Bookplanet: South African writing after apartheid

Post-Apartheid Fiction -- by RACHEL DONADIO/NY Times Magazine

Niq Mhlongo is one of the most high-spirited and irreverent new voices of South Africa ’s post-apartheid literary scene. One afternoon in the spring, he was sitting in the front seat of his friend Gugu’s blue BMW pointing out Soweto landmarks. Buoyant, wearing a floppy knitted hat on his round, shaved head, Mhlongo chatted with Gugu in English and a combination of Zulu and Sotho they dubbed “Zutho” while Gugu drove and fiddled with his BlackBerry at red lights. We passed the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital compound, the largest hospital in the world, down hilly Vilakazi Street, where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu once lived, past brick ranch houses transformed into bed-and-breakfasts catering to tourists nostalgic for the struggle, along roads lined with KFC billboards and low-slung walls painted with colorful advertisements for undertakers: “Green Pastures Funerals. Affordable and Dignified.”

Not owning a car and concerned that we might attract undue attention touring Soweto by taxi, Mhlongo had asked if I’d consider paying “a contribution” for Gugu to drive us, and I readily agreed. That turned out to attract another kind of attention. Nearly as soon as we got on the highway from the parking lot of one of Johannesburg’s countless shopping malls, a police car signaled us to pull over. In contrast to the usual American protocol, the officers stayed in their car while Gugu got out to talk to them. He came back a few minutes later, smiling. They had wanted 10 rand (about $1.40), he said, a casual bribe that left both him and Mhlongo completely unfazed. “I think about 95 percent of the people that own cars here have experienced it,” Mhlongo later wrote in an e-mail message. “It was not a surprise for me at all. The urban legend here is that you cannot drive your car without carrying petty cash for ‘tax.’ ”

Mhlongo and his cohort have in one short decade made social and economic leaps that might previously have taken generations. Born to a poor family in Soweto under apartheid, he came of age in a culture of post-apartheid possibility and has joined, however precariously, a black middle class that’s a small but growing fraction of the population. As such, he and other young black novelists carry the full promise — and burden — of their country’s future.

In his brash first novel, “Dog Eat Dog,” published in 2004, Mhlongo, now 33, wrote with verve and candor about the anxieties of his demographic: children who are the first in their families to attend college, who are worried about making a living and fearful of disappointing their relatives’ expectations, let alone their country’s, yet who aren’t afraid to play the system. Set in 1994, the heady year of South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections, the first-person novel tells the story of Dingamanzi Njomane, a street-smart kid from the townships struggling to stay afloat at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Informed by the university that he doesn’t meet the criteria for financial aid, he storms into the bursary and shouts at a white woman who handles such cases. He tells her supervisor that his mother supports nine relatives on his late father’s pension. They had even shut off the electricity, he says. “I was not ashamed that I lied. Living in this South Africa of ours you have to master the art of lying in order to survive,” Mhlongo’s protagonist explains. “As she looked at me I hid my hands under the edge of the table so that she couldn’t see my gold-plated Pulsar watch, which I had bought the previous year at American Swiss.”

At one point, a blond white woman singles out Dingz to help a black woman having trouble with an A.T.M. machine. “Why pick me when there are three people in front of me?” he asks himself. “Is it because I’m black?” he says out loud, then ponders: “Yes, it is true that I was implying that she was a racist. It was the season of change when everyone was trying hard to disown apartheid, but to me the color white was synonymous with the word and I didn’t regret what I had said to the blonde. Anyway, I had been told that playing the race card is a good strategy for silencing those whites who still think they are more intelligent than black people. Even in Parliament it was often used. When the white political parties questioned the black parties they would be reminded of their past atrocities even if their questions were legitimate. Then the white political parties would have to divert from their original questions and apologize for their past deeds.”

