It is with great sadness that the ALA notes the passing of South African writer Zoë Wicomb. Born in Namaqualand in South Africa’s Western Cape and a long-time resident of the UK, Wicomb distinguished herself as—hands down—one of the most incisive, critically engaged writers and scholars of South Africa, the legacies of apartheid, and the entanglements of culture. She was Professor Emerita at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she taught Postcolonial Literature and Creative Writing. From 2005 to 2011, she also served as Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch.
Like Lewis Nkosi, Njabulo Ndebele, J.M. Coetzee, Yvette Christiansë, and Gabeba Baderoon, Wicomb braided together a distinguished career as both literary scholar and creative writer. For twenty-five years, she published brilliant academic essays: deft, agile analyses of visual culture, race, gender, and postcolonial thought that shaped the thinking of so many students and scholars. Her scholarship—much of which has been collected in the 2018 volume Nation, Race, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013—exemplified the generative nature of rigorous, bold, and clear-sighted Black feminist literary and cultural study well before intersectionality entered the popular imagination. Her influential essays make her an essential resource for any student or scholar of Southern African literature and culture.
Wicomb was also the tantalizing wordsmith of four novels and two short story collections: You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), The One That Got Away (2008), October (2014), and Still Life (2020). From her first book to her most recent, Wicomb made an indelible mark on South African letters. In her layered, subtle, distinctively metafictional style, Wicomb conjured a deeply memorable cast of searching characters who navigate self-consciousness, doubt, ambiguity, unstable memories, personal violence, on top of historical erasure, displacement and migration, legacies of colonialism, and a raft of persistent social hierarchies.
With equal parts subtlety and scrutiny, Wicomb’s fiction assiduously interrogates—often devastatingly mocks—the assumptions of supremacy, be they racial, sexual, linguistic, or cultural. Little, indeed, escapes her critical eye. And her liquid prose is spring-loaded with illuminating allusion, deep knowledge of sweeping world-shaping developments, and astute philosophical insight. It’s also delightfully funny at times, showcasing Wicomb’s trademark skewering wit. Consider her laugh-out-loud lineage of the Griqua leaders proffered in her splendid novel, David’s Story:
Adam Kok I begat Cornelius Kok the Careless … who begat Adam Kok II who begat Adam Kok III who more or less begat Adam Muis Kok. All without the interference of women.
There is also the penetrating reference to play-whites, or light-skinned South Africans passing as white, in her novel Playing in the Light as engaging in the “scramble for whiteness” (122), a formulation that inverts, yet also registers the vast implications of, Europe’s colonization of Africa.
It’s this keen attention to the intricate ironies of thought, language, and action—all shot through with legacies of racism and sexism—that makes Wicomb’s own language so delicious, so vital. To evoke the term of another remarkable African feminist, Ama Ata Aidoo, to read Wicomb’s fiction is to see the world through a “black-eyed squint”: a laser-focused concentration, committed skepticism, and piercing insight that forces a rethinking of what we thought we knew. Little wonder, then, that Wicomb’s fiction would be the subject of many critical essays and book chapters . . . and of three international conferences, followed by numerous special issues in journals and an anthology. And her writing has been rightly awarded numerous prizes, not least of which is the 2013 inaugural Windham Campbell Prize in fiction and the 2001 M-Net Prize for David’s Story. Little wonder that Wicomb was also the recipient of at least three honorary degrees: from the Open University in the UK (2009), the University of Pretoria (2016), and the University of Cape Town (2017) in South Africa. And little wonder that the ALA would also invite Zoë Wicomb to its 2024 conference in Louisville to celebrate her extraordinary contributions to African letters and to their study. That she accepted our invitation was our great honor and our immense joy.