Njabulo Ndebele's prize-winning stories from South Africa's black townships first began appearing in the early 1980s in Staffrider, a magazine given out to Soweto's black commuters, many of whom could not afford the fares into work in Johannesburg, and who thus had to "ride staff" outside or on top. In 1983 the stories of Fools and Other Stories were collected and published, and they won the 1984 NOMA award, Africa's highest literary award. These stories have remained in print ever since, and the author has taken a leading role in developing black culture and education post-apartheid. He now heads the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Looking back around 2020 at his career, Ndebele noted the key influence of Steve Biko's writing in
Black ViewPoint and Biko's work with the 1970s Black Consciousness Movement on the
Fools collection (Biko was killed in police custody in 1977): ". . . In
Fools and Other Stories I deliberately explored a world in South African townships without white people in it. The kind of communication Biko envisaged ought to be normal in South Africa today. But it isn't yet where it should be. . . ."
This Readers International US edition marks thirty years from the first post-apartheid election in South Africa in 1994.
Ndebele, Njabulo: - "NJABULO SIMAKAHLE NDEBELE was born in 1948 in Johannesburg. His mother was a hospital nurse, and his father was a well-known high school teacher of mathematics and isiZulu in the Western Native Township, including teaching the young Desmond Tutu, who remembered him warmly. In 1951, his father was promoted to Principal of the Charterston High School in the Nigel mining area on the East Rand, where the family moved just ahead of the apartheid regime's forced mass removals of black residents from Western Native Township and Sophiatown to Soweto between 1955 and 1960. In 1960 his parents sent him to Swaziland (a former British protectorate now called Eswatini) to be educated at an Anglican boarding school outside the Bantu Education system then in use in South Africa -- an insidious internal education system (see The Music of the Violin) and a pattern of escape (see Fools) reflected in this collection. From 1969 he studied, graduated in English and Philosophy, and then taught at UBLS (the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, now the National University of Lesotho) at the Roma campus in Lesotho until 1990, the year of Nelson Mandela's release (he had been advised by his father not to return home in 1973 after graduation because of police interest in him). He also travelled to Cambridge (UK) for his MA in English literature and to Denver, Colorado for his Ph.D degree. As an academic in Lesotho he rose to become Head of the English Department, Dean of the Humanities Faculty, and Pro Vice-Chancellor at UBLS. In 1983, Ndebele's stories were collected and published as Fools and Other Stories, highly acclaimed by critics and winner of the 1984 NOMA prize, Africa's highest literary award. His influential book of essays followed in 1991, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. By the time Njabulo Ndebele left Lesotho for South Africa in 1991, he was ready to participate at the highest levels in the recovery of his country from apartheid in both culture and education. He was the President of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW). At the University of the Witwatersrand, he followed Es'kia Mphahlele (also published by Readers International) as Chair of the Department of African Literature, then Ndebele became a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Western Cape, and later Vice-Chancellor of the University of the North. He continued to publish original works: The Cry of Winnie Mandela, a novel in 2004, and essays Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts About Our Country in 2007. During the 1990s he published a series of short fiction titles aimed at young/teen readers and post-apartheid public library audiences - Sarah, Rings, and I (1993), Banolo and the Peach Tree (1994), Death of a Son (1996), Umpropheti/The Prophetess (1999, dual language re-issue of a story from Fools). For two years he served as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ford Foundation in New York, and in 2000 he began a term of service as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Cape Town. At present he serves as Chancellor at the University of Johannesburg and chairs the Nelson Mandela Foundation."
