I feel greatly privileged that I was asked to tell the extraordinary story of how Mike Msizi, an activist whose time in exile was spent in Denmark, returned to South Africa and saw an opportunity to create a wind farm on the land of his ancestors.
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Because of my links with Denmark (having been an exchange student there in the 1970s) I met the Danish Ambassador to South Africa, René Dinesen. Mike had first approached the Danes to help him get the project started. The ambassador introduced me to Tommy Garner, CEO of Cennergi, the renewable-energy offshoot of Exxaro Resources, who had partnered with Mike and the local community to build the wind farm on Wittekleibosch, the place in the Tsitsikamma where Mfengu people had first been granted land in 1837. Tommy asked me to tell the story of the land, the people and Mike, who by then had tragically died in a car crash.
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The book therefore tells three interlinked stories: Mike Msizi’s remarkable life as an activist and entrepreneur; how the Mfengu came to live so far from the Frontier as British citizens and how they eventually lost the battle to keep their land to the National Party’s cruel apartheid policy, only to get it back under President de Klerk; and the wind farm itself, its conception, financing and the early days of its building.
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I was truly humbled by the many people I interviewed in the course of the project as I learnt about the hardship suffered and the great dignity and resolve shown by the people of Wittekleibosch and the other Mfengu settlements in the Tsitsikamma. Exile to a barren part of the “Ciskei” did not lessen their resolve and when they finally won the right to return, they entered into a business partnership with dairy farmer, Johan du Plessis, a venture that continues to succeed to this day.
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Some of the incidents that I report on in the book astonished me when I discovered them. One example: that the Mfengu men had been responsible as beach workers in Port Elizabeth for South Africa’s first and second strikes – the latter for the right to work naked! The pictures that Ivor Markman helped me find of the men in loincloths around their middles with elephant tusks or bales of wool on their head as they prepared to surge through the surf to waiting row boats were riveting, and explanation enough.
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Sean Robertson did a wonderful job in designing the book, combining text, photographs, documents and maps seamlessly together.
Stefanie de Beer not only produced wonderful modern images but designed and created the cover image, vividly bringing to life the idea that I had tried to create in recalling Mike’s words to his brother as he planned yet another ambitious scheme, “Just Imagine!”
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Just Imagine was awarded the John Kannemeyer Award for Biography by the South African Independent Publishers’ Association in 2016.