Reassessing Thematic Crossings between South Africa and Nigeria: Postcolonial Leadership and Power in Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel

Abstract

While Chris Dunton has described Nigeria and South Africa as the two powerhouses of African fiction, their literatures have, for evident historical reasons, followed distinct trajectories. Thus far, little critical attention has been paid to comparing theorisations of contemporary South African and Nigerian novels. This article aims to contribute to re-enlivening the sorely lacking dialogue between the countries’ literatures by providing a comparative reading of Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel . I argue that Langa’s allegorical novel dispenses with the idea of South African exceptionalism by exploring the lust for power in the postcolony. In particular, his representation of the postcolonial ruling class establishes an intertextual dialogue with writing from elsewhere on the continent. Waiting for an Angel , while engaging with postcolonial military dictatorships during the mid-1980s and 1990s in Nigeria, is also noteworthy for invoking a sense of placelessness and, therefore, offers itself for a comparative analysis. Relating the novels to their literary antecedents as well as to recent theorisations of third-generation Nigerian fiction and the post-apartheid novel, I suggest that their reflections on postcolonial leadership unsettle the boundaries of national literatures and invoke a sense of continental connectivity.