After apartheid
Questions were asked of writers as apartheid came to an end with the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and over the transitional period leading up to the democratic election in 1994. What, they were asked, will you now write about, now that apartheid, and racial tension, your primary topics as South African writers, have gone? Well, apartheid may have died, but its effects linger on, and as writers such as Coetzee have demonstrated, the issues of power that haunted the apartheid era are still in many ways with us. Certainly, while there has been no sudden post-apartheid renaissance, there are many important writers dealing with South Africa today, and processing its past, which is still in many ways with us.Among them, one of the most acclaimed is Zakes Mda, who worked for many years as a playwright and poet before publishing his first novels in 1995. He started with a bang - with two novels, She Plays with the Darkness and Ways of Dying. The latter, the story of a professional mourner, won the M-Net Book Prize.
His next novel, The Heart of Redness (2001), won the Commonwealth Prize; it contrasts the past of the 19th century, when the prophetess Nongqawuse brought ruin to the Xhosa people, with a present-day narrative.
Ivan Vladislavic is another author pushing into the post-apartheid future, with distinctly post-modern works that play with the conventions of fiction as much as they speak about contemporary realties in South Africa today. He has published two collections of stories, Missing Persons (1990) and Propaganda by Monuments (2000), and two novels, The Folly (1993) and The Restless Supermarket (2001).
Lesego Rampolokeng came to prominence in the 1980s, through the Congress of South African Writers. His is one of the most irreverent voices to hit the South African literary scene over the past decade. Using a vibrant mix of rap-styled poetry and township idiom, he displays no loyalty to any figures of authority. His poems are published in Horns for Hondo (1991) and End Beginnings (1993). A powerful live performer of his work, he has collaborated with musicians as well.
For an interview with Rampolokeng, see the Rhodes University website
K Sello Duiker is a young novelist who has recently made a splash in South Africa, with two novels, Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), coming out in quick succession. Both have won him awards and critical acclaim. Set in the urban landscape of Cape Town, the two novels see the world through the eyes of the underdog, a street kid in the first and an ostracised gay student in the second.
Mark Behr has been one of the most compelling and controversial additions to the South African literary canon. His first novel, The Smell of Apples (1997), was first published in Afrikaans. It tells of white South Africans who were brainwashed by the apartheid system, and went on to win several prizes. Soon after that, Behr admitted that he had been a spy for the apartheid police while a student activist; a graphic illustration, if one were needed, of the divided loyalties felt by many whites in that period.
Behr's second novel, Embrace (2000), deals with the formative experiences of a young homosexual.
For a detailed discussion of Behr and his work, go to the Spokane Falls Community College website
There are many South African writers worth checking out. Many are still dealing with the legacy of apartheid and the struggle against it, as South Africa finds a new national - and hybrid - identity. One is Zoe Wicomb, whose new novel, David's Story (2001, winner of the M-Net Book Prize), interrogates the past and present of an anti-apartheid activist, as does Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001).
Mike Nicol's first novel, The Powers That Be (1989), brought a magic-realist sensibility to South African literature, and his latest, The Ibis Tapestry (1998) is a post-modern take on the secrets of South Africa's apartheid abuses. Among Afrikaans writers now translated into English, notable works have come from Etienne van Heerden, particularly the marvellous Ancestral Voices (1989), and from Marlene Van Niekerk, with the hilarious and horrifying Triomf (1994).
Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) is a critically acclaimed view of the physical and moral decay in both the rural areas of Tiragalong and the urban ghetto of Hillbrow. Kgafela wa Magogodi is a poet who probes issues such as Aids in his collection Thy Condom Come (2000).
- Thomas Thale was formerly deputy head of English at Vista Soweto and a lecturer in the African Literature Department of the University of the Witwatersrand. He has a Masters degree in African literature.
