As die Cape Flats Kon Praat: Locality and the Literature of Precarious Living

Abstract

This paper discusses the importance of Brian Fredericks’s short story collection, As die Cape Flats Kon Praat (If the Cape Flats Could Speak), published in 2020. The nine stories in the collection present different narratives of male characters and their experiences on the living areas outside Cape Town collectively known as the Cape Flats. These areas are synonymous with poverty and violence, identifiers that simultaneously suggest urgent attention but also reductive stereotyping. Two of the stories in the collection are examined here for information they provide about the intersections between gang culture and family relations, as well as how both are shaped by senses of place. How geographical space (here, space that was engineered during apartheid) influences and is influenced by the movements and actions of people is a point of theoretical interest in this article. This is supported by a short study of the workings of Cape Flats gangs and the transactional role played by violence. Fredericks’s collection joins a growing and necessary library of redress that reflects the value of Cape Flats narratives as essential to South African literature. That this collection includes the language of Afrikaaps, which is undergoing a similar re-evaluation in recent knowledge production, underscores the relevance of newer output that sheds light on the social codes, cultural grammars, and moral economies of a hitherto underrepresented literary region.