Rise of the 21st-Century Black South African Travelogue: Itineraries of Touring and Testing Freedoms

Abstract

This article shines a spotlight on the 21st-century growth of published travel books and blogs by black South Africans, with a focus on the 2013–20 period. It concerns itself with the publication of black South African travelogues of various kinds during the tumultuous post-transition years of the century's second decade, marked in extremis by the Marikana massacre. The period gave rise to diverse black literary-cultural forms, including travel texts with their spatial explorations and searching meditations. Through a survey of popular black post-2012 travelogues, many by women, I explore how the texts pursue spatial horizons and probe the parameters of the nation, continent, and world. The article engages with South Africa's heightened historical and contemporary contexts of racialized mobility and border tightening against which to examine impetuses and articulations of boundary-traversing black travel. Its dual focus is on travelogues that venture across the African continent and on those that cover the length and breadth of South Africa, if taking in some trips beyond. It engages with works by Sihle Khumalo, Zukiswa Wanner, Lerato Mogoatlhe, Niq Mhlongo, Lesego Malepe, Fikile Hlatshwayo, and the Black Project Children of Post-Apartheid South Africa collective. On one level, the travelogues are concerned with claiming the map and the page, centering black travel subjectivities. On another level, the texts evaluate and calibrate the extent to which post-apartheid, post-Marikana South Africa has "traveled" in relation to its fraught past and how it is faring in relation to imagined futures. As the travelogues reach and breach South Africa's borders, they draw on senses of distance—spatial and temporal—to reflect on individual lives, national trajectories, and considerations beyond. The article thus attends to how the travelogues explore what black South African freedoms mean, what it is to be black and on the move in 21st-century contexts, and how questions of the nation and other identifications push and pull in space, as well as in time. In sum, the article argues that the travelogues test concepts of freedom through negotiating and narrating mobility in and beyond contemporary South Africa with all its instabilities, contradictions, and hopes.