The gripping autobiography My Traitor's Heart (1989), written by the talented Rian Malan, gave eloquent voice to white South Africa's primal fears in the 1980s and is essential reading for anyone who finds it hard to understand how white people could live with themselves under apartheid. Head of the Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, authorized a good biography ( Rabble Rouser for Peace, by John Allan, 2006), but look for the book by his successor, Njongonkulu Ndungane: A World With A Human Face: A Voice from Africa(2003) provides an excellent analysis of the challenges facing the country, and how the West exacerbates many of the problems. Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (1995) is an obvious choice, as is - if you can stand the harrowing truth - Country of My Skull (1998), Afrikaans poet Anjie Krog's account of her work as a journalist reporting on the Truth Reconciliation Commission. Of course political autobiography often provides the most direct insights into the complex past of South Africa, and there is no shortage here. Zakes Mda is another recommended novelist in this genre either his first book Ways of Dying (1995), which follows the adventures of a self-confessed "professional mourner," or his third book, The Heart of Redness (2002), a fictional narrative inspired by the real-life story of Nongqawuse, the Xhosa prophetess responsible for the tragic Cattle Killing of 1856.įor a political overview of the country, packaged as rollicking read, you can't go wrong with Richard Calland and Allistair Sparkes, both eloquent, intelligent, and incisive political analysts, and a joy to read.
It is political in some sense, but mostly it is a psychological analysis of a relationship that reverberates on many levels - an absolute must for any serious lover of literature. Ironically it is this theme that won awards for the latest offering from the superbly talented Afrikaans writer Marlene van Niekerk: Agaat (2007 beautifully translated into English) features the relationship between a mute 67-year old woman dying of ALS motor neuron disease and her "colored" nurse, Agaat. Both are brilliant reads, but my personal favorite remains Age of Iron (1990), in which a white woman who is dying of cancer befriends the black tramp living in her garden. Coetzee, first author to win the Booker prize twice - deal with the painful issues surrounding race, usually with love across the color bar Coetzee's novels in particular explore the painful constraints of humanity when saturated in the racist fears of the "Dark Continent." He won the first Booker prize for The Life & Times of Michael K, in 1983, and the second, in 1999, for the book Disgrace, since made into a (not very successful) film. Even our best-known imports - Nadine Gordimer, whose awards have included a Booker and a Nobel Prize (read The Conservationist, The House Gun, or The Burger's Daughter, the prolific Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and J.
Lesser-known and more devastating is the work of Sol Plaatje, founding ANC member, who wrote Native Life in South Africa (1916), about the devastation of the Land Act in 1916. This reached its apotheosis with the advent of the "Jim-comes-to-Jo'burg novel," a phrase coined by Nadine Gordimer to describe the plot in which a naive rural African moves into the corrupt and evil urban landscape - the most famous example being Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (1948). As the first South African novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883) - a beautifully rendered account of daily life in the harsh Karoo - was written at the close of the 19th century by Olive Schreiner, the literature produced in this southern tip captured the imagination of its colonizers with its evocation of a bleak landscape and tough survival.
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