Today Mhlongo says, racism still exists in South Africa, “although now it is no longer institutionalized or overt like before.” As Mhlongo’s work makes eminently clear, the era of struggle literature is over in South Africa. Today, the country is contending with the complications of freedom. A racial divide once enforced by law has become an economic divide that falls mostly along racial lines. Everyone is profoundly uncertain of his place. Four out of five South Africans are black, one in four is unemployed and at least one in nine H.I.V. positive. Violent crime is rampant, rape rates are among the highest on the globe. South Africa today is a grand experiment in multicultural democracy, where the leadership is black, money largely white and the line between empowerment and exploitation ever shifting. The preamble to the 1996 Constitution — perhaps the most significant document to emerge from the post-apartheid period, if not the country’s entire history — says, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.” The unity is willed: not quite a facade but not quite a foundation, either.

The state of the novel is hardly among South Africa’s top priorities, and yet in some ways its bill of health mirrors that of the culture as a whole. In the mid-’80s, J. M. Coetzee famously asserted that the “great South African novel” — a book that would encompass all strata of society the way “War and Peace” did for Russia — would be impossible to write in a country so divided. Twelve years after the end of apartheid, the South African literary scene remains as fragmented as ever, with writers exploring their own ethnic experiences. Although more books are published than ever before, few create a national conversation, in part because South Africa has been transformed from a resistance culture to a consumer culture, where the novel is less vital. During apartheid, writers contended with a government that underscored their importance by banning their books. Today, as the artist William Kentridge put it when I spoke to him in Johannesburg in the spring, South Africa is best understood “not as a post-apartheid society but a post-anti-apartheid one.” Writers, like everyone else, are coming to terms with a new moral order. “What are our themes now?” the accomplished literary novelist Damon Galgut, who is white, asked when I met him in Cape Town . “How do we pick up? The resistance literature is gone; there’s nothing to resist.” Today the conversation has shifted away from the search for the great South African novel and toward the search for the great black South African novelist. Since the end of apartheid, the national and international spotlight has been shifting to black writers, driven by an expectation that this is their moment to write the next chapter of South African history: the political, social and economic coming-of-age of the 80 percent of the population that was formerly disenfranchised.

“This is a great time to be a black writer in South Africa,” Mhlongo says. “Most black writers who wrote before democracy focused on politics, but now there are lots of things to write about — the AIDS pandemic, poverty, crime, xenophobia, unemployment. My scope is not limited to apartheid because there are so many things happening in South Africa today.” But the wealth of new material has produced other complications: intense pressure on the few black novelists who have emerged, compounded by white guilt about why there aren’t more of them. In 2000, Shaun de Waal, then literary editor of The Mail and Guardian, a left-wing weekly newspaper, lamented in a column that he had grown “very tired of hearing the question inevitably posed by visiting foreign journalists trawling for information about South African literature: Where are the new young black writers?” De Waal, who is descended from the first Dutch colonists to settle in South Africa, wrote that he was tired of “feeling apologetic” about the lack of clear answers. “There seemed to be an expectation that as apartheid collapsed and its legacy faded a new generation of young black writers (let’s call them Y.B.W.’s) would emerge in their full glory, spurred on by the new freedoms of a new democracy. It was thought that the combination of apartheid censorship and lack of educational advantage had held them back, but now their time had come.” That didn’t happen. “If you were a bright young thing,” de Waal suggested, “with creative talent in a marketplace uninterested in serious writers but desperate to find black people to fill highly paid government and corporate jobs, what would you do?”

