Within Loving Memory of the Century : An Autobiography

Azaria Mbatha is one of South Africa's most important contemporary artists in the last century. This moving book is freely illustrated with artwork of Mbatha's own making, choice and allocation. His autobiography is rooted in the traditional Zulu heritage of his childhood and the tenets of Christianity imparted by his father. Mbatha weaves his own history into the history of his family, into the history of South Africa and into the history of his time, as he experienced it. The book and its art illustrations are vehicles for his spiritual, political and social commentary and reflect issues of the author's personal involvement in historical, religious and existential themes. Azaria Mbatha's autobiography embodies episodic memories of his life across a unique spectrum of African experience. Mbatha writes under a strong sense of compulsion to his generation. He reviews all that is important in his life and links the lives, experiences and histories he has inherited from earlier generations to lives as yet unborn through the medium of story telling. The autobiography is part memoir, part ethnography, part folk tale, part history and part moral construction. The book collapses the boundaries between memoir, history and moral philosophy. It asserts a different order of logic and structure. Mbatha adopts a firm stance as a commentator within a crumbling society racked by personal and collective conflict. His cogent topical themes are depicted, reviewed and expanded in an imaginative continuity of experience woven into the literary fabric of his memories. The text is fascinating, profound and moving.