Post-Liberation Temporalities, Utopian Afterlives and Three South African Novels by Masande Ntshanga, Mohale Mashigo and Niq Mhlongo

Abstract

Exploring the ordinary has been a central concern in South African literary and cultural studies. The ordinary or everyday relies on the lived experience of time – on temporalities defined as the way we experience and imagine the relation between past, present, and future. My central argument in this article is that the lived experience of a systemic shift (which is an ordinary experience in post-apartheid South Africa), coupled with the utopian ideals that attended the liberation movement, has shaped South African temporalities in ways that endure. It is within this framework of how we imagine and experience time that I read three novels: Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016). I argue that all three texts articulate post-apartheid temporalities as a type of post-liberation consciousness, or afterlife, born out of a successful revolution in South Africa. In much the same way that apartheid prejudice did not disappear after independence, nor did the inclusive ideologies of the broad-based anti-apartheid or liberation movement that can be seen in all aspects of South African cultural life. By afterlives, I mean how certain aspects of the past reside in the present, and specifically how the utopian discourses that shaped the anti-apartheid resistance movements live on in current post-liberation fiction.