Expanding 'South Africanness': debut novels.

Lenta, Margaret

I intend to ask the question of how, in the post-apartheid, post-democratic-elections period in South Africa, specifically the years 1999-2008, obligations and interests have been reconsidered and conclusions which have resulted have found their way into debut novels written and published in this country. After the pause in literary production which followed the fall of the apartheid regime, there has been a flowering of fiction by first-time novelists. South African debut novels which have appeared since 1999, although diverse in their nature, and often related to the ethnic or language group of their authors, demonstrate a general awareness of new freedoms and new developments in South African society, as well as registering disappointment with the new regime.

The question has been asked by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly about South African literature, "How does writing by those who were classified as belonging to different racial groups under the apartheid system, by those who speak different languages, by those of different genders and sexualities, differently inflect the peculiar pressures and opportunities with which they were confronted during the past two and a half decades?" (1998: 1). I shall offer a multipart answer to this question and will consider a different time span from that of Attridge and Jolly, whose Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995 (1998) spans the period of mid- to late apartheid and the early years of the post-apartheid era. Rita Barnard's Apartheid and Beyond (2007) goes so far as to consider works of the late 1990s, but follows the custom of most critical works published abroad in focussing on established authors whose works can be easily obtained outside this country.

Consideration of literary work of the apartheid era alongside post-apartheid work seems to become less appropriate as time goes on, though it cannot be denied, as Annie Gagiano has pointed out, that "mourning the ugly and cruel past appropriately remains a feature of South African writing" (2006: 133). Even a novel in which the apartheid past is the major subject, Mtutulezi Nyoka's I Speak to the Silent (2004), deals with the sexual abuse of women cadres in the liberation movement: a matter that the solidarity of the struggle would have rendered inadmissible. None of the novels which I shall consider, nor indeed any from the period 1999-2008 that I have encountered but have been forced by lack of space to omit, could have been written before the advent of democracy.

More than forty years of repressive apartheid government established the idea that serious literature should not merely be critical, but should enlighten readers as to the crimes of government. Writers in the period nevertheless had to face that some subjects were inadmissible, either because a book which focussed on them was likely to be banned (1) and therefore involve its publisher in financial loss, or because the consensus amongst oppositional people and parties was that they distracted from the great cause of bringing down the apartheid government. "Just as surely as certain sexual relationships were proscribed by apartheid, certain experiences or areas of knowledge were out of bounds to probing in words," writes Andre Brink of the years of apartheid (Attridge and Jolly 1998:15). He goes on to list topics, other than political opposition to the National Party government, which were forbidden: dates of black settlement in the subcontinent, the misuse of the Bible "to instil an acceptance by the oppressed of their fate", "the extent of miscegenation between Afrikaners and their slaves", "the enslavement of indigenous peoples", "strategies to ensure and perpetuate the marginalization of women in both black and white societies..." (1998: 15), all of which have become important subjects in the period 1999-2008.

The production of novels appears to have increased greatly since 1999, and debut novels have been particularly numerous. There has been a growth of publishing houses in this country and they have been willing to publish new authors. The theme which propels a writer into print for the first time, or into the writing of a first novel as opposed to working in other literary forms, stands a good chance of reflecting the issues which appear urgent to him or her. The fact that a work is accepted for publication suggests the publisher believes that readers are likely to agree that these subjects are important--as well, of course, that the author has handled them well. Novels, in fact, at least collectively, offer a key to the era.

There is likely to be evidence of the novice status of the writer in debut works, and some of the works which I shall discuss--K Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents is an example--have been followed by other, more mature novels. I do not suggest that it is fair to pass any conclusive literary judgment on a debut novel, but rather that the subject-matter and often the forms of these works are of considerable, if finally historical, significance. A first-person narrator is, not coincidentally, common in these novels. The novels, though they differ in subject-matter and form, possess interests, I shall claim, which make them distinctively 'post-democratic elections', even though some of them are set in communities which seem not to interact with those outside of their own group.

I shall include in my consideration novels by authors who have had previous experience of writing for publication, but whose first novels appeared in this period. Yvette Christianse, Michiel Heyns, David Medalie, Phaswane Mpe, Njabulo S Ndebele and Zoe Wicomb have all published in other literary forms: poetry, the short story, children's fiction and/or critical articles. All, not coincidentally, are or were academics. Though their work offers evidence that their literary and linguistic skills have been honed by past experience, my intention is not to award marks for literary merit but to distinguish the themes which have seemed sufficiently urgent to writer and publisher to motivate them to produce long fiction.

