Robert Harms
“In this beautifully written story of Jan Tzatzoe, an African chief and British-educated Christian who embodied many of the contradictions of his age, Roger Levine paints a vivid portrait African-European relations on the South African frontier during its historical transformation in the nineteenth century. Levine shows that on the South African frontier borders were porous, identities were malleable, and religious beliefs were negotiable. Africans were neither total resistors nor total collaborators, but instead negotiated tortuous paths through shifting landscapes.(Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade)
Andrew Bank
This fascinating and absorbing work demonstrates a great depth of knowledge of colonial and British source materials. Despite the difficulties of disaggregating the sounds of Jan Tzatzoe from those of his colonial translators and mediators, Levine gives us access to the voice of an African who experienced fluctuating fortunes as a cultural intermediary, a man-between, thus making a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of the dialogue between Western and indigenous knowledge systems.—Andrew Bank, University of the Western Cape
John Demos and Aaron Sachs
This is a book that captivates, that draws you immediately into both its story and its argument and then invites you along for the most delightfully jostling of rides. The urgency of the present tense, the energy of the action, the vividness of the metaphors: this kind of craft brings the pleasure back to reading history, allows us to exercise our imagination. Yet Levine's compelling narrative is blended, throughout, with the kind of deft, nuanced analysis that would never allow Jan Tzatzoe's tale to be merely another anecdote about a cultural intermediary operating within colonialist power structures. A Living Man from Africa thus becomes both a surprising, humane intervention in the historiography and a sustained meditation on the nature of history. It is astonishing to see what Levine has uncovered about the life of a spiritually inclined Xhosa man in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is even more astonishing to realize that Levine has enlisted his readers in an effort to rediscover the humble joy of pursuing mystery and possibility. We are delighted to inaugurate Yale University Press's new series, New Directions in Narrative History, with this exemplary piece of historical scholarship and writing.—John Demos (Yale University) and Aaron Sachs (Cornell University), series editors.
Nancy Jacobs
The author demonstrates how intertwined Europeans and Africans were and that the European-introduced religion was not an alien imposition. These observations have been made before, but Levine makes them in an accessibly told biography.(Nancy Jacobs, Brown University)
Robert Harms
In this beautifully written story of Jan Tzatzoe, an African chief and British-educated Christian who embodied many of the contradictions of his age, Roger Levine paints a vivid portrait of African-European relations on the South African frontier during its historical transformation in the nineteenth century. Levine shows that on the South African frontier borders were porous, identities were malleable, and religious beliefs were negotiable. Africans were neither total resistors nor total collaborators, but instead negotiated tortuous paths through shifting landscapes.—Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
Elizabeth Elbourne
This is a fascinating and frequently moving book, packed with unexpected detail and beautifully crafted. A rich micro history of the life of an African chief, diplomat and Christian evangelist who was ultimately betrayed by the colonial state, A Living Man from Africa also raises penetrating wider questions about the lived experience of colonialism.—Elizabeth Elbourne, McGill University
