"This time set again": the temporal and political conceptions of Serote's To every birth its blood

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 199

Authorship, authenticity and the black community: The novels of Soweto 1976

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 8 September 1986Following the renewal of black cultural activity around drama and poetry in South Africa since the early 1970s, a resurgence of the use of prose fiction has recently begun to take place. In the past decade several anthologies and collections of short stories have been published inside the country, and Staffrider and other literary magazines have fulfilled an important role in disseminating the stories of (amongst others) Matshoba, Ndebele, Essop, Dangor and Maseko to a wider audience. A number of novels have also appeared, the most noteworthy being Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) and Amandla (1980); Ahmed Essop's The Visitation (1980) and The Emperor (1984); Sipho Sepamla's The Root is One (1979) and A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981); Mbulelo Mzamane's The Children of Soweto (1982); Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) and Boyd Makhoba's On the Eve (1986). The 16 June 1976 marked the palpable onset of a period of massive and ongoing political confrontation in South Africa, and it is no surprise that several of these novels deal directly or indirectly with this event and its aftermath. Mzamane's novel, and Sepamla's and Tlali's second novels, investigate the human experiences, reactions and the political activity in Soweto immediately before and after that fateful day in June. Serote's work, while it refers to the 'days of Power' only fleetingly, extrapolates the growth of armed resistance to the white government in the period following the Soweto uprising. The events of 1976 have a powerful implied presence as a fulcrum in this narrative, transforming the agonized subjective narration of Tsi Molope in the first section of the novel into a more objectified focus on the activities of a group of revolutionaries afterwards

Poems

Promised Land, Go home and do not sleep, Women, trespassing in a garde

Walking, Falling

Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Soles seventh collection of poetry. It extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships; the exposing of false and clichéd perspectives in our socio-political life; our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape. Rustum Kozain has written about his work: Whether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the readers complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity

Authority, authenticity and the black writer: depictions of politics and community in selected fictional black consciousness texts

Ph. D., Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 199