Journalist, writer, activist and feminist - Margie Orford
The author and journalist Dr Margie Orford's life has taken many turns since her parents moved with her as a young girl from Klerksdorp in South Africa to the south of Namibia in the early seventies.Margie was arrested as a student in Cape Town during a protest and consequently had to sit for her final exam while behind bars. Today she enjoys the success that her Clare Hart series brings her.
“My parents took us all over Namibia and we 'helped' them with research they were doing to put lions in Etosha on contraceptives as an alternative to culling.
“My mother wrote a report on this and my father received his master's degree in zoology for that work. I rode horses as often as I could," Margie recalls.
She then went to school in Cape Town and visited Namibia during holidays. In her final year at the University of Cape Town (UCT), she was arrested while participating in an anti-apartheid protest. She was held in the infamous Pollsmoor prison as a political prisoner and wrote her final exams there.
"After that, to escape the violence, I began travelling and returned to complete my honours degree in English and film studies at UCT before heading back to London," Margie says.
She was born in London as her father studied medicine there.
After her time in London, Margie returned to Namibia in 1990 with her first child and her South African husband. They made Windhoek their home and she had two more children. Margie remembers that after the birth of her children, she was in the early stages of post-natal depression which was caused, among other things, by the fact that she wasn't working.
She then approached the author and publisher Jane Katjavivi to work for New Namibia Books.
“I began to hone in on women's writing. Feminism has always been central to my way of thinking and how I understand the world," she says.
Nine years later, Margie was awarded the prestigious Fullbright scholarship and she and her three young daughters went to New York for two years. They returned just before the events of 11 September 2001.
In 2002 she returned to Cape Town where she took up journalism to try to make sense of the violence in South Africa.
"I wanted to understand why - after the incredible political transformation under Mandela - there was so much violence between people. I found that listing the facts did not tackle the complexity of the truth and for this reason, I switched to fiction,” she says.
Clare Hart
The main character of Margie's highly successful Clare Hart series is an investigative journalist turned profiler, who has a doctorate in rape and femicide. "I had much experience as a journalist by that time and became interested in the psychology of crime and criminals," Margie says.
She says her latest novel, The Eye of the Beholder, deviates from the crime fiction genre and is more of a novella that deals with sin and revenge. "It is also a feminist thriller. I love this form of writing where I am freed from the frustration of making sure the investigations work out! I was also quite burnt out to spend time on such horrible matters," she says.
Margie has just finished her memoirs and is halfway through her latest novel, The Wound that Never Heals, which is a sequel to The Eye of the Beholder.
"In my new novel I have three female characters - and one is from Namibia, from Karasburg in the South - so I'm excited and a little nervous to write this character. . . but it feels good in a way to return to my roots," she says.
However, this is not the last Namibian character that Margie has in mind. "I have another book I would like to write - sort of a domestic drama, again with a Namibian as the main character who left the country as a young child and established herself in Scotland. So, the themes of exile and longing as well as displacement and a home will all be present," she says. – [email protected]