"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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admired by poets of all poetical persuasions as the creator of a body of authentic
African poetry unrivalled since Roy Campbell”. In this article Guy Butler remarks on
Livingstone’s craftsmanship: “that powerful, clear voice … with such versatility and
range of tone and attitude. I loved his insistence on practice and craft”.
I summarise these tributes and obituaries because the way in which he was seen
and remembered by his contemporaries is indicative of the mark Livingstone made and of
the man he was. In short, his contemporaries acknowledge (sometimes obliquely) his
ecological awareness, his blending of the scientific and the poetic, his lyricism and his
craftsmanship. There is both praise and criticism for his refusal to be bludgeoned into
writing about the politics of the day. In his press report, Gray quotes Chapman’s apposite
summary of the man and his work:
He is still the poet no future discussion of South African work can avoid. In his
bigger ecological themes, about nature’s creative and destructive forces, he really
anticipated this country’s post-apartheid concerns. He disdained narrow
tolerances. He was our first 21st-century poet.
His life
Born on 5 January 1932 of Scottish parents in Kuala Lumpur, Douglas Livingstone spent
the first ten years of his life in Malaysia, apart from extended visits to Scotland and Perth,
Australia. His father was an officer in the colonial police. At the age of five he was sent
to a convent boarding school with his sister, Heather. He witnessed the Japanese invasion
and capture of Malaysia (December 1941 to February 1942) as a ten-year old boy.
During the invasion, the family moved south and settled in Colombo, in what was then
Ceylon, for a short time. While his father was in a prisoner of war camp in Sumatra, the
remainder of the Livingstone family arrived in Durban in March 1942. Douglas
Livingstone’s father rejoined the family in Durban after the war and sent his son to
boarding school at Kearsney College because he was spending more time on the beach
than at the two day-schools at which he had been enrolled. The family then returned to
Malaysia, but left Livingstone behind at the boarding school, which he later remembered
for its “wonderful library” (1968: 59). During his school holidays he learnt to hunt (for
the first and last time), joined a criminal gang, and decided: “I was to become a poet, a
‘true’ poet, whatever that means – I remember the phrase is all, often muttered under my
breath as a sort of talisman or battle-cry in my tenser moments” (ibid.).