Farewell Zoë Wicomb, the vivid voyager who wrote SA into the world

When Zoë Wicomb arrived in Britain at the age of 22 in 1970, just off the SS Southern Cross from Cape Town, the first thing she did was make her way to Carnaby Street where she bought herself a big black hat. In the days following her death last week, this story was retold by several of her friends and family: as an emblem of her vitality, style and pluck; of the passion that defined her writing and her life. She was the daughter of a conservative coloured schoolmaster raised in a small rural Namaqualand community — and here she was in Swinging London!

It would be incorrect to say “she did not look back”,  because she did, all the time. Dislocation drove her creativity, and all eight of her books — four novels, two story collections and one of essays — are about South Africa or rooted in it, even if they are written from the United Kingdom in which she made her home and raised her family.  

But in the way she must have tied that hippie hat over the Afro she refused to tame, she forged her own utterly distinctive voice. Her first book, a collection of interconnected stories called You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town published abroad in 1988, was praised by Toni Morrison — one of her icons — as “seductive, brilliant and precious”; when it was finally published in South Africa two decades later, David Attwell wrote in the introduction that the stories stood out “as exquisite embers in the ash of so much apartheid-era writing, speaking powerfully to post-apartheid sensibilities”. 

This is spot on.  The stories might be deeply rooted in the author’s experience of Beeswater, the rural community outside Vanrhynsdorp where she was raised, or of coloured Cape Town, where she went to high school and then to the just-opened University of the Western Cape (UWC) in the “bush”, but they have a breadth to them that draws on her erudition. 

They have an edge to them too: a striving beyond the confines of what Wicomb called the “totalising” identity of declaring oneself “coloured” — or “black”, or anything, for that matter — into what she described as “multiple belongings”. The words of the exiled poet Arthur Nortje that she uses as an epigraph to You Can’t Get Lost could well serve as her epitaph: “Origins trouble the voyager much, those roots/ that have sipped the waters of another continent…” 

“She was always a delight.”

The novelist Damon Galgut recalls “feeling jealous” when he picked up You Can’t Get Lost, “because it was a book I wish I’d written myself. Later the jealousy was supplanted by the pleasure of getting to know Zoe a little. She was always a delight.” 

Another friend was the writer Ivan Vladislavic. She was “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature”, he says. “Her fiction is so finely wrought and extraordinarily rich in its language and insights. She was marvellous company too, witty, often provocative and occasionally dauntingly regal.”  

We were friends too, albeit not close. I last saw her last year, on her annual visit to Cape Town with her partner of 49 years, the artist Roger Palmer. Dressed in one of her characteristically colourful 50s-style full skirts (she loved to twirl these while dancing), she dominated the dinner table: sparring with Roger, as was their way, arguing furiously with me over the state of South African media (she insisted it was “captured by white monopoly capital”), laughing uproariously, and declaring the day — which had begun with an ocean swim — to be “the best of my life”. 

“She said this all the time,” recalls her friend, the legendary Cape Town bookseller Henrietta Dax, who was present at that dinner. “Good company, a great swim, a fine bottle of sparkling wine. Every good experience was ‘the best.”

But this wasn’t just hyperbole: her joie de vivre was infectious. For Dax, her singular quality is the way she balanced this enthusiasm with care: when Dax was ill, Zoë and Roger dropped what they were doing to come to Cape Town to look after her. 

But there were shadows, too. When I asked Zoë at that dinner what she was working on, she responded categorically that she would never pen another word. She always said this. She found writing an ordeal and was scathing in her self-criticism, often riven by self-doubt. She doted on her grandsons and played a large role in raising them in Glasgow, which is one of the reasons she could not settle permanently in South Africa after she retired.  

She dedicated The One That Got Away, a short story collection, to her first grandson, Finn, and her novel October to the second, Theo. When Hannah, her daughter, had a third boy, Milo, Zoë exclaimed: “Damn! I guess I’ll have to write another book!” She did — her last one, Still Life, published in 2020. 

Deteriorating health

Of course, she wrote on. She was due to give a paper at next month’s “Nobel in Africa” conference at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies on the work of Vladislavic, one of her very favourite writers. And despite her deteriorating health, she collaborated with Roger for the first time in their 49 years together, on a book about the Pietermaritzburg street-sign artist Fanlo “Chickenman” Mkhize, whom they had known for decades, to be published this year. 

“Just last Sunday we were sitting at the kitchen table crossing the t’s and undotting the i’s,” Roger told me. “She thought her lead essay was ‘a load of rubbish. Give me two weeks and I’ll turn it into something.’” Of course, it was “something” already: in a way that only Zoë could, it parses Chickenman with Dickens’ Bleak House. 

