Anthony Fleischer is a South African author who lives in Cape Town. He has written eight novels, all set in Africa. This website promotes three of these books - Okavango God's, Garibaldi's Ski-Boat and Children of Adamaster and provides links to online book-sellers. Anthony Fleischer was born in South Africa and educated at the University of the Witwatersrand and at Lincoln College, Oxford. Recently, he wrote this 'memoir' of his Oxford days for IMPRINT, the Lincoln College journal:.
African PENS - Anthony Fleischer - May 2008
Three bumps for Lincoln VIII during Eights Week in 1950; tours of France with Lincoln rugby XV and Greyhounds; Sunday cricket with Lincoln Lollards, and finally a B.Litt. (Oxon) conferred in 1952. My Oxford career!
Academic memories are mainly of Rhodes House, Professor (Sally) Herbert Frankel, Professors Hancock and Wheare, and wise counsel from Sir Keith Murray, then Rector of Lincoln, later Lord Murray of Newhaven. Sir Keith encouraged me to complete my thesis on “Social and Administrative Problems of Labour Migration in South Africa” – now in the Bodleian, still in typescript form. The thesis was never published – not surprising considering the title – but the subject of ‘migration’ is of increasing significance today, not only in Africa. The “push” and “pull” factors of socio-economic imbalance are behind the recent xenophobia in my country.
I returned home to South Africa armed with my B.Litt. degree, got a job with the Chamber of Mines at a salary of £50 a month and did the smartest thing of my life – married Dona Dolores Carlotta Kent de Paiva Rapozo. Together we produced my first novel, THE SKIN IS DEEP, published by Secker & Warburg in London in 1958. I was after all a Bachelor of Letters from Oxford and should surely write! Dolores helped me with that first literary effort and we were both very pleased to read positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, and other newspapers in the United Kingdom. The story dealt with the trials of Chilembwe who migrated to South Africa from Malawi to work on a gold mine
I have on file a letter from Sir Keith Murray congratulating me on my second novel GARIBALDI’S SKI BOAT, published by André Deutsch in London in 1960. That letter is far more precious to me than any review in any newspaper anywhere. That book was also published in Germany by Rex Verlag, Munich, and in Italy by Mondadori, Milan, but Sir Keith’s early recognition of the André Deutsch English edition is still the most cherished. Sadly, I last saw Sir Keith on his death bed in a London hospital.
When THE SKIN IS DEEP reached South Africa in 1958 it was banned under Government Notice 1413. I was deeply upset by the ban and in the same year I joined the South African Centre of International PEN, the global writers’ organisation which champions free expression. Dolores and I have worked together for PEN ever since, and I have been a member of South African PEN for fifty years, and President for the past seven years.
Together Dolores and I attended PEN Congresses as South African delegates in Barcelona, Edinburgh, Prague and Santiago de Compostela. In Barcelona I was asked by Carlos Torner of Catalan PEN to join his task group on a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. Back in South Africa I was able to obtain signatures to the UDLR
from President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi. South Africa has eleven official languages and throughout Africa linguistic rights and free expression go together.
SA PEN’s main purposes are to defend free expression and encourage literature. While publishing our own titles over the years, we have also together motivated and been instrumental in the production of eight PEN volumes of new writing, culminating in AFRICAN PENS in 2007. Our purpose has always been to encourage new authors.
The Caine Prize for African Writing is a greater effort in the same field. It is pleasing to be able to report that the work of three young authors on the 2008 Caine Prize short-list of five first appeared in AFRICAN PENS, the third volume of short stories which SA PEN selected and published in Cape Town in 2007. The Caine Prize will be presented at a dinner to be held in the Bodleian on 7th July – a day before my 80th birthday! Dolores and I hope to be there to celebrate with the authors:
Stanley Kenani for For honour, set in Malawi
Henrietta Rose-Innes for Poison, set in Cape Town
Gill Schierhout for The day of the surgical colloquium hosted by the Far East Rand Hospital, set in a mine hospital in South Africa
Nobel Laureate and SA PEN member JM Coetzee selected the first two stories as winners for the 2007 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award, which is to be followed by the PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Award series for 2009, 2010 and 2011, with annual prizes totalling £10,000, kindly donated by benefactor John Studzinski.
The new PEN series will be headed by SA PEN member Shaun Johnson, Rhodes Scholar and Commonwealth Prize winner for his first novel THE NATIVE COMMISSIONER. Shaun also heads the Mandela Rhodes Foundation which provides scholarships for talented young people from Africa, some of whom may become Rhodes Scholars. Some may even become established authors.
Write! Africa Write!
Anthony C Fleischer
President
South African PEN Cape Town May 2008
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Anthony Fleischer - April 2007
I was asked the other day which of my novels I liked best while writing it. I could very quickly answer “GARIBALDI’S SKI-BOAT” because it had to do with the sea and with fishing. I also liked this comment from a review in TIME & TIDE in London when the novel was first published: “It is difficult to pin-point the extraordinary attractiveness of this story, perhaps it is because the author never, by so much as a nod towards a more complex world, leaves the setting and the characters he has drawn.” I stayed on the Umzimvubu River and then went out to sea with Garibaldi to catch some fish.
At one stage Garibaldi says: “And really if you have lived does it matter that the living must stop? If you have known does it matter that you will forget? If even for a moment there is the joy and clear beauty of living do the cloudy dismal times cancel it out? Does it matter that you have to pay for it? Pay for the living pay for the joy? Does it matter? A soul smiles and a body is alive and, knowing the insecurity of being that way, it serves until the time comes. Do not fear the end, only feel its inevitability which is there always to spice the joy and exalt the soul. When it comes be ready for you have not been robbed.”
Another reason for choosing to comment on GARIBALDI SKI-BOAT in this introduction is that Sir Keith Murray, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, my guide and mentor through wonderful years at a great University liked the story. It is with great respect for Sir Keith that I repeat the first paragraph of his warm letter to me dated January 2nd 1961:
Dear Tony,
I wanted to say again how much I enjoyed ‘Garibaldi’s Ski-Boat’. I took it home for Christmas and re-read it and it appealed to me even more on this second occasion; the characters of Garibaldi, Sky and Lifwana stand out so clearly and you have drawn them with extraordinary sensitivity. Finally of course, the sea and river complexes are wonderfully outlined and the final descriptive passages of the last trip of the ski-boat are absolute first class. I do congratulate you in the whole creation”…………..
Yours ever,
Keith
Lord Murray of Newhaven has sadly left us. I saw him last in hospital in London. More than fifty years ago he pushed me to finish my first book, an unpublished thesis which would allow me to sign if I wanted to:
Anthony Fleischer, B.Litt Oxon.
President
South African PEN Cape Town April 2007
