Life and Works of Njabulo S. Ndebele

Njabulo S. Ndebele is known principally for his collection of short stories Fools and Other Stories (1983), which won the 1984 Noma Award, and for his seminal contribution to literary debate in South Africa in the 1980s. Although his contribution has been relatively slight in volume, his influence on South African literature has been significant. This influence is due in large measure to his work’s divergence from much of the politicized black fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways Ndebele’s writing constitutes a return to a more traditional concern with narrative complexity and literary quality. Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele was born in Western Native Township near Johannesburg on 4 July 1948. His father, Nimrod Ndebele, a Zulu, was a teacher at Madibane High School in Johannesburg who later became an inspector of schools; his mother, Regina Makhosazana Ndebele (née Tshabangu), a Swazi from neighbouring Swaziland, had trained as a nurse. Ndebele moved with his family in 1954 to Charterston Location near Nigel, a small mining town thirty miles south of Johannesburg. He attended Mzimkhulu Lower Primary School and Zsakheni Higher Primary School, finishing his primary education there in 1960. Rather than have him suffer the inferior educational facilities that were mandated for blacks under the apartheid South African government, Ndebele’s parents sent him to school across the border in black-ruled Swaziland, a common practice at that time for families who were affluent enough. As a boarding student, Ndebele attended Saint Christopher’s High School in Swaziland, receiving the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate in 1966. He became a secondary-school teacher in the coal mining town of Witbank, South Africa, where he remained until 1968. In 1970 he went to Lesotho and enrolled in what was then the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (BOLESWA). Ndebele received his first-class degree in English and philosophy in 1973. After teaching high school