Alfred John Wannenburgh III (2 December 1936 – 18 December 2010) was a South African author, journalist, conservationist, and anti-apartheid activist from Cape Town. His early political writings which began in 1961/62 cemented his career as a left-wing protest writer in the radical pan-African literary scene and led him, Richard Rive, and Jan Hoogendyk to form what Grant Farred called the "Western Cape Protest School" constituted by Wannenburgh, Rive, Alex La Guma, and James Matthews—who occasionally met at Hoogendyk's Rondebosch home. Wannenburgh attended both Rondebosch Boys' Preparatory School and Rondebosch Boys' High School and received his undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology, African History, and Political Philosophy from the University of Cape Town (UCT).Negro Digest, January 1963, p. 42 His career in journalism began in 1961 and ended in 2010. He worked for many years as a foreign correspondent or stringer for America's Associated Press and Britain's The Guardian. Domestically, he was also a columnist, feature writer, and sub-editor for the Cape Times, Weekend Argus, and Sunday Times in particular, from 1984 to 2010, while taking several research sabbaticals in-between.
Early life
Wannenburgh grew up in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, namely 'Little Mowbray' (a subdivision of Mowbray proper) and Upper Rondebosch. He was born into a middle-class Capetonian family of Anglo-Germanic and French Huguenot descent at either South Peninsula Maternity Home or Saint Monica's. His father, Malcolm Wentzel Wannenburgh, was a human computer at Cape Town City's ('CCC') Mowbray-based Trigonometrical Survey Office under the Mapping and Survey's Department. Wannenburgh's family home was Harmony—a now lost Sir Herbert Baker manor house in Roseberry Road, Mowbray. Wannenburgh's two sisters, Audrey and Elizabeth, attended Rustenburg School for Girls. His mother, Dorothy (née Wood), was a CCC mayoral secretary. After matriculating, Wannenburgh worked as a land surveyor's assistant, salesman, clerk, and window-dresser in the Cape Town City Bowl.
From the late 60s or early 70s until his death, he lived at Dartmouth, 212 Main Road, Muizenberg (on Muizenberg's 'Historic Mile'). Dartmouth was an Edwardian beach house, situated next-door to the Yokohama papier-mâché house, and was left to Wannenburgh by his father. The structure stood directly below the Battle of Muizenberg historical site on Bailey's Kloof. It was demolished post-2013. His second wife, Celeste Wannenburgh (née Matthews), is a former Proportional Representative Councillor (Raadslid) for the City of Cape Town, a Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards recipient, and teacher that has served as a commissioner, board member, and advisor on several departmental agencies under South Africa's Department of Sport, Arts and Culture. At the age of 74, Wannenburgh succumbed to cancer at his Muizenberg home. Matthew Wannenburgh (* October 1, 1996), born out of Wannenburgh's second marriage from 1992 to 2010, is his only child.
Early writing career and political activities
Wannenburgh was an Independent Newspapers reporter, columnist, and sub-editor for almost two decades; spent several years as a stringer for European and North American newspaper houses; and published in a variety of diverse European and African political, short fiction, and wildlife publications (including Black Orpheus, Présence Africaine, Animan, Atlantis, GEO, New African, New Contrast, New Age, Negro Digest, Nagyvilág, Transition, London's Tribune and Gauteng's The Sunday Independent). In his 2010 Cape Times staff obituary, he was remembered as an "affable activist" and "laid-back hero" who underplayed his contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle as a journalist, writer, go-between, and revisionist historian. He was a member of the Communist Party in South Africa and the South African Congress of Democrats (COD)—a radical left-wing white, anti-apartheid organisation founded in South Africa in 1952 or 1953 as part of the multi-racial Congress Alliance, after the African National Congress (ANC) invited whites to become part of the Congress Movement.Vladimír Klíma et al., Black Africa: literature and language, 1976, p. 257
He is most significantly associated with the Western Cape Protest School of the 60s analogous to the 'Sophiatown writers' of the 50s. In 1955, he was a Congress Alliance delegate representing his local COD branch as one of 3,000 Kliptown 'Charterists', and was asked to travel to Kliptown to attend the Congress of the People (25 June 1955 – 26 June 1955) organised by the National Action Council—a multi-racial organisation which later became known as the Congress Alliance—to witness the declaration and ratify the adoption of the Freedom Charter, which set out the aims and aspirations of the opponents of apartheid. Wannenburgh was also a covert member of the UMkhonto we Sizwe ('Spear of the Nation' or 'MK') and was recruited by Dennis Goldberg and admitted in 1962. He was already a member of Goldberg's technical (engineering) unit, making bombs alongside him to be used for the anti-apartheid struggle's upcoming 'symbolic bombing' that began on December 16, 1961.
Wannenburgh met Richard Rive in 1959 in a UCT registration queue and was already a close friend of his by the time Rive asked him to contribute stories to anthologies edited by him for Heinemann's African Writers Series—namely the short story anthology Quartet (1963) and the similar but expanded prose anthology Modern African Prose (1964).Wannenburgh, 'Memories of Richard', New Contrast 71. 18.3 (1990): 29–39
Wannenburgh remained in South Africa in the early 1960s rather than going into self-imposed exile, however, he did relocate in 1965 (according to Roger Field) to Lüderitz, Namibia for a time—where he worked as a local History teacher and alluvial diamond researcher/prospector. Prior to leaving "his [Muizenberg] home in a hurry" (in 1965), he received a decisive written warning from Hendrik Verwoerd's government to 'choose' exile before the situation escalated; and while away, a painting described by Wannenburgh as protest art gifted to him by Alex La Guma (after joint work on a SACPO [South African Coloured People's Organisation] election campaign) was likely confiscated by trespassing Special Branch, who had visited Wannenburgh before for questioning in either the late '50s or early '60s when he first lived as a bachelor in Rondebosch. Two operatives, possibly the same ones, would later arrive and unwittingly receive help (from Wannenburgh) removing their vehicle in indiscernible darkness from a roadside depression at a remote Namibian bar near the alluvial site where Wannenburgh was working as a prospector-cum-researcher. After returning to the establishment ahead of them, he heard them inquire for someone named 'Alfred' from the safety of an adjoining space, and thereafter made himself scarce.
Soon after arriving in Namibia, he also learnt of, his friend, Ingrid Jonker's suicide "in the winter of 1965" at Three Anchor Bay. By 1985, several of Wannenburgh's short stories and books, respectively, had been translated into five European languages—namely Dutch, German, Polish, Hungarian, (Italian?) and French; with his story 'Echoes' being re-published in Hungary's Nagyvilág and Égtájak, France's Présence Africaine, East Germany's Sinn und Form, West Germany's Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen, America's Black World/Negro Digest, and anthologised twice in Poland (see 'selected works' below).
Synopsis of books The Natural Wonder of Southern Africa (1984) has been omitted from this section.
1963–1964: Quartet An anthology written and co-edited by Alf Wannenburgh and Richard Rive, featuring James Matthews, Alex La Guma, Rive, and himself as part of their collective protest literature. This 'Western Cape Protest School' first began meeting collectively at the Rondebosch home of Wannenburgh's good friend, Jan Hoogendyk. In Quartet, Wannenburgh wrote Awendgesang, Echoes, The Snake pit, and Debut. Quartet was banned on August 21, 1964 (Shaun Viljoen states '1965') by South Africa's apartheid government for being 'politically undesirable' but would still become widely read. The book was therefore first published in New York in 1963 under the name Quartet, being written in part by four writers—hence its title. Wannenburgh negotiated and secured Crown Publishers' endorsement. In 1965, Quartet was released in London by Heinemann, and remained in print in their prestigious African Writers Series for the next 20 years. The only copies present in South Africa at the time were those smuggled in by individuals. Alan Paton calls it "a milestone in the history of South African literature" in his 1963 introduction. Some also call it "one of the seminal texts of apartheid resistance literature." The official re-launch of the book in South Africa only took place in 2008 at Cape Town's District Six Museum. The two surviving authors (and their families), Alf Wannenburgh and James Matthews, both attended the Cape Town re-launch of Quartet 45 years later in their native South Africa. Richard Rive, having been murdered on the Cape Flats in 1996, and Alex La Guma, having died in Havana, Cuba in 1985. Professor Brian O'Connell (former Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape) praised Quartet—describing it as a book of both literary and historical importance. O'Connell said: "Here is a piece of Cape history recorded some 40 years ago, in compassion and truth of mood. The Cape and Cape Town, are changing at a more rapid pace than ever, and Quartet offers us a hold-fast to whom we were." "Rive's Modern African Prose anthology became their [Heinemann's] runaway bestseller, setting the fashion for an entire post-war literature that is now accepted worldwide. Yet when Heinemann duly asked him to revise it—and to remove his 'white' contributors [i.e. Alf Wannenburgh and Jack Cope]—he simply refused, despite the loss in royalties."
1978: Rhodesian Legacy & The Bushmen Published in 1978 by Struik. The book speaks of old Rhodesia, not in terms of the socio-political dilemmas it would soon face, but instead, its human achievement and natural endowment. Wannenburgh's writing and the photography of Ian Murphy, in unison, create a detailed re-telling of the wonders of the Rhodesian landscape such as the Victoria Falls, The Great Eastern Highlands, and the Matobo Hills.
Wannenburgh's The Bushmen, explores how the last of the Kalahari Bushmen are being drawn irrevocably into the vortex of our contemporary "civilisation"—glancing back at their animistic beliefs, fragmented cosmological traditions, hunting practices and implements, food gathering approaches, and child rearing. Aware of the urgency of the task, Alf Wannenburgh, Peter Johnson and Anthony Bannister searched deep in the Kalahari thirstlands to find those few remaining Bushmen who still live as their forefathers have done for the past 20 000 years. The book has been praised as a superb record of Wannenburgh's eyewitness experience, among the last of the Bushmen as hunter-gatherers with whom he lived for several months.Christopher Heywood, A history of South African literature, 2004, p. 207 The book was well-received amid the changing domestic socio-political landscape both preceding and following the pluralism of South Africa's post-1994 democratic dispensation and was subsequently republished by Smithmark Publishers in 1980, again by Struik in 1999, and New Holland Publishers in 2000.
1980: Forgotten Frontiersmen