Lindy Stiebel
Biographic Data
| ID | 1906775 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lindy Stiebel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lindy |
| FAMILY NAME | Stiebel |
| SIGNATURE | STIEBEL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6284-0481 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Giving an account of oneself
One fundamental way to leave a mark in life is to write an account of oneself, whether as a memoir or an autobiographical sketch. For Moravians, this practice is a spiritual requirement and takes the form of a Lebenslauf, which translates to ‘life account’. The Edwards family, of which I am a descendant, has been Moravian for many generations and has lived in Moravian settlements across several countries, including England, Ireland, Canada and So…
Chalk and Cheese? A comparative study of Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010)
This article brings together two giants of Southern African literature and criticism for the purposes of comparison, particularly of their experience of the Drum and Golden City Post era, and the immediate aftermath. Bessie Head and Lewis Nkosi, both journalists, first crossed paths in the Johannesburg of what Nkosi called ‘The Fabulous Decade’ of the 1950s; both, in the early 1960s, went into exile – Nkosi to America to take up a Nieman Fellowsh…
‘A quintessentially English designer’ from Durban
Victor Stiebel (1907–76), in his obituary in The Times , was described as a well known and highly esteemed British couturier. Yet, for the first eighteen years of his life, Stiebel lived unremarkably in Durban, South Africa, with his middle-class colonial family. In an article written by a fashion historian who appraised his importance within the British fashion industry, Stiebel is described as the quintessential English designer. How did this ‘…
Re-imagining Africa
Haggard’s significance as a barometer of his age as a popular writer and as a writer of interest for the modern age still holds true. This article revisits some of the themes of that statement and assesses Haggard’s ongoing legacy in the modern era. It will draw on my books Imagining Africa: landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African romances (2001) and also on the Introduction to Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: H. Rider Haggard (2009), a commi…
Made in Cato Manor
South African writer Ronnie Govender’s work linked to Cato Manor, in Durban, urgently aims to fill an “empty space”. This is due not only to a lost childhood and nostalgia for an erased environment, but also to a sense of anger that a place like Cato Manor has never received the attention that other sites of apartheid forced removals – say District Six and Sophiatown – have. This urban township area was declared a “non-place”, it seems, not only …
Deep sea writing
Oceans have occupied our imagination since time immemorial, both in symbolic and in practical ways. The Indian Ocean is a region characterized both by complex economic, historical, cultural, and social entanglements. Memories of recent and distant pasts plumb oceanic depths, needing to be carefully recollected and sieved to make sense of the present, and imagine possibilities for the future. The ocean is thus read as a site of contested struggles…
‘When in Rome…?’
The post-NRF phase of KZN Literary Tourism in South Africa has seen the development of a number of literary trails throughout the province, funded by area-based municipalities and the National Arts Council of the country. Those supported by the local municipalities also include a community guide training component which strengthens considerably the community outreach component of the project. To date seven literary trails have been compiled and p…
Lewis Nkosi's Durban
Lewis Nkosi, the late exiled South African writer, and the city of Durban, an extended urban space of an estimated 3 million inhabitants, are incontrovertibly linked. This sprawling Indian Ocean town is where Nkosi was born, where he was educated as a small child, where he started his working career, and where he was finally buried on 10 September 2010. Given the centrality of Durban to Nkosi's life story, it is unsurprising that this city period…
Crossing the Kala Pani
In 2010, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured labourers from India brought across the Indian Ocean – the kala pani – on the SS Truro in 1860, was marked in a variety of ways by the descendants of those original pioneers. One of the many letters to the press during last year asked whether cultural organisations should be “celebrating” or “commemorating” this anniversary given the harsh conditions under which indentured labo…
Eyes Across the Water
Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, edited by Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, Pretoria, University of South Africa Press, Indian Ocean Series, 2010, ix + 396 pp
Lewis Nkosi 1936 – 2010
Last stop “little Gujarat”
Grey Street in Durban is tied to the history of the Indian population in South Africa and their construction of a ‘home away from home’. Recently renamed Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street after the prominent anti‐apartheid activist, “Grey Street” as it is still known by the locals, is where Indian immigrants to Natal inevitably made their way from the late nineteenth century onwards. Inevitably, too, South African Indian writers descended from these first im…
Cooeing to the natives’1
In 1855, both the British government and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) commissioned the Australian explorer Augustus Charles Gregory to undertake an ambitious exploration of Australia's interior. Thomas Baines, artist and explorer, fresh from a stint in the Cape Colony as war artist to Major-General Henry Somerset in the frontier wars in the Eastern Cape, offered his services to the proposed North Australian Expedition (NAE). This article …
Looking at the Local/Locale. A Postcolonial Reading of Lewis Nkosi’s (1986)
Going on (literary) pilgrimage
