“You Are Suffering from Literary Kwashiorkor”: Transculturation at the Confluence of African Literature, Vegetarianism and Indigenous Ritual Practice in Nape ’a Motana’s Son-In-Law of the Boere

Abstract

SummaryOn the surface, Nape ’a Motana’s fictional work Son-In-Law of the Boere (2010) is a tale of love between a black “Jim-comes-to-Jo’burg” stereotype and a white Afrikaans female teaching colleague during a transitional era in South African political and social history. However, as this article will reveal, the text is a compelling and transformative narrative which should be read as a literary transculturation of three veins of social discourse: (1) the literary historiography of African literature and the provision of access for contemporary readers to the African literary archive, (2) vegetarianism as a metaphor for transformation in a postcolonial and post-apartheid society, and (3) the representation of indigenous ritual practices in the modernity of liberation-era South Africa. Furthermore, the novel suggests that access to African fictional texts and a corps of motivated educators in South African schools would go some distance toward developing the necessary literacies to overcome the “literary kwashiorkor” referred to in the title of this essay.