Samuel Raditlhalo

In residence Spring 2008

Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Literature

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R

Telephone:  617.496-6573

Email: Tlhalo.Raditlhalo@uct.ac.za

Biography

Sam Raditlhalo is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Cape Town. He completed his Ph.D. with Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands, and his thesis is on the construction of identity in twentieth-century South African autobiographical writings. He has published in South Africa and abroad in accredited and non-accredited journals. He was part of the editorial collective responsible for Es’kia (2002), Es’kia Continued (2004) and Es’kia: May you Grow as Big as an Elephant (2006). His compilation of essays by Njabulo S. Ndebele, Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts on Our Country, was published in October 2007. Dr. Raditlhalo currently researches on auto/biographies from the fringes of society.

Project

“Unsung Hero: The Life of Hamilton Mshado Naki”

Life writing in South Africa is well established as a literary genre as well as providing the general readership with significant historical memory of what it meant to be a South African. It remains problematic that life writings of ordinary South Africans who also did extraordinary deeds are scarcely researched and written, as though such people did not in fact exist for the greater good of humanity. Outside of Chabani Mangayi’s groundbreaking Looking Through the Keyhole, and A Black Man Called Sekoto, little has been researched and written about some of our illustrious progenitors who happen to be Black South Africans. The focus of the research will be on the life and work of Mr. Hamilton Naki. The primary aim is to give the subject a human face, to place him historically alongside, rather than behind, Dr. Barnard. The secondary aim is to excavate a slice of a South African city and how this individual situated and was situated within the racial city, but rose to such heights through dint of talent.