A state of fear

by Menán Du Plessis

Book by du Plessis, M.

190 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1984

About the author

Menán Du Plessis's profile is a linguist (African languages), researcher and Writer. She currently resides in Western Cape, South Africa. She was born in Cape Town South Africa. She is a research associate in the department of linguistics at Stellenbosch University. While she studied various languages, including Xhosa, during her early years at the University of Cape Town, and also took courses in Anglophone and Francophone African Literature, her first studies in Theoretical Linguistics were with John Coetzee and Roger Lass in the 1980s, when she also first embarked on a doctoral thesis. However these were difficult times in my country, and it was only much later that she was able to resume her postgraduate studies, with a new topic. She received her PhD from UCT in 2009 for a thesis in Khoesan Linguistics, and have been engaged ever since in research, writing and teaching. She has conducted fieldwork to obtain recordings from two of the last speakers of Kora, and has recently completed a book on this nearly extinct Khoesan language of the early Cape and the Gariep, with chapters on the phonetics and syntax of the language, as well as annotated versions of the heritage texts, plus a two-way dictionary. The fieldwork, for which she had to obtain urgent funding from overseas, involved the keen participation of community members. The overall work - which is envisaged as an act of cultural restitution - should meet some of the expressed desires of modern day descendants of the Korana and Griqua people, which makes it all the more shameful that the project has received so little local support. She is specialised Comparative Khoesan, comparative Bantu, typology of African languages (all families), historical linguistics, history of the discipline, theory of theory-building, issues in translation and lexicography.

Reviews

[Storm Simpson · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the 1987 review by James North in NYT:

“''A State of Fear'' is like a Cape Town winter: cold blasts of dark wind and rain that unceasingly drum in the sense that there can be no escape in a place that tortures children; no detachment is possible, in art or in life.”

I liked this but it was too cerebral at times. A white liberal protagonist during 1980s boycott Cape Town.

[Paul Lothane · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a work! Here, Cape Town's superb natural beauty is depicted in non-pareil fashion. Anna Rossouw, intensely intellectual (like the author of this work) is ineluctably a lover of nature, with extraordinary dedication to flora in particular. This novel showcases waves of sublime descriptions as Anna inter alia shows how broad-minded she is in the (erstwhile) enclave of apartheid, even going as far as to hide a couple of her own students from the powers that be. The author has been widely praised for this work, as she "conveyed the spiritual reality of apartheid". A brilliant, intellectual, rewarding, haunting novel.

[Nadine May · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm as always impressed by the research he does for his books. This time he goes for the
environmentalist groups who are totally clueless about what they truly support. Michael has truly tackled the Global warming scam in a most entertaining way.