seems to get lost in translation each time they communicate.

A young historian, Mwelela Cele, grapples with the rich legacy of writer and dramatist H.I.E Dhlomo.

Nthikeng Mohlele (author of Scent of Bliss) tells us how he writes, how sometimes this force called creativity plays havoc with him. Funny and illuminating about how a great writer goes about his work.

Brian Jones and Jane Morris are a dedicated pair of publishers who run ‘amaBooks in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. They tell of the trials and tribulations of publishing in a Zimbabwe under strain. Inspiration stuff.

In our Bookshelf Series, Alex Perry, author of Falling Off The Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies, and Time magazine Africa bureau chief, tells us what he’s reading. But first he clears the confusion about how the world understands globalisation.

There’s all this and more – literary travel, book reviews, a restaurant review and listings pages. It’s a jam-packed edition that will satisfy literature lovers and those keen to know more about Gordimer.

Purchase and get involved

See website at www.wordsetc.co.za or Facebook group called Wordsetc – A South African Literary Journal.

Wordsetc is available at bookshops (Exclusive Books, CNA and many independent bookstores such as Boekehuis, Kalk Bay Books, Clarke’s Bookstore, Protea Books and The Book Lounge) and alternative distribution points such as DVD Gurus, Absolutely Fabulous DVD Nouveau (Morningside), Service Station Café and Wild Olive bistro (Greenside). The journal retails for R49.95. Subscription is R170 for four editions. Back copies are available.

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To commemorate Barack Obama’s inauguration today, Wordsetc brings you this piece from our latest edition by Barbara Nussbaum.

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A Psalm for Obama

Let us Savour today
The seed of all who dream
Some seed bore fruit
In the hands of one man
A fruit, So magnificent
That the world woke up
And celebrated
May we be in awe
Of this new ocean of change
So pure in being
So wide in breadth
So divine intent
That millions of us
Witness the seas of our being
Flowing in waves
Of togetherness
Bringing tears of relief in some
Songs of joy in others
And hope for humanity’s oneness
In love

- Dedicated to Obama and to all who dream, November 6, 2008, Johannesburg

I wrote this psalm the day on November 6, a day after Barack Obama was elected US President. The previous day, Obama had delivered an unforgettable acceptance speech. I had been stunned and moved by a sacred moment in time. It was a day where history felt blessed. Like billions of people around the world, I shared a contagious hope for a different future.

And then, part of me felt a deep and sober sadness. What has taken us so long as a world to wake up? I was born to Jewish parents in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. My father and grandparents had fled the Holocaust in Germany. We had lost many relatives to the Holocaust, so witnessing any ignorance in the world about race, religion, ethnicity and colour has continued to be a concern. Watching the tears rolling down Jesse Jackson’s face and Oprah’s face, I cried too. Mine were tears of catharsis. I was crying for a world, which had taken too long, to care. Paradoxically, in a moment that defined the possibility for collective transformation, I finally felt free to acknowledge a profound sadness and disappointment. How long we have taken as a world to make a collective choice for change.

Finally in Obama, we have a leader with a magnificent ability to communicate across class, across race, across nations. He touches so many of us who yearn for the power of our connection as human beings.

By the next day, I had slept peacefully and began to write the psalm, starting to feel the joy and the abundant blessings of Obama’s election. In the writing, I felt the gratitude for all the dreamers and visionaries I have met in my life. I realised that many of us hope and dream and I wanted to acknowledge all who dream and all who are bold enough to dare to hope audaciously.

That day, I saw the possibility of hope in the millions of faces on the television screen. For in Obama, the world has a leader whose awareness of our interconnectedness combines with a powerful stand for hope and for change. Obama’s ability to articulate the ways in which we are intertwined as human beings speaks to a zeitgeist, a moment in time, when the world is hungry for his message. Our choices and decisions, small and large, individually and collectively, affect each other continuously and have repercussions globally as we discover how interlinked we are in our communities, in our businesses, in our countries and in our world. Obama speaks to this so brilliantly and inspires us. This moment felt sacred for the world and sacred in my own life’s journey. When I hear Obama speak, I recognise an ubuntu exemplar. These are people I watch for, people who give my own life meaning and inspiration.

