Chris Van Wyk – författare

Agnes, the Van Wyks’ Zulu housekeeper, had a special friendship with young Chris in the late sixties to early seventies. He would defend her whenever she came to work with a hangover on a Monday morning and made a mess of the cleaning. In turn, Agnes never told on Chris when he played truant from school.

As the years passed, the two grew closer, swopping stories about coloureds and Zulus, life in Riverlea and Soweto, pass laws, politics and falling in love. She taught him to count in Zulu and he promised to teach her to read in English.

Whenever the clock ran against her, Agnes would stop almost in mid-sentence, grab a broom or cloth, and declare: ‘I have to rush. I have eggs to lay, chickens to hatch.’

What an odd, ungrammatical thing to say, Chris often mused. But many years later, he played a CD by Louis Jordan, a 1940s American jazz singer, and it all became clear.

Eggs to lay, chickens to hatch (forthcoming end April 2010) is Chris van Wyk’s second childhood memoir about growing up in Riverlea and his colourful interactions with the men and women who lived the African proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. But mostly it is the story of a wonderful friendship between a young coloured boy and a Zulu woman.

Shirley, Goodness & Mercy is a heart-warming, yet compellingly honest story about a young boy growing up in Newclare, Coronationville and Riverlea during the apartheid era.

Despite Van Wyk’s later becoming involved in the ‘struggle’, this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy’s special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak and dusty townships.

In Shirley, Goodness & Mercy Chris van Wyk – poet, novelist and short story writer – had created a truly remarkable work, at once both thought-provoking and vastly entertaining.