LEWIS NKOSI, "The Black Psychiatrist"/ "Flying Home!" Texts, perspectives, homage

444pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, 2021

Lewis Nkosi’s one-act play The Black Psychiatrist and its unpublished sequel Flying Home!, written in 2000-2001, together with a collection of essays on Nkosi's life and work.

Contributions include:

"Lewis Nkosi's Emblematic Play The Black Psychiatrist" and "Lewis Nkosi's Airport Play Flying Home!" by Astrid Starck-Adler

"'Listening to the Voices in the Streets and the Songs I Hear'", Lewis Nkosi interviewed by Tiiseto Makube (2006)

"H.I.E. Dhlomo and Lewis Nkosi's Historical Imagination, or Meeting Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw in 1989" by Ntongela Masilela

"Lewis Nkosi - Home and Exile and Mandela's Ego" by Veronique Tadjo

"Reading Mating Birds" by Lucy Graham

"Lewis Nkosi: a letter out of season (with preface to Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe by Lewis Nkosi)" by Flora Veit-Wild

"The Lewis I Knew" by Randolph Vigne

"The Lusaka of Lewis Nkosi, a memoir" by Stephen Chan

"Forever Colossal" by Raks Seakhoa Morakabe.

South African writer and literary critic Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) was born in rural KwaZulu-Natal. He lived in South African under apartheid until he was 22 years old. Although his works were banned in South Africa under the Suppression of Communism Act he became the first black South African journalist to win a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. When he applied for permission to go to the USA he was granted a one-way exit permit to leave South Africa, thus being barred from returning. He accepted the scholarship and left the country in 1961, beginning a 30-year exile. He subsequently lived in Central Africa, Britain, Poland, France and Switzerland. He returned to South Africa in 2001.

Astrid Starck-Adler was Professor Emerita of German and Yiddish Literature at both the Department of German and Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland, and the Université de Haute in Alsace, France.

Dag Henrichen is a Namibian historian at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Switzerland.