Includes abstract. / Patchwork is a fictional story told by a female character from her perspective as a child and as an adult. Its set in Zambia over two periods in time, the late seventies and the start of the millennium. It's the story of family ties and how a child can get caught up in the consequences of the actions and decisions adult's make. The story reveals how the effects of these consequences can manifest in the child's life for many years after the fact. Pumpkin is the result of a relationship between a teenage woman and a married man. The coming of age story reveals the impact growing up with a part-time father has on Pumpkin. Particularly the lengths she's prepared to go to explain her father's absence to her friends and the rejection she feels when one day her father ignores her in the street when he's with his legitimate family. Pumpkin's mother turns to alcohol as a shield from the heartache she suffers in her relationship with an older married man and Pumpkin is burdened with having to look after her mother. Pumpkin's life takes a turn when her father takes her to live with him in his marital home. Thrust into the hostile environment of her new home, Pumpkin finds herself trying to adjust to a different life. Caught between struggling to survive a new home, making new bonds, and experiencing life issues such as the death of a neighbour, Pumpkin also has to accept the fact that her parents will never be together when her mother sobers and gets married.

Includes bibliographical references. / This work of creative non-fiction encompasses episodes of travel motivated by the author’s desire to expose her children to different cultures and philosophies as an antidote to her own experiences of growing up during apartheid. The journeys are undertaken over a period of 18 years, starting in 1993, just before the birth of a democratic South Africa. Crossing borders refers to both personal and physical expansion, juxtaposing the isolation of apartheid with the freedom to explore that which was foreign. The main theme is that of leaving home to extend one’s view of self in relation to the world, inculcating the possibility of a global community of mutual respect. Minor themes are identity and searching for roots and a sense of belonging; religious tolerance, equality, respect, climate change and children’s rights are some of the issues grappled with in countries as diverse as Cuba, Greenland and Sweden. Although each chapter focuses on a different country, themes of dispossession, discrimination, colonialism and struggle run throughout. The author uses travel as the vehicle to educate her children beyond the borders of a family and a country emerging from a repressive past , teaching them to challenge stereotypes and showing them that people are not that different on the other side o f a man -made divide. Underpinning this family memoir is the joy of travel and discovery of a wealth of culture, history and mythology through the children’s eyes. The children’s development is traced from infancy through adolescence to early adulthood and concludes with the hope that the foundation has been laid to make a constructive contribution to a more empathetic society.

Word processed copy.

No description available.

There has been a change of regime in a place with very different co-ordinates to the real world, and the President and his intimates - his chef, barber and portraitist - are being held accountable for their complicity by the new Commander. Each man in turn speaks of his appetites, the physical, the tactile, the hurt done by him and to him, detailing the intimacies of his particular embodied life. The significant woman in each man's life gives voice to the minutiae of pain, balancing melancholy, farce and horror, until all characters' voices elide in a whirlpool of personal and public reckoning, memory and desire.

Includes abstract.

This MA thesis is divided into three parts. 1) A Preface, which concerns the act of writing this work, with a reflections on the attendant difficulties regarding editing and editorial distance. A placement of the poetry in relation to "South African writing", and to late 20th century poetry. A brief elucidation of the poems' preoccupations and concems. 2) Two Essays, entitled "Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of Course: The Lonely Larkin" and 'William Empson : His Modem Escape". The first concerns Philip Larkin's uncanny ability to create a beauty out of irony, isolation, and desolation, his achievement of transcendence from entrapment. The second essay deals with William Empson's unique poetic position: a truly modem one. The essays puts forward the idea that Empson's poetry can be regarded as a struggle between a wish for escape and a need to engage with an horrendous "objective" reality. In other words, his struggle is between poetry and plain speaking; between art and science. 3) The Poems, which form a group of forty written throughout 1997/8. They have been thoroughly edited several times over, in close consultation with Assoc. Prof. Stephen Watson of the Department of English.

Featherstream is a romantic suspense novel set at the southernmost tip of Africa during the Second World War. Returning to her father's farm at Cape Agulhas for the university holidays, Anna van der Vliet stumbles on a clandestine operation to provision enemy U-boats. Her dilemma of whether to betray family or country is further complicated when she falls in love with German naval commander Thomas von Eisenheim. Anna goes on to uncover a plot by Nazi Germany and the right-wing Ossewabrandwag organisation to blow up the Union's parliament buildings and install a pro-German Afrikaner government. The novel's landscape ranges from the remote fynbos plains of Agulhas in the Southern Cape, through the Moravian hamlet of Elim to Cape Town. Based on extensive historical research, it explores the deep ideological tensions in South Africa between supporters of the pro-war government of General Jan Smuts and Doctor Daniel Malan's Purified National Party, which were mirrored in communities and families across South Africa. The driving force of the story is a young woman's struggle to reconcile divided loyalties and emerge from the emotional stranglehold of her overbearing father.

No description available.

No description available.