seven days of mxolisi nyezwa

It is often said that experience yields wisdom and through suffering we learn to become better people.

Pain and loss, as Port Elizabeth born multi award winning author Mxolisi Nyezwa puts it, does not necessarily have to be a physical manifestation. Suffering is a highly personal journey of finding oneself.

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there is nothing ordinary about the accomplished author, who has never had a formal job in his life
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The specter of the tragedy surrounds the entire book, which argues that as human beings our lives are intertwined.
Nyezwa adds that “human beings are not computers, we cannot completely delete or close files as we please, we carry our baggage with us as we move on with our lives”.

From very on in his life, Mxolisi was drawn deep into the enchanting world of words. He also recalls that he was “an avid reader” and how his parents encouraged them all to read all the time. His awareness about writing is closely tied to these early forages into the world of books.

Nyezwa admits to having quite an ordinary upbringing, having lived his entire life in New Brighton. Just one of the many townships that form Port Elizabeth.
Contrary to the writer’s lifestyle, there is nothing ordinary about the accomplished author, who has never had a formal job in his life. This clears it. Mxolisi is not cut out from the same cloth as nine-to-fivers.

And while Nyezwa can afford to live just about anywhere he sees fit, he chooses to live in New Brighton.
“It was as difficult to live in the townships back then as it is today,” says Nyezwa. Nowadays, the youth express their desperation through anti-social and criminal behavior. With this new anthology, he paints a picture of a dying world and of dying people. He captures within it, the false illusion of living in a country with great wealth but, riddled with unbelievably high levels of poverty.

As a young boy in New Brighton, Nyezwa once narrowly escaped the jaws of death. It was the late 80s, one of the most chaotic and violent periods in the recent history of South Africa. Nyezwa and a friend were walking over a busy highway road to Kristen Library, as the rampant boycotts had resulted in schools being closed. Out of nowhere a police van stopped and two white policemen jumped out, brandishing revolvers as they gave chase on the two boys. With screeching tires and two cops taking aim at them, two innocent boys who were out to read books in a library, were now dodging death and weaving through a moving body of traffic and as anyone the scene must have been a snippet from an action sequence in a movie. Life, back then, was dark and unreal. Something most would now fail to imagine.