Literary tourism, of which the literary trail is an integral part, is a relatively new phenomenon. As South Africa's tourism market grows, new avenues of interest have emerged, and literary tourism has become a potential growth area. This article draws from the experience of the Literary Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal research project, operational over the past five years, and it explores the phenomenon of the literary trail. The article seeks, first, …
H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier
Reviewed by: H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances Lindy Stiebel (bio) H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances, by Gerald Monsman; pp. ix + 294. University of North Carolina at Greensboro: ELT Press, 2006, $40.00. Gerald Monsman's H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier aims "to revise the image of Haggard as a mere writer…
Still Beating the Drum
Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground Pe…
Hitting the hot spots
Literary tourism is a new field in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and South Africa more generally. Whilst in England, the interested reader/traveller can buy books on Hardy's Wessex, Dickens's London and Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon; show literature students and the public generally an assortment of films on places associated with important writers, and even go on guided walks through famous ‘literary’ places like Wordsworth's Lake District; t…
As Europe is to Africa, so is man to woman”
A Map to Treasure
(1998). A Map to Treasure: The Literary Significance of Thomas Baines's ‘Map of the Gold Fields of South Eastern Africa’ (1873) South African Historical Journal: Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 64-69
Writing on the earth
The issue of land in South Africa has always been problematic. This is to be expected in a country whose history has been one of colonisation, contested borders and, in the more recent apartheid past, of legalised removals of people from the land. In recent post-colonial theory too, the notion of spatiality has proved to be significant: to write a history of a country and its people is to write a spatial history through the processes of naming, m…
What a Man's Gotta Do
(1987). WHAT A MAN'S GOTTA DO: THE MASCULINE MYTH IN POPULAR CULTURE. Agenda: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 63-64
Eyes Across the Water
Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, edited by Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, Pretoria, University of South Africa Press, Indian Ocean Series, 2010, ix + 396 pp
Hitting the hot spots
Literary tourism is a new field in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and South Africa more generally. Whilst in England, the interested reader/traveller can buy books on Hardy's Wessex, Dickens's London and Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon; show literature students and the public generally an assortment of films on places associated with important writers, and even go on guided walks through famous ‘literary’ places like Wordsworth's Lake District; t…
Deep sea writing
Oceans have occupied our imagination since time immemorial, both in symbolic and in practical ways. The Indian Ocean is a region characterized both by complex economic, historical, cultural, and social entanglements. Memories of recent and distant pasts plumb oceanic depths, needing to be carefully recollected and sieved to make sense of the present, and imagine possibilities for the future. The ocean is thus read as a site of contested struggles…
Going on (literary) pilgrimage
Literary tourism, of which the literary trail is an integral part, is a relatively new phenomenon. As South Africa's tourism market grows, new avenues of interest have emerged, and literary tourism has become a potential growth area. This article draws from the experience of the Literary Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal research project, operational over the past five years, and it explores the phenomenon of the literary trail. The article seeks, first, …
What a Man's Gotta Do
(1987). WHAT A MAN'S GOTTA DO: THE MASCULINE MYTH IN POPULAR CULTURE. Agenda: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 63-64
What a Man's Gotta Do
(1987). WHAT A MAN'S GOTTA DO: THE MASCULINE MYTH IN POPULAR CULTURE. Agenda: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 63-64
Writing on the earth
The issue of land in South Africa has always been problematic. This is to be expected in a country whose history has been one of colonisation, contested borders and, in the more recent apartheid past, of legalised removals of people from the land. In recent post-colonial theory too, the notion of spatiality has proved to be significant: to write a history of a country and its people is to write a spatial history through the processes of naming, m…
A Map to Treasure
(1998). A Map to Treasure: The Literary Significance of Thomas Baines's ‘Map of the Gold Fields of South Eastern Africa’ (1873) South African Historical Journal: Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 64-69
As Europe is to Africa, so is man to woman”
Hitting the hot spots
Literary tourism is a new field in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and South Africa more generally. Whilst in England, the interested reader/traveller can buy books on Hardy's Wessex, Dickens's London and Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon; show literature students and the public generally an assortment of films on places associated with important writers, and even go on guided walks through famous ‘literary’ places like Wordsworth's Lake District; t…
Still Beating the Drum
Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground Pe…
Looking at the Local/Locale. A Postcolonial Reading of Lewis Nkosi’s (1986)
Going on (literary) pilgrimage
Literary tourism, of which the literary trail is an integral part, is a relatively new phenomenon. As South Africa's tourism market grows, new avenues of interest have emerged, and literary tourism has become a potential growth area. This article draws from the experience of the Literary Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal research project, operational over the past five years, and it explores the phenomenon of the literary trail. The article seeks, first, …
