The Love Doctor: The Tales of Adam Kok, the Griqua (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781727732849)

Vendor: Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$10.00
$10.00
$10.00
Subtotal: $10.00
WR Book House

The Love Doctor: The Tales of Adam Kok, the Griqua

$10.00

The Love Doctor: The Tales of Adam Kok, the Griqua

$10.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
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Adam Kok is a fictional character. A Griqua, descended from an all too intimate follower of the legendary Griqua chief, Adam Kok. His ancient forebear handed down the line his own taste for other men's wives, including the chief's, and the chief's modern namesake followed dedicatedly in his forebear's footsteps. Having participated in the armed struggle against the apartheid regime, Adam Kok came to live in Zimbabwe, where he married the beautiful and upright, Rudo. Although he died a few years back, Adam used his job as a popular human interest journalist for a Harare newspaper to good effect. Adam was a great lover of women, a latter day Don Juan or Giacomo Casanova, an Africanist, a staunch Griqua patriot, an Epicurean when it came to Scots whisky and a frequenter of drinking holes, a man whose iconoclastic effusions were a cocktail of the truth people do not like to hear, and pure evil. A photographic negative, whose whiteness forced one to think of black and whose blackness made one think of white - an immoral scoundrel. Though almost all the stories relate the unabashed Utilitarianism of Adam's philosophy of life, many of them tackle issues of current importance in Zimbabwe, in Africa and the World. The narrator sets up a dialogue between his friend, Adam, and the reader in order to explore these issues. The result is a dialectic between Adam's own scandalous thoughts and deeds, the idea's of his wife, Rudo, who is a devout Catholic, the reader and the narrator himself, who is a socialist. In the process a fascinating cross-section of Zimbabwean as well as global social life and textures emerges. The original idea was inspired by Stuart Cloete's tales of Jean Macaque. His witty, iconoclastic and amoral depiction of scandalous situations in the capital of love, Paris, seemed to ring some serious bells when it came to the goings-on in Harare, the Sunshine City, and also a capital - if not of love - let us say sexual adventure.

Author: Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
ISBN-10: 1727732847
ISBN-13: 9781727732849
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Language: English
Published: 10/04/2018
Pages: 238
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.99h x 5.24w x 0.50d
By Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
By Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
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Robert Mshengu Kavanagh is a South African who has lived in Zimbabwe from 1984 to the present and is therefore well-positioned to portray the social life and major issues that characterize reality in modern Harare. After his first wife's death in 2004, Kavanagh married Hazvinei Gambe, a Zimbabwean born and bred. She was able to make a major contribution to ensuring the stories captured the latest happenings, touched on the burning issues and ensured that the language reflected the lingo of the times. Kavanagh brought to these stories a wealth of past experience, not only in writing for newspapers and posting blogs on a wide range of local and international topics but also the kind of experience you can only get from living with the people and travelling far and wide. As a Rhodes Scholar, Kavanagh is an alumnus of Cape Town, Oxford and Leeds, fourth generation African, conversant in six African languages, a published author, cultural activist and academic in South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. He has an M.Phil. from Oxford and a Ph.D. from Leeds and was instrumental in founding Theatre Arts Departments at the Universities of Addis Ababa and Zimbabwe and was Founder and Director (1989-2010) of the children's arts education for development organization, the CHIPAWO Trust and then Director of CHIPAWO World. His published books include: "The Making of a Servant", translations of Xhosa satirical poetry with Z.S.Qangule (Baobab), "Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa" (Zed Books), "Making People's Theatre" (Wits University Press), "South African People's Plays" ed. (Heineman African Writers Series), "Ngoma: Approaches to Arts Education in Southern Africa" ed. (Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education), "Zimbabwe: Challenging the Stereotypes" (Themba Books), "Mangothobane: a Soweto Nobody" (Themba Books), "A Contended Space: the Theatre of Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente" (Themba Books) and a novel, "Jan's Book", articles in many journals on topics relating to theatre, culture, politics and ideology.

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