Zoë Wicomb, a celebrated South African-Scottish writer and scholar, has died.
All my memories of her crystallise around her voice: it brought a small piece of South Africa into whatever context she found herself in. Whether it was a public reading (always a source of terror for her) or an animated conversation in the Glasgow home in Scotland which she and her husband, the photographer Roger Palmer, had made into a beautiful dwelling.
The cadences of her speech, untouched by the Glaswegian accents around her, were those of her native Namaqualand in South Africa and the coloured community among which she grew up. Her vivid language, lively and unstinting in both praise and censure, gave a hint of the battles she needed to fight to reach the eminent place she finally occupied.
