Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual by Hlonipha Mokoena

ISBN: 9781869141912

UKZN Press, 2011

350 pages, Paperback

This book examines the life of Magema Fuze and suggests that Kholwa identity was fashioned through the practice of bricolage: the cobbling together, in indeterminate and sometimes contradictory ways, of elements from both colonial and indigenous cultures.

Magema Fuze's literary life represents a black intellectual tradition whose potential was not realized. Beyond his work as a printer and scribe, it is worth adding another role, namely that Fuze was a popular South African historian who attempted to write histories with intimate resonances that would appeal to his readers and rouse their nationalistic sentiments.