So obsessed was Zoë with rewriting, her former student and close friend Mariangela Palladino told me, that every time she had to prepare for a public reading, she would do so with a red pen, “changing the printed words and giving the audience something new and different from what was on the page”. Vladislavic says he is “sure the self-doubt, the endless questioning, is part of the reason she produced such superb fiction”. 

This self-doubt, says Palladino, was entirely at odds with her gusto in the classroom at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she was a legendary professor of literature and of creative writing: “She shook the world of her students. She could open up horizons by clicking a finger.” She was a strict PhD supervisor, but also an unfailingly generous one, a life guide as well as a teacher. 

Palladino believes that this ability to be “authoritative without being authoritarian” is something she learned from her upbringing. Her parents, from Griqua stock of the Eastern Cape, had migrated to Namaqualand where they became community leaders because they were educated and spoke English. 

Visionary Griqua chief

Zoë’s mother was a direct descendant of the visionary Griqua chief Andries le Fleur, a legacy that was important to Zoë. Her friend, the activist and politician Lynne Brown, told me that there was always an internal conflict about this: “When I said, ‘I’m Hessaqua’, she responded, ‘Rubbish! There’s no such thing. There’s no Khoi or San!’ You would get a long story about identity formation. But it did mean something to her. She wanted to break free, but she also had a sense of belonging.” 

This tension is manifest in her writing, and in her life. She insisted on being herself,  whatever the price, which was sometimes high. 

Once, when Brown went to visit Zoë in Glasgow, her host led her through town wearing cats-eye sunglasses and a thrift-store faux leopard-skin jacket. When children mocked her — “Golliwog! Golliwog!” — she was distraught and devastated, but when Brown ran after the children to admonish them she got even more upset, and begged her friend to let it go. 

Hearing this story reminds me of one that Roger told me, of how, when they moved to Glasgow and needed to use black cabs, his seemingly confident partner could not lift her arm to hail one. He understood this to be a legacy of her upbringing, as a rural coloured girl in apartheid South Africa. 

The Wicomb family was forcibly removed from Beeswater, a fragmented rural community of about sixty homesteads near Vanrynsdorp, to a windswept township called Die Bulte outside Vredendal. Zoë’s mother died when she was 13: this, she often said, liberated her in that it opened the door for her to Cape Town, to go to high school and stay with family: “There was a conscious need to be somewhere more exciting, more challenging,” Roger told me. 

Had she known about Steve Biko’s new Black Consciousness Movement, Zoë had said, “I would not have felt so despondent and anxious to get away”; as it was, she did not encounter a live performance, an art film, or any work by a black writer until she arrived in England. 

Ann Harries

As Zoë was boarding the Southern Cross in 1970, she was introduced by her cousin, the activist Gertrude Fester, to a young white South African woman named Ann Harries. Harries, who would become a distinguished novelist herself, recalls “a dismissive nod that put me in my place at once”. But when she came up for dinner that evening, she found that was seated with the “strikingly beautiful” Zoë and two young blond Afrikaners, one of whom expressed his racist disgust at having been seated with her. 

Overcome with rage, Harries got up and slapped him: “Zoë burst into delighted laughter, the two men fled, and thus began a lifelong beautiful friendship between two liberated South African women.”

In London, Zoë supported herself by working as a supply teacher: she would march her students up Box Hill to make Jane Austen’s Emma come alive for them. There had been two books in her childhood home: Pride and Prejudice, and an abridged Oliver Twist: “I still love both,” she said in a 2017 interview. “I was transported from the vulgarity of apartheid by books — books opened up different worlds, and brought freedom from an oppressive social order.”

But she was “panic-stricken”, she has said, that her “bush” education from UWC was “so poor” that “I would have to teach myself to read in order to teach A-level students”. She registered for a second undergraduate degree from Reading University, where she fell in with a group of art students and, through them, started hanging out in the budding artists’ community of London’s East End. 

It was there that she met Roger, when he arrived, bad tempered, at the home of a friend to reclaim a pasta pot that he claimed was long overdue being returned to his house. The pot was being used to cook a meal for a guest who had just returned from a visit to her native South Africa. He landed up staying for the meal: “I’ve had enough of this ridiculous country called England,” Zoë pronounced. “I should go home.”

They fell in love and she stayed in the “ridiculous country” whose racism she found more insidious than that back home where “at least you knew where you stood”. The couple  moved to Nottingham, where Roger got a job. Hannah was born, and Zoë started writing, conjuring Beeswater from Sherwood Forest, where they lived in a particularly dank cottage.

A few years earlier, in London, she had come across the Heinemann African Writers edition of Bessie Head’s Maru, and was astonished to see a photograph of herself on the cover. 

Unauthorised

“Uncannily, and much as I hated the unauthorised use of the picture, I felt an affinity with her,” Zoë later said. Maru, written by a southern African woman of mixed race, “gave me the courage or permission to write”. Head became a lodestar for Zoë, and she often returned to her. 

