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"Growing up in the Sixties, I first began to know of Ranjith Kally through his work in The Post, a Durban newspaper, as well as in Drum magazine. Back then, he was among a group of Durban-based news photographers who became local household names: people like GR Naidoo, Moosa Badsha, Mickey Padayachee, Gopal Narainsamy, Ralph Johns and, later on, MS Roy, Morris Reddy and Steven ‘Even’ Naidoo."
"The Damned of the Earth was published at the end of that year, shortly after his death. It was immediately banned by the French state. Often read as heresy or prophecy rather than analysis the book was, simultaneously, a brilliant and electric critique of the colony and a driving and frequently scathing critique of the gangrenous degeneration of what has since come to be called the postcolony. It offered compelling legitimation to the anti-colonial forces in Algeria, across Southern Africa, in Vietnam, and elsewhere, as well as a forceful warning to these struggles. Its vision is both stereoscopic and, given its strong sense of movement and change, and the articulation of ideas to experience, fundamentally dialectical."
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John Berger, who died on January 2, turned 90 in November last year. A Jar of Wild Flowers (Zed Books), a collection of essays written by his friends and artistic collaborators in celebration of Berger, and edited by Yasmin Gunaratnam and Amarjit Chandan, was published at the time — as a present to this singular poet, art critic, writer, filmmaker and humanist. The Con publishes Chandan’s essay on The Meaning of Berger from the collection. The Long White Thread (Smokestack Books), a collection of poetry written for Berger, was also released at around that time."
