Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country--one of spectacular beauty and promise--come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors? To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha's extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey. Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission's work. The narrative is often traumatic, vivid, and provocative. Krog's powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions, and secret themes. This compelling tale is Antjie Krog's profound literary account of the mending of a country that was in colossal need of change.

Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

History

Krog, Antjie

Africa

Crown

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country’s corrosive past—three hundred years of colonialism, the Anglo-Boer War, the displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of millions of people, and the ravages of racism and capitalist exploitation—continues to eat away at what Desmond Tutu admiringly called “the Rainbow Nation.” Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as starting point, acclaimed writer Antjie Krog’s essays explore texts from every corner of South Africa in an attempt to remap the borders of her country’s communities. In these pages, texts from black women, Afrikaner men, and comic strips are discussed alongside ideas from African philosophers, an archbishop, and a Nobel Prize winner. Through this extraordinary marriage of academic observation and poetic intervention, Krog endeavors to move South Africa beyond the present moment and toward a vocabulary of grace and care.

Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (The Africa List)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Seagull Books

COUNTRY OF MY SKULL

Country of my skull

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Random House]

Krog captures the complexity of South Africa's Truth and Reconcilliation Commission in a personal narrative, taking the reader beneath the big movements of the Truth Commission and beyond, into the heart of what it means to be a South African today. Originally published by Jonathan Cape.

Country of My Skull

Vintage

This is the first collection of Antjie Krog’s poetry to appear in English, and it cements her reputation as one of South Africa’s greatest poets. Down to My Last Skin is her poetic exploration of her different identities, the layers that make the human condition so intricate, fragile and yet resilient. The collection is divided into seven clear sections which explore layers in Krog’s life, and those in every individual. Down to My Last Skin was the inaugural winner of the FNB Vita Poetry Award in 2000. From Down to My Last Skin, p80 (n) neither family nor friends says Lady Anne tonight everything speaks through the dead towards me your brittle bundle of bones my longestloved beloved lies lonely and longingly cradled somewhere lost and lean I am overwhelmingly awake tonight of me so little has become you are all I had in this world beloved deathling alone and cold it is behind my ribs Africa had me giving up all it is so dark it is so bleak soft beloved taunter of me so little has become I am down to my last skin

Down to My Last Skin: Poems

Penguin Random House South Africa

In times of fundamental change, people tend to find a space, lose it and the find another space as life and the world transform around them. What does this metamorphosis entail and in what ways are we affected by it? How do we live through it and what may we become on our journey toward each other, particularly when the space and places form which we depart are – at least on the surface – so vastly different? Ranging freely and often wittily across many terrains, this brave book by one of South Africa’s foremost writers and poets provides a unique and compelling discourse on living creatively in Africa today

A Change of Tongue

Fynbos Fairies

Children's Books

Umuzi

One of South Africa’s greatest living poets selects from her most recent poems and also from the poems and the themes that best represent her from across her long career. Part One of Skinned contains poems about writing, family and love poems. The poems in second part were chosen from a volume featuring a long epic poem based on the life of Lady Anne Barnard from Scotland, who accompanied her husband to Cape Town and lived in the castle there from 1797 until 1802. This volume was written during the height of apartheid and the poet chose Lady Anne as representative of the colonial vision. Part Three contains extracts from several speakers who lived in the land before the likes of lady Anne arrived. Krog includes here interviews with inhabitants of the stone desert, three re-workings of Bushmen or Xam narratives, as well as a translation of an oral Xhosa praise poem. Part Four represents the political turmoil of South Africa and the divisions within Africa. The poems come from volumes that explored how blacks and whites identifying with the oppressed were removed from official history. The present volume as a whole explores the necessity of "a change of tongue" in order to be.

Skinned: Selected Poems

Poetry

Seven Stories Press

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989. It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history—the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. She left diaries, correspondence and watercolors documenting her experiences in this exotic land, the contact zone of colonizers and indigenous peoples. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency. Krog’s powerful and eloquent bringing together of the past and the present, and the historical and the poetic embodies an experience that is as pertinent and compelling today in a democratic but still turbulent South Africa, as it is in the USA and other places where the intersections of race, identity, power, and language lie at the center of civic life.

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse

Bucknell University Press

In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by an ANC member in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Antjie Krog’s stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case. From there the book ranges widely in scope, both in time – reaching back to the days of Basotho king Moshoeshoe – and in space – as we follow Krog’s experiences as a research fellow in Berlin, far from the Africa that produced her. Begging to Be Black is a book of journeys – moral, historical, philosophical and geographical. These form strands that Krog interweaves and sets in conversation with each other, as she explores questions of change and becoming, coherency and connectedness, before drawing them closer together as the book approaches its powerful end. Experimental and courageous, Begging to Be Black is a welcome addition to Krog’s own oeuvre and to South African literary non-fiction

Begging to be Black

Arts & Literature

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Books by Krog, Antjie