Incognegro: From Black Power to Apartheid and Back

EAN/UPC/ISBN Code 9780807072684

Brand Beacon Press

From 1991 through 1996, Frank Wilderson led a double life. By day he taught at universities in Johannesburg and Soweto. By night he served as an operative in the armed wing of the African National Congress, coordinating clandestine propaganda, launching psychological warfare, and more. Wilderson was the only card-carrying member of the African National Congress who was a black American, and in part Incognegro is a nonfiction thriller about cabalist activity and political intrigue during the strange last years of apartheid. But it"s also the story of the author"s privileged but complex maturation in America: from a middle-class childhood in the picturesque mansions of Kenwood, Minneapolis, to an incendiary adolescence at the student barricades in Berkeley and the bullet-ridden rooms of the Black Panther Party. Full of candor, Incognegro is both a literary memoir and a suspenseful one. It refuses to minister to an easy sense of harmony, resolution, or convenience—and will challenge what you thought you knew about apartheid South Africa."Incognegro is an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures. Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word."—Ishmael Reed