Mandla Langa
Mandla Langa (born 1950 in KwaMashu, Durban) is a South African journalist and writer known for his novel The Lost Colours of The Chameleon. He went into exile in 1976 and has thus lived in several countries including Botswana, United Kingdom, Angola, Hungary, Mozambique and Zambia.
Quotes
[edit]- There are not enough hours in the day to explore the lives of men and women in their daily struggles with poverty, hunger and disease
- Storytellers will never go out of business. It’s all a work in progress. An egg waiting to be hatched.
- It is enough to have imagined, but it helps to have lived through the circumstances
- If you are a human being the huge ethical debates will rest with you in the snarling loneliness of midnight
- Home and exile are not geographic places
- Post-apartheid South Africa has failed to take advantage of the goodwill of the world and harness African solidarity
- Certain chroniclers of our past have pushed out of the frame the little man and woman whose contribution towards the creation of a democratic South Africa was immeasurable
- In our haste to promote an unproblematic and amnesiac Rainbow Nation, we have rewarded murderers with medals and even loosed some of them to speak for us in exalted councils
- Guest column: Mandla Langa explains process behind his new book 12 October, 2014
- Every writer enjoys a challenge that plunges him or her into uncharted waters
- The new buzzword is ‘erasure’ and it is my belief that great people, especially if they stand for ideals that are inimical to the interests of the powerful, are erased via misinterpretation
- It is my belief that in accepting Mandela in all his complex configurations, we can start coming to terms with the kind of greatness we are collectively capable of reaching
