This is the unlikely history of a writer and artist who supposedly left little to no record. Dugmore Boetie wrote a celebrated autobiographical novel, a popular work published posthumously that has been printed and reprinted in at least eight editions in the United Kingdom, United States, and Turkey. Yet for over half a century, scholars and public figures have insisted that, except for his book, he left no real trace. Four complex and overlapping themes emerged during our archival and oral research as we attempted to wrestle fact from fiction about Boetie and his writing: biography, fabrication, collaboration, and erasure. This talk introduces our biographical treatment. We offer a biographical study of Boetie himself; a biography of Familiarity, his principal work; and more broadly, a meditation on race, racism, and racialized exclusion and exploitation in the arts in mid-twentieth-century South Africa. We focus our analysis on the fabrication of identities or self-fashioning by Boetie and others, the collaborative activities between Boetie and various communities of writers and artists, and the erasure of Boetie’s life and contributions by racialized and racist socio-cultural and political currents during and after his passing in 1966.

Speakers:

Vusumuzi R. Kumalois a Senior Lecturer in History at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. His recent book, South Africa’s Struggle for Independent Education (HSRC Press, 2023) focuses on the Wilberforce Institute, one of the first major independent African schools in segregationist South Africa.

Benjamin N. Lawranceis an author and editor of twenty books, including Amistad’s Orphans (Yale UP, 2014), and the former editor-in-chief of the African Studies Review. He is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Together they published “‘A Genius without Direction’: The Abortive Exile of Dugmore Boetie and the Fate of Southern African Refugees in a Decolonizing Africa,” in the American Historical Review (2021), and a new critical edition of Boetie’s masterpiece, Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (Ohio UP 2020). They are currently writing a biographical study of Dugmore Boetie.

Format: In-person and via Zoom

Venue: The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (1 Tolip Street, Westdene)

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