Zoë Wicomb (23 November 1948 - 13 October 2025), is one of the most well-known alumni of the University of the Western Cape. She graduated with a BA degree in the late 1960s, an experience that filters into her fiction, especially her short story “A Clearing in the Bush”. Set at UWC in 1966, the story reflects the tensions that emerge when students are obliged to commemorate the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, out of whose apartheid imagination the university was established as a university for “Coloureds”. Wicomb’s award-winning fiction critiques and escapes the apartheid imaginary, and continues to inspire students at the university today. Wicomb’s oeuvre includes You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light(2006), The One That Got Away (2008), October (2015), her last novel Still Life (2020), as well as numerous highly influential literary-political essays. 

What follows are expressions of appreciation for Zoë Wicomb’s life and her work from people at UWC who knew her:

Words seem so inadequate to describe Zoë. She was in turn my colleague, my mentor and my friend. I read You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town years before meeting her at UCT in the early 1990s. I was a crass graduate and TA, and recall - with shame now - saying, “It’s really very good”. But she was gracious. And just smiled. Years later, as an ageing academic and teacher, I turned often to her wide-ranging literary and cultural criticism, to conversations on whatsapp or email or her annual February visits, and novel-writing. Apart from the sheer pleasure of talking, drinking and laughing with her, these have allowed me to sharpen my own teaching and writing immeasurably, with one memorable example being our collaborative conversation about representations of Sara Baartman published in Surfacing. In the last few days we were making arrangements to have a conversation about her latest novel, Still Life, and she’d already made plans for this work trip to South Africa as part of a STIAS programme for November. Recently, just before her death, with the burst of spring and flowers in October (also the title of one of her novels!) I was reminded of these words from her novel of this name. They are the narrated thoughts of one of her – to my mind – most complex yet quite minor fictional characters, Sylvie. But they also convey so much about her:

Here…where she has planted the vygie…she has always known is for her, Sylvie, and her alone. That is why she turned the patch into a garden, arranged the stones…In the veld she dug up kanniedood and koekemakranka, and planted them around to show up the glorious purple. … If, as AntieMa says, the devil has blown in her blood, then that blood is the screaming purple here at her feet…
(Prof Desiree Lewis, HOD Women’s and Gender Studies)

Her novels have left deep impressions on me, like on many others, not in the least her first publication, a collection of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, which, among other profound things, gives deep insights into the early years of UWC, where she was a student in the 1960s. Her close eye on the bluntness and boredom of white supremacist academic mediocrity, and then turning to the first-ever student protests at UWC when students refused the order to attend a memorial service after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd have left deep impressions on me. I reread her collection of short stories when working on histories of South African student mobilisations a few years ago with a fresh eye on her deep insights into the early years of UWC, the university where I have taught for 25 years.
(Professor Emerita Heike Becker, Department of Anthropology)

In 1994 I was an Honours student at UWC, and Zoë Wicomb presented a number of seminars on black feminist literary theory. Apartheid was just ending, and as a young, naïve student new to UWC, these were completely novel, radical ideas that I had never encountered before. I must have asked a couple of really stupid, crass questions, and distinctly remember Zoë drawing herself up in her seat, fixing me with a steady, fierce gaze, and putting me firmly in my place. I was then so intimidated by her formidable, sharp intellect which brooked no fools, and certainly no young white men who blundered in asking thoughtless questions. We have since become friends, and it was a privilege to nominate her for an honorary doctorate in 2022, which she was able to accept in person at a gala event on campus the following year. It was here that she met Brian O’Connell again, her class mate from her student days at UWC in the 1960s. She confessed that she, like many other students, had had a crush on the handsome, tall Brian – and hesitated going up to him and greeting him. But Brian immediately recognized her, rushed over to where we stood, and with a beaming face, struggling a bit with his words, embraced her, saying: “Oh my dear, you were always so aloof!”. We both understood that he too may have had a crush on Zoë, but neither had the courage to approach one another. Zoë’s work and her ideas will carry on to reverberate and inspire at UWC, and fittingly so through her writing. We teach her novel Playing in the Light to 900 first year students every year, and in the third year, students read from her famous short story collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Postgraduate students will continue to work with her fictions and critical essays. She will continue to be an important, unmistakable voice in our classrooms and seminars.
(Prof Hermann Wittenberg, English Department)

The image comes to mind of Zoë dancing at our departmental parties in a fabulous yellow or blue skirt that flared out all around her and filled the room, and singing along to ‘Don’t know much about history…’  And laughing.
(Prof Julia Martin, Emerita Professor, English Department)

Zoë undoubtedly brought an unmistakable style of her own to our department. Not only in terms of wonderful sixties dresses and court shoes that suited her so well, or the sharpness of her wit and tongue, but also in her unique way with words that could make you squirm one minute and laugh out loud the next. In fact, Zoë was always refreshingly forthright in her critique of what she considered lazy thinking, or careless use of language, and was not afraid to speak her mind, to both students and colleagues alike. I remember how she stopped a first-year student trying to sneak out of a lecture in his tracks by addressing him in the most cutting manner: “What, are you leaving already? Am I boring you?”. No-one dared leave early after that. But at the same time, she was also an unstintingly generous mentor to students and colleagues. Zoë famously loved light, from the warmth of the sun on her skin to the play of light on walls and trees. She often said she craved the light of this home when she was away from it. But in fact, to her friends, she was the source of light, always up for an outing with good food and wine, or ready for a party, as long as there was also some stimulating conversation and better still, intense debate. Later, at her home in Glasgow, she made a remarkable garden of vegetables and flowers that were different to those that she grew up with in Vredendal, and being an excellent cook, she served up delicious meals to those who visited her and Roger. Seeing her there made one feel that she was also home. I remember Zoë once scolding me that I had not cleaned the hurricane lamps as she had been taught to do daily as a child. To this day I hear her voice whenever I use those old candle holders. And so, I will light them again now, as I can’t yet believe her own light is no more.
(Emerita Professor Marika Flockemann, English Department)