About

Yahya Clothier writes under the name Bushgrad — a handle rooted in his years at the University of the Western Cape, the institution known during South Africa's transition years as the Bush University: a place of resistance, intellect, and hard-won dignity on the margins of the apartheid state. He has lived and worked in Asia for more than two decades, encouraging students not merely to acquire English but to formulate ideas, test them against the world, and find their own words for what they observe.

 Yahya left South Africa because post-colonial Africa — and South Africa in particular — remains a territory where the structures of settler colonial economy continue to operate, now administered by those who are committed to inheriting the machinery rather than dismantling it. The image that stays with him is one borrowed from Agostinho Neto — the Angolan poet, physician, and first president of independent Angola — whose poem Western Civilization opens with sheets of tin nailed to posts driven into the ground, rags completing the intimate landscape. That image, written about Angola under Portuguese colonialism, describes with uncomfortable precision what post-apartheid South Africa has failed to dismantle, and the violence which the machinery of Apartheid inflicts on its victims. Distance was the condition under which clear thought became possible and what would guarantee his nascent family a refuge. He chose it, and does not regret it. 

 From Asia, he writes about international law, geopolitics, and the enduring grammar of colonial power — arguing cases that rarely find advocates in the spaces where they most need to be heard. He also writes poetry, believing it's where the literary and the human sit closest together. His political, analytical articles appear here on Bushgrad, and his poetry at Trumanity. 

 —Our Humanity. Our Truth.

Unless attributed to others, works are owned by Yahya Clothier (bushgrad)