Jacobs, Rayda

Rayda Jacobs (1947-2024) was a writer and filmmaker.

Biography

Rayda Jacobs was born on 6 March 1947, the eldest of seven children of a Muslim family in the Cape Town suburb of Diep River, but in the early 1960s the implementation of the Group Areas Act forced the family to move to Athlone. In 1968 she immigrated to Toronto and took up writing. Her first published book was The Middle Children (1994), which consists of a number of interconnected short stories based on her experiences living in apartheid South Africa and was published in Canada. In 1995 she returned to South Africa and besides resuming her writing career, which included feature articles for the Cape Times, also acted as radio host.

Her subsequent books included five novels, two biographical accounts and another collection of short stories. In order of publication they were: Eyes of the Sky (1996), The Slave Book (1998), Sachs Street (2001), Confessions of a Gambler (2003), Postcards from South Africa (2004), The Mecca Diaries (2005), My Father’s Orchid (2006), Masquerade: the Story of my Life (2008) and Joonie (2011). Two of her novels, Eyes of the Sky and Confessions of a Gambler, won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction, with the latter also winning a Sunday Times Literary Award.

In 2007 Confessions of a Gambler was turned into a feature film, in which she played the main role and which she also directed. It was shown internationally various festivals, including Dubai and Miami, and in 2009 it was nominated for five SAFTA awards, winning for Best Achievement in Original Music/Score (Ghalik Jacobs & Muriel Marco). Locally it had screenings at the Cape Winelands, KKNK, Grahamstown and Apollo film festivals. The film was produced by Rogue Star Films and Jacobs’s own Riempie Productions.

She also produced and directed a number of short documentaries, many of them reflecting the Muslim culture in South Africa. They were The People of the Richtersveld (2000), God Has Many Names (2000), A Minute With God (2000), Portrait of Muslim Women (2003), The Tuan of Antonie’s Gat (2003), 9 Eleven Muslims in the Americas (2003) and The Legacy of Muhammad (2004). In 2011 there was talk of another feature entitled Crossroads going into production, but that didn’t come to fruition.

Rayda Jacobs died in Toronto on 29 October 2024. Ghalik Jacobs, who often handled the sound and audio post production on her films, is her younger brother.