The Wynberg Seven 1987 by Gladys Thomas | Scarce Struggle Book
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Product details
The Wynberg Seven 1987
By Gladys Thomas
Scarce
Binding: Soft cover
Book Condition: Fairly good condition. Some minor signs of aging on the front and back cover. As per photos.
Edition: 1987
Born Gladys Doreen Adams of a mixed race couple, the daughter of John Adams and an Irish woman, Dorothy O'Riodan, on the 14th of December, 1934 in Soutrivier, Cape Town. She lived with her mother in Salt River until she was six, when she was taken to live with her fathers family in Lakeside. There was conflict between the families because of the racial issue at the time and the fact that both parents married to other people, so she was not allowed to see her mother again.
She went to school from Lakeside, attending an Afrikaans, Dutch Reformed school, in Retreat up to Standard 6, then like many, she left school to work at the age of fifteen. Initially at a in a sweets factory then at the Monatic clothing factory, though she really wanted to be a nurse. When she was 18 she married Albert Thomas, with whom she had two children, Adrian Thomas and Tanja Thomas.
The family settled in Simonstown, but she, her family and friends were later evicted in terms of the notorious Group Areas Act and moved to the raw, unfinished township of Ocean View. This experience led to her starting to write. She states that she, like many others, was angry and she thus "wrote not beautiful poetry but angry words. How could you explain to your teenage children why their lives had changed so radically?". Thomas's literary career really started in 1967 when she contacted James Matthews about her writing and they began working on the anthology, Cry Rage!, which was published by SPROCAS in 1972, and then banned by the Apartheid authorities two weeks after its launch.
Since her work was so critical of apartheid, much of it was banned; so when a stage production of one of her plays was praised by The World in 1979, her plays were banned and she was detained by the Security Police.
In 1983 she attended the International Writing Program in Iowa City, and her writing intensified markedly. Among the works now produced were Six stories of the children of Crossroads (1986) (using interviews she did with the dispossessed children of the community of Crossroads, which had been bulldozed in 1986 to make room for a white suburb), The Wynberg Seven (1987, based on her interviews with parents who watched their teenagers being taken into Pollsmoor Prison), and Spotty Dog and other Township Children's Stories (Skotaville, 1989).
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