Of the various definitions of ubuntu, I like the one given by a Congolese student Raiz Boneza, who is currently engaged in peace studies in Norway. He writes, “I am because you are, I became because you became; we are human beings through the eyes of other human beings; my dignity is your dignity. That is what ubuntu teaches us.”

To give some context and background, I have had the privilege of living between the US and South Africa during the past sixteen years. Frightened after being mugged in Joburg in 2000, I bolted to the US, just in time to witness the horror of George W Bush stealing that election. Seeing images of collective disappointment on the television hurt me. I witnessed the gaping chasm in a nation divided, puzzled and angry. I was shocked and in the noise of my own outrage, noticed the beginning of a profound inner dialogue. It went something like this.

How could American politics be different if ubuntu was part of the equation? How could the world be, if ubuntu was widely practised? What would American capitalism look like if sprinkled with African ubuntu? All these questions were alive for me. In the sweet intensity of those moment, life felt large and the questions irresistible! These have stayed with me, like a slow insistent drum beat that needed to be heard.

My own pathway to ubuntu emerged in unexpected ways. Through research for a thesis, on African dance, I began to understand something about the power of the social processes and the genius of the emotional intelligence that lives in African culture. The research proved to be an unusual passport into an unexpected forum in 1995 – Wits Business School’s South African Management Project. The intention of the project was to acknowledge how Eurocentric our corporate culture was in South Africa and to explore how and why African culture might be better understood and more effectively accommodated in the business setting. We started to document how and why African culture was relevant to the work place.

I met some stellar personalities who became my mentors and teachers. Through their eyes, I began discover the valuable heritage of African culture. Through their wisdom, I learned about the gold that lies deep within the soul of this country. And ubuntu stayed with me, even thousands of miles away in America.

So returning to that unfortunate November 2000, when I watched a different President-elect assume “glory” on a television screen, the questions evoked in the aftermath of that election stayed with me. I finally settled on taking up the challenge of writing about ubuntu for Americans. This seemed a crazy idea, but I felt deeply moved and started writing. The events of September 11 2001 fuelled my motivation to write even more. By the end of 2002 I had completed an eight thousand-word article on ubuntu. It was published by the World Business Academy (www.worldbusiness.org), a cutting edge think tank, based in California, where I was then living.

I cried for several days after the acceptance of the article. Not only because of the awe of personal achievement but because of the feedback of Rinaldo Brutoco, founder and president of the Academy about the importance of ubuntu for the world. Brutoco, a visionary and a futurist is surrounded by fellows who are thought leaders. For Brutoco, ubuntu captured where we need to go as a planet. Then (and now) he believes that the only conscious choice we have as a planet is to acknowledge our interconnectedness, and to know that we are only people through other people, collectively responsible for creating a world economy that works for all.

The insight I gained from Brutoco is that Africa’s gift to the world is ubuntu. Sadly we don’t value ubuntu much or recognise the many ways that this concept has influenced our history. In our obsession with the politics of the day, we forget how magnificent our own transformation process has been. We don’t recognise that we are leaders in the art of dialogue that so often holds the possibility for collective transformation. This is a gift we can share if we choose to see it for ourselves.

I continue dreaming and writing about ubuntu in the midst of cynicism about the word, especially in South Africa where it is overused, misunderstood and misinterpreted. Since 2006 I have been watching out for ubuntu exemplars and collecting their stories. And since the beginning of this year, I have been excitedly following Obama, noticing his language of we – of connection. His speeches reveal a remarkable gift of articulating the bonds that connect us as human beings. He sews the golden thread of our shared humanity in his careful choice of words and images. At the end of his influential speech on race earlier this year, Obama described the mutual recognition between Ashley, a young white girl who had been eating mustard and relish sandwiches for a year, and an old black man. Asked why he was at the meeting, the black man said he was at the meeting because of Ashley. In that speech, and that story, I recognised that in Obama we have an ubuntu exemplar writ large. Really large!

