Category: Richard Newton

Richard Newton was born in Sunderland and grew up in Africa and South Korea. After spells as a zoo educator in Hampshire and a wildlife officer in Malawi, he has been a travel writer since 1992, working for many newspapers and magazines. His fiction has appeared in Narrative, Moth, and the Saturday Evening Post, among others. He won the Thresholds International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition in 2015 with an essay about Herman Charles Bosman. His novel Taylor & Burton in Africa was published in 2025.

‘Life’ by Bessie Head

My literary awakening was forged in wonder and fear in the Botswana Book Centre in Gaborone. Within that amply-stocked bookshop in my early teens, I discovered authors who remain favourites. The aisles were narrow, and any visit came with the risk of getting blocked in by an unnerving woman ranting to herself. There I had my first encounters, in person and in print, with Bessie Head.

She didn’t shy away from her mental health issues: they were explored in her stories. In Life, a woman – Life Morapedi – returns from Johannesburg to her childhood village of Serowe, bringing with her ‘bits and bits of a foreign culture and city habits’. Her fate is flagged in the first paragraph: ‘The murder of Life had this complicated undertone of rejection.’ Initially she turns to prostitution – unheard of in Serowe – but eventually marries a man who reminds her of a Johannesburg gangster. She does not take to married life well, and goes off the rails, tragically. At the end, Head quotes a song by Jim Reeves, who was hugely popular in southern Africa: ‘That’s what happens when two worlds collide.’

First published in Encounter magazine in 1975, and then in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Heinemann, 1977

‘Botalaote Hill’ by Gothataone Moeng

As a chronicler of the royal village of Serowe, and of Botswana as a whole, Gothataone Moeng has assumed Bessie Head’s mantle. Forty years after Head’s death (in 1986, aged 48), the country’s central tension remains the same: the clash of the modern and traditional, of city and village.

Botalaote Hill emerges from that tension. It centres on the sexual awakening of 15-year-old Boikanyo, burdened with the responsibility of caring for a dying aunt who had a string of boyfriends in the diamond mining town of Orapa and returned to Serowe stricken, it seems, with AIDS. Years later, living in Gaborone, Boikanyo’s friends are fascinated by, but not all of them believe, her recollections of the village. ‘That sceptic seemed to assume that the hill—which I now knew to be just a hillock—the school, the cemetery were symbolic of something that I had overcome, something I had escaped.’

First published in Oxford American in 2017, online here. Appears as ‘Botalaote’ in the collection Call and Response, Oneworld, 2023

‘The Go-Away Bird’ by Muriel Spark

In Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), unhappy home for newly-married Muriel Spark from 1937 to 1944, the central tension within the colonial community was between Africa and Europe. They didn’t quite belong in either, but were tied to both.

Spark’s African short stories were the making of her as a writer. The Seraph and the Zambezi won the Observer short story competition in 1951, and propelled her into print. The Go-Away Bird is more ambitious, broken into three parts, set in Africa, London, and back in Africa. Daphne du Toit is the displaced protagonist, haunted in Africa by the call of the grey lourie, ‘go-‘way, go-‘way’, and in London by a caged budgerigar that repeats the same message.

First published in The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories, Macmillan, 1958 and collected in The Complete Short Stories, Viking, 2001

‘Bruns’ by Norman Rush

In the early 1980s, Botswana boasted an unlikely concentration of nascent literary talent: Alexander McCall Smith was teaching at the University of Botswana; Hilary Mantel was living with her geologist husband in Lobatse, an hour’s drive from Gaborone; and Norman Rush was co-managing (with his wife, Elsa) the US Peace Corps. Was there something in the lack of water, there on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, that nurtured literary talent? “I’m sure it was simply happenstance,” Norman told me a few years ago. He arrived in Botswana expecting to get a lot of reading and writing done, but his duties during his five years there left him with very little spare time. “I managed to read Bessie Head standing up at the Botswana Book Centre.”

