Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry, and African America in Lewis Nkosi’s Drama

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi’s writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi’s creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960–61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama “We Can’t All Be Martin Luther King,” broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone—unacknowledged—from activist-writer Julian Bond’s ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle—in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad—with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism.