The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie’s response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa’s oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie’s story, as one critic puts it, offers “an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes” that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets’ refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africa’s bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. From Duggie’s Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie’s narrative celebrates humanity’s relentless drive to survive at any cost.
This new edition of Dugmore Boetie’s out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams’ haunting poem, “Soweto Funeral,” composed after attending Boetie’s interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.
Dugmore Boetie is the pen name of South African journalist, writer, and musician, Douglas Mahonga Buti (1924–66).
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Vusumuzi R. Kumalo is a Senior Lecturer in history at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. His research explores the history of independent black education. Benjamin N. Lawrence is an author and editor of twenty books, and former editor-in-chief of the African Studies Review. He is Professor of History at the University of Arizona.