Mr Chameleon - Tatamkhulu Afrika - An Autobiography

Jacana, 2005. Soft cover (424 pages) in very good condition, almost like new. 

Mr Chameleon (2005) is the autobiography of the South African political activist, poet, and novelist Tatamkhulu Afrika, who was born in Cairo in 1920 and died eighty-two years later in Cape Town. Afrika converted to Islam in the 1960s and classified himself as Muslim, thereby ceding the racial privilege of whiteness under apartheid. Afrika titled his autobiography after the chameleon, which embodies the discursive elusiveness of the life recounted in Mr Chameleon. Afrika's autobiography is simultaneously the narration of a politically engaged life and a meditation on the nature of identity. By the time of his death in 2002, the poet Tatamkhulu Afrika's extraordinary life story had become well known in literary circles in South Africa. In often beautiful prose, Mr Chameleon recounts a narrative that traverses from Egypt to the Bo-kaap, reversing the colonial Cape to Cairo sweep up the continent? Within a continental range of reference, Mr Chameleon tells of the hard-earned selfhood of a writer whose five successive name changes and racial reclassification confounded the certainties of apartheid. Afrika was born in Egypt in 1920 to a Turkish father and Egyptian mother, who moved to South Africa when Afrika was two. After the death of his parents shortly after their arrival in South Africa, he was raised by family friends as a white child. Afrika fought on the Allied side in the Second World War and later as part of Umkhonto we Sizwe (or "Spear of the Nation" in Zulu, the name of the armed wing of the African National Congress) in the anti-apartheid struggle. After being known as Mogamed Fu'ad Nasif, John Charlton, Ismail Joubert, and Tatamkhulu Ismail Afrika, Afrika adopted the last of his names, which means "Grandfather of Africa" in Xhosa, from an honorific title given to him by fellow soldiers in Umkhonto we Sizwe.