South African Writer Research Articles

The Legacy of Nongqawuse: Cultural Memory and Identity Construction in The Heart of Redness

ABSTRACT The Heart of Redness illustrates South African writer Zakes Mda’s engagement with ethnic development in the post-apartheid era. The novel centres on the identity crisis of the exiled protagonist, Camagu, portraying his journey to recover lost personal memory and gradually reconstruct a localized sense of identity through cultural memory. Camagu’s transformation reflects Mda’s emphasis on cultural memory, revealing its potential for the Xhosa people to overcome identity crises and achieve internal reconciliation in the post-apartheid period. Through this lens, Mda critiques the limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), underscoring its failure to address historical divisions within Black communities. He contends that only by reconstructing a shared history and culture can internal tensions within the black people be alleviated, laying the foundation for a more equitable racial relationship.

“Home out of home”: South Africa, Central Europe, and “dark nostography”

The essay provides a comprehensive discussion of South African nostographies which are concerned with the nostographers’ return to their Central European father/motherland. The paper not only explores the poetics of nostographic writing but also attempts to identify specific generic signposts that characterise South African nostos narratives about Central European homecoming. Having analysed – with the support of archival records – several notable examples of second-generation nostographies by South African writers of Central European descent (Gordimer, Zwi, Jacobson), the essay focuses on the first nostos narrative by a second generation South African Pole, i.e. Blood and Silver by Jan Glazewski (2022). The proposed reading of Glazewski’s book pays special attention to the way in which the Polish/Ukrainian “home” to which the author returns partakes in negotiating the “anachronoid” identity of the auto/biographical (homecoming) subject – especially in the context of the subject’s multiple dislocations; and in revealing a new, essentially transnational geography of historical and ideological connections between Central Europe and South Africa. Additionally, the essay argues that Glazewski’s book should be recognised as a specimen of “dark nostography,” i.e. a homecoming narrative in which one’s double home (South African and Central Europe) is acknowledged as a site of trauma, while the homecomer is considered the subject implicated in the past and present forms of injustice and violence.

Silent Speech in Phaswane Mpe's HIV/AIDS Writing.

South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe's writings-including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism-contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses the tension between silence and speech in Mpe's creative writing in response to HIV/AIDS. Using Mpe's works as an illustrative example, I trouble the desire to read illness narratives as forms of truth-telling and silence-breaking. The desire for the transparency of speech in a global archive of illness narratives also informs a colonial politics of representation that instrumentalizes literature as ethnographic evidence. Mpe's writing on HIV/AIDS refuses a demand for authenticity by holding the embodied experience of disease at a slight remove from the reader in order to register the forms of spiritual and epistemological crisis that epidemic and social loss produce. My contention is that the political stakes of this writing lie not in Mpe's ability to render a public health crisis with verisimilitude, but in the capacity for writing to provide solace and sublimity faced with death. Through an analysis of Mpe's fiction and poetry, this article proposes a methodology for reading the politics of illness narratives across globalized space which attends to the world-building potential of creative expression as a radical practice that resists incorporative models of aesthetic intelligibility.

ENTRE RUÍNAS E SILÊNCIOS: AMORALIDADE X DOGMAS RELIGIOSOS EM SEM GENTILEZA, DE FUTHI NTSHINGILA

We know that violence caused by gender and social inequalities is historically constituted as a ‘plastered’ element in the most diverse relationships and cultures. In this way, this work proposes an investigative analysis of the female representation of the protagonist character, Mvelo, in the novel Sem Gentileza (2016) by South African writer Futhi Ntshingila, with the aim of understanding how the writer aesthetically describes these inequalities in the narrative, especially in the context of violence against women, highlighting, for this section, the South African context of black women. From this perspective, we will discuss themes that we consider pertinent, such as religious dogma and the free will of the moral act, which are absent in the characters that make up the narrative, and we will also consider the necropolitics latent in the social context of the characters. In order to carry out this descriptive analysis from a phenomenological point of view and establish a coherent view of the discussions and characters, we will use the studies of Biko (1990), Baur (2000), Hick (2018), Revel (2005), Mbembe (2016), Fanon (2022), Hill-Collins (2019), Hooks (2020), Arendt (1997, 2004), Almeida and Teles (2012) and Saffioti (2004, 2015) among other scholars and theorists as theoretical anchors. Methodologically, this is a qualitative, bibliographical study with a descriptive analytical approach. Through this description, as a preliminary result, we conjecture that the way Ntshingila delineates violence in her poetic texture produces a certain ‘subtlety’ for such grotesque moments.

