The Season of Whispers is Over: Now the Stories can be Safely Told

In his article ‘Post-apartheid Literature Beyond Race’, S.S. Ibinga makes several bold–and perhaps premature–claims for what he nevertheless calls the literature of transition, as present-day South African society gradually adapts to new social and cultural structures. He talks of ‘an abrupt shift away from racial focus’ in writing, following the eradication of legalised racial segregation. This paper considers two very different narrative approaches to the healing process in post-apartheid literature, equally powerful, but both emanating from the deep wounds resulting from centuries of racial inequality and violence. The first approach is represented by Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1998), which purports to be a letter from the mother of a township thug to the mother of the young American aid-worker he murdered; and the second by Zakes Mda’s own brand of magical realism in The Madonna of Excelsior (2002). Magona’s work is based on a true story, which she endeavours to tell in such a way that the reader feels as much understanding and compassion for the aggressor as for the victim, and a cathartic release of grief. Mda’s novel, if it bears any resemblance at all to mourning, then it must be as the most carnivalesque of wakes. He tells the commonplace yet wretched life story of Niki, a young African girl born in apartheid South Africa in the early ‘50s. Niki is the mortar where all the multiple forms of abuse of apartheid are pounded. Yet the story, told with a twinkle in the author’s eye, and seen through the prism of Niki’s buoyant, loving nature, gleams with hope and ends with healing. The paper compares the narrative strategies of the two works, each revealing a new aesthetics, free of the ideological determinism that apartheid literature was accused of, and thus themselves symptomatic of the healing process