The emergency years
Increasing internal and external pressure on the apartheid state led, in the 1980s, to its most repressive measures yet. While sanctions were imposed from outside, a mass democratic movement, based on the ideals of the Freedom Charter, arose within the country. The state responded with successive states of emergency that brought white troops to the townships; a state of civil war existed in all but name.In the face of this, the driving need for politicised work was felt, as it had been in the 1970s. Poets such as the orator Mzwakhe Mbuli reached vast audiences, while novelists such as Menan du Plessis and Mandla Langa engaged with the business of resistance to apartheid. Yet, at the same time, some felt the need for a move away from rhetoric and toward the depiction of ordinary life.
In his 1986 essay, The Rediscovery of the Ordinary Njabulo Ndebele expressed this view, seeing politically determined work as inimical to a full depiction of rounded humanity in fiction. His own fiction, in the award-winning collection, Fools and Other Stories (1983), demonstrated that it could be done with grace. Although written in the wake of township rebellion, the book is not polemical but evokes township life with subtlety. It probes the formative experiences of young men growing up in a township, vividly evoking the rhythms and speech of township life. The main story, Fools was later reworked into a movie with an all-South African cast.
JM Coetzee, one of South Africa's most lauded writers, began publishing in the 1970s, but achieved prominence in the "emergency years". Like Ndebele, he eschewed fiction of direct political statement, though his complex post-modern work deals in subtle ways with issues of power, authority and history. One of the key works of recent South African writing, Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) tackles issues germane to South Africa by telling the story of an official at the outpost of an unidentified empire, one under stress from a barbarian threat that may or may not be imagined. His next novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), won the Booker Prize in Britain. This story of a poor man of colour trying to survive in a civil-war situation, never taking sides, is very powerful, as is Age of Iron (1990), which takes the perspective of a white academic who is dying even as the townships explode with violence.
Coetzee's next novel, Disgrace (1999), won him a second Booker Prize and caused huge debate in South Africa over its depiction of a postapartheid reality in which the wounds of the past have not been healed - and new ones are being inflicted. Coetzee is also an illustrious literary academic Doubling the Point (1992), and has published a memoir of growing up in South Africa, Boyhood (1998).
His more recent works include The Lives of Animals, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (1999); The Humanities in Africa - Die Geisteswissenschaften in Afrika (2001); Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986 to 1999 (2001); and two more novels, Youth (2002) and Slow Man (2005).
Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. For an extensive biography of the writer, visit the Nobel Prize website. Another biography can be found at Books and Writers.