Obama inspires those of us who dream to dream more, to dream with hope. He, like our beloved Madiba, inspires us to be bold and to believe in a more humane world; a world in which we value each other, care about each other, respect each other and love each other. I wrote the psalm as a global citizen with the heart of a daughter of Africa. Inspired by the oceans of change I see, I choose hope. Yes hope, even during a time when too few political leaders glow with the alchemy and magic of Madiba or Obama, in our country and in our world.

I believe that part of Obama’s gift derives, not only from his connection to the spirit of Africa, but also because of his ability to feel compassion for all people. In the epilogue of his memoir Dreams From My Father, we sense Obama’s recognition in the beautiful universality of our common humanity. He writes: “I hear the spirit of…..Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marchers…….I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in the Lower East side sweat shop; dust bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of their shattered lives……I hear all of these voices clamouring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life….. What is our community and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How to transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?”

My greatest hope is that we not only value what Obama is bringing to America and the world, but that while acknowledging his greatness, we recognise our own greatness as South Africans and the gift of ubuntu we can bring to the world.

- Barbara Nussbaum

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By turning to books to tell his complicated life story, Barack Obama successfully sold his grand vision for his country that would otherwise have viewed him as too exotic, and perhaps, unelectable, because of his race and Islamic name.

This fourth edition of Wordsetc, South Africa’s foremost literary journal, looks at the life of the US President-elect through the prism of literature. Inside Obama the politician there’s Obama the writer. The edition also looks at what he stands for and the unprecedented results of the 2008 US presidential election. In addition to the main profile, there are plenty of in-depth essays offering different perspectives on what Obama represents.

Contents at a glance

In the main profile Wordsetc editor and publisher Phakama Mbonambi notes that Obama used a stirring memoir (Dreams From My Father) to sell his life story and convince a sceptical electorate that his name and heritage may be exotic to a US audience but he was, in fact, electable to the ultimate public office – the Oval Office. His roots as a writer are also explored, with his mother looming large.

In a lyrical essay “A Most Divisive Election”, Mike Sager, Wordsetc editor at large and guest editor of this edition, notices that tensions ran high in the 2008 US presidential election, a sign that America had yet to deal with myriad social issues. He sees Obama as offering hope to his own biracial child that he could be anything he wanted.

Juan Williams, a bestselling author and one of America’s leading political commentators, says in “A message for all the world, that Obama’s achievement the fulfilment of a dreams of those who marched and suffered for civil rights in the 1960s, the Moses generation. He sees Obama as the leader of the Joshua generation, his rise a beacon of hope worldwide.

In Personal Notes, Jacob Dlamini, a journalist studying towards a PhD in History at Yale University, takes an active interest in the 2008 election unlike in 2000 and 2004. While the US fascinates him, it also alienates him. As a result, he has learned to take US life in small doses.

South African writer Barbara Nussbaum sees Barack Obama as the embodiment of ubuntu by his constant stressing humanity’s interconnectedness. She advises that, in honouring Obama, Africa must be grateful for giving the world the wonderful concept of ubuntu.

In his essay, “It all seems like a show”, Andrew P. Jones, a US writer, academic and filmmaker based in Johannesburg, takes a discordant view. He doesn’t think Obama’s victory holds much significance for the liberation of Black people in the US.

In our fiction section, Sandisile Tshuma offers a wonderful short story (“Arrested Development”) about surviving the hardships of Zimbabwe.

There’s all this and more – literary travel, book reviews, a restaurant review and listings pages. It’s a jam-packed edition that will satisfy literature lovers and those keen to know more about Obama.

For an interview with publishing editor Phakama Mbonambi, or to excerpt any of the stories from Wordsetc, please contact him on 083 287 1955 or Flamencomail@gmail.com.

See website at www.wordsetc.co.za or Facebook group called Wordsetc. Wordsetc is available at bookshops (Exclusive Books, CNA and many independent bookstores such as Boekehuis, Kalk Bay Books, Clarke’s Bookstore, Protea Books and The Book Lounge). It retails for R49.95.

