Though South Africa’s history has been propelled more by legal writ than literary experimentation or success, its few illustrious persons of letters are starkly noticeable and world-renowned, belonging now to a ‘commonwealth’ (or postcolonial) literature rather than a unique tradition. Perhaps this is right; but in the process South Africans have become disenfranchised from their literary history. As Churchill could tell you, refusing to learn from history might cause history to repeat itself. This is a problem at which the currently much-debated secrecy bill – the notorious ‘Protection of Information Bill’ which was passed this November by the South African National Assembly without a public interest clause – might hint.
Though South Africa’s history has been propelled more by legal writ than literary experimentation or success, its few illustrious persons of letters are starkly noticeable and world-renowned, belonging now to a ‘commonwealth’ (or postcolonial) literature rather than a unique tradition. Perhaps this is right; but in the process South Africans have become disenfranchised from their literary history. As Churchill could tell you, refusing to learn from history might cause history to repeat itself. This is a problem at which the currently much-debated secrecy bill – the notorious ‘Protection of Information Bill’ which was passed this November by the South African National Assembly without a public interest clause – might hint.
I was educated at a provincial English high school in South Africa, where we read a bit of Wordsworth, a smidgen of Blake, and Shakespeare yearly. But no Schreiner, Paton, Coetzee, or Gordimer. The high school library was closed the year I entered. It seems a hostile climate to suckle a literary culture.
When I visit home, I look for signs that this is changing: for literary magazines on the shelves (there are still none) and larger local fiction sections in bookshops. Yet the grand dames and messieurs of South African fiction whose works criticized the apartheid regime: Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and J.M Coetzee (who has since emigrated to Australia) and Athol Fugard, have won Nobels and other international prizes and have passed into the pantheon of laureates.
While still thin on the ground, local fiction under democracy is slowly gathering speed, and it too has a voice of protest. Amongst the new generation of South African writers, Damon Galgut, twice nominated for the Man-Booker Prize, is the predominant figure. Galgut is carrying J.M. Coetzee’s mantle with his lean unsentimental prose and its hidden resonances, and his aimless male protagonists in strangely hostile circumstances. The Good Doctor (2003), a novel about a man in an ineffectual hospital in the hinterland haunted by a past occupation, is especially recommended. Ivan Vladislavic, whose Keys of the City was an unexpected paean to the unlikeable city of Johannesburg, is on the rise. Like Galgut, Vladislavic works in the male province of Paul Auster, but turns his pen to the puzzles and inconsistences posed by the new South Africa: its petty corruption, racial tensions, and bureaucracy.
Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat, the story of a paralyzed woman and her fraught relationship with her coloured nurse, once something of a daughter, yields in translation from the Afrikaans a surprising richness and unexpected lyricism. It seems the story of this country’s fiction is mistaken underestimation. Yet this novel too is ‘about’ race.
One wonders whether or not South African fiction is destined for topical restriction. Will it always be ‘about’ something? Or conversely, is it possible to tell a story in South Africa without it being corralled by issues: colonialism and history, apartheid, racism, and crime?
If the secrecy bill – the ANC’s method of silencing government critique, punishing offenders with up to 25 years in prison – continues, South African fiction may have to replace journalism as it did under apartheid. As the bill circulates in parliament, writers and editors are watching carefully to see the fate of the written word in the New South Africa.
