Agnes Sam

Agnes Sam (born 1942) is a South African writer.[1]

Life

As a child of nine, Agnes Sam's great-grandfather had been 'shanghaied' into indentureship and brought to Durban in 1860 on the Lord George Bentinck II. Sam was thus born into an Indian family in Port Elizabeth, and grew up there, near the family business.[2] She was educated at a Roman Catholic school in Port Elizabeth.[2] There the Indian experience was never mentioned in history lessons:[3]

how and why the largest group of Indians outside the subcontinent came to be in South Africa was never accounted for [...] South African Indians like myself have lost mother tongue, family name, religion, culture, history, and historica links with India. Cut off from India, apartheid has further separated us from other communities in South Africa, thereby exascerbating our isolation.[4]

Sam went on to study Zoology and Psychology at the National University of Lesotho, and trained as a teacher in Zimbabwe.[5] After briefly teaching science in Zambia, she went into exile in 1973 in England, bringing up three children there while also attempting to take a further degree.[6]

Most of the stories in Sam's debut collection, Jesus is Indian, are set in Port Elizabeth.[2] She returned to South Africa in 1993.[2]

Works
  • 'South Africa: Guest of Honour Amongst the Uninvited Newcomers to England's Great Tradition'. Kunapipi, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1985), pp.92-96
  • Jesus Is Indian and Other Stories. England: Women's Press, 1989.
  • The Pragashini - Smuts affair. York: Paloma Books, 2009.
  • The Pragashini - Smuts Conspiracy. York: Paloma Books, 2014.
  • Dora: a screenplay. York: Paloma Books, 2014.
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References
  1. Gareth Cornwell; Dirk Klopper; Craig Mackenzie (2010). "Sam, Agnes". The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945. Columbia University Press. pp. 172–3. ISBN 978-0-231-50381-5.
  2. Jeanette Eve (2003). A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape: Places and the Voices of Writers. Juta and Company Ltd. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-919930-15-2.
  3. Jaspal Kaur Singh (2008). "Globalism and Transnationalism: Cultural Politics in the Texts of Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Agnes Sam, and Farida Karodia". Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora. University of Calgary Press. pp. 135–. ISBN 978-1-55238-245-5.
  4. Sam, 'Introduction', Jesus is Indian and Other Stories', p.1,11. Quoted in Singh, Globalism and Transnationalism, p.136
  5. Lauretta G. Ngcobo, ed. (1987). Let it be told: essays by black women in Britain. Pluto Press. pp. 71–. ISBN 978-0-7453-0254-6.
  6. Margaret J. Daymond; Dorothy Driver; Sheila Meintjes (2003). Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region. Feminist Press at CUNY. p. 402. ISBN 978-1-55861-407-9.

Further reading
  • Flockemann, Miki (1998). "Asian Diasporas, Contending Identities and New Configurations: Stories by Agnes Sam and Olive Senior". English in Africa. 25 (1): 71–86.
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