Bruns, set in a fictionalized town based on Mahalapye (notable for straddling the Tropic of Capricorn), marks the debut of a narrative voice that he later utilized in his novel Mating (1991), which won the US National Book Award. The story was first published in The New Yorker (an earlier story, After the Life Class, was published there in 1978, before he went to Botswana), and is the linchpin of his collection, Whites, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

First published in The New Yorker in 1983, online here. It was collected in Whites, Alfred A Knopf, 1986

‘There Here Then Now’ by Naomi Mitchison

My father was the director of The British Council in Botswana from 1980-83. He was usually unflappable, but one announcement was guaranteed to change his mood: “Naomi Mitchison’s here.” He’d deflate with a sigh.

She was the doyenne of Scottish letters, and had been famous for more than fifty years. In 1960, in Scotland, she met Linchwe II, the young paramount chief of the Bakgatla tribe, who was travelling on a British Council grant. He invited her to his tribal seat, the village of Mochudi north of Gaborone. So began an association that led to her adoption as the mother of the tribe. She visited Botswana often, and regarded the British Council, and whoever was director, as being both at her service and an adversary.

In the last thirty-five years of her long life (1897-1999), she wrote prolifically about Africa, and drew on local folk tales. In There Here Then Now, three brothers – symbolising a Bushman, a Mokgatla (a member of the Bakgatla tribe), and a European – represent the clashes of hunter-gathering, agriculture, and industrialisation.

Batswana folk tales were also a rich source for fellow Scot and resident of Mochudi, Alexander McCall Smith. Criticisms about cultural appropriation continue to rumble, but both writers are largely venerated within Botswana.

Appears in the collection Images of Africa, Canongate, 1980

‘Starlight on the Veld’ by Herman Charles Bosman

Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) was South Africa’s greatest short story writer, but his career almost ended before it began. He was condemned to death for shooting his stepbrother. The sentence was commuted to four years, after which he became a jobbing writer, and drew extensively on his time as a young school teacher in remotest Transvaal prior to his legal troubles.

He wrote two major short story sequences, published in local literary magazines and newspapers. The first centres on a campfire raconteur, Oom Schalk Lourens. The second, the Voorkamer stories, eavesdrops on a bunch of Afrikaner farmers putting the world to rights as they await the arrival of the weekly mail lorry at a rural post office. Written in English with an Afrikaans cadence, his stories were both of their time (beware of racial epithets) and before their time (some criticize apartheid). They are all worth reading, but start with Starlight on the Veld, which showcases the lyricism and humour that runs through his work.

First published in The South African Opinion in January 1936, and subsequently featured in numerous collections and anthologies. It can be read online at Narrative

‘Joburg, Sis!’ by Barney Simon

In 1989, I was interviewing Pieter-Dirk Uys (South Africa’s Barry Humphries) at the café outside the committedly multiracial Market Theatre in Johannesburg, when a frenetic, bald, bearded man stopped to chat with us. It was Barney Simon, co-founder of the theatre, and still, then, basking in the success of the worldwide smash, Woza Albert! (co-written with the two stars, Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema). The play imagined the second coming of Christ in apartheid Johannesburg (a BBC documentary can be found, fuzzily, here.)

Simon’s love-hate relationship with his home city, as well as his theatrical inclinations, are on display in his short story collection, Joburg, Sis! The title story is a gritty, dramatic monologue in South African dialect, incorporating multilingual slang. (‘Sis’ is an exclamation of disgust.)

Originally published in the collection Joburg, Sis!, Bateleur Press, 1974, and has featured in several anthologies, notably A Century of South African Short Stories, edited by Jean Marquard, AD Donker, 1978

‘Calls’ by Masande Ntshanga

The struggle against apartheid was one of the great moral campaigns of the 20^th Century, giving rise to a celebrated body of literature and two Nobel Laureates (Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee). Post-apartheid writers subsequently explored the complex aftermath of minority rule, including the HIV/AIDS crisis.

