The city beyond the border: the urban worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera

Abstract

The urban worlds of Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Yvonne Vera are ones in which a range of physical and conceptual borders are explosively visible yet rendered permeable. Focusing on fiction by these three recently deceased novelists, and tracing their urban worlds back to Drum magazine's inscriptions of the city in the 1950s, this article explores the emergence of an urban imagination that writes itself out of the binary structures characterizing discourses of the city in southern Africa. Among the borders that the three authors write beyond are those between urban and rural, and ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, onto which binary structures gender difference has conventionally been mapped. Noting the ways in which women have been written out of city space, the article considers the extent to which gender shapes experiences and representations of the city and highlights the efforts of Duiker, Mpe and Vera to create imaginative space for women in the city. Finally, reading across the Limpopo River, the article transgresses the geo‐political borders that divide southern Africa and suggests the importance of doing so in literary and urban scholarship.