I propose to confine myself to novels written in English, even though Afrikaans novels in the period have been of considerable interest, and the movement, of which Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach are part, to translate fiction and other literary forms from Afrikaans into English has been strong in the period. None of these writers has produced a first novel between 1999 and 2008, and

the decision to translate, and the process in which this occurs, in which author and translator are involved in a special, co-operative relationship, deserves a separate essay by a specialist in this area.

Even in English, the volume of first novels which has appeared in South Africa in the period 1999-2008 is large, and my selection of works, though not arbitrary, necessarily omits many which might be considered significant. The intention to represent rather than cover the novels of the period will motivate me, as well as, in some cases, personal preferences.

To categorise first novels in terms of subject-matter is to do them partial justice, since most of the authors have included a complexity of interests and impulses. Responding to my own sense of what was politically suppressed or at least considered undesirable under apartheid, however, I shall look at the novels as responses to obligations which authors are now free to honour. The elements which I shall distinguish will be, first, the will to give voice to 'previously silent communities'; second will be 'sex and gender', which given the proprieties of the apartheid era often overlaps with the first; third, the mixture of languages now characteristic of novels by black authors; fourth, 'writing back', that is, responding to and taking issue with earlier works; fifth, the roman a these, implying a singleness of subject, to the extent that the work becomes fictionalised argument. The sixth element will be 'fusion', by which I mean that novels register the fact that people of different ethnic communities are now free to know each other outside of their work, and to form what ties they wish.

A second meaning will be given to the term fusion: the exchange of values between communities can hardly be absent from present-day South African fiction. Postcolonial hybridity means that a work which appears to be confined within a single ethnic community will nevertheless bear marks of contact with others. With the partial exception of the romans a these, almost all the novels contain these elements, and whilst drawing attention to a major element in each which could not have been dealt with in fiction, or at least not in the same way, in the apartheid era, I shall suggest the diversity of their interest.

An obligation, recognised in many debut novels, came with democracy, to tell from the inside the stories of previously silent minority communities. Zoe Wicomb's David's Story (2000) is concerned with the history and present-day significance of the Griqua people, as well as of women in the ANC in exile. Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding (2001), takes as its subject a Muslim Indian husband and wife who leave India to settle in Durban. Yvette Christianse's Unconfessed (2006), the narrative of a slave woman in the early nineteenth-century Cape, represents the same impulse to give voice to the silent. Aziz Hassim's The Lotus People (2002) is another first novel which tells the story of the Durban 'Indian' community. Three of these novels, David's Story, The Wedding and Unconfessed, are also strongly concerned with gender.

David's Story may well be the most ambitious as well as the finest novel which has appeared in the period. Its protagonist, David Dirkse, a former ANC cadre (the present of the novel is the post-1990 period) seeks to recover the history of his people, the Griquas, from the early period when the Koks and Le Fleurs taught national consciousness to a hybrid group of Khoi, Cape Dutch and slavery survivors, down to the present state of their descendants in Kokstad and Cape Town. It is a history of effort and determination, perpetually foiled by governments which believed that only whites should own land. The pursuit of respectability which becomes traditional for coloured people is shown to originate in the Griqua wish to deserve a better destiny than they achieve.

A second part of the novel deals with Dulcie, the dedicated woman cadre who is visited in the night by comrades who rape and torture her--"fucking women was a way of preventing them from rising in the Movement" (2000: 179), these men believe. Dulcie's loyalty and dedication to the struggle prevents her from reporting the abuse she suffers, and this suppression is the key to the parallel between her story and that of the Griquas, in whose origins--it was the Huguenot refugee Madame La Fleur who decided to bring her son with her to the Cape--and subsequent history women have been all-important but systematically obscured. This suppression is summarised for official history in the term 'steatopygous', used since the days of Saartjie Baartman to suggest that indigenous South African women have no characteristics other than the grotesque and physical.

David himself, the inheritor and collector of the history, says to the ironic and sceptical woman who is writing it down, "'There's surely no need for all the old women. Can't some of the oumas be turned into oupas? There's no harm in that, just turning the she's into he's'" (2000: 200). It is a process which has gone on for centuries, and which he understands as natural. But when the recording woman suggests that Dulcie be turned into a man, his sense of her and what she has suffered will not allow it: "'No, no, that would not make sense at all. Dulcie is definitely a woman'" (2000: 200).

Yvette Christianse's Unconfessed deals with slavery in the period between the abolition of the oceanic slave trade (1808) and the final abolition of slavery (1838). The title makes the point that the group to which its protagonist, who is the narrator for most of the work, belongs is that of women slaves, who are forced to be silent about their sufferings: Sila van den Kaap's very name is a falsehood to disguise the illegality of her enslavement. Robert C-H Shell sets as the epigraph to his Children of Bondage (1994) the comment by W W Bird in 1822 that "[t]he acquisition of a male slave is a life interest; that of a female is considered to be a perpetual heritage" (1994: np), and Unconfessed reveals the stratagems of members of the slave-owning class to ensure that this remained the case.

A subset of this category of previously silent minority communities is the group of novels about homosexuals, which like Unconfessed belongs equally in the 'sex and gender' grouping. The new constitution, finalised in 1996, which proclaimed the equality of the gender groups and legitimised all kinds of sexual orientation, has also allowed the production of novels in which homosexuals are major subjects. Michiel Heyns's The Children's Day (2002) is an example of such a work, as is, in its different way, K Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents (2000).

The main theme of The Children's Day is the maturing of a boy, growing up in a Free State village, Verkeerdespruit, where homosexuality is unidentified in words, even by those whose sexuality is of that kind. The consequences--a suicide, a dreadful marriage and a life of concealment are amongst them--can only be hinted at. The boy, Simon, stands a little apart from the people of the village: he is the only child of the English-speaking magistrate; his mother is Afrikaans, but freethinking. The convention, made famous by Perceval Gibbon in The Vrouw Grobelaar's Leading Cases (1905) and Herman Charles Bosman in Mafeking Road (1998 [1947]) and elsewhere, that people of such a village may be portrayed as comic caricatures, is present: Mr de Wet, Klasie the postmaster, Betty the Exchange, and others are at times described in this way, but their vulnerable humanity is also revealed. Most important of the characters whom Simon must learn to understand is Fanie, a poor white, epileptic child whom his schoolfellows identify as a natural victim, but whom eventually Simon comes to understand and value.

Simon has various homosexual encounters as he grows up, and it is clear at the end of the novel that he will soon understand his orientation better than he does, but the work's great merit is that it insists on the ordinariness of his life: the Free State village, the conventionally snobbish boarding school to which he is sent make the point that homosexual people are and always have been part of the life of rural South Africa.

Thirteen Cents is narrated by a coloured street child who tells the story of his life as a petty thief, an underling for adult criminals and a prostitute for affluent men. Like Sila van den Kaap, he belongs to a group which is exploited but required to be silent. His desperate, abused existence, facing starvation and assault every day, is movingly rendered, the more so because of his acceptance of it. The lyricism of the work and its single focus render it less of a novel than most of the works which I shall consider, but it shows great promise, which was to be fulfilled in Duiker's later works, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2002) and The Hidden Star (2005).

Gender and the changing roles and relations between the gender groups are a major subject in black writing, both by women and men. Black women have felt freer than they did under apartheid to explore their position and aspirations: Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007) investigates a dilemma of our era, that of young middle-class black women, expected in the past and to an extent still to be guardians of tradition, but now puzzled as to which cultural position they should occupy. (Futhi Ntshingila's Shameless (2008) is a slighter work on a related theme.) Coconut consists of first-person narratives by two young women, Ofilwe Tlou, the daughter of a newly rich black family in Johannesburg, and Fiki, who works as a waitress in the Silver Spoon, where the Tlous have Sunday breakfast. Ofilwe registers with pain the contradictions of her family and school life, the residual racism of children and teachers, her determinedly English-speaking home. She is ashamed that she does not speak sePedi well, and tries to re-learn the language in order to take her place in her extended family. Her Africanist brother, Tshepo, rejects Christianity and efforts to Europeanise, but eventually quarrels with his father because he wants to be a writer, not an actuary. The different pressures on the brother and sister are strongly related to their genders.

Fiki is an orphaned township child who lives with 'Uncle', a failure and token affirmative action appointment in his firm. She, at least until the last pages of the novel, has no doubts about her wish for riches and western culture. She is enchanted by the magazine version of well-to-do white life, and though exploited at the Silver Spoon, accepts this as the cost of access to whiteness:

"Get on an apron and..." she waits for me to complete the sentence for her.

"Bake bread," I say, humiliated.

"Yes," she nods, "bake bread!"

I am mortified. I cannot believe I am being yelled at in this way in front of the kitchen staff. The bloody kitchen staff! Miss Becky would never degrade me in this manner. Miss Becky would never make me put on a plastic apron and a ridiculous hair net. It is her dumb daughter who has absolutely no understanding of how vital I am to the functioning of the Silver Spoon, that can go and disrespect me in that way in front of the kitchen staff. But I pull myself together.

"You heard her," I say to the kitchen staff after Caroline has left the room. "Stop standing around and bake bread!" (Matlwa 2007: 145)

A striking though minor feature of the novel, which it shares with Shameless, is the treatment of sexual abuse by an uncle, which is seen as wrong, but by no means monstrous: cramped living quarters and damaged male egos are the cause.

Two novels by men, minor though interesting, in which gender relations are a secondary subject, are Mtutulezi Nyoka's I Speak to the Silent (2004) and Siphiwo Mahala's When a Man Cries (2007). In I Speak to the Silent the male protagonist beats up his wife when he is unhappy, and though he comes to recognise that this is wrong, does not go so far as to understand that his wife has suffered grief equal to his own. Sexual abuse of young women by powerful men is the major plot catalyst, but the book wanders through many other situations: dreary life in the impoverished Ciskei, the arrogance of rich white women (always a favourite topic in such works--white men incur much less blame), the corruption of the police and the removal under apartheid of worthy community leaders.

Siphiwo Mahala's When a Man Cries, much of which was originally published as short stories, is also, though not to the same degree, multifocussed. Mahala's protagonist, Themba, a schoolmaster, comes to understand that sexual exploitation of his pupils is wrong, as is the sexual harassment of women colleagues. After a series of experiments in seduction and near-rape, which produce different kinds of disasters, he repents and is reunited with his wife. His growing understanding of the needs of the poor in his community is equally a subject.

Both of these male-authored novels portray male centrality and power in a way that seems to assume that they are unchangeable. In so far as they problematise wife abuse and marital infidelity, they may be an advance on male-authored black fiction of the past, which rarely admitted that such things occurred. (2) Women's novels, however, depict different attitudes: Matlwa's Coconut depicts the protagonist's father as casually unfaithful, and another debut novel, Angelina N Sithebe's Holy Hill (2007), describes the violent jealousy of the female protagonist's fiance. In both cases, the mothers of the offended women fail their daughters by condoning this facet of male behaviour--"what can you expect?" is their response.

A last-minute entry into the category of 'stories of previously silent communities' is Sally-Ann Murray's Small Moving Parts (2009), which tells the story of a family of South African whites who are poor, and who, as the narrator tells us, are struggling not to become poor whites. Father deserts the family at an early stage, and Murray's depiction of the mother's hard work and sacrifices (and the price that her children have to pay for those sacrifices) is always moving, even painful. It is salutary, however, to be reminded that impoverished whites, especially if they were women family heads, were another group which the nation preferred in the past to ignore.

Njabulo S Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003), which also contains elements of the 'previously silent' as well as of 'sex and gender', is a more serious questioning of gender roles. It draws on the myth of Penelope, who waited for years for her husband Ulysses to return from Troy, and therefore contains the 'fusion' elements common in postcolonial South African writing. Penelope is the archetype of a woman whose husband, after an absence of decades, assumes the right to a rapturous reception from his wife on his return; Winnie Mandela is the modern exemplar.

To an equal extent with authors like Wicomb, Christianse, Heyns and Duiker, Ndebele brings into the public arena the lives of people who have been required to be silent. He faces the fact that a marital relationship must change--perhaps fade--when a separation of great length occurs, for whatever reason. Male partners change, and discard women with whom they no longer wish to be intimate, or punish them for changing, on the assumption that women must remain constant. His novel however focusses on women who have learnt to accept the changes in themselves. The passage in which Winnie Mandela reflects on what happened to her in Brandfort is full of insight into what may have changed the real woman:

In Brandfort I stood out so much! I was too much for the benighted herrenvolk of Brandfort, the children of Hendrik Verwoerd. I brought Brandfort to the attention of the world. I brought it into the twentieth century. The fools in Pretoria! Instead of consigning me to Siberia, they sent me to Brandfort as an agent of revolution. In Brandfort I raged against everything in sight, until I had only myself to face. Then I raged against myself.

Brandfort was my first real taste of power; something close to absolute power. (Ndebele 2003: 102)

Ndebele's form, studies of the lives of four fictional black women whose menfolk have deserted them, as well as of a fictionalised Winnie Mandela, has led him to use terms from African languages. This 'multilingualism' is a prominent feature of most novels by black authors. Crucial to Ndebele's novel, for example, is the concept of the ibandla, the supportive group of women, who address their fellows as zintombi.

Ndebele's experience of growing up as an urban Zulu, spending twenty years in exile in Lesotho and working in universities in that country and South Africa has given him literary as well as spoken mastery of three of South Africa's major languages. The constitution, which proclaims the official status of all eleven languages, offers an opportunity, he believes, for the writing of fiction which will be at least 'multilingual'. He is likely to be speaking for many black writers when he claims that "there are aspects of my experience that I cannot imagine in English"; and that "my history of using English as a medium for artistic expression is incomparably much longer than my use of Sesotho and isiZulu for that purpose" (2007: 151). This double-bind leads him to the conclusion that First is the possibility of fiction woven together in at least three languages.... The average South African speaks any combination of at least two languages. The average black South African speaks any combination of at least three languages. In the Johannesburg area, the average rises to four or five languages.... This means that a multilingual fiction has a potentially large multilingual black readership, on condition that a speech community located at a multilingual intersection actually amounts to a reading community. Such a development cannot happen on its own. Readers of multilingual fiction have to transform speech habits into a reading discipline, making possible the growth of a dialogue between writers and readers. (2007: 151-2)

Ndebele's essay does not go on to consider the problems of "transforming speech habits into a written discipline", but they are briefly considered in Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, where a black woman, Refilwe, has been made Commissioning Editor for books in sePedi in a publishing house:

But she soon discovered the frustrations which went with her new and prestigious position. Although she knew what good books looked like, the company she worked for kept on reminding her that good books were only those that could get a school prescription. What frustrated her so much was the extent to which publishing was in many ways out of touch with the language and events of everyday life.

It was a very different story with other creative forms; music for instance. In the music trade, unlike publishing, producers and public alike were receptive to work that broke new ground. To songs that spoke in the hard language that people used in their everyday lives.... a fairly open-minded Commissioning Editor in Sepedi had to be frustrated when she could not take a crop of newly-emerging, critical writers onto her list ... (Mpe 2001: 94-5)

Refilwe's impulse is to facilitate the production of an adult literature in sePedi; her superiors insist that it must remain juvenile, in the sense decreed by the government-controlled educational authorities under apartheid. It might be argued that potential readers of sePedi literature are themselves conservative and resistant to works "in the hard language" that people use in their everyday lives, but Refilwe (and Mpe) know that this is not consistently so.

Nevertheless, as Ndebele and other black South African writers are aware, the readership for novels written in the indigenous languages of this country, other than Afrikaans, is tiny. The decision taken by many, following Chinua Achebe's early example in Things Fall Apart (1958), is to include in English-language novels those proverbs and characteristic expressions from their mother tongues which, as Ndebele says, they cannot imagine in English. Examples of works in which this occurs are Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Nape a Motana's Fanie Fourie's Lobola (2007) and Siphiwo Mahala's When a Man Cries (2007), as well of course as The Cry of Winnie Mandela. A related phenomenon is the growing reluctance of publishers' editors to sanitise black English into the standard forms: (3) Sandile Memela's Flowers of the Nation (2005) unselfconsciously uses what would be cliche and slang in standard English, as well as unexplained pieces of township vocabulary, to convey the experience of two black children. K Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents uses, as part of its strategy to make known a group which literate society has chosen to ignore, the dialect of Cape Town street people, a mixture of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa.

Given the privileging of certain groups as the legitimate voices of South Africa in the past, it is to be expected that 'writing back' will be important. The Cry of Winnie Mandela writes back to the Odyssey, maintaining that the return of a husband after an absence of decades is at least problematic. Unconfessed can be see as a 'writing back' to fictions of slavery like Brink's A Chain of Voices (1982), in which women slaves, beaten and sexually exploited as they are, are nevertheless shown to accept their sufferings, without judging their oppressors.

Phaswane Mpe's rhapsody of urbanisation, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), written in the second person, 'writes back' to another familiar South African form, the 'Jim Comes to Jo'burg' of the past, in which a naive country boy is corrupted by city life: famous examples are Douglas Blackburn's Leaven (1908), R R R Dhlomo's An African Tragedy (1928) and Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). Mpe's young people come to Johannesburg from the rural village of Tiralong, and several of them die of their urban experiences, but there is no sense such as exists in the earlier novels that the rural areas are productive of innocence which will be lost in the city. Tiralong is a place of malicious gossip, muti men throwing the bones and lying about responsibility for crimes, and murders, including the necklacing of witches. In Johannesburg promising young people meet foreigners and profit from association with them. A dark shadow in this novel is the spread of HIV/ AIDS, and the last pages, in which the death of Refilwe is portrayed as a happy reunion with the ancestors, only carry conviction if the reader accepts the personal history of the author, which has caused him to offer a picture of a city which may be glamorous, squalid and fatal at the same time. (4)

The roman d these, as I have suggested, is an extreme case of response to different "pressures and opportunities" in which a writer has cast into fictional form arguments related to a single moral preoccupation. Chris Marnewick's Shepherds and Butchers (2008), in which a discussion of state executions in the last years of apartheid is fictionalised, is perhaps the clearest example of a novel in this category. Any criticism of the prison services was strictly forbidden under the apartheid regime. Another novel which belongs here is Johan Steyn's Father Michael's Lottery (2005). Set in Botswana, though written by a South African and published in this country, it deals with the AIDS pandemic, and the refusal of state medical services to recognise the urgency to spend funds on the treatment of the poor, a theme which has preoccupied South Africans for the last ten years at least.

The category of the roman d these, even less than the others, is by no means water-tight: many of the novels which I discuss or allude to belong to an extent in this category, since they engage with moral issues considered inadmissible under apartheid. Jonnie Steinberg's The Number (2004), though its back cover identifies it as a documentary based on a series of interviews with an offender in prison, has some of the licence of fiction in as much as Steinberg admits that he altered names, and that some of the dates are approximate: "prison gangsters are not wont to keep records, so fixing the date and time is at best an educated guess" (2004: xi). Its prime loyalty is to the truth of prison life, but Marnewick and Steyn would declare comparable loyalties to the facts. Another novel which is as strongly related to large-scale phenomena of the period as these is Jonathan Morgan's Finding Mr Madini (1999), which deals with xenophobia and the homeless--and Duiker's Thirteen Cents belongs here as well as elsewhere.

The forward-looking features of many novels of this period--which I have called 'fusion novels'--have been recognised by Gagiano: [M]ost of the post-1999 texts included here do also register a life-current onward and several can be considered confident stake-claimers in their commemorative or affirmative recognition of a range of cultures--using the term (as used by writers such as Duiker) to refer not only to racial or linguistic units, but to many kinds of established alliances--regional (both rural and urban), political, historical, or exploratory and tentative. (2006: 153-5)

These 'fusion' novels have for the most part a happy relationship to the new dispensation. Nape a Motana's Fanie Fourie's Lobola (2007) brings new subject-matter to the novel. Set amongst working-class whites and blacks, its language, by the conventional standards of middle-class, highly literate whites, is at times inappropriate to a novel. There is much mention of women's biceps, and a striking amount of reference to bodily functions. It tells in broadly comic mode the story of an Afrikaner's marriage to a Pedi woman, Dimatkatjo Machabaphala, whom he meets in a (black) doctor's surgery, where she is a nurse. Fanie's mother disapproves, but he is determined to marry Dimatkatjo, which, his black friend George explains, will entail paying lobola.

The rest of the novel is a farcical account of the lobola negotiations and the wedding. Dimatkatjo's unscrupulous brother and cousin try to up the agreed lobola; another cousin borrows Fanie's car and comes close to wrecking it. Eventually Malome, the uncle of the bride, intervenes and peaceful agreement is achieved. Motana's sense that African tradition must prevail, that Fanie must conform to it and the younger generation must not be allowed to corrupt it, is striking and in its way postcolonial. SePedi proverbs and maxims are crucial to it.

David Medalie's The Shadow Follows (2006), a very different 'fusion' novel, is Dickensian in its complexity and in the way that ties of kinship, adoption, sexuality and friendship are discovered and serve to unite people who might be thought unlikely ever to meet. It is set in the affluent, multiracial society of Johannesburg, where friendships, business associations and even families are re-forming themselves to render race irrelevant. Fusion, in the sense of the productive co-existence of people of different groups, is an element of Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2005), which also belongs in the 'previously silent minority' category, though it is a politicised work of the post 9/11 period. Like other novels of the period--Barbara Folscher's thriller Blind Faith (2007) is another example--it allows its characters to have meaningful lives whilst in exile, facing the colonial and postcolonial fact that South Africans travel and interact with metropolitan cultures.

In an article entitled "Does South African Literature Still Exist?" (2005: 6983), Leon de Kock recognises the fact that what homogenised South African texts under apartheid was political, and that now, "our various acts of writing are no longer held in this clasp of denial and counter-statement" (70). He celebrates the "death of South African literature as we used to know it", and the freedom of authors to draw inspiration from models other than South African.

De Kock's example is Agaat (2004), by Marlene van Niekerk, originally written in Afrikaans though now translated into English (2006). Another accomplished novel of this period, which departs, formally and in its subject-matter, from apartheid expectations is Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin (2007). It is set, in a manner reminiscent of J M Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), in an undefined state, where an absolute ruler has just been toppled, and three men who depend on his patronage, his chef, portraitist and barber, are imprisoned in his residence. Their womenfolk--daughter, wife and lover--feel themselves involved in the men's fate, but also freed by their fall. Power, insecurity, fear, sexual passion--these are the matters which Dovey has considered, as experienced by people whose behaviour and emotions are not tied to a particular, recognisable state. Though Coetzee's influence is evident, so is Kafka's, and there can be no suggestion that Dovey will be reproached, as was Coetzee in the early eighties, with neglect of subjects which ought to be irresistible or with the use of an elitist form.

De Kock might claim that the category of South African literature has become unimportant, and if it is understood as implying similarity of subject-matter and attitudes, it is appropriate that this should now be the case. Most of the novels which I have discussed above are however sited in South Africa, and would be recognised by South Africans and foreigners alike as South African in their subject-matter.

It is nevertheless easy to detect an absence or perhaps a de-emphasis common to these novels: compared to the fictions of the apartheid era, the state is a remote presence. Whereas typically the plot of an apartheid novel would involve the individual's conflict with the state, this is no longer the case in the novels of 1999-2008. Even a non-realistic novel of the apartheid period, Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983), focuses on the resistance of an individual to the will of the state to control him. In the fictions of 1999-2008, this subject has declined in importance, even when the author is dealing with the apartheid period. In Coovadia's The Wedding, for example, which focuses on the pre-apartheid, segregationist period, moving into apartheid towards the end of its protagonists' lives, the state is a minor matter. And in Unconfessed, where the reader might expect unjust laws to be a major subject, it is the previously slave-owning class and its will to circumvent the law which is important. Thirteen Cents reveals the lives of people who live unsupported by the state, as does Finding Mr Madini. Even I Speak to the Silent, where the focus is mainly on the apartheid period, has as its major subject an abuse within the liberation movement. The Cry of Winnie Mandela, which presents women whose unequal relationship to their husbands was a matter of law under apartheid, and which, in the novel's present, is customary, may be said to span this shift. The result of this decline in interest in interventionism and control by the state has been a stronger emphasis in novels on the power of individuals and their negotiating abilities --politics, in fact, at the level of cultural criticism.

What these debut novels collectively, and at times individually achieve is an expansion of the idea of 'South Africanness', which, they assert, is not confined to any kind of political orthodoxy, or to a language or ethnic group, or to a gender group or a class. Their diversity is not merely a recognition of the different traditions and interests of the various South African groups; equally importantly, it declares the authors' and publishers' confidence that members of other groups need and want to read about them. Writing of the pre-apartheid documents produced in or about South Africa, De Kock lists as examples the epic account of Portuguese seafaring around the Cape, the Dutch register of occupation, the English travel diary, the Xhosa praise song, the French pastoral narrative of Africa ... the Scottish romantic ballad. These objects of culture have seldom been aware of each other, despite their geographical contiguity. (2001: 264)

The major departure of the novels of the period 1999-2008 may be that while they are as diverse, culturally if not in national origins, as the documents named by De Kock, their intention is to extend awareness of their subject-matter to as large as possible a section of the South African public. This is not equally the case in all: it is more evident in a minor work like Fanie Fourie's Lobola than in Blood Kin, but in most of the works the impulse to exclude certain groups, or to include them only as "comically uncultivated people" (De Kock 2001:266) has passed. Heyns, for example, in The Children's Day, shows the people of Verkeerdespruit as possessed of the full range of human possibilities; Christianse's novel demonstrates the falseness of the Robben Island overseer's verdict on the wretched women slaves, that they are merely animals.

The multilingualism advocated by Ndebele and others is a further move towards extending the South African readership of fiction (5) beyond the white educated middle class. It must be admitted, however, that the presence of untranslated (or perhaps even translated) phrases in indigenous languages in a novel may not make it easier to market it abroad. Both Brink (1998: 1617) and De Kock (2001:284) deplore the fact that few South African authors have been successful abroad.

Considering the diversity which I have demonstrated, can it be claimed that there is a 'South African Literature' in our day? It is of course easier to make this judgement retrospectively than in the present: in forty years time homogeneity in the novels of the early twenty-first century may be easier to detect. I would claim, however, that the debut novels of 1999-2008 have sufficient in common in the impulses of their authors, though not in their immediate subjects, to mark them as distinctively of their period.

References

Attridge, Derek and Rosemary Jolly. 1998. Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barnard, Rita. 2007. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. New York: OUP.

Blackburn, Douglas. 1991 [1908)]. Leaven. Pietermaritzburg: University ofNatal Press.

Bosman, Herman Charles. 1998 [1947]. Mafeking Road and Other Stories. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau.

Bregin, Elana. 2007. "Making Space for New Voices: The Politics of Editing in South Africa." Current Writing 19(1):153-9.

Brink, Andre. 1998. "Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature". In: Attridge, David and Rosemary Jolly (eds). Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 14-28.

Christianse, Yvette. 2007 [US 2006]. Unconfessed. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Coetzee, J M. 1980. Waiting for the Barbarians. Johannesburg: Ravan.

--. 1983. Life & Times of Michael K. Johannesburg: Ravan.

Coovadia. Imraan. 2001. The Wedding. New York: Picador.

De Kock, Leon. 2001. "South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction." Poetics Today 22(2): 263-98.

--. 2005. "Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa." English in Africa 32(2): 69-83.

Dhlomo, R R R. 1928. An African Tragedy. Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Publishers.

Dovey, Ceridwen. 2007. Blood Kin. Johannesburg: Penguin.

Duiker, K Sello. 2000. Thirteen Cents. Cape Town: David Philip.

Folscher, Barbara. 2007. Blind Faith. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau.

Gagiano, Annie. 2006. "Moving beyond Compartmentality: South African English Writing from 1999-2005." IWU: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht XXXIX (2/3):133-55.

Gibbon, Perceval. 1905. The Vrouw Grobelaar's Leading Cases. Edinburgh: William Blackwood.

Hassim, Aziz. 2002. The Lotus People. Durban: Madiba Publishers.

Heyns, Michiel. 2002. The Children's Day. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

Mahala, Siphiwo. 2007. When a Man Cries. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Marnewick, Christopher. 2008. Shepherds and Butchers. Cape Town: Umuzi.

Matlwa, Kopano. 2007. Coconut. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Medalie, David. 2006. The Shadow Follows. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.

Memela, Sandile. 2005. Flowers of the Nation. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Morgan, Jonathan and the Great African Spider Writers. 1999. Finding Mr Madini. Cape Town: David Philip.

Motana, Nape a. 2007. Fanie Fourie's Lobola. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Mphahlele, Es'kia. 1959. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber.

Mpe, Phaswane. 2001. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Murray, Sally-Ann. 2009. Small Moving Parts. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Ndebele, Njabulo S. 2003. The Cry ofWinnie Mandela. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 2007. Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country. Cape Town: Umuzi.

Ntshingila, Futhi. 2008. Shameless. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Nyoka, Mtutulezi. 2004. I Speak to the Silent. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Paton, Alan. 1948. Cry, the Beloved Country. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Shell, Robert C-H. 1994. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Shukri, Ishtiyaq. 2005. The Silent Minaret. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Sithebe, Angelina N. 2007. Holy Hill. Cape Town: Umuzi.

Steinberg, Jonnie. 2004. The Number. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

Steyn, Johan. 2005. Father Michael's Lottery. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Van Niekerk, Marlene. 2004. Agaat. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

--. 2006. Agaat. Trans. Michiel Heyns. Cape Town: Tafelberg/ Jonathan Ball.

Wicomb, Zoe. 2000. David's Story. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Wittenberg, Hermann. 2008. "The Taint of the Censor: J M Coetzee and the Making of In the Heart of the Country." English in Africa 35(2): 133150.

Notes

(1.) Herman Wittenberg has written of the dilemma which confronted Ravan Press, in the late 1970s when J M Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country seemed likely to be banned on publication, thus involving its publisher in considerable financial loss. Wittenberg explains the change in the attitudes and practice of the Board of Censorship: "HOC was written during the years of the opaque and arbitrary censorship bureaucracy under Judge Lammie Snyman who chaired the Publication Control Board into the late 1970s. After the showdown between Afrikaans writers and intellectuals and the state in 1978 around the controversial banning of Etienne Leroux's novel Magersfontein, O Magersfontein!, a more moderate and reformist Publications Control Board under the chairmanship of Professor J van Rooyen took control that sought to bring a measure of rational certainty and scientific rigour to the process." The earlier Publications Control Board had considered the probable reactions of 'the ordinary reader', whereas the new Board made judgements on the basis of the reactions of 'the likely reader'. In both cases, literary merit had been, it was claimed, a criterion. In the Heart of the Country, first published by Secker and Warburg, was in fact "embargoed by Customs on its arrival in Cape Town . and referred to the censorship board for a decision." (Wittenberg 2008: 136-7).

(2.) An early and notable exception is Es'kia Mphahele's Down Second Avenue (1959).

(3.) See Bregin, Elana (2007).

(4.) Phaswane Mpe died at the age of 34 of HIV-related causes in 2004.

(5.) It is interesting to note that this multilingualism, in a more extensive form made possible by subtitles, has spread to SABC programmes like Isidingo, a few years ago entirely scripted in English.