‘Make them roll in their graves’: South African Writing, Decolonisation, and the English Literature A-Level

ABSTRACT This article analyses the activities and early outcomes of an ongoing co-designed and co-delivered research impact project entitled “Decolonising the English Literature A-Level”. It draws on examples from three case studies, classroom experiences, and student and teacher feedback to show how efforts to support the decolonisation of taught content and pedagogies aimed at A-Level learners can generate benefits for students relating to knowledge and understanding; skills development; personal motivation and well-being; academic attainment; and educational and career ambitions and prospects.

Aspects of Loco-Description in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

The term “topography” describes a landscape’s structural elements and how they interact with the surrounding area. It focuses on the connections between the natural and constructed ecosystems and how human activities affect the environment. The history and ecological health of a region can be inferred from its topography. For instance, a location’s topography may reveal whether it has seen erosion, deforestation, or other types of ecological disturbance. Ecologists can better understand how environmental changes affect the landscape and its inhabitants by studying the topography of a certain location. John Maxwell Coetzee was a famous South African writer who tells us about these landscapes, climates, and other ecological aspects flawlessly in his novel Disgrace. John Maxwell Coetzee was popularly known by his initials, J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee was born on February 9, 1940, in Cape Town, South Africa. This paper studies the aspects of loco-description in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Radikaal versus beskeie: Die vroegste vrouestemme teen patriargie in die Suid-Afrikaanse literatuursisteem

This article explores similar social experiences of South Africa in the English and Afrikaans literary systems respectively. It investigates the reflection of patriarchy as an ideological presupposition of South African society in the earliest writings of two South African writers, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and Maria Elizabeth Rothmann (1875-1975) (known as M. E. R.). In doing this, it offers a discussion of how these women's involvement in South African politics sought to address the situation that political rule during the late 1800s and early 1900s created for South African women in the broader context of the South African War. The practice of gender politics as a response to these social experiences is discussed, while the contribution of Schreiner's radical voice to the stereotyping of the Afrikaner woman is compared to the modest voice with which M. E. R. fought for the rights of these stereotyped women. The article concludes that the nature of, and similarities and differences between their feminist voices determined Schreiner's and M. E. R.'s contribution to their respective literary systems, as well as their contribution to English and Afrikaans prose.

“DISGRACE” BY J.M. COETZEE AS A POSTMODERN VARIATION OF THE NOVEL ABOUT A MUSICIAN

“DISGRACE” BY J.M. COETZEE AS A POSTMODERN VARIATION OF THE NOVEL ABOUT A MUSICIAN

South African Food Studies

Abstract Introducing a special issue of Matatu titled “South African Food Studies,” this essay argues for the importance of food as a lens for understanding contemporary culture and society. More specifically, the essay advocates for recentring Global South contexts—in this case South Africa—in a ‘food studies’ conversation that has often been dominated by the American academy; it also underscores the vitality of the humanities, qualitative social sciences, and creative arts for transcending reductive ‘food security’ paradigms often applied in the Global South. The essay first examines the short story “Water No Get Enemy” by South African writer Fred Khumalo, introducing how a focus on food and eating can illuminate globalisation, xenophobia, resource conflict, and environmental change. From here, the authors introduce the evolving field of ‘food studies,’ then outline the eight academic, personal, and creative pieces that constitute this special issue, all authored by contributors from the African continent. Issues raised include the gendered and queer politics of food, breastmilk, and soil; the ongoing coloniality of neoliberal approaches to food inequality; the burdening of Black bodies; the role of so-called ‘ethnic restaurants’ in building transnational and multi-ethnic communities; and the heightened stakes of food access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

South Africa-sur-Nemunas1 : Transnational Hinterlands in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

Wild(e) on Stage: Manipulated Scripts and Suppressed Truths in Nadine Gordimer’s “The Amateurs”

"This paper deals with the topic of historical inheritance and literary discourse through a prismatic lens. It focuses on Nadine Gordimer, a well- known white South African writer of Anglo-Jewish and Eastern European origins, who always stood up against racism and the colonialist legacy which deviously paved the way for the apartheid system in her country. In particular, light is shed on “The Amateurs”, one of her earliest short stories and a piercing portrayal of South African segregation policies during the 1940s. At the same time, Gordimer engages here in a critical dialogue with the English fin de siècle and the comedy-of-manners genre by recollecting an episode from her youth, when she happened to play Gwendolen’s role in an amateur staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. As we shall see, “The Amateurs” is a semantically poignant story where the threads of European literary tradition, metatheatricality and personal memory are powerfully interwoven."

