Sean Jacobs honours the late Zöe Wicomb (1948—2025).

Zöe Wicomb was a significant influence on me, a presence in my life, and someone I cared about and greatly appreciated. It was a bonus that we became friends. 

As I remarked at a memorial event for her held at Clarke’s Bookstore in Cape Town in early November 2025, although I’d known of Zöe Wicomb for much of my adult life and admired her genius as a novelist and academic from afar, I only met her in person in early 2006.

At the time, I was in the second half of my first academic year as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the United States. I’d helped organise a monthly series of speakers called ‘African Writers on Writing and Citizenship in the 21st Century’.

We invited Fatou Diome from Senegal and France, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, Bessora from Gabon, and Zöe. My duties included hosting the writers.

From the moment of her arrival, I felt a special connection with Zöe. Of course, I noticed her self-possession and intellect. Apart from a public reading, she gave a lecture to the English department that left everyone spellbound. At first, she appeared nervous, but once she got going, her quiet confidence filled the room. That was the beginning of many more meetings in New York City and Cape Town, which is also how I met Roger Palmer, Zöe’s husband and collaborator on other projects.

But our connection ran deeper. We shared something of a heritage—roots in the rural Cape. Zöe was from Namaqualand; my mother was from the Klein, or ‘Small’, Karoo. Her father was a teacher; my coloured grandparents were farm workers. Like my mother, Zöe had gone to Cape Town as a teenager—Zöe to attend school, my mother to work as a domestic worker.

Seeing Zöe’s trajectory alongside my mother’s sharpened my understanding of what apartheid foreclosed for so many women of that generation.  Zöe’s life illuminated not a contrast in talent, but the difference that opportunity—or its denial—can make.

More broadly, figures like Zöe, along with other black people of her generation, became for me emblems of the extraordinary effort it took to break through apartheid’s constraints and the wealth of brilliance that could have been our collective heritage if those constraints had been less brutal.

However, our friendship was not one of hero worship; it was genuine.

One of my proudest memories was attending her honorary doctorate ceremony at the University of Cape Town. It was the first time since my days as a UCT student and then briefly as a journalist in the early nineteen-nineties that I had been back inside what was once called Jameson Hall—by then, fittingly, renamed after Sarah Baartman, the Khoi woman who was displayed in Europe in the eighteenth century. That moment—Zöe honoured in a space that had itself been renamed to honour a woman erased by colonialism—felt right.

Much has been written about Zöe’s commitment to nuance—to the intersections of race, gender and power—but what I loved most was her clarity. She had little patience for pretension. She could cut through the noise.

I remember in 2022 she called to talk about The Promise, Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize–winning novel about a white South African family, the Swarts. The book unfolds through a series of family funerals. As Zöe wrote: ‘Funerals turn out to be a vehicle for satirising the manners and mores of this society in all its grotesquerie.’ At each funeral, family members would raise the question of ‘the promise’: that they had vowed to gift to the family’s black servant, Salome, the house she had lived in for most of her life, but which belonged to the white family. Salome rarely speaks.

Some readers complained that the novel failed to give ‘the other’ a voice—a criticism that many black South African readers didn’t share, according to Zöe. She disagreed with the critics, and I encouraged her to write about it for Africa Is a Country, the website I’d founded and was editing at the time. I was surprised when she said yes—she could have published those thoughts anywhere.

In her short essay ‘Denouncing the Reader’, she argued that Galgut’s choice was deliberate. The novel, she wrote, holds up a mirror to white readers—showing them how they view their servants as silent and enduring. By withholding Salome’s inner life, Galgut confronts that blindness head-on. As Zöe put it, ‘Excluding blacks from narratology’s “implied reader” is Galgut’s bold device for destabilising such acceptance of post-apartheid culture.’

That was classic Zöe—sharp, brave and generous in intellect.

Finally, I would like to conclude with Zöe’s quality of really listening.

Once, I told her a story from my childhood—how my father worked as a gardener for a white judge in one of Cape Town’s wealthiest suburbs, and how I would go along with him on weekends and during parts of school holidays. Those visits exposed me early to the city’s brutal racial and class divides, and to the hierarchy embodied in the simple fact that my father had to call his employer ‘master’ and that he grew up ten minutes from where he now worked before his family was forcibly removed after the Group Areas Act.

A while later, Zöe told me that one of her short stories had been inspired by that conversation. The story centres on a white writer and his gardener’s son in apartheid South Africa. In her version, the gardener—based on my father—is proud, defiant and fully human. My father, not as I remembered him, but as she knew he could be.

That was Zöe’s gift—she could listen deeply, translate lived experience into art and return it with dignity. To me, she was a writer of rare moral intelligence, a mentor, a friend, and a link to a generation whose courage made so much possible. She taught me, and so many others, that stories, honestly told, are acts of resistance and of love.

• Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the graduate programme in international affairs at The New School in New York City, and founder of Africa Is a Country, and Eleven Named People. This piece is based on a post from his Facebook page, published in November 2025.