Lewis Nkosi

Lewis Nkosi
Lewis Nkosi at the Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages (CSSALL) at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), 2001
Born	(1936-12-05)5 December 1936 Embo, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Died	5 September 2010(2010-09-05) (aged 73) Johannesburg, South Africa
Nationality	South African
Occupation	Novelist, journalist, essayist, poet

Lewis Nkosi (5 December 1936 – 5 September 2010) was a South African writer, who spent 30 years in exile as a consequence of restrictions placed on him and his writing by the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. A multifaceted personality, he attempted every literary genre, literary criticism, poetry, drama, novels, short stories, essays, as well as journalism.

Nkosi was born in a traditional Zulu family in a place called Embo in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He attended local schools, before enrolling at M. L. Sultan Technical College in Durban.

Nkosi in his early twenties began working as a journalist, first in Durban, joining the weekly publication Ilanga lase Natal ("Natal sun") in 1955, and then in Johannesburg for Drum magazine and as chief reporter for its Sunday newspaper, the Golden City Post, from 1956 to 1960.

He contributed essays to many magazines and newspapers. His essays criticised apartheid and the racist state, as a result, the South African government banned his works.

Nkosi faced severe restrictions on his writing due to the publishing regulations found in the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, and he faced severe restrictions as a writer. At the same time he became the first black South African journalist to win a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University to pursue his studies. When he applied for permission to go to United States, he was granted a one-way exit permit to leave South Africa, thus barred from returning. In 1961, accepting the scholarship to study at Harvard, he began a 30-year exile.

In 1962 he attended the African Writers Conference at Makerere University, along with the likes of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ezekiel Mphahlele. He was an editor for The New African in London and the NET in the United States. He became a Professor of Literature and held positions at the University of Wyoming and the University of California-Irvine, as well as at universities in Zambia and in Warsaw, Poland. He appeared in Three Swings on a Pendulum, a programme about "Swinging London" in 1967 which can be viewed on BBC iplayer.