25
classic South African reads
Shaun de Waal
Looking for deeper insight into South Africa? Here are snap
reviews of 25 classic South African reads - and where you can
get them - covering non-fiction, fiction and poetry and featuring
a range of the country's greatest novelists, poets, journalists
and historians.
Shaun de Waal, twice-winner of the
Pringle Award for best movie critic in South Africa and former
arts and books editor of the Mail & Guardian, is the
author of several books and a graphic novel.
NON-FICTION
The World That Made Mandela
By Luli Callinicos |
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| Bringing history and geography together,
this is a large coffee-table-sized book filled with archival
and contemporary images, telling the story of Nelson Mandela
and his struggle for SA's freedom through the many places
associated with his life. From his birthplace in Qunu to
the Old Fort in Johannesburg, where he was held prisoner
(and which is now the site of the Constitutional Court),
from Soweto to Mpumalanga, the images provide a wonderful
historical context for SA today, combining to form a unique "heritage
trail". |
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Long Walk to Freedom:
By Nelson Mandela |
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The towering figure of South Africa's liberation struggle began
this autobiography in prison, having pages in tiny writing
smuggled out by comrades. When he came out of jail in 1990,
and went on to become SA's first black president in 1994,
he continued the work, and it is essential reading for anyone
who wants to understand Mandela, the times he has lived through
and the war he waged for freedom. He also authorised a biography
by Anthony Sampson (see box right), which provides much useful
extra information and differing perspectives. |
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Tomorrow Is Another Country
By Allister Sparks |
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on: Kalahari.net | Amazon.com |
Sparks is a veteran South African journalist and author of The Mind of South
Africa.
His account of the transition from apartheid to democracy is one of several,
but undoubtedly the best. It describes, from behind the scenes, the process that
began with tentative contact between the sworn enemies, moving through the unbanning
of the liberation movements and the complex negotiations that led to SA's first
fully democratic election in 1994.
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A History
of South Africa
By Frank Welsh |
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The revised and updated edition of
this comprehensive one-volume history of South Africa goes
beyond the achievement of democracy to look at the problems
facing the new society in the period since Nelson Mandela
ended his term as SA's first black president. The book also
goes back into SA history, and explains the country's ethnic
mix - though it has also been criticised for pro-Afrikaner
attitudes. Judge for yourself.
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The South African War 1899-1902
By Fransjohan Pretorius |
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By the end of the 19th century, South
Africa was partly a British colony and partly a pair of independent
Afrikaner republics. British imperialism and capitalist expansionism
meant that the independence of the republic (particularly
the gold-rich Transvaal) would come under threat. In 1899,
the second Ango-Boer War, which made the earlier conflict
seem negligible, broke out. In some ways, it was the first
modern war, one that saw the invention of trench warfare,
concentration camps and guerrilla fighting, as the highly
organised British army squared up against the motley band
of farmer-hunter-soldiers that made up the loose-knit Boer
army. It was also a conflict that defined the political future
of a united South Africa. Pretorius gives the best outline
of the war, focusing on aspects (such as the participation
of large numbers of black people) that were hitherto ignored.
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The Country of My Skull
By Antjie Krog |
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A deeply personal and utterly compelling
account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
investigated the horrors of apartheid repression, written
by one of the most acclaimed poets in the Afrikaans language.
Here she writes in English, from the perspective of a radical
Afrikaner, of the searing process of confessing apartheid's
sins. A bestseller in SA and successful abroad, the book
has been reissued with additional material.
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My Traitor's Heart
By Rian Malan |
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Subtitled "Blood and Bad Dreams: A
South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe
and Himself", this book was a bestseller in SA and elsewhere
when it came out in 1990. By a member of one of Afrikanerdom's
leading apartheid families, it goes into the heart of darkness
of a country in turmoil. It's not a pretty picture, but it
makes for compelling, sobering reading.
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Portraits of Power
By Mark Gevisser |
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A collection of Gevisser's acclaimed
columns for the Mail & Guardian, in which he wrote detailed,
elegant and psychologically acute profiles of all the key
players in the new South Africa, from controversial academic
Malegapuru Makgoba to musician-director Mbongeni Ngema, from
Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris to filmmaker Anant Singh, from politicians
such as Sam (Mbhazima) Shilowa and Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
to soccer star Mark Fish.
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New Babylon
/ New Nineveh
By Charles van Onselen |
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Subtitled "Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand
1886-1914", this essential pair of historical studies are
now republished in one volume. They examine the era of Johannesburg's
establishment and early growth through social, political
and economic lenses to provide a picture of how this great
city developed, and what that story has to tell us about
South Africa today.
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Cape Town: The Making of a City
By Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith |
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Cape Town was South Africa's first
city - some still regard it so. It has certainly always been
the great melting pot of the country, with an extraordinary
ethnic diversity from the start. Now one of the world's favourite
tourist destinations, the city has a complex history, which
is told in this beautiful and engrossing book. It looks at
Cape Town in colonial times, under Dutch and then British
rule, from the earliest small settlement founded to grow
vegetables for passing ships to the brink of the 20th century.
A plethora of paintings, maps, drawings and photographs illustrate
the book and make it very accessible. (A companion volume,
by the same authors, looking at the city today in the same
format, is Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated
Social History.)
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FICTION
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Disgrace
By JM Coetzee |
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The crowning achievement of a distinguished
literary career, Disgrace won Coetzee the Booker Prize for
the second time, making him the first writer to achieve that
distinction - and occasioned much debate within South Africa.
