Noni Jabavu
| Noni Jabavu | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Helen Nontando Jabavu 20 August 1919 Middledrift, Eastern Cape, South Africa |
| Died | 19 June 2008 (aged 88) At sea |
| Nationality | South African |
| Occupation | Writer and journalist |
Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu (20 August 1919 – 19 June 2008) was a South African writer and journalist, one of the first African women to pursue a successful literary career and the first black South African woman to publish books of autobiography. Educated in Britain from the age of 13, she became the first African woman to be the editor of a British literary magazine when in 1961 she took on the editorship of The New Strand, a revived version of The Strand Magazine, which had closed in 1950.
In the words of poet Makhosazana Xaba: "One only has to read her two books (Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People) to realize just how skilled she was as a memoirist. Her journalistic column editorials demonstrate a reflective style that must have been unusual for her times. While interviewing Wally Serote who was living in Botswana during the same time as Noni, I learned something that confirmed my initial thoughts on her. 'We men, she said, did not know how to relate to her (Noni). She was a woman living far ahead of our times.' This speaks volumes considering Serote himself is a world-wise literary and cultural giant."
Noni Jabavu was born in Middledrift in the Eastern Cape into a family of intellectuals, the marriage of her parents forging a union between two of the most prominent Christian families in the Eastern Cape at the time. Her mother was Thandiswa Florence Makiwane, founder of Zenzele Woman's Self-Improvement Association; her father was the activist and author Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, and her grandfather John Tengo Jabavu, was an editor of South Africa's first newspaper to be written in Xhosa. Noni was educated in England from the age of 13, under the guardianship of Margaret and Arthur Bevington Gillett (alongside Mohan Kumaramangalam and his sister Parvati Krishnan) and continued to live there for many years.
She studied first at The Mount School, York and later at London's Royal Academy of Music. Before the Second World War she had become disinterested in the Royal Academy of Music and concentrated mostly on left-wing student politics. In 1938, she was at a prom in the Queen’s Hall that was interrupted to be told of Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" settlement.
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