Arthur Maimane

John Arthur Mogale Maimane (5 October 1932 – 28 June 2005), better known as Arthur Maimane, was a South African journalist and novelist.

Biography

Maimane was born in Pretoria, South Africa, growing up in the black township of Lady Selborne.Denis Herbstein
"Arthur Maimane" (obituary)
''The Guardian'', 15 July 2005. He was educated in Johannesburg at St Peter's College, also known as the "Black Eton" of South Africa (Oliver Tambo was his mathematics teacher before becoming a lawyer and president of the African National Congress)."Arthur Maimane"
South African History Online. Maimane was originally intending to study medicine, when a young priest, Trevor Huddleston (who was involved in the Sophiatown forced removals), persuaded him to take a vacation job at ''Drum'' magazine. As a result, Maimane choose journalism as his life career. He was a versatile journalist, covering a wide spectrum of subjects for ''Drum'', including writing sports reports, thriller and interviews with beauty queens and other celebrities.

Reporter

Joining ''Drum'' in the early 1950s, he was mentored by Henry Nxumalo. The photograph of Maimane in Anthony Sampson's 1956 book ''Drum: A Venture into the New Africa'', "trilby on back of head, cigarette dangling", is an amusing take-off of the Hollywood "newshound" image, but conceals his innate seriousness as a reporter and analyst of the world around him.

Under the pseudonym Arthur Mogale, he wrote a regular series for ''Drum'' entitled "The Chief", in which he described gangster incidents he had heard about in the shebeens. Don Mattera, a leading Sophiatown gangster, took exception to this: "The gangsters were pissed off with him and there was a word out that we should wipe this guy off."

Maimane moved to ''Drum'' magazine's sister daily paper, ''Golden City Post'', as the news editor but he did not stay long. In 1958, the year after his friend Nxumalo was murdered by unknown assailants, Maimane relocated to Ghana to work on the West African edition of ''Drum''.

Moving in 1961 to London, England, the young editor accepted a position at Reuters and was posted to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as the agency's correspondent in East Africa. There, Maimane met his second wife, Jenny, and, when he was deported from Tanzania, after refusing the founding editorship of TANU's new daily and for critically reporting political events, the couple returned to London.

From 1964, Maimane worked for the BBC African Service at Bush House, going on to be a news writer for BBC One's current affairs programme '' 24 Hours'' from 1966, and then moving to Independent Television News (ITN) in 1973. In 1976, his novel ''Victims'' was published in London by Allison and Busby but was banned in South Africa, although the English Academy of South Africa awarded Maimane its Pringle Award for Creative Writing in 1978.

He took early retirement from ITN in 1989, and after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, Maimane was invited to return to
South Africa by the liberal ''Weekly Mail'', reporting on the early dismantling of apartheid legislation in 1991 as the newspaper's parliamentary correspondent. He returned again to South Africa after the 1994 elections and was appointed Features editor of the ''Weekly Mail''. He also wrote a column for the '' Sunday Independent''. After a brief return to England, he was appointed managing editor of the ''Johannesburg Star'', South Africa's biggest daily newspaper (1994–97). His post-apartheid play, ''Hang On In There, Nelson'', was performed at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg and at the State Theatre in Pretoria, in 1996.
His novel ''Victims'' was reissued in 2000 under the title ''Hate No More'' in South Africa.

In 2001, Maimane and his wife returned to London, after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Maimane died on 28 June 2005, aged 72, at the Charing Cross Hospital in London.

Books

* ''Victims'', London: Allison & Busby, 1976. (Winner of the English Academy of South Africa’s Thomas Pringle Award for Creative Writing in 1979).
* ''Hate No More'' (reissued version of ''Victims''), Kwela Books, 2000, .

See also

* List of South African writers

Further reading

* Mike Nicol, ''A Good-Looking Corpse: The World of Drum - Jazz and Gangsters, Hope and Defiance in the Townships of South Africa'', London: Secker & Warburg, 1991,
* Anthony Sampson, ''Drum: A Venture into the New Africa'', London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983,

References

External links

"1989, London, Arthur Maimane, novelist, journalist, Drum magazine, Come Back Africa, segregation"
(video). Villon Films Archive collections.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Maimane, Arthur
1932 births
2005 deaths
20th-century South African dramatists and playwrights
20th-century South African male writers
20th-century South African novelists
BBC World Service people
South African columnists
South African emigrants to the United Kingdom
South African male novelists
South African newspaper editors
South African television journalists
Writers from Pretoria
20th-century South African journalists
21st-century South African journalists