published by Chatto & Windus
Generally regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers, Margaret Atwood is a poet, Booker-prize winning novelist, storyteller, essayist, environmental activist, cartoonist and illustrator. Known for her strong support of causes, her reputation has grown year by year to the point where she is now regarded as something of a cultural icon and modern sage. This remarkable and lively memoir shows how the foundations of her personality were laid.
Written with veteran assurance, it provides a vivid picture of both Atwood the person and Atwood the writer. In telling her story, she revisits old haunts, returning to places and themes she has used over the years. Her voice can be laconic, often very funny, but also remarkably penetrating and astute in its insights.
Employed as an entomologist in Canada’s Department of Agriculture, her father spent much of his life in the backwoods of Canada. His family went with him. Living in log cabins and experiencing nature at its most harsh and raw, left Atwood with a passionate and lasting love of the outdoors and a continuing fascination with the relationship between people and wilderness.
At an early age, she became acquainted with the 1852 book, Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie, which has since attained the status of an early Canadian classic. Over the subsequent years, Moodie’s book came back to haunt the author, culminating in a series of poems which became the book, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. (A subsequent Moodie book, Life in the Clearings, provided the inspiration for the critically acclaimed novel Alias Grace, which was later turned into a TV mini-series.) A genteel English immigrant, Moodie had tried to make a life in the backwoods of Canada with few resources and no experience, with her husband, John. It was a hard life which she found herself ill-equipped to deal with. Besides having experienced a similar frontier life, some of Moodie’s appeal to Atwood must surely lie in the fact that she was one of the first woman writers to produce anything resembling literature in Upper Canada.
It is a tradition Atwood has continued, in the process bringing Canadian literature to the attention of the world. Atwood has always been quick to acknowledge where she comes from, believing that refusing to do so is a form of amputation. “By discovering your place,” she wrote in Travels Back, an introduction to her occasional writings published in Curious Pursuits, “You discover yourself.”
Despite her rural roots, Atwood has led a nomadic life, travelling and living all over the world.
Her determination to write novels at a time when women writers were not always treated with the seriousness they deserved saw her living in cheap digs and taking arbitrary jobs to supplement her income.
In the course of the book, Atwood explains how she came to write her classic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (later turned into a widely praised and popular TV series, which Atwood also approved of). The book’s dystopian themes of patriarchal domination, reproductive rights, surveillance and resilience may have seemed far-fetched when she first conceived it, but in our time of historical upheaval, especially with the rise of Trumpism, it is, like Orwell’s 1984, in danger of becoming only too real. As she wryly observes: “It did seem like a tall tale back in 1984… But now not so tall”.
Equally interesting, if worrying in this age of misinformation and domineering cults, are the circumstances leading up to the writing of its sequel, The Testaments.
In another chapter on the writing of the Blind Assassin, she describes, in some detail, her creative process and how the story kept rearranging itself in her mind as she rejected certain themes and brought in others. It offers a fascinating glimpse into how a novel evolves.
Because of the influence he had on her life, she also pays ample tribute to her lifelong partner, Graeme, a recognised writer in his own right. A passionate birdwatcher, the two were equally at home discussing literature or paddling canoes down some remote, freezing river or wading knee-deep in marshland looking for rare birds.
Indeed, one of the joys of reading a book like this is that it makes one feel entirely in the presence of the author. For anyone interested in what makes a person a writer, and how the life of a professional writer is lived, it is matchless.
Jonathan Ball Publishers
For several centuries, mining has been the backbone of the South African economy. Without it, the country would not have made the rapid economic strides it did nor developed to the levels it has. Although its importance has, for a variety of factors, diminished in recent years, it still makes a significant contribution to our GDP.
Despite the pivotal role mining has played in transforming South Africa into the greatest industrial power in Africa, its legacy will forever remain tainted by its history of black exploitation. In this updated version of her in-depth study of the history of mining in South Africa, Digging Deep, originally published in 2013, author Jade Davenport tackles some of these uncomfortable truths, as well as updating her information..
South Africa is a country blessed with abundant mineral resources. The first to be discovered in any significant quantity was copper. The fact that the deposits occurred in one of the most remote, arid and inhospitable parts of the country initially made it difficult to access and mine. Transporting the copper was another problem which had to be overcome. After a few boom years, the deposits became exhausted, and most of the mines closed.
The next major discovery, the one destined to put South Africa on the global mining map, was diamonds. The find would attract fortune-seekers from all over the world and mark the beginning of the country’s mining boom. Initially, the claims were worked by hordes of small workers who came to form a short-lived Diggers Democracy. As the surface deposits got worked out, the extraction methods became more difficult and costly, putting them beyond the reach of these ordinary miners (the same thing would later happen on the gold fields). The era of the rich and powerful mining magnates was about to begin.
Just as it happened in Kimberly, the discovery of gold in the Eastern Transvaal precipitated another rush. For a while, the Pilgrim’s Rest, De Kaap Valley and Barberton areas were the epicentre of the South African gold-mining industry. That all changed with the discovery of the world’s most extensive gold resource on the Witwatersrand. As word of this find spread, the magnates, many of whom had already made fortunes out of diamonds, swooped in. Looming large over all of them was the colossus-like figure of Cecil Rhodes with his imperialistic ambitions, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato. In later years, the Oppenheimer family would emerge to prominence.
The rapidly burgeoning mining industry required a source of reliable and relatively cheap energy to sustain its growth. Fortune once again favoured South Africa. Not only did it have extensive coal reserves, but many of the deposits were situated close to the mines. The advent of the railways meant that coal could be transported more easily and in greater quantities. This, in turn, would have a ripple effect on other industries such as Iscor, Eskom and Sasol.
The South African economy would also receive another boost with the discovery of the world’s largest platinum reserves, as well as many other valuable minerals.
Before 1994, black people had been subjected to a variety of discriminatory mechanisms which effectively excluded them from owning and operating mining assets, their participation being largely restricted to unskilled and semi-skilled labour. That began to change with the advent of the ANC government. They embarked on a policy of racial economic transformation, particularly in shaping the nature and trajectory of black economic empowerment.
Sadly, however, the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act of 2004, which was supposed to redress past injustices and open up access to mineral resources, ended up having the opposite effect, impeding as opposed to encouraging economic growth. In the words of the author: “Rather than delivering promised prosperity, the MPRDA created a web of regulatory uncertainty, facilitated pervasive corruption and deterred much-needed investment”. As a result, the South African mining industry went into serious decline, a situation that was exacerbated still further during the chaotic Jacob Zuma state capture years, where ANC corruption, cronyism and elite-enrichment became the prevailing norm.
If the ANC’s administration has been crippled by a poor choice of political instruments – some of whom have proven almost comically incompetent – to bring about effective change, the newly elected President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment of the political ideologue, Gwede Mantashe, as Minister of Mines has done little to improve the situation, either. To this day, the mining industry continues to languish in the doldrums, plagued by uncertainty and with much of its rich mineral resources left locked beneath the earth. Meanwhile, its competitors surge ahead, unhindered by all the cumbersome and confusing legislation that bedevils South Africa.
As we struggle to work out who we are as a nation, we can only hope the situation will one day improve.
Highly readable, incisive and superbly balanced, Davenport has produced a far-reaching and useful synthesis of the development of one of the country’s key industries. It will be of great value to the academic community and the public alike, not just because of its encyclopaedic nature, but for the obvious quality of its scholarship and research.
Stidy's Eye 