Prof jakes gerwel biography for kids
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To Madiba he was also chief speechwriter, influential friend, advisor and confidant.
Gerwel played a huge role in the transition from apartheid to establishing a constitutional democracy and was respected in government circles locally and internationally. Cape Town: Kwela. (As compiler together with Jeanne Viall and Wilmot James)
Jakes Gerwel passed away on 28 November 2012 at the age of sixty-six after a heart bypass operation in the Netcare Kuils River Hospital.
Written by Jason Lloyd, 2018
Jason Lloyd – who regularly acts as socio-political commentator on radio, freelances as Op-ed writer and columnist – is a public servant and former journalist.
Cape Town: Kwela. (As compiler together with Linda Rode)
Elize Botha
However, he turned down the honour of having Charles Street renamed after him when this proposed name change was met with negative reactions from some quarters.
In 2015 the City of Cape Town officially renamed Vanguard Drive Jakes Gerwel Drive.
As authoritative literary critic Gerwel distinguished himself as a reader and analyst with a very fine sense of complex literary texts when he expressed himself in book reviews and articles about writers’ works.
Cape Town: Kwela. 23). He was awarded a scholarship to study in Belgium, he completed a PHD in literature and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels in 1979.
He taught at Hewat Training College in CT before joining UWC, he was one of only two black UWC lectures at the time. Every one of his columns contains a few sentences or words in the order of “I wish it was me who crafted that sentence or who had found or coined that word”’.
A recurrent theme of his columns was our public conversation about and with each other.
Education
Free University of Brussels.
Career
He served as Director-General of the Presidency when Nelson Mandela was in office. So much so that the late André Brink remarked, ‘Jakes was one of the keenest literary experts I’ve ever come across.’
Gerwel believed in bringing a sense of social awareness to one’s aesthetic engagement with literature, especially in order to shed light on the manmade suffering of ‘the other’, the previously disadvantaged.
Between 1999 and 2012 Gerwel wrote a monthly column for Rapport.
He is the seventh of ten children of laborers on a sheep farm near Somerst East. In 1999, Gerwel was instrumental in brokering the deal that saw Lockerbie bombing suspects extradited to Scotland. Well-known people who served on this informal committee included professors Hein Willemse, Willie Esterhuyse, Njabulo Ndebele, dr.
Professor Gert ‘Jakes’ Johannes Gerwel
Gert Johannes “Jakes” Gerwel was born on 18 January 1946 in the town of Kommadagga in the district of Somerset East, Eastern Province (now Eastern Cape).