Peace and Division: The Black Novel in South Africa

Abstract

This analysis of black South African fiction, translated into English, pivots on a century-old aberration, the Natives Land Act of 1913, which assigned 90% of the land to a white minority. The fallout of this destructive legislation remains with us today. Indeed, landlessness, I argue, is the fundamental root of South Africa’s continued ills. Whether conceived under colonialism, apartheid, or the post-apartheid moment – our phantom democracy – the fiction gathered under the moniker, Africa Pulse, is fundamentally concerned with a relation to land, or a divorce from it. A complex of problems – economic, political, cultural and psychological – emerge. Two novels span the century-old conflict, BW Vilakazi’s No Matter When and MJ Mngadi’s Home is Nowhere. The first is a romantic, egalitarian, and inclusive vision, the latter starkly and brutally dystopian. As bookends, they mark an unrequited desire for a sense of home, and the pathological consequence of its obliteration.