Book of the Month: Why it's worth reading Blame Me on History 60 years later

As a millennial, writing about William "Bloke" Modisane's work is strange and exhilarating at the same time. After reading his seminal autobiographical text, Blame Me on History, and some of his creative work, I was reminded of Michael Chapman's profound statement in his essay More than Telling a Story: Drum and its Significance in Black South African Writing, where he asserts that the Drum writers of the 1950s "were concerned with more than writing a story".

This is particularly relevant to Modisane's works. He was a Drum writer, but Blame Me on History isn't "concerned about the story" of his life alone. Instead, as Njabulo Ndebele puts it, "Modisane's book is concerned with expos[ing] our raw past, private and public in their nature, which is still present in many forms as unacknowledged antecedent."