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One of few books translated into English from Sesotho, In My Heart introduces a long-neglected voice to global readership. Elsewhere Texts, edited by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, presents radical new engagements with non-European literary cultures. This volume, the latest in this ambitious series, is a brilliant collection of essays originally written in Sesotho by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng. Often confined to the role of "native informants" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers working in African languages laid the foundation for the politics and poetics of decolonization and are legendary among their own communities of readers, though their work remains little known elsewhere.
In My Heart belongs to this tradition of colonial renegades. Writing in the 1950s during the cataclysmic events of apartheid that were transforming life in South Africa, Mofokeng offers a series of meditations that provide his readers with a Sesotho worldview outside the categories authorized by colonial knowledge.
In My Heart, expertly translated by Nhlanhla Maake, introduces a significant African thinker's influential work to a global readership.
About the author
Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng (1923-1957), the first scholar in South Africa to receive a PhD in Sesotho from the University of the Witwatersrand, is the author of the stage play
Senkatana;
Leetong: On Pilgrimage, a volume of essays; and
Pelong Ya Ka.
Nhlanhla Maake is managing director at DDK Merchandising and roving mentor on the Doctoral Programme of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Johannesburg. He is creative writing editor of the
English Academy Review and a member of the English Academy Council.
