Walk Down Memory Lane: Racial Injustice in Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds

Abstract

Using as a stepping stone Mating Birds by the late South African novelist Lewis Nkosi, I take a trip down memory lane to grapple with the issue of justice in apartheid era South Africa. The paper argues that the scales of the judiciary under the system of institutionalized racism was heavily weighted in favour of the white minority who ruled the roost in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Underpinned by a racist ideology that foregrounded the supposed purity of Afrikanerdom, the steamroller of the judicial system under apartheid denied any rights to South African blacks and coloured alike to the point of forefending love across the colour bar. The lead character in Mating Birds, to wit Sibiya, knows only too well the strictures of an unfair administration of justice. Sentenced to death by hanging for allegedly raping a white girl, his dogged impassioned denials fails to pack a punch as the laws of his country make it a crime for a black man to even have designs (no matter how sincere) on a white girl. Tapping into a methodology based on philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, psychological perspectives, the paper brings to light the multifaceted cruelty of race-spiked injustice as evidenced by Sidiya’s plight.