Full Description
One of few books translated into English from Sesotho, In My Heart introduces a long-neglected voice to global readership.
Elsewhere Texts, edited by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, presents radical new engagements with non-European literary cultures. This volume, the latest in this ambitious series, is a brilliant collection of essays originally written in Sesotho by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng. Often confined to the role of "native informants" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers working in African languages laid the foundation for the politics and poetics of decolonization and are legendary among their own communities of readers, though their work remains little known elsewhere. In My Heart belongs to this tradition of colonial renegades. Writing in the 1950s during the cataclysmic events of apartheid that were transforming life in South Africa, Mofokeng offers a series of meditations that provide his readers with a Sesotho worldview outside the categories authorized by colonial knowledge. In My Heart, expertly translated by Nhlanhla Maake, introduces a significant African thinker's influential work to a global readership.
Contents
General Introduction by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak
Translator's Note
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka by Simon Gikandi
1.The Heart
2.Character
3.Loneliness
4.Death
5.Horse Racing
6.Farewell
7.Change
8.Time
9.Friends
10.Paper
11.Exams
12.The River
13.Driving an Automobile
14.The Sea
15.The Hospital
16.Plants
17.Money
18.Marriage
19.Old Age
20.The End
