Dugmore Boetie

Dugmore Boetie is the pen name of South African journalist, writer, and musician Douglas Mahonga Buti (c. 1924 – November 1966).

His mother, Regina, who was classified under apartheid legislation as Cape Coloured, was from a farming family with Dutch and African heritage who lived in Queenstown.

Buti does not appear to have been educated beyond primary school, and the defining event of his childhood was the amputation of his leg after he fell from a tree and the wound became infected.

Buti fled South Africa following the Sharpeville massacre, finding his way to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika in late 1960.

[1] In the early 1960s, Buti became involved in writing workshops run by Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Nimrod Mkele and Barney Simon.

[1] Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, or Tshotsholoza, tells the story of Duggie, whose life parallels South Africa's transition from informal racial separation in the 1920s to formalised apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s.

Having fled home after killing his mother in an act of reprisal, he lives in a storm drain, before finding himself in a Cape Town children’s reformatory.

Simon continued to revise the text long after Buti's death, and the book's production has been called a process of "collaboration", "co-production", or "cultural appropriation".

By the time of publication, Buti's preferred title, Tshotsholoza, had been replaced and the cover of the first edition suggests co-authorship by crediting the work to "Dugmore Boetie with Barney Simon".