Inside out: Gender, individualism, and representations of the contemporary South African prison

Abstract

This article examines A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Red Ink by Angela Makholwa, which are, respectively, auto/biographical and fictional narrative representations of the contemporary South African prison. Both narratives foreground gender because their female authors consciously posit their own femininity, in the case of Gobodo-Madikizela, and of her protagonist, in the case of Makholwa, as significant to the prison they portray. Although the way non-fiction and fiction operate cannot be conflated, Makholwa’s novel seems to mirror the structure of Gobodo-Madikizela’s auto/biography in obvious ways; an observation that helps justify why I analytically compare these narratives in this article. Most apartheid prison narratives, by authors of all genders, largely adopted an unambiguously political frame in articulating the subject positions of characters. The personal was deliberately subsumed in what appeared to be an urgent political need to dismantle the oppressive apartheid system. By contrast, there is a clear shift to the individualization of the prisoner at the expense of politicized collectivity in the selected narratives. However, my reading seeks to demonstrate that the ostensibly apolitical stance adopted by Makholwa and the personal and psychological approach taken by Gobodo-Madikizela are in fact deeply political and community-engaged processes.