But where are we now? Post-post-apartheid? The current crop of writers is young, diverse, with a wide range of urgent preoccupations, and a desire to break free of the tropes of the past.

One of the most notable is Masande Ntshanga, who published his first short story at 18, and has since produced two genre-bending novels (The Reactive and Triangulum). ‘Calls’ is a lively blending of speculative fiction and African traditions.

First published in New York-based n+1 Magazine in Spring 2016, online here

‘A Sunrise on the Veld’ by Doris Lessing

For seven years, until 1994, my father was the British Council representative in Malawi, and I was a regular on the British Airways service from Heathrow, with a fuelling stop in Harare. On one return flight, an unmistakable woman, grey hair pulled tightly back, sat in front of me on the leg from Zimbabwe. At Terminal 4 baggage claim, I helped her with her suitcases. No other passenger seemed aware, or remotely interested, that they’d shared a flight with Doris Lessing.

A Sunrise on the Veld captures the endless possibilities of an African dawn and a 15-year-old boy looking to his future…until a horrific incident changes the outlook. This is one of Lessing’s greatest stories, standing out in an oeuvre that earned her the Nobel Prize in 2007. (How did she take the news?)

First published in the collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country, Michael Joseph, 1951); has since appeared in several other collections

‘The Ultimate Safari’ by Nadine Gordimer

Our time in Malawi coincided with an appalling civil war in Mozambique, estimated to have displaced two million people. Refugees fleeing to Malawi only had to cross a road. For a stretch, the main north-south highway formed the border, and on the Malawian side there were huge refugee camps. The crossing into South Africa was more perilous. Thousands of refugees traversed Kruger National Park, a reserve the size of Israel, taking their chances with elephants, buffalos, and lions. The flow has never entirely ceased.

Once, during one of our extended self-drive safaris there, my wife and I saw in the distance a group making the crossing, porting all of their belongings with them. Nadine Gordimer’s The Ultimate Safari, published in 1989, puts the reader in the shoes – or lack of shoes – of the refugees.

First published in Granta in 1989, and then in the collection Jump and Other Stories, Bloomsbury, 1991

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ by Ernest Hemingway

No author has stamped their name on the world quite like Hemingway. In thirty years as a travel writer, I keep bumping into him: his homes, hotels he’s stayed in, bars he drank at, and – at Murchison Falls in Uganda – the site of one of his two successive plane crashes. I even spent a morning in Cuba with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s boat captain (who claimed to be the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea).

The personality overshadowed the work. For half the literary world Hemingway is now firmly out of fashion, while the other half keeps the flame burning. I’m in the latter camp.

There are a dozen Hemingway books on my shelves, red flags be damned. This story is one of the reasons. Compare and contrast to Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird. They both culminate with a hunt gone wrong. But which female protagonist has agency?

First published in Cosmopolitan in 1936, and collected in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories, Charles Scribner, 1938. It has subsequently appeared in many other collections and anthologies

‘Loss of Face’ by A. S. Byatt

My father’s only non-African overseas posting was South Korea, which even in the mid-1980s was on the international cultural circuit. Antonia Byatt was one of the British writers who visited under his auspices. Holidaying from school at the time, I took her shopping for pirated cassettes in Itaewon, our local district in Seoul. She visited our house for meals, and, perhaps significantly, spied on our shelves my mother’s collection of novels by Margaret Drabble, her sister.

The house and my parents feature in Loss of Face. The portrait of my mother is not entirely flattering; our home in Durham is referenced, and, by implication, her provincial northern roots. (Unlike Antonia – and my South Shields-born father – my mother retained her regional accent.) She was an infant teacher at the Seoul British School, and her enthusiasm for Beatrix Potter’s books is mentioned somewhat condescendingly. No matter. My parents and two of my former homes appear, albeit in fictionalized form, in a story by a Booker winner. I’ll take the win.

Collected in Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1987