30 May 1931 – 14 October 2024
By Jill Nicholls
I first met Ann Oosthuizen when I was 23 and she was 43 – which seemed a grand old age at that time. Now she has died, aged 93. She was always an inspiring woman, sharing her many and varied experiences and her sense of wonder at nature and at life, and proving how radical it was possible to be.
She was born in South Africa and lectured at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, where she wrote and toured with two plays written in protest at apartheid. She also had three children. When we met she had just left South Africa via New York, after the death of her husband. She was squatting with young feminist friends in London. She wrote a long story, Bones, about her marriage, which I helped her edit and which we published in Spare Rib. Subsequently she wrote a novel which also drew on those experiences: Loneliness and Other Lovers (such a beautiful title) which was published by Sheba Feminist Publishers – which Ann and I had helped found.
Ann threw herself into Sheba, being its only (very low) paid worker in its one room office in Hackney, over a fish and chip shop and a workshop for pinball machines. With her friend, Sheba co-founder An Dekker, who like Ann spoke Dutch, she was responsible for bringing several Dutch feminist titles to the UK – unusual as most feminist books from abroad at that time were from the US. The stand-out one for me was For Ourselves by Anja Meulenbelt, a book about women’s sexuality, which Ann translated. It all seemed very sensible to me – I used to recommend it frequently in the problem pages I wrote in those days for mainstream women’s magazines – but it was actually pretty controversial at the time. Sheba colleague Alison Read remembers: ‘Sitting in the gallery at County Hall, we were terrified that the Tories would have got hold of a copy as we had a GLC grant application pending. Par for the course then.’
Ann also edited and contributed to collections of stories – Stepping Out: Short Stories on Friendship Between Women, and Sometimes When It Rains – Writings by South African Women. She wrote a lot of poetry, was represented in women’s poetry collections, and formed close friendships with other poets. Her work appears in Licking the Bed Clean and Smile, Smile, Smile, Smile both with Tina Reid, Alison Fell, Michèle Roberts and Stef Pixner, and the anthology One Foot on the Mountain, edited by Lilian Mohin.
In the early 1990s Ann moved house from London to South Wales. But for the next ten years she was largely back in South Africa, in Johannesburg, where she worked with women’s organisations, and also in Zimbabwe, where she lived on a farm. She wrote her second novel, Close Up, later retitled Sarah’s Story, which won the 1996 Bertram’s Literature of Africa Award – a great honour. Mothobi Motloatse, who administered the award, said, ‘The judges of the competition were asking me whether the novel was written by a black or a white South African’ – which was praise indeed.
Ann always kept on being active and travelling – to Johannesburg, to Ethiopia to see her younger son when he was working there, and she kept visiting her friend Sarah in Tuscany – Sarah laughed about them being two 80 year olds going to the seaside and swimming.
I visited her often over the years in her beautiful old bakehouse by the estuary in Carmarthenshire. She wrote, walked, beach-combed and made many good friends there. She tried to learn Welsh and worked with Honno, the Welsh women’s publishing house – they published her last short story collection Mirror, Mirror. As her friend Hilary Rhys Osmond says, ‘Ann was many things to many people but above all she was a free spirit and a very good friend.’
Ann with her friend Hil Rhys Osmond
St Anthony’s Well, a place Ann loved to visit
This is a poem by Ann from One Foot on the Mountain. Some of her other works are on HOWL’s booklist on this website.
Bulletin from the front line by Ann Oosthuizen