Niq Mhlongo is one of only a handful of black novelists of his generation to have achieved a certain level of prominence. Two others in this small group have died in the past two years: K. Sello Duiker committed suicide at the age of 30, and Phaswane Mpe died at 34, probably of AIDS. Celebrated while alive, the two became the subjects of intense hagiography after their deaths, seen as martyrs of the country. In his 2001 novel, “Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Mpe captured the dislocation and despair of people who moved in the late ’90s from rural South Africa to Hillbrow, a rough neighborhood in downtown Johannesburg with overcrowded high-rises and a large population of immigrants from elsewhere in Africa . In the South African literary imagination, Hillbrow has come to represent everything frightening and promising about the new South Africa; it is at once a scene of drugs, crime and xenophobia toward immigrants and also what theorists enthusiastically call “Afropolitan,” a space that transcends national boundaries. Mpe, who taught in the department of African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, moved to Johannesburg from a rural village. In his novel, he wrote about AIDS and explored the collision between urban economic mobility and the traditional beliefs that migrants imported to the city. “Different traditions merge into each other, and often new ideas are undermined by the old,” Mpe said in a 2001 interview with South Africa’s Sunday Times. Before his death in 2004, Mpe began preparations to become a sangoma, or traditional healer.

Duiker was a child of the city. Raised in Soweto by middle-class parents who had university degrees, in the ’80s he was sent out of the township to attend a Catholic primary school. He later became one of the first black students to attend a largely white, elite progressive private high school, the Redhill School, a path not without its complications. Duiker also wrestled with his sexuality. His first novel, “Thirteen Cents” (2000), is about a child hustler who turns tricks for rich white men in Cape Town. His second, more ambitious and richly realized novel, “The Quiet Violence of Dreams” (2001), tells the story of Tshepo, a young black university student who winds up in a mental hospital, given the diagnosis “cannabis-induced psychosis” and unable to make sense of his life, his inner turmoil a reflection of a broader societal confusion. He eventually turns to prostitution. The novel also examined the melding of black and white through consumer culture. “When you go out in some places in Cape Town no one really cares that you’re black and that your mother sent you to a private school so that you could speak well,” Duiker wrote. “No one cares that you’re white and that your father abuses his colleagues at work and calls them kaffirs at home. On the dance floor ... people only care that you can dance and that you look good.” There, he went on to write, “designer labels are the new Esperanto,” and kwaito, or township music, and the rave music of white club culture begin to merge. “The people I know never forget that in essence the difference between kwaito and rave is down to a difference in beats per minute and that the margin is becoming narrower.”

In his young life, Duiker was a rising star, anointed as a spokesman for his vexed generation. “At the tender age of 28, he has had two novels published and is well into his third,” The Sunday Times declared in 2002. “And his voice is growing stronger by the day.” (Duiker’s third novel, “The Hidden Star,” a kind of folk tale, was published posthumously in the spring.) Although Duiker was clearly contending with mental illness , his suicide has come to seem a result of external as well as internal pressures. When I met him in Johannesburg, Fred Khumalo, a journalist for The Sunday Times, a novelist and the author of a recent memoir about his years as an anti-apartheid activist, suggested: “Maybe in a way we killed him. We put him on a pedestal. We put pressure on him, we expected so much of him.”

Mhlongo now feels the pressure left by their deaths. Mpe and Duiker, he wrote in an e-mail message, “ventured into new themes that are relevant to South Africa today” — like homophobia, homelessness and xenophobia. “Now people expect us (few young writers as we are) to fill their shoes and explore more themes that were uncommon to South African writing before.”

For his part, Mhlongo is wary of being boxed in by a public persona he is also trying to cultivate. “I got this name tag of being the ‘voice of the kwaito generation’ in writing,” he says. The moniker is the South African equivalent of the hip-hop generation — a marketing term as much as a demographic one. “This sometimes is a bit harmful to my performance, because I always have to behave in a certain way, or write in a certain way that is associated with this generation.” Namely, to keep up with the mores, music and slang of his friends from the township. Indeed, Mhlongo supports himself with freelance projects about his world — writing comics and the occasional newspaper feature or for television. He’s working on a screenplay for a film about Khabzela, a well-known D. J. who died from AIDS after refusing to take antiretroviral drugs. “My publisher once told me that if I want to be a writer I must keep my old job because there is no money in writing,” Mhlongo says. Mhlongo lives — or “stays” in Jo’burg parlance — in Ridgeway, a mixed-race but effectively black suburb. Although it is only a 5- or 10-minute drive from Soweto, the distance is symbolic as much as geographic — like leaving the projects or moving to Manhattan from the outer boroughs once you’ve made it, only with far more political weight. Although he no longer lives in Soweto proper, Mhlongo goes back all the time. “I like the noise,” he told me, gazing at the horizon from the roof terrace of the Rock, a Soweto bar and nightclub that’s the pulsing heart of his social scene.

