Autobiographical account of Modisane’s early life in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, a center of black South African cultural life until its destruction by demolition and the forced removal of its inhabitants, followed by rezoning as a whites-only suburb. Modisane worked as a journalist, jazz critic, and actor in Sophiatown until the late 1950s, when he left South Africa for England in order to escape the oppression of the apartheid government (which would ban BLAME ME ON HISTORY upon its publication). Inscribed to Stanley Mosk, the former California Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice (1964-2001) who wrote several landmark decisions on civil rights and racial discrimination. Mosk was influenced by a trip to South Africa in the 1960s, and his letters about the politics and legal systems of the African countries he visited were published in The Los Angeles Daily Journal (Braitman and Uelmen 142). A significant association between these two civil rights activists and writers.