Cover art courtesy Shephard Fairey of California USA.

By Pippa Green

“When I first approached Manuel with the idea of writing a biography on him – back in 2002 – he was not averse to the idea. Neither did he bubble with enthusiasm.”

“I also realise how little we still know about each other and the personal pain so many suffered. The present often suffocates the past.”

English writer Somerset Maugham once said there are three rules about writing biographies – unfortunately nobody knows what they are. That can be nowhere more true than if the subject is a living person still making history. And most of the new spate of biographies in South Africa are about very much alive people because we are stage in our history where we are beginning to reflect on the foundations of our democracy.

Part of that is a reflection on the leaders who helped bring it into being. First we had the books on the first generation – Nelson Mandela, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo. In the past two years, we have seen the stories of the second generation of political leaders explained. So we have had a substantial biography on Thabo Mbeki by Mark Gevisser (there have been others but for the most part, whether they are hostile or friendly, have been vehicles used to express the authors’ own political opinions), one on Cyril Ramaphosa (a reluctant subject), an authorised (and the most comprehensive) biography of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and a biography/autobiography on Mac Maharaj that elucidates the political battles inside the ANC like few others have done.

It seems entirely right that this reflection is taking place now, as that generation grows old. But biographies of politicians, interesting as they may turn out to be, are especially difficult at a time in South Africa when the political jostling for power is so great. What should be a work on history is sometimes seen as a political intervention.

It’s a pity really because we are constrained by today in recording the stories of yesterday for tomorrow. The rich and interesting narratives of the lives of South Africans are difficult to tell because they may disturb the political exigencies of the moment.

The best writers of biography have managed to transcend, but not ignore, the present. Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki does this in an emphatic and empathetic way. We understand the man who became President – his strengths and weaknesses – and the history that shaped him, because Gevisser looked beyond today, both past and forward, to tell his story.

So how and why do biographers choose their subjects? I began work on this project nearly three years ago, but it had been on my mind at least three years before that. Partly it is to do with the age we have reached as a country. It is more than a decade after our democracy was established and we are beginning to tell the stories of the “founding parents” (although most are still the “founding fathers”).

But there is a much more specific reason in my interest in Manuel. I had come of age, back to back with him as it were, in the same city and the same political milieu. But our paths to that point were decidedly different. When I first became aware of him, I was a university student, brought up in a middle-class (though, not rich – my parents were both journalists) household with all the attendant advantages that went with being white in a discriminatory society. He was a trainee civil engineer on a construction site by day and a political activist at night. He had been brought up in a working class household, had suffered through the relatively early death of his father. His mother, a garment worker, had had to make significant sacrifices to give her children, at the very least, a good high school education. Both sides of his family – paternal and maternal – had been victim of the Group Areas Act. Both had lost their homes in old, established communities.

I didn’t know this back in the early 1980s. Then, when I became a newspaper reporter, and when he fell much more in my focus, he was a full-time civic organiser and activist. But he never wore his past as a large badge intended to evoke sympathy. Neither did he do so through long periods when he was either in hiding from police or in jail during the emergency. I recall once doing an interview with him in the house I lived in Cape Town. He had come dressed to look like a Muslim artisan – overalls and a skull cap – in an old battered bakkie. Somehow – I can’t recall how – I had arranged this secret rendezvous in the middle of the State of Emergency to interview him for an article I was writing about how the UDF had been affected by the clampdown. What I do remember is that it took a lot of nudging, on my part, to get him to speak about his own personal predicament.

After the ANC was unbanned, he rocketed to an important leadership position in the organisation, was appointed to Mandela’s first cabinet, and then became the first black Minister of Finance. Today he is the longest-serving finance minister in the world. He was one of those who took the debris of an economy that apartheid had left in its wake, shook it up, straightened it out.

Yes, there are still many failures, many shortcomings in what our country can deliver to its citizens, not least jobs. But we have been in the longest recorded phase of economic growth. And Manuel, it seemed, played a critical role in this.

