num_pages: 218
description: And Night Fell is another addition to the rapidly growing Twentieth Century genre of the prison memoir. Many of the elements will be the night arrest, the beatings, the cramped cell, the endless interrogations, the smell of the slop bucket and the rattle of the jailer's key. Molefe Pheto was unlike most "politicals," though, in the privateness of his concerns and in the mental and aesthetic detachment he was able to preserve -- even, it seems, while being beaten. Pheto's main interests are drama, music, poetry. As far as one can tell from his book, it was the injustice done to black artists by white promoters and entrepreneurs, rather than national issues or ideology, that led him into his Black Consciousness viewpoint and into his work for MDALI, the black Music, Drama, Arts and Literature Institute. Even the cover of this handsomely designed book, which features a Klee-like painting by Khehla Maqhubela, is a clue to the inwardness of his attitudes. A multicolored solar wheel and an African figure rendered in warm bright hues shade into an eerie blue-green area where an owl with numerals clustered around its head presides over a sky marked with what could be black lightning or else cracks in the sky itself.
language: English
title: And night fell: Memoirs of a political prisoner in South Africa
publisher: Allison & Busby