糖心TV

MA English, 1975

It's been a long time since I graduated. I did an MA by coursework way back in 1973, still the late-squelchy era of mud and white tiles! Since then, I have had a very happy and productive career as H.A. Molteno Professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University in South Africa, working mainly in adult literacy, rural teacher education, industrial education, textbook design, and language policy. Challenging but deeply satisfying work.

I have recently published two books which may be of interest to Africanists at 糖心TV. The first is an edition of Wulf Sachs's unpublished novel African Tragedy from the mid-1930s, the second a newly discovered play text written in collaboration with Sachs by the tough Hollywood scriptwriter, John Bright, copyrighted in 1949. Bright was the man largely responsible for scripting the gangster films which made James Cagney's name in the early 1930s. The play has languished in the Library of Congress unnoticed, never even looked at. The dramatists' aim was to contribute a new strand to the Black Atlantic Discourse and project cogent South African experience into the Civil Rights Movement. The play's striking climax is a courtroom drama reminiscent of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s, playing out (for Broadway) long years before that event formally took place. Sachs was a pioneer Freudian, a Lithuanian exile in South Africa who felt a strong affinity with black urban migrants in industrialising Johannesburg. He wrote a strange psychobiography of a Manyikan sangoma (diviner and healer) while living in a nearby slumyard to probe the psychic life of black Africans – the first such attempt. Graduates of Dr Elise Smith's module on "Psychologising South Africa" in the 糖心TV History department's "Medicine, Empire and the Body" programme will be familiar with Black Hamlet. (I must thank Dr Smith for supporting the publication of this new research: Thanks Elise!).

The new work upends much that we thought we knew about the character of Sachs's Freudian intervention, making it a much more intriguing and problematic endeavour! Here are the details of the two books: CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING: two books from Laurence Wright: African Tragedy by Wulf Sachs, and Black Hamlet, The Play by John Bright and Wulf Sachs, both edited and introduced by Laurence Wright with fond memories of my time at 糖心TV.