ART + REVOLUTION, the life and death of Thami Mnyele, South African artist

258pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2008

Thami Mnyele was born in Alexandra Township in 1948. In the 1970s he secured a grant to the Art Centre in Rourke’s Drift in Natal, where he received a year of formal art training. He worked as an illustrator for the SACHED Trust for seven years. In 1979 he was forced into exile in Gaberone, Botswana, where he became a leading 'cultural worker' with the Medu Art Ensemble. He joined the ANC and studied at an MK training camp in Angola. On 14th June 1985 he was killed in a raid by South African Special Forces operatives.

Diana Wylie is Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of A Little God: The twilight of patriarchy in a southern African chiefdom and Starving on a Full Stomach: The triumph of cultural racism in modern South Africa (winner of the Melville J. Herskovits Award).