Yet I was not sure that I really knew, or understood him. What made him able to grasp the historical circumstances he was dealt in life and, in turn, shape them to make new history? In a sense all biographies are duty-bound to try to answer this question, but it is one of the hardest to answer. We take so much for granted about the people we think we know.

When I first approached Manuel with the idea of writing a biography on him – back in 2002 – he was not averse to the idea. Neither did he bubble with enthusiasm. But as we engaged in initial dialogues that were more than conversations and less than interviews, he began to examine questions about himself and his own background that intrigued him.

And so in 2005, we began seriously: a structured series of interviews that followed, more or less, but not religiously, a chronological order. We had agreed that the biography should not be “authorised” but rather a “co-operative one”. There are certain implications to an authorised biography. For one thing, one needs access to far more written documentation than is possible when the “story” is still running. It is impossible to extract cabinet memos, for instance, from a serving cabinet minister. Also, I thought that Manuel was not yet old enough – his career is not yet done – for an authorised biography to be sufficiently authoritative. Thirdly, in our contentious country, authorised biographies of political leaders may seem more like an endorsement than a reflection and a narrative account. Lastly, an unauthorised biography allows the writer more distance and more independence. Sometimes we see significance in the things that the subjects don’t.

There is also always the tension in such an undertaking between how to balance personal details of a life, with the bigger political issues. It is critical to balance the two. The story of a human life is imminently personal. To deny this would be to write a book that no reader can relate to. But there are always the issues that are somehow bigger and beyond the personal: the grand narratives of transition in this country, for instance. A biography of a political leader is, by definition, more about the political changes they were part of than anything else. But to ignore the personal aspects of a life totally would make for a dry (and untruthful) read.

With Manuel, I was fortunate in many ways in my subject choice. For the first six months or so of my research, we would meet once every six weeks or so, for over an hour. I would ask questions and he would remember and reflect. Mostly, we would meet around the kitchen table in his house on the government estate in Pretoria, after hours, so there were few interruptions. Occasionally, we would meet in his offices where there are often interruptions and always time pressures. Later on we met less frequently but fairly regularly. Those interactions have allowed his voice to be central in my writing. And his voice, luckily, is more interesting than that of many politicians – it is robust and colourful at times, reflective at others.

For the writer of narrative non-fiction, where every fact and date has to be pinned down before the story can go forward, Manuel is a godsend. He has one of the sharpest memories I have come across. I have gone out to interview others in his life, and tried to cross-check dialogue and dates and places and a sequence of events. In almost every case his memory is astonishingly precise.

I have interviewed about seventy people for this project, several more than once, and that too has been a revelatory experience. I have found that when one asks people to reflect on their own journeys through life, and the way those journeys intersected with Manuel’s, they have engaged with the past in a way that at first I didn’t think possible in a country where it still impinges so directly on the present. Yet as friend and fellow-journalist, Marianne Thamm, remarked to me, many of our everyday conversations either deal with the immediately practical, or are pretty superficial. So when people get a chance to really reflect on the circumstances, both personal and historic, that have shaped their lives, they have grasped that opportunity.

I also realise how little we still know about each other and the personal pain so many suffered. The present often suffocates the past. Perhaps this is why we tell the stories of our past and of the people who have led us out of it. To try to capture the humanity in others, and so help us find our own.

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• Pippa Green’s biography of Trevor Manuel – Choice, Not Fate – will be launched by Penguin next week.
• This essay appeared in the second edition of Wordsetc in May 2008. Back copies are still available. To subscribe to this excellent literary journal please visit http://www.wordsetc.co.za/. It’s R170 for four copies.

The next edition of Wordsetc looks at – wait for it – Barack Obama. We’re looking at him through the lens of literature.

Obama is that rare politician who can write (Dreams From My Father, and The Audacity of Hope). And, besides, he has just pulled off a major feat, one whose implications will be spoken about and analysed for generations. Through thought-provoking essays, this edition dissects his achievement. This edition will be out at the beginning of December. So, the countdown has begun.

Meanwhile, if you’re not posting comment here, please join the discussion on our Facebook Group.

Cover art courtesy Shephard Fairey of California USA.