Now That We\u27re Free

This month I voted for the first time to choose my own government in South Africa. The exercise of this belated right, when it came, left me numb. Throughout that day I experienced a pause, both of mind and feeling. I have lived in exile for 31 years. Years charged with a restlessness that would not leave me; preoccupied variously with a sense of loss; a loss of country, of friends and relations, of language, and to some degree, a loss of self. So, on the 26th of April 1994, I paused to look back on the years spent in deficiency. However, this could not last for long, for the occasion did not belong to the past, but to the future. The next few days flowed like glue as the whole world waited with baited breath for the results, even though it was a foregone conclusion that the ANC would win. I waited with the world, tense and fearful that the worst, in the form of internecine violence, might yet follow the elections. When South Africa and the world could not wait any longer, the results were declared anyhow. And no one complained about the drawing board results. On the contrary, everyone was satisfied. Well, that is, if you overlooked all the irregularities. Nobody does things quite like South Africans

The African Woman writer

It is of great significance that there is such a presence of African women writers at this conference. Women have always played vital roles in our oral literature, but the written form has tended to ignore the women. Until recently, it was a male preserve and women featured in this literature as cardboard characters that answered to the images that male writers have of their mothers on the one hand, and their wives on the other. It is true that Africa holds two contradictory views of woman — the idealised, if not the idolised mother, and the female reality of woman as wife

Impressions and Thoughts on the Options of South African Women

Eighteen months after President De Klerk gave his historic speech of 2 February 1990, South Africans are beginning to show signs of believing that things are actually destined for change, and that change will be irreversible. This has brought on a frenzy of hope and doubt, of feverish excitement (as of people before a gathering storm), of joyous instability and aggressive possessiveness, as though they are afraid to lose what they\u27ve known all through the years of oppression. Visiting South Africa after many years, one soon finds oneself joining in the medley, and it is hard to pause and observe the fast changing, never-to-be-repeated history in formation. But it is precisely at this momentous time that we must pause and observe and record, for this time of transition, when we bury the past, is also the beginning of life as it shall be. This is a time of sorting out, when South Africans must resolve what it is they must discard or carry into the future

My life and my writing

I find, writing about myself, does not come easily. Addressing the world about the little swirls of little events that loosely gather, tangle and disentangle — in short, my life, seems of very doubtful consequence. When at birth I was released into this motion of swirling little events my life was also set on rails and predetermined — free within the confines of turbulent change in South Africa. It was to take another thirty years for me to break loose, to burn the bridges, to leave South Africa and go into exile

“I slipped into the pages of a book”: intertextuality and literary solidarities in South African writing about London

Publisher versionIn this article, I argue that London plays a dual role in South African writing, as a “real” city at a particular moment in history, and as a textual, imaginative space. For many South African writers, London comes to stand metonymically for English culture and literature even if their attitude toward Englishness and Empire may be one of ambivalent critique. The intertexts invoked in South African representations of London forge literary solidarities, and foreground belated postcolonial engagements with modernity that are significantly displaced from the “margin” to the “center” of modernism (and Empire) itself