ABSTRACT
Journalist, critic, playwright, and novelist, Lewis Nkosi was born in 1936 in Durban, Natal, South Africa, and educated in public schools in Zululand. In 1955 he launched a career in journalism as editor of a Zulu-English weekly called the Ilanga LaseNatal (Natal Sun), and in the following year he joined the staff of South Africa’s popular Drum magazine. While working for Drum as chief reporter and later for the Post, Nkosi lived in a ghetto in Johannesburg, a city that he has described as being totally without an inner life; he believes that this intellectual, emotional, and moral ennui, exemplified in South African city life, is responsible for the country’s inability to produce a substantial body of literature.
