In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me… - Lewis Nkosi

Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!

The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!

For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write.