H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier
Reviewed by: H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances Lindy Stiebel (bio) H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances, by Gerald Monsman; pp. ix + 294. University of North Carolina at Greensboro: ELT Press, 2006, $40.00. Gerald Monsman's H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier aims "to revise the image of Haggard as a mere writer…
Cooeing to the natives’1
In 1855, both the British government and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) commissioned the Australian explorer Augustus Charles Gregory to undertake an ambitious exploration of Australia's interior. Thomas Baines, artist and explorer, fresh from a stint in the Cape Colony as war artist to Major-General Henry Somerset in the frontier wars in the Eastern Cape, offered his services to the proposed North Australian Expedition (NAE). This article …
Lewis Nkosi 1936 – 2010
Last stop “little Gujarat”
Grey Street in Durban is tied to the history of the Indian population in South Africa and their construction of a ‘home away from home’. Recently renamed Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street after the prominent anti‐apartheid activist, “Grey Street” as it is still known by the locals, is where Indian immigrants to Natal inevitably made their way from the late nineteenth century onwards. Inevitably, too, South African Indian writers descended from these first im…
Crossing the Kala Pani
In 2010, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured labourers from India brought across the Indian Ocean – the kala pani – on the SS Truro in 1860, was marked in a variety of ways by the descendants of those original pioneers. One of the many letters to the press during last year asked whether cultural organisations should be “celebrating” or “commemorating” this anniversary given the harsh conditions under which indentured labo…
Eyes Across the Water
Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, edited by Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, Pretoria, University of South Africa Press, Indian Ocean Series, 2010, ix + 396 pp
‘When in Rome…?’
The post-NRF phase of KZN Literary Tourism in South Africa has seen the development of a number of literary trails throughout the province, funded by area-based municipalities and the National Arts Council of the country. Those supported by the local municipalities also include a community guide training component which strengthens considerably the community outreach component of the project. To date seven literary trails have been compiled and p…
Lewis Nkosi's Durban
Lewis Nkosi, the late exiled South African writer, and the city of Durban, an extended urban space of an estimated 3 million inhabitants, are incontrovertibly linked. This sprawling Indian Ocean town is where Nkosi was born, where he was educated as a small child, where he started his working career, and where he was finally buried on 10 September 2010. Given the centrality of Durban to Nkosi's life story, it is unsurprising that this city period…
Deep sea writing
Oceans have occupied our imagination since time immemorial, both in symbolic and in practical ways. The Indian Ocean is a region characterized both by complex economic, historical, cultural, and social entanglements. Memories of recent and distant pasts plumb oceanic depths, needing to be carefully recollected and sieved to make sense of the present, and imagine possibilities for the future. The ocean is thus read as a site of contested struggles…
Re-imagining Africa
Haggard’s significance as a barometer of his age as a popular writer and as a writer of interest for the modern age still holds true. This article revisits some of the themes of that statement and assesses Haggard’s ongoing legacy in the modern era. It will draw on my books Imagining Africa: landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African romances (2001) and also on the Introduction to Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: H. Rider Haggard (2009), a commi…
Made in Cato Manor
South African writer Ronnie Govender’s work linked to Cato Manor, in Durban, urgently aims to fill an “empty space”. This is due not only to a lost childhood and nostalgia for an erased environment, but also to a sense of anger that a place like Cato Manor has never received the attention that other sites of apartheid forced removals – say District Six and Sophiatown – have. This urban township area was declared a “non-place”, it seems, not only …
‘A quintessentially English designer’ from Durban
Victor Stiebel (1907–76), in his obituary in The Times , was described as a well known and highly esteemed British couturier. Yet, for the first eighteen years of his life, Stiebel lived unremarkably in Durban, South Africa, with his middle-class colonial family. In an article written by a fashion historian who appraised his importance within the British fashion industry, Stiebel is described as the quintessential English designer. How did this ‘…
Chalk and Cheese? A comparative study of Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010)
This article brings together two giants of Southern African literature and criticism for the purposes of comparison, particularly of their experience of the Drum and Golden City Post era, and the immediate aftermath. Bessie Head and Lewis Nkosi, both journalists, first crossed paths in the Johannesburg of what Nkosi called ‘The Fabulous Decade’ of the 1950s; both, in the early 1960s, went into exile – Nkosi to America to take up a Nieman Fellowsh…
Giving an account of oneself
One fundamental way to leave a mark in life is to write an account of oneself, whether as a memoir or an autobiographical sketch. For Moravians, this practice is a spiritual requirement and takes the form of a Lebenslauf, which translates to ‘life account’. The Edwards family, of which I am a descendant, has been Moravian for many generations and has lived in Moravian settlements across several countries, including England, Ireland, Canada and So…
History (19 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Geography (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (7 works)