Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue.

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

Library Weekly archive

Miriam Tlali

Miriam Tlali, ca. 1986 (Source: Trouw, 16-12-1986 via Delpher) On 24 February 2017, South African novelist Miriam Tlali died at the age of 83 in Doornfontein, Johannesburg. She was a visiting fellow of the African Studies Centre in 1984. While she was staying in Leiden, she worked on a novel and a short story collection.

Miriam Masoli Tlali was born in Doornfontein in 1933 and grew up in Sophiatown. She attended St Cyprian's Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the National University of Lesotho (then called Pius the XII University) at Roma, Lesotho. Leaving there because of lack of funds, she went to secretarial school and found employment as a bookkeeper at a Johannesburg furniture store.

Tlali drew on her experiences as an office clerk for her first book, Muriel at Metropolitan, a semi-autobiographical novel. Although written in 1969, it was not published for six years, being rejected by many publishing houses in South Africa. In 1975 Ravan Press published Muriel at Metropolitan: 'only after removing certain extracts they thought would certainly offend the Censorship Board — the South African literary watchdog. But despite this effort, the novel was banned almost immediately after publication because the Censorship Board pronounced it undesirable in the South African political context'. The book reached a wider audience after its publication in 1979 by Longman under the title Between Two Worlds, and its subsequent translation into other languages, including Japanese, Polish, German and Dutch.

Her second novel, Amandla, which was based on the 1976 Soweto uprising, was also banned in South Africa soon after it was published in 1980. Later books by Tlali include Mihloti (meaning 'Tears'), a collection of short stories, interviews and non-fiction, published in 1984 by the black publishing house Skotaville, which she co-founded. Her novels were unbanned in 1986. Her 1989 book Footprints in the Quag, published in South Africa by David Philip, was brought out under the title Soweto Stories by Pandora Press.

Tlali co-founded and contributed to Staffrider magazine, for which she wrote a regular column, 'Soweto Speaking', as well as writing for other South African publications, including the Rand Daily Mail.

Tlali received numerous awards during her lifetime, most notably, the Presidential Award, the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) in 2008, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the South African Literary Awards.

(Source: Wikipedia)