To Write as a Boxer

This book recuperates the narrative of Andrew Jeptha, a Cape Town-born boxer who was the first black fighter to win a British welterweight title in 1907. As a result of that victory, Jeptha was permanently blinded, and took to preparing a book titled A South African Boxer in Britain (1910). This volume explores the relationship between the life of a pugilist and his textual production, and locates the complex negotiations of a pugilist by situating Jeptha in a larger arc of the 'care of the self', extending from Greco-Roman aesthetics to the present. In the process, it investigates the strategies of care that were integral to opposing, confronting and living in the increasingly racialised world of the early 1900s.