In the past few years, Mhlongo has become something of a regular on the international circuit, attending conferences and residencies in Holland, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere in Africa. He was invited to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer but chose to attend a conference in Kenya instead. “Dog Eat Dog” has been translated into Spanish, and last summer Mhlongo traveled to Spain to collect a literary award, which came with a heavy bronze statue. At the Alicante Airport, “they scanned my prize and thought it was a bomb,” he said.

But even as Mhlongo achieves success abroad, in South Africa the people he writes about aren’t necessarily reading his work. Much to his disappointment, in all of Soweto, “Dog Eat Dog” is for sale in only one place: the upscale bookshop of the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to a 12-year-old boy killed in a 1976 student demonstration protesting the government’s plan to teach all subjects in Afrikaans. An impressive new structure with a permanent photographic exhibit on the political and social history of Soweto, the museum clearly caters to tourists, not locals. Indeed, in South Africa, literature is something of a luxury item. Books are expensive — a paperback can cost $20, while the average per capita income is less than $5,000 a year. But the single greatest obstacle to reading culture in South Africa is illiteracy. In Soweto, Mhlongo took me to the tiny, dark one-story township house where he lived as a child and where his older sister Margreth now lives with her small children. She met us in the spare kitchen. Although in her late 40s, she looked older and was missing a few teeth. She didn’t speak English, Mhlongo said, and had never learned how to read.

Growing up in Soweto, Mhlongo did not have a mother tongue: he writes today in English, speaks Zulu and Sotho with his friends and knows his way around Afrikaans. Mhlongo is the seventh of nine children born between the late ’50s and the late ’70s, “all from the same mother and father,” he noted. His father, who died when Mhlongo was a teenager, worked as a sweeper in a post office, and his older brothers supported the family. “Food was O.K., but cold drinks were a luxury,” he said. Mhlongo’s mother is from the northeast Limpopo Province and sent Mhlongo there to finish high school. He failed his matriculation exam in October 1990 — something he attributes to his study habits and the fact that schools had been interrupted when Mandela was let out of prison in February of that year. Mhlongo had a desultory academic career, albeit at two of South Africa’s best universities. He studied African literature and political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand for a few years, then transferred to the University of Cape Town to study law. He didn’t do particularly well and all but dropped out. “I got bored,” Mhlongo said. So he wrote a novel: “I was lucky to have had it published the first time I submitted it.” Mhlongo’s second novel, due out next year, is about the pressures on the first children in their families to attend university. The protagonist’s family doesn’t have a “Western education,” Mhlongo explained to me, and expects him to become the breadwinner. Afraid of shaming his family by confessing that he flunked out, he pretends to be a lawyer and sets up an office in the township. The novel is tentatively titled “After Tears,” for a ritual that has become a mainstay of township social life: a night of carousing to honor the newly deceased. After visiting his sister, we drove to the gates of Avalon, the vast, unassuming field that is Soweto’s main cemetery. A plain sign at the gate listed burial fees. “More people live there than in Soweto,” Mhlongo said.

No longer fueled by rage at a morally bankrupt regime, as their parents were, Mhlongo’s generation is instead beset by anxiety about how to take advantage of the freedom it inherited. Young writers admire enormously those who helped dismantle apartheid. For many, the godfather of that generation is Zakes Mda, who at 58 is one of the most prominent black novelists in South African history. A celebrated playwright during the struggle years, Mda has published five novels since 1995 and won every literary prize offered in South Africa. (He is also one of the few South African novelists to be published in the United States, in his case by the distinguished literary publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.) Mhlongo speaks highly of Mda’s work, and the older novelist knew Mpe and Duiker before their deaths. (He was particularly close to Duiker, who he says would call him in moments of despair.) Both generationally and perhaps temperamentally, Mda seems as secure of his place in South Africa as Mhlongo and his contemporaries seem uncertain about theirs. This is not without its paradoxes, because for much of the past 30 years, Mda has lived abroad. Mda may have a more central place in South Africa’s literary and political spheres than any other novelist today, but he lives in Athens, Ohio , where he has taught creative writing and literature at Ohio University since 2002.

