From apartheid to Post-Apartheid: The Representational Trajectory to a Multiracial Nation in Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Andre Brink’s The Rights of Desire and Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior

This article, which draws inspiration from the literary works of three South African writers, focuses on the two (amongst many) major historic periods in the life of the present-day nation described as post-apartheid South Africa. The two periods, evident in the works of Andre Brink, Zakes Mda and Nadine Gordimer under review, are the reign of apartheid and the transition to a democratic multiracial society built on the principles of equality and the respect of the rights and freedoms of South Africans. From both historical and literary standpoints, the transition to multiracialism is the outcome of the struggle of the oppressed black population of South Africa against the oppressive monolithic racist regime which ruled the country on an official governance policy which it called ‘Apartheid’. In order to enforce this inhumane worldview, the said racist regime used means of brutality and savagery with the intention of transforming the country into a ‘white nation’ that would belong to a minority-turned majority known as the Afrikaners. The often callous and gruesome acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the different racist apartheid regimes (that ruled South Africa from 1948-1994) became a major concern to the world at large and South African anti-apartheid writers in particular. Thus this category of the country’s writers tended to use literature as an instrument of protest against racial discrimination, which brought untold hardship to the black population. Andre Brink, Zakes Mda, and Nadine Gordimer are among the writers whose works vividly trace the South African experience from apartheid to post-apartheid eras. Brink, Mda and Gordimer in their respective works attempt to portray the endeavours and challenges of reconstructing the new nation from the debris of close to four decades of the brutal regime. The main issues discussed in this article are analyzed from New Historicist and Postcolonial perspectives due to the peculiar postcolonial nature of South Africa.

Reflections on Literary Studies in South Africa

Zakes Mda is not only one of South Africa’s most significant post-apartheid novelists, but has worked in diverse media such as theatre, film, opera, painting and music. His prolific creativity in forms other than the novel needs to be taken into account when evaluating his writings. This article proposes an intermedial analysis of Black Diamond (2009), a novel which has largely been given unfavourable critical attention, and suggests that it needs to be considered as a mixed medial text that is shaped by a cinematic mode of narration. The novel is also re-interpreted in the light of a postcolonially inflected “surface reading,” which makes the pervasive visuality of Mda’s prose visible. Finally, it is argued that texts such as Black Diamond raise questions about the interpretive methodologies and reading practices in English literary studies, pointing to future challenges and opportunities in the discipline.

South African Ecocriticism

This essay surveys South African ecocriticism, scaling it alongside African and postcolonial ecocriticisms. The authors praise critics who use local specificities to disrupt the universalization of Euro-American environmental and ecocritical tenets. That disruption generates global relevance. However, the field is still overcoming imbalances toward white literary and critical voices, as well as a disarticulation of “animal-centered” from “people-centered” approaches. Animal studies and landscape have pulled South African ecocritics in two main directions, which this chapter maps. The authors then bolster arguments for reintegrating concerns about animals, land, and people, in the service of unpacking conservation’s links to race, colonialism, apartheid, and post-apartheid inequities. Novelist Zakes Mda stages the need for such reintegration in The Whale Caller, which reframes human-nonhuman relations and exposes the tourism economy’s disenfranchisement of both animals and people. (This article has been commissioned as a supplement to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard.)