Disrupting Whiteness as Higher Education: Towards a Systemic Decoloniality

This creative conceptual paper expands traditionalised academic approaches through integrated narratives, plays, lyrics, and poetry as decolonial method. Based in first person narratives, informal interviews, artistic expression, and music-integration, the author clarifies tensions in decolonial strategy, including moving beyond racial representation to acknowledge and respond to racialised poverty, racism built into the fabric of higher education, and an overarching denial of racial disparities. The paper begins with a discussion of the student-created and produced play, The Fall, which brings the #RhodesMustFall movement onto the stage. Integrating student discussions and reactions to the play, the paper echoes themes from The Fall, suggesting that strategies which interrupt coloniality, while necessary, are insufficient to transform from formal education’s capitalistic and exploitative foundation. In centring USA and South African writers, the paper highlights that the purpose of education remains a White supremacist vision and that to move from such anti-Black infrastructures, transformation must align directly with ongoing, student-led decolonial approaches. The paper then parallels higher education protests to the context of the 2010 World Cup’s artistic exploitation of South Africa, warning of the power of appropriation, especially on a global stage. The paper concludes with the affirmation that creative, artistic, and Black-centric voices must be fostered and integrated into decolonial strategies to transform the global Whiteness of higher education.

“Silenced Generation”: South African Emigrant Writers and Their Fates (1950–1960s)

The article is devoted to the problem of emigration of writers from South Africa in the 1950s–1960s. Using the example of the fates of three South African writers – Peter Abrahams, Nat Nakasa and Arthur Nortier – the author raises the following questions: what were the reasons that forced the creative intelligentsia to leave their country? What was the state policy towards emigrants in the 1950s and 1960s? Why did emigration become an opportunity for some writers to gain political and creative freedom, while for others it became a path to self-destruction, loneliness and death? The problem of emigration and emigrant literature of South Africa is almost unexplored both in South Africa and in foreign historiography. However, the study of the fate of South African emigration sheds light on similar processes and problems in the history of other countries: the causes of emigration of intellectuals, the relations between writers and authorities, the problem of self-identification of representatives of various diasporas abroad, as well as the problem of intercultural and interracial dialogue both in literature and everyday life.

The Politics of Emotion in Damon Galgut’s The Promise

The “affective turn” of Western literary criticism arose at the beginning of the 21^st century as a result of new discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive science, and other disciplines. As one of the main fields of Affect Studies, discourses of the emotion pry into the emotional dimensions of literary texts to reveal the embodiment, sociality, and politics of emotions. South African writer Damon Galgut constructs a series of affective scenes with both individuality and representativeness in his 2021 Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise and thus turns the fictional world into an affective field. The novelist focuses on the titular event “promise” and takes it as the thread running through four funerals of the white Swart family. Through the lens of Affect Studies, the author attempts to interpret shame, anger and compassion behind the Swarts’ making, breaching, and honouring of the promise and examines how those emotions are dictated by South Africa’s gender, racial and class politics. The author concludes that the compassion-based African Ubuntu philosophy may lead South Africa to the promised land of national reconciliation.

The Informal Economy in Masande Ntshanga’sThe Reactive

AbstractThe idea that (semi-)peripheral societies might follow developmental pathways distinct from those prescribed by globalization has been explored at length in the last twenty years by scholars such as G. G. Alcock, Rem Koolhaus, Jane Guyer, AbdouMaliq Simone, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall. For scholars who have celebrated these kinds of sociality, the informal economy—as Keith Hart has called it—represents Gordimer’s “space that lies between camps”: an alternative social velocity to both the corrupt or “can’t do” state and global capitalist modernization. But more and more South African writers are using their work to interrogate the idea that living in the interstices of institutions such as the state, traditional community, and capital is in fact liberatory or counter-hegemonic. In this article I argue that Masande Ntshanga’s 2014 novelThe Reactiveis the paradigm of the “disaffection” of present fiction—as Ivan Vladislavić describes it—with contemporary South Africa.

Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

"Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel."

“People just Didn’t Respect Women who Were not Married”: Revisiting the Question of why Abused Wives Stay in Marriage in Reneilwe Malatji’s Short Story “Love Interrupted”

This article is an African feminist analysis of the short story “Love Interrupted” by South African writer Reneilwe Malatji in terms of how it deepens our understanding of why abused wives stay in marriage. Drawing on African cultural conceptions of marriage, motherhood and family relationships—as elucidated in African feminisms—the analysis unravels several reasons why women stay in marriage despite persistent abuse: 1) they stay to meet cultural expectations of a good wife; 2) they stay because of feelings of indebtedness to husbands who married them at great cost; 3) they perceive marriage as the sole means of accessing and maintaining respectability in society; and 4) they stay out of a sense of responsibility towards children born to perpetuate the patrilineal line. Malatji’s story shows that these reasons do not exist in isolation of each other but rather inform and reinforce each other. Thus, this article argues that the intricate connectedness of these reasons illustrates the ubiquity of cultural gender roles, values and beliefs in compelling women to manage abusive marriages rather than end them.