When I met him in Ohio in August, in the flush of late summer, Mda said that he considers himself a migrant worker in the States, not an émigré. A rotund man with a wide smile, Mda returns to South Africa several times a year and said he would prefer to return permanently but is staying in Ohio for the sake of his two young children, who love their elementary school. He is in the process of getting them permanent residency. In Ohio, Mda lives in a small, dark ranch house off the highway near a Wal-Mart . In Johannesburg, he lives in a formerly white suburb, in a large house with a swimming pool. If he moved his children back to South Africa, he said, “they’d be spoiled brats.” Mda remains the dramaturge at the Market Theater in Johannesburg, a flagship institution of the South African scene and formerly the front lines of anti-apartheid theater. For Mda, the novel is a “luxury” of freedom, well suited to the more reflective, post-apartheid period. Before, there was “an urgency of writing novels that would have an immediate impact on the struggle,” Mda told me. “We’re no longer writing for the struggle; we’re writing for ourselves.”

Since the end of apartheid, Mda’s old comrades have become the country’s political and business elite. “People I was in the struggle with are billionaires,” Mda said. “But I’ve chosen to be a writer and be poor.” In his novels and other writings, Mda has been outspoken in his criticism of the new ruling class and what he calls “the cronyism networks” that have led to the enrichment of a select black minority, leaving the majority in poverty. When Mda criticized the Mandela government for this in the late ’90s, Mandela sent three government ministers to have lunch with him at an Indian restaurant in Pretoria. “I was pleasantly surprised because I thought these guys were unhappy with me,” he said. Like many South Africans, Mda says he wishes there were a stronger opposition to keep the African National Congress accountable. “The A.N.C. is winning on the economy,” he maintained, “but losing on security and AIDS.” Yet the opposition parties — white nationalists, religious parties — offer no viable alternative. “They’d take that country down the drain,” he insisted. “It would be like Zimbabwe .”

Under the A.N.C., if anyone has the standing to speak truth to power, it’s Mda, who has the pedigree of what he calls the aristocrats of the revolution. His father, Ashby Peter Mda, was the head of the African National Congress Youth League in the late ’40s. As a child in Johannesburg in the ’50s, Mda spent time at the Mandelas’ house, before Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment in 1964. In 1963, Mda’s father, a lawyer, was involved with political activities that forced the family into exile in Lesotho . During apartheid, Mda’s plays were widely performed in South Africa, even when he lived abroad. Mda first left Africa to study painting in Switzerland several years after high school and over the years has acquired a Ph.D. in theater from Cape Town University and two master’s degrees, one in theater and one in communications, from Ohio University. In the early ’90s he was a research fellow at Yale and taught at the University of Vermont .

