Dugmore Boetie

Dugmore Boetie is the pen name of South African journalist, writer, and musician Douglas Mahonga Buti (c. 1924 – November 1966). He is best known for Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, or Tshotsholoza, a fictionalised autobiographical book first published in 1969.

Life Many details of Buti's life are unclear, but what is known has been compiled by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Vusumuzi R. Kumalo in the introduction to a 2020 edition of Buti's principal work, Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, or Tshotsholoza.

Buti was born between 1922 and 1926 in Sophiatown Township, a racially integrated community of White, Black, Asian and Coloured residents. His father, Alcott Buti, was amaHlubi and an Ethiopianist lay preacher. 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. She may have been a washerwoman. 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. It appears Buti travelled widely in his youth and into his early twenties. It was during these years that his musical talents developed, becoming competent on the guitar, piano and piano accordion. He performed with bands in Johannesburg and Durban, possibly performing in Dorkay House.

As Buti's reputation grew, he was able to secure financial support from Simon, First and Laurens van der Post. This allowed Buti to begin work on a new novel, possibly Tshotsholoza, in 1964. By this time, he was living in Dube Township, and various claims emerged about criminal activity and imprisonments. Another short story was published, first in The Classic in 1965 and then in the London Magazine in October 1966. This was to become the first chapter for his book.

Publication Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost was first published in 1969 by Cresset Press in London, with an afterword by Barney Simon. A US edition was published the following year by Dutton Press. The US edition included a preface by Nadine Gordimer.

The book was not published in South Africa until 2005, although it does not appear to have ever been included on the apartheid government’s list of banned books.

The most recent edition, published by Ohio University Press in 2020, restores the book's original title, Tshotsholoza.

Authorship Barney Simon’s role in bringing Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost to publication has been repeatedly debated. 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". Some critics contend that the whole book was written by Buti, while others see it as an example of a white South African "discovering" a black voice.

Following Buti's death, his mother assigned agency rights to Simon. 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". Simon's name was only removed from the cover in 2005 when the first South African edition appeared.

In the introduction to the 2020 edition, the editors do not categorically state whether it was solely authored by one or the other, but they believe the text is "largely authored by Buti under the adopted literary identity of Boetie and lightly edited in style and form for publication by Simon."