Struggle Handshakes and UDF Rasta Colours: White Imaginings and the Appropriation of the Struggle in South African Post-Apartheid Youth Literature

Abstract

Summary Post-apartheid South African Young Adult (YA) fiction, like other literary genres, has the power to frame historical discourses of the apartheid era in significant ways. In the case of much post-apartheid YA fiction, this has tended to both reproduce black stereotypes and allow for a particular reconstruction of that historical period (Sibanda 2012). In this article, through a discussion of two post-apartheid YA novels, The World Beneath (Warman 2013) and Cape Town (Hammond 2012), I explore the ways in which these novels have either appropriated the black voice or silenced that voice altogether. The paper also focuses on how these novels engage in a rehistoricisation of white complicity in apartheid policies through the reconfiguration of the role of whiteness in the struggle while simultaneously constructing a non-racialised anti- apartheid communalism to substantiate the revision of apartheid history through a white lens. The third aspect of the paper deals with ways in which apartheid history in these novels is either misrepresented or factually incorrect, thus providing the implied reader with a distorted or factually erroneous history of the country and the resistance movement.