Author/ illustrator Niki Daly talks about the influence on his writing of his native Cape Town and the post-apartheid changes in South Africa.

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NIKI DALY interviewed by NIKKI GAMBLE

Niki Daly was born in Cape Town in 1946, to a working class white family. After finishing at High School he obtained a diploma in Art and Design and worked in advertising. Always a keen musician, in 1970 he went to England to fulfil a recording and songwriting contract. He also worked as a graphic designer/illustrator and taught at the East Ham College of Technology, London. He won a British Arts Council Illustration Award for The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Road (his first published work) in 1978. Since then, he has illustrated many stories of his own as well as those of other writers. In 1980 he returned to South Africa where he worked as a teacher and freelance illustrator, and led the Graphic Design Department of Stellenbosch University until 1989. In 1988 he won a Parents Choice Award for his book, Not so Fast, Songololo. In 1990 he travelled to the USA with storyteller Gcina Mhlophe, to work on a video of Not so Fast, Songololo. From 1989 to1992 he developed Songololo Books, a children’s book division of David Philip Publishers. During 1989-1990 Daly ran writing and illustration workshops which facilitated the work of other writer and illustrator teams. Many of these workshop projects, such as Charlie’s House; Somewhere in Africa and All the Magic in the World have been published internationally as picture books. He has also written songs for puppet theatre and animation. He lives in Mowbray, a suburb of Cape Town, with his wife, Jude Daly, an illustrator, and their two sons, Joseph and Leo.

You are passionate about Cape Town. You were born there but it continues to hold fresh attraction for you even after all those years.

IYes, i’s very beautiful. I continue to be amazed by the variation of the landscape. The coast looks like the South of France but as you move inland it’s more like the Scottish Highlands. I find that diversity very appealing. When I was growing up in Cape Town, Table Mountain had fossilised in my imagination, like a one dimensional postcard backdrop, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. When I was 22 I left Cape Town for two years. When I came back, I saw Table Mountain as I’d never seen it before: it was like a living organism, a multi-faceted rock face that changed character with the sun playing on it making constantly shifting shapes, or silhouetted against the night sky.

Has your street changed much since the end of Apartheid?

Yes and I welcome the changes. Some people have natural concerns that are associated with crime statistics, the decline in property prices and so on. But the thing to celebrate is the vibrancy. Our road is now full of a wonderful variety of people, the multiracial neighbourhood that I represent in the Jamela books. All the children play together without any residual bad feeling.

A typical walk from my home along the road where I live is past the taxi rank where Jamela chases the chickens, on to the practice where the Sangoma uses traditional healing alongside a doctor practising conventional medicine, past the barber’s shop through a higgledy-piggledy collection of street vendors selling everything from herbs to repairing leather bags and the drug lords. After that I reach the main road where there’s a terminus for workers coming in from the townships, student hostels for students who come from all over South Africa to the University of Cape Town. That’s my Cape Town. Tourists don’t see the real Cape Town because they stay in the nice hotels or the all-white areas. They probably return home thinking that South Africa hasn’t changed, but if they were to get out to the suburbs they would see that things are changing. Of course transition is difficult and getting rid of extreme poverty is still a long way from happening because we have a constant stream of very poor people coming into South Africa from across the border. That’s part of the South African reality.

How do you deal with the poverty on a day to day basis?

On a personal level you can make a contribution. I get involved with people who come to the door looking for work. I have someone who cleans the car and I buy candles from a door-to-door trader. I believe that the deal is that once you enter into a commercial agreement you have a commitment to keep it going. But the poverty is so overwhelming that you have to give your attention to other things too. If you were dealing with the poverty all the time you would need tremendous spiritual strength or you would sink into despair.

In what ways has living in South Africa contributed to the development of your art?

 I discovered my voice back in South Africa. If I had stayed in England, I would have continued to be intimidated by the native talent. Back in South Africa I could be myself. Isolation from the business side of publishing allowed me to try things that perhaps I would have been discouraged from doing if I had stayed in England because it wouldn’t have been considered commercial.

Looking at the body of your work, I’m struck by the diversity of style. The Dancer is markedly different from the Jamela books or Ruby Sings the Blues. What do you consider to be the essential ‘Niki Dalyness’ of your work?

 I do have an ability to change style but I’m essentially a drawer and I draw using different materials.

When I was at college in the 1960s and 70s, style was a paramount; people made their careers out of style. I was drawing naturalistically and traditionally. I didn’t have what would be called a style and that was a disadvantage. Over the years I’ve experimented with different techniques. In the early days I used cross-hatching and then dropped that because it slows the process down. Later I taught illustration and that helped me to see that illustration techniques are an exact way of appreciating the personality behind the tools and materials.

I think what is essential in my work is connected to what I call the pulse or rhythm. How long can you sit on one drawing? My wife can spend a week on one illustration. For me it’s two days. If I extend that time, you can be sure I’m going to screw it up. It’s like comparing a sprinter with a marathon runner, there are different work paces that we prefer. No matter which project I’m working on, the drawings capture movement, executed with a certain amount of speed and expression. Line is a way of recording emotion. You can’t rely on facial expression to tell you how a character is feeling; you have to show it through the body language. That’s something that I’ve studied from the great masters like Ardizonne, whose pictures are like a ballet: you can see how the steps have been composed and how the illustrations lead into the big double page spreads. So I have come to the conclusion that speed, spontaneity and expression are key elements in my work. Finally, that’s what I would say is ‘Niki Daly’s’ style but it’s taken me a long time to understand that.

Thank you Niki Daly for talking to Write Away