Blame Me on History

By Bloke Modisane

Book Overview

This is the autobiography of William Bloke Modisane. He was one of a team of black writers of the 1950s who created "Drum magazine" and who also later became an actor and playwright. His story was... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671700677
• ISBN13: 9780671700676
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

One of the most powerful...

book I have ever read. Read it 6 years ago and yet its embers remain.

black intellectual's experience of apartheid's dark days

Banned when it was first published in South Africa in 1963, Modisane's account of life as a black in South Africa in the 1940s and 50s is still for me one of the most vivid and insightful reminiscences of apartheid. As he remembers his youth in Sophiatown, his survival tactics, the deaths of his siblings of starvation and his father in a brutal gang fight, he returns again and again - as a refrain - to the last days of Sophiatown whose eerie emptiness echoed his own internal alienation and sense of futility during the darkest days of apartheid. In his evocative style he paints a picture of the vibrant shebeen culture of Sophiatown and some of its famous and notorious inhabitants but without the romantic gloss of some writers. What is refreshing is his lack of romanticising, his inclusion of graphic descriptions of the casual violence and lawlessness of gangs - unrestrained by the white police - who terrorised the community. He was one of a team of black writers, first for the 'Golden City Post', then for 'Drum' magazine, became an actor and playwright and left for West Germany in 1958 when Sophiatown was finally bulldozed. His keen sense of the terrible ironies and absurdities of apartheid, as well as a wealth of historical and political detail provided for me, as a white growing up in 1950s and 60s South Africa, a fascinating, sobering and illuminating window on the experience of a black intellectual trying to survive in South Africa in the 1950s.