“She felt she had to write,” says Mariangela Palladino. “It seemed to me to be her way of social justice. There were gaps in history and they had to be filled.” She would, when asked, speak at gatherings of the Nottingham Anti-Apartheid Movement, but she loathed and feared public speaking. Writing was “her very quiet, very fierce, very cunning way of being a militant, intellectually and socially,” says Palladino.

When Roger got a job in Glasgow, they moved there, where Zoë did graduate work in literary linguistics at the University of Strathclyde. But in 1990, with the end of apartheid, she returned to Cape Town to see if she could resettle. She got a job at UWC, bought a little house in Observatory, and enrolled Hannah at Harold Cressy School; Roger would visit during holidays. 

It was in this period that Zoë became close to Lynne Brown, then still an underground activist. 

“Many comrades went to therapy,” Brown recalls. “I went to Zoë. In a very  difficult time, I could trust her. She would never repeat what I told her. And she probed things. She didn’t have a set view. That’s why we have remained so close over 30 years.” 

Zoë could be grand and literary — the word “regal” is often used by friends — but she also loved to be “ordinary”, says Brown. She spent much time in Mitchells Plain with Brown’s family, who adored her, and continued to do so on every visit home, even after she returned to Glasgow in 1993: having Roger so far away wasn’t working out, and she decided to put her family first. She got her post at the University of Strathclyde, and taught there until her retirement in 2008. She continued publishing her fiction, despite her complaints.

“For years we have been waiting to see what the literature of post-apartheid South Africa will look like,” wrote JM Coetzee in his endorsement of her first novel, David’s Story (2001). “Now Zoe Wicomb delivers the goods. Witty in tone, sophisticated in technique, eclectic in language, beholden to no one in its politics, David’s Story is a tremendous achievement and a huge step in the remaking of the South Africa novel.” 

In 2013 she would win Yale University’s inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. The citation reads that her “subtle, lively language and beautifully crafted narratives explore the complex entanglements of home, and the continuing challenges of being in the world”. 

In one of Zoë’s early stories, a child looked at a fearsome mother from under the table, “and through the iron crossbars… saw in her two great buttocks the opposing worlds she occupied”. She was the kind of writer who could craft such a sentence, freighting an earthy image with conceptual heft, and also begin a bracing 1991 essay with the line: “We’ve all been horribly bullied by Father Culture and Mother Nature, that binary pair who define the terms of our production in the old language of the West — race, ethnicity, nation.” In another essay, she would provocatively compare township necklacings to suburban braais, in the way they brought people together around a fire. 

Insightful tribute

Although Zoë hated the word “coloured”, she preferred it to “brown”, which she felt served “conservatism” by celebrating “in-betweenness”. In an insightful tribute to her just published on Africa is a Country, her friends Lynne Brown and Desiree Lewis — professor of women’s studies at UWC — note how her death “has prompted an outpouring of tributes from black women writers and scholars across the globe, a reflection of the immense political and literary impact of her work”. 

These tributes spoke to Zoë’s “lifelong commitment to unraveling the social fictions that continue to shape South African life”, but Zoë herself might raise an eyebrow, from beyond the grave, to being remembered as a black female pioneer. In a 2021 essay, for example, she critiqued a “woke” politics that could, as Brown and Lewis put it, “end up hardening complex truths, collapsing the contradictions of the past into performances of moral clarity that often reflect the psycho-political needs of the present more than the realities of history”. 

Brown and Lewis note that, like Bessie Head, “she chose to ground her expansive, universal vision in the particulars of place: a view of the local that was at once compassionate and sharply critical”. Celebrating their “inspiring, hilariously funny, outrageously adventurous and incredibly generous” friend, they offer an example of this grounding from October, where the author describes in detail the flora of Namaqualand: the kanniedoods and the koekemakankra and the vivid vygies among them, planted by a character named Sylvie: “If, as AntiMa says, the devil has blown in her blood, then that blood is the screaming purple here at her feet.” 

Zoë Wicomb saw the devil in her own blood, in her landscape; this lived beside her joie de vivre. Every Wednesday night in Glasgow, she and Roger dined with Hannah and the boys. Ouma would always introduce the same topic: how her grandchildren should do her in before she went gaga. Much dark laughter would ensue: a gun? a cyanide suppository? 

“She could no longer stand the physical pain,” says Roger, of the past few months. “She was, finally, done with writing. She was ready to die.” Her family, her friends and her readers will miss her terribly. DM

Zoë Wicomb was born on 23 November 1948. She died in Glasgow of a pulmonary embolism on 13 October 2025. She is survived by her partner Roger Palmer; her daughter Hannah Palmer; her grandsons Finn, Theo and Milo McClure; and her brother Neil Wicomb and his family, who live in Gauteng. There will be a public memorial service for her in Cape Town in January 2026.