SA literature: the emergency years

A mass democratic movement, based on the ideals of the Freedom Charter, arose within South Africa in the 1980s, and the state responded with successive states of emergency that brought white troops to the townships.

In the face of this, 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.

Njabulo Ndebele

Yet, at the same time, some felt the need for a move away from rhetoric and toward the depiction of ordinary life and Njabulo Ndebele, in his 1986 essay, The Rediscovery of the Ordinary 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. The main story, "Fools", was later reworked into a movie with an all-South African cast.

JM Coetzee

Like Ndebele, JM Coetzee, one of South Africa�s most lauded writers in the 1970s, dealt 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.

His next novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), a story of a poor man of colour trying to survive in a civil-war situation, won the Booker Prize in Britain. Age of Iron (1990) 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 post-apartheid reality in which the wounds of the past have not been healed - and new ones are being inflicted. A film of the book, starring John Malkovitch, had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008, where it won the International Critics� Award.

An illustrious literary academic, Coetzee published 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 and the Order of Mapungubwe by the South African government in 2005 for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage".