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Aparthied authors
1. South-African Authors
Many writers have been writing during apartheid and post-apartheid era. Having their origins
in South Africa, most of them witnessed the racial and ethnic issues. Three of the authors are
discussed here
Manu Herbstein
Manu Herbstein (b. 1936 near Cape Town, South Africa) holds dual South African
and Ghanaian citizenship. In the 1960s he worked as a civil and structural engineer in
England, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Ghana again, Zambia and Scotland. He was active in the
Anti-Apartheid Movement in London and in Glasgow and during the 1960s he made regular
monthly contributions to the ANC via an account in the name, O.R. Tambo and T.X.
Makiwane.From 1963-1965, along with Arun Ganghi, Herbstein founded and lead the Anti-
Apartheid Movement in Bombay, India and from 1967 to 1968 he was on the ANC‟s fund-
raising committee in Lusaka.
He returned to Ghana in 1970 and has lived there since. He began writing seriously
as he approached retirement. His novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the
2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.
His first novel is Ama, A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In 1775, the kingdom of
Asante has conquered its northern neighbor, Dagbon, and exacted an annual tribute of 500
slaves. "Ama" is a story of the eponymous heroine who is caught up in the aftermath of these
events, and whose travels (and travails) take her as a slave to the Americas. The protagonist is
captured and eventually transported to Brazil. Ama adopts various strategies in her struggle
against the deprivation of her liberty, striking a balance between, on the one hand, escape and
resistance and, on the other, accommodation to the realities of the power of her oppressors.
Once asked about the idea behind this novel, Manu replied:
“The Atlantic slave trade is the foundation upon which what we used to call
imperialism and now call globalization was constructed. Slave plantations were prototypes
both for the factories of the industrial revolution in the West and for the British and Nazi
concentration camps. We must resist the collective historical amnesia which the West has
imposed upon us.
2. The stories of hardly any of the millions of Africans who, over a period of four
centuries, were subjected to forced migration across the ocean, have survived. We know the
names of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and communists who were sent to the Nazi gas
chambers. The names of almost all the twelve million enslaved Africans are irretrievably lost.
We need to conjure up their spirits, give them back their names and listen to their voices.”
In "Brave Music of a Distant Drum," a blind old slave woman, Ama, summons her
son to come and write down her story so that her granddaughter and her granddaughter's
children can one day read it and know their history.
Ama's son, Kwame Zumbi - named Zacharias Williams by the white Christians who raised
him - considers his mother an old pagan and has little interest in doing more than is necessary
to fulfill his obligation to her. How he is changed by the acts of hearing and writing down the
details of his mother's story is as powerful and important a story as Ama's.
In one of his interviews he said:
“Growing up in apartheid South Africa it was difficult to be unaware of injustice. As
early as primary school I sensed that the South African history I was taught was largely
propaganda. I guess that planted in my mind the seeds of the idea that there are at least two
histories, the dominant one told by the winners and another, often untold, of those at the
receiving end.”
Zakes Mda
Zakes Mda is the most “critically acclaimed” author of the post-Apartheid black
South African literary scene. After spending 32 years in exile, his novel depicts characters
coming to term with post-Apartheid life. His work‟s most important theme is the struggle to
hold on to the traditional African values in the face of new South African politics and
Western materialism. In his works he has used performance technique to educate people for
democracy. His novels investigates the role of history, community and memory in reforming
a new national identity.
Zakes‟s much admired work is The Heart of Redness and Ways of Dying. The Heart
of Redness published in 2000, is set in Qolorha in which redness indicates traditional South
Africa. Camagu a former resident comes after several years of chosen „exile‟ in America
where he becomes a „communication specialist‟. He find himself overqualified and
unemployed, “a stranger in his own country” (31). Zake in his novel has recreated the
3. historical record in which war between amaXhosa and the British in South Africa was
interrupted. The natives split themselves into two, the one who compromised, and the one
who resisted. The believers opposed the changes led by British materialism and the
unbelievers wanted economic development.
In The heart of redness, Mda explores the contrasts between the present Westernized
urban black per-son, the rural areas where traditional beliefs are being contested and the past
where traditional beliefs were still dominant but challenged by the two central events of
Xhosa history British imperialism and the Great Cattle Killing. Camagu‟s encounter with the
villagers led him to discover his ancestral roots
Ways of Dying is set in a transitional years of first democratic elections. A time when
government officials and revolutionary “liberators” alike score wholesale slaughter of
innocent villagers, middle-aged Toloki supports himself as a traveling paid mourner who
grieves publicly at strangers‟ funerals. During one unusual Christmas Day burial service, he
encounters Noria, once a notoriously wild young girl in their common home village, whose
young son has been murdered. They form a union: a statement that initiates a rhythmic swing
of present-day experiences widespread with political violence and peril with extended
flashbacks to their briefly shared and mostly separate pasts. A communal voice “we live our
lives as one” tells their stories, also layering in colorful related tales involving such striking
characters as the wily pragmatic taxicab driver Shadrack, a proud archbishop, Nefolovhowe
the coffin-maker, and a compassionate “twilight mum” (Madimvhaza) who cares for
abandoned children. Their several stories cohere to underscore the insight that has shaped
Toloki‟s life: “Death lives with us every day. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of
living.”
Mda highlights the haunting presence of the violent past of apartheid and slavery in
the present, and suggests that in mourning the past, memory might lead in unexpected,
uncomfortable directions, rather than restoring a whole identity or healing the scars of the
past. In stepping beyond redemptive forms of memory, Mda asks for new forms of politics
that are equal to the task of imagining the possibilities of contemporary life. The novel offers
heinous scenes of violent death which seems to generate itself endlessly, as “funerals acquire
a life of their own, and give birth to other funerals” (160). The scene of patrolling and
burning people alive condemn people to temporal freeze. The novel talks about the violent
past and uncertain present.
4. Zoë Wicomb
Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand, South Africa where she learned English "by
copying the radio" (Anstey). She lived in England the went back to South Africa and taught
at the University of the Western Cape. She now resides in Scotland where she is a professor
at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author of numerous articles dealing with issues of
feminism and postcolonial literature. Her first book, a collection of short stories, You Can't
get Lost in Cape Town is regarded very highly. Since then she has written a novel which
really wrestles with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, representation, feminism, and love.
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town is among the only works of fiction to explore the
experience of “Coloured” citizens in apartheid-era South Africa, whose mixed heritage traps
them, as Bharati Mukherjee wrote in the New York Times, “in the racial crucible of their
country." Frieda Shenton, the daughter of Coloured parents in rural South Africa, is taught as
a child to emulate whites: she is encouraged to learn correct English, to straighten her hair,
and to do more than, as her father says, “peg out the madam‟s washing.”
While still a self-conscious and overweight adolescent, Frieda is sent away from
home to be among the first to integrate a prestigious Anglican high school in Cape Town, and
finds herself in a city where racial lines are so strictly drawn that it is not possible to step out
of one‟s place. Facing painful isolation as a Coloured student and as a girl who knows she is
“not the kind of girl whom boys look at,” she realizes that even the education her parents
yearned for will not bring her freedom or a secure sense of identity in her tormented country.
At last, Frieda flees to England, only to return more than a decade later to a South
Africa now in violent rebellion against apartheid—but still, seemingly, without a place for
her. It is only as Frieda finds the courage to tell her “terrible stories” that she at last begins to
create her own place in a world where she has always felt herself an exile.
The 1987 publication of You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town won Zoë Wicomb an
international readership and wide critical acclaim. As richly imagined and stylistically
innovative as Wicomb's debut work, David's Story is a mesmerizing novel, multilayered and
multivoiced, at times elegiac, wry, and expansive.
Unfolding in South Africa at the moment of Nelson Mandela's release from prison in
1991, the novel explores the life and vision of David Dirkse, part of the underground world of
5. activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement—a world seldom revealed to
outsiders. With "time to think" after the unbanning of the movement, David is researching his
roots in the history of the mixed-race "Coloured" people of South Africa and of their
antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers.
But David soon learns that he is on a hit list, and, caught in a web of betrayal and
surveillance, he is forced to rethink his role in the struggle for "nonracial democracy," the
loyalty of his "comrades," and his own conceptions of freedom. Through voices and stories of
David and the women who surround him—responding to, illuminating, and sometimes
contradicting one another—Wicomb offers a moving exploration of the nature of political
vision, memory, and truth.