Mines and Mountains: Mine Dump Aesthetics, Marikana, and Contemporary South African Fiction

The mine dump, long a useful metonym for South African writers, has receded from view in "Johannesburg fiction" of recent years. By contrast, in the visual arts, there has been a burgeoning of renewed engagement with mines and mine dumps. Does this tell us something about representation, and the unrepresentable, in these different creative forms? Mine dumps, urban mountains, are related to histories of oppression, to ongoing economic inequality, and to environmental degradation, but they are still visually impressive. For about a decade, South African novelists have tended to avoid this paradox. One might extrapolate such a trend to suggest that, while in the visual arts there is some level of continuity—the continuation of a tradition—when it comes to fiction there has been a rupture, or at least a disruption. Is it that mine dumps are too familiar, that it has become impossible to avoid cliché in literary evocations of them? Or is the rupture to some degree coterminous with the Marikana massacre of 2012? Marikana has been the subject of essays, poems, long form journalism, and nonfiction books, as well as documentary films, music, and theater. But it has not substantially or explicitly found its way into literary fiction. Like the artificial mine-mountains of the reef, Marikana's natural "mountain," Wonderkop, seems to remain out of the immediate purview of contemporary fiction. While Marikana might mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another in South African literary production, it is not (as yet) encompassed by or taken account of in the country's fiction.

HATE-MOTIVATED VIOLENCE: IS IT LINKED TO HATEFUL EXPRESSION?

In 1996, the late Prof JMT Labuschagne wrote an article dealing with the limits of freedom of speech and hate speech (“Menseregtelike en Strafregtelike Bekamping van Groepsidentiteitmatige Krenking en Geweld” 1996 De Jure 23). He discussed freedom of expression and hate speech in the United States of America, various European countries, South Africa and also within the context of international law. He subsequently discussed the idea of updating his thoughts, taking into consideration the influence of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (4 of 2000, commonly referred to as the “Discrimination Act”). Sadly, he never got around to doing so. Since his 1996 article, much development has taken place in this field including the introduction of the 2004 Draft Prohibition of Hate Speech Bill. The events of 11 September 2001 in the USA and the 2005 bombings in London (and other similar attacks all over the world) have increased intolerance and suspicion between people from different races and religions manyfold. Immediately following the London bombings, it was reported that religious hate crime (that is, attacks targeting England’s Muslim community) had increased by nearly 600% (“Religious Hate Crime Up 600%” 2005-08-0221:14 SA http://www.news24.com visited 2 Aug 2005). Hate speech is regarded as an exception to freedom of speech/expression. The notion of freedom of expression has been discussed at length by various South African writers (Johannessen “A Critical View of the Constitutional Hate Speech Provision: Section 16” 1997 SAJHR 136; Devenish “Freedom of Expression: The ‘Marketplace’ of Ideas”1995 TSAR 442; Carpenter “Fundamental Rights: Is There a Pecking Order?” 1995 Codicillus 27; Johannessen “Freedom of Expression and Information in the New South African Constitution and Its Compatibility with International Standards” 1995 SAJHR 216; Van Rooyen “Censorship in a Future South Africa: A Legal Perspective” 1994 De Jure 283; Nesser “Hate Speech in the New South Africa: Constitutional Considerations for a Land Recovering from Decades of Racial Repression and Violence” 1994 SAJHR 336; and Marcus “Freedom of Expression Under the Constitution” 1994 SAJHR 140). This note briefly touches on some aspects relating to freedomof expression and hate speech and also explores the (rather newly discovered) notion of hate crime. It asks the question whether there is any connection between hate speech and hate crime.

Anfractuous Narratives, Human Rights and Precarity in Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary

This article offers an analysis of South African writer and political activist Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days and addresses the ways in which her creative imagination has been triggered by feelings of vulnerability and precarity within the context of racism and injustice. The analysis leans on Bryan Turner’s notion of vulnerability and human rights and Judith Butler’s thoughts on precarious lives. Meer’s narrative is anfractuous given the many roles she played in society, resulting in a memoir that is replete with windings and intricate turnings. Her plots and paths as an academic, artist, sociologist, writer, prisoner, Mandela’s biographer, political activist and human rights campaigner are anfractuous—they twist and turn but do not break. Turner notes that without an ethical commitment realistically to follow one’s vocation or one’s fate, a human being cannot achieve “personality.” In Weber’s ethical system, being a “personality” means having devotion to a cause or acting passionately in terms of a career or course of action that one has rationally chosen. Meer’s politics, activism and commitment to social justice were never divided from her academic inquiry. Her memoir describes her 113 days’ incarceration in the Johannesburg jail in 1976 during the Soweto uprising. The memoir is easily interpreted as a classic postcolonial text, yet this diary of imprisonment may well reflect random moments in the lives of different people—social connectedness of a less obvious nature, yet of significance in glimpsing a common global humanity.