Mda’s textured, contemplative novels, with their vivid imaginative universes, have often been compared to magic realism. In “Ways of Dying,” which tells the story of a professional mourner in a violent, unnamed South African city, people are beset by curses, and a woman is pregnant for 15 months. In his critically acclaimed and most difficult novel, “The Heart of Redness,” published in South Africa in 2000 and in the United States in 2002, Mda explores the ways in which black South Africans manage to hold a variety of seemingly contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. It tells the story of Camagu, a man who returns to his native South Africa after the end of apartheid, after three decades in exile, working at an international development agency in New York. Back home, he finds he doesn’t have the right struggle connections to get a job. “He regrets now that he acquired so much knowledge in the fields of communication and economic development but never learnt the freedom dance,” Mda writes. Camagu’s story is interwoven with that of Nongqawuse, a 19th-century prophetess from the Xhosa people who still looms large in the South African popular and political imagination. In 1856, Nongqawuse had a prophetic vision that if the Xhosa slaughtered their own cattle, their dead ancestors would rise from the grave and cast the British conquering their lands into the sea. Heeding her vision proved disastrous, and many thousands of Xhosa died of starvation. The survivors were divided: Nongqawuse’s supporters were called believers, her detractors unbelievers. In “The Heart of Redness,” Mda brings that clash to the contemporary Eastern Cape Province. In his new configuration, the believers support building a casino on the coast, while the unbelievers fear it will destroy the landscape and heritage. It is an ambiguous stance: while not exactly endorsing the Xhosa’s self-sacrificial impulse, Mda doesn’t entirely disown it, either. He seems to be saying that tradition doesn’t look so bad if progress means casinos.

The novel caught the attention of the American novelist Norman Rush, who published a scathing assessment of Mda’s work in The New York Review of Books in 2003. Rush interpreted “The Heart of Redness” as nothing less than “a literary gesture against modernity, against the heedlessness of gangbuster capitalism, against secularism,” the product of “a controlling, reflexive, culturally backward-looking ideology.” Rush also saw what he called “the great omission” in that novel and in “Ways of Dying” too: that Mda doesn’t directly address the AIDS pandemic. “Was the AIDS crisis omitted because its presence would have made implausible the optimism, or social energy, that the story promises as it does its work of encouraging attachment to the old ways?” Rush asked.

The review deeply irritated Mda. “That guy, he expected me to talk about everything going on in South Africa,” Mda said over dinner in Ohio. “I’m not a newspaper!” If he were writing “Ways of Dying” now, he said, “it would be about AIDS, that’s the major way of dying today. In 1991, it was not the issue.” His most recent novel, “The Whale Caller” (2005), doesn’t talk about AIDS because it’s not part of the plot, he told me; in “The Madonna of Excelsior” (2002), he does, because it is. (That novel was a best seller in South Africa.) But who, Mda asks, is Norman Rush to tell him what to put in his novels, anyway? “Why didn’t he ask Coetzee why he didn’t write about AIDS?” Mda said. “In ‘Disgrace’ ” — Coetzee’s remarkable 1999 novel, which caused a tremendous clamor in South Africa for its unsettling vision of post-apartheid uncertainty — “there’s not even a mention of AIDS. Nobody takes issue with him because he’s white. But because I’m black, it’s my issue.” Mda told me that his sister died of AIDS. “I know very few families who haven’t been touched” by the disease, Mda added.

In many ways, Rush’s review points to the pitfalls facing all South African writers. Even with the best intentions, anyone who writes opens himself up to criticism that he’s hewing — or not hewing — to a particular political program. White writers who probe the moral confusion of the new South Africa are sometimes seen as apologists for the bad old days, while those who don’t are seen as too beholden to the romance of the A.N.C., a critique frequently leveled at Nadine Gordimer. Coetzee was criticized for not creating fully realized black characters in “Disgrace,” if not for outright racism. (He has since emigrated to Australia .) Even if the country is bursting with material — what better terrain for a novelist than the ways a new political, racial and economic order is playing out in people’s everyday lives? — it’s not easy to remain true to the demands of the imagination. And yet, Mda says, writers are doing their best. “There are more black novelists today than there ever were in the history of South Africa,” he told me. “There’s a quantity out there, and out of that quantity you’ll get quality.”

In Johannesburg, Mhlongo’s confidence is more measured. “I will be romanticizing our 12 years of democracy if I say that the end of apartheid in South Africa brought about the end of racism,” Mhlongo told me. “We as South African people — blacks, whites, Indians and coloreds — have internalized it over the years. Racism therefore is not something that can be expected to change overnight in South Africa, although my generation is trying hard to forge a new identity.”

(Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the NY Times Book Review.)