It is a bleak but always compelling story of the new South
Africa struggling to come to terms with itself, addressing
issues of guilt, responsibility, meaning and survival, written
in prose of crystalline sharpness. A surprise bestseller
in SA as well as abroad.
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Cry, The Beloved Country
By Alan Paton |
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Perhaps the most famous novel to come
out of South Africa, Paton's 1948 work brought to the notice
of the world the dilemmas of ordinary South Africans living
under an oppressive system, one which threatened to destroy
their very humanity. Informed by Paton's Christian and liberal
beliefs, the novel tells of a rural Zulu parson's heart-breaking
search for his son, who has been drawn into the criminal
underworld of the city. Cry, The Beloved Country has sold
millions of copies around the world.
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Selected Stories
By Nadine Gordimer |
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Winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for
Literature, Gordimer was for decades SA's literary conscience.
Her stories are perhaps the best introduction to her work:
they span the 1950s to the 1990s in this volume (British
edition), moving from the city to the countryside and from
the highest ranks of society to the lowest. With delicacy
and power, they cast a bright light on the extraordinary
lives led by South Africans of all races, and the nature
of their interactions across colour lines and within them.
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The Heart of Redness
By Zakes Mda |
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Mda came to prominence as a dramatist
in the 1970s; now he has flourished as a novelist. This,
his second novel, won the 2001 Sunday Times Fiction Prize,
and has become a school setwork. Weaving together two strands
of storytelling, the novel moves between the past and the
present. In the past is the narrative of Nongqawuse, the
19th century prophetess whose visions brought a message from
the ancestors and took her people to the brink of extermination.
In the present time, 150 years later, a feud that dates back
to the days of Nongqawuse still simmers in the village of
Qolorha as it faces the demands of modernity.
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Mafeking Road and Other Stories
By Herman Charles Bosman |
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In a new edition to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of its first publication, this collection is
a South African classic. In the voice of the sly old bushveld
storyteller Oom Schalk Laurens, Bosman tells tales of a rural
Afrikaner South Africa that has long since vanished - yet
the unique flavour and wry humour of the stories remains
undiminished.
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Welcome to Our Hillbrow
By Phaswane Mpe |
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Phaswane Mpe's first novel (shortlisted
for the 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Prize) is a new variation
on what was known as the "Jim Comes to Jo'burg" theme in
South African literature. A man leaves his rural home in
the Northern Province and comes to the big city to find a
new life. What he finds is a dangerous but vital inner city,
epitomised by Hillbrow, the flatland in the centre of Johannesburg
where the well-heeled no longer set foot - the "city of gold,
milk, honey and bile". This is the land of drug deals, xenophobia,
violence, sex and Aids, and this novel is an uncompromising
look at the reality of the new South Africa as it affects
the poorest of the urban population. It is also a story of
love, survival and hope.
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Fools and Other Stories
By Njabulo Ndebele |
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Ndebele is a noted academic and critic
as well as a writer of fiction. In this work, he carries
out the brief argued in his essay "Rediscovery of the Ordinary",
returning the gaze of the reader to the very human lives
of township people and forgoing the rhetoric of political
struggle, though that background is not ignored. His characters
deal with the generation gap and the formative experiences
of childhood in these warmly perceptive stories.
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A Place
Called Vatmaar
By AHM Scholtz |
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| The author came to literature late in life, but was hailed as the "Steinbeck
of the coloured South African platteland" - and produced a bestseller that has
now been translated all over the world. His novel, which is very close to actual
history, tells the story of a village inhabited mostly by "coloureds", the mixed-race
people of the Cape, from its earliest beginnings. The various characters of the
village's history speak, telling their stories from their own perspectives to
create a portrait of a whole community. |
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Ancestral Voices
By Etienne van Heerden |
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In its original Afrikaans, titled Toorberg,
Van Heerden's novel won all the prizes going in South Africa
that year. It draws on the tradition of the plaasroman (farm
novel), and transforms it at the same time, to tell the riveting
transgenerational story of a family entangled with its ghosts
- both living and dead. An utterly compelling read.
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A Dry White
Season
By Andre Brink |
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This novel by one of South Africa's
most prolific authors, set in the 1970s, brought the issue
of deaths in detention to the notice of many who would rather
have not known about it. When a white South African investigates
the death of a black friend in police custody, he uncovers
the brutal truth about apartheid South Africa. An interesting
companion volume would be Cry Freedom, Donald Woods' non-fiction
account of his friendship with Bantu Steve Biko, the Black
Consciousness leader murdered in custody by police.
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The New Century of South African Poetry
Edited by Michael Chapman |
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This new anthology is the ultimate overview of South African poetry, reaching
from its earliest manifestations in the oral culture of the land's indigenous
inhabitants to the complexities of post-apartheid verse. It includes translations
from the country's many languages, discovering hitherto hidden voices as well
as placing in context the best-known names of our rich poetic heritage.
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Come and Hope with Me
By Mongane Wally Serote |
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Though the position does not officially exist, Wally Serote is perhaps SA's poet
laureate, a veteran of the liberation struggle and now a member of Parliament.
His work goes back to the 1970s, with his coruscating portraits of life as a
black person in South Africa in those days. The newest volume from this winner
of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa is a single long poem, driven forward
by incantatory rhythms, addressed to a people just emerging from the horrors
of oppression and now awakening to a new dawn.
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Inside
and Out
By Jeremy Cronin |
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Bringing together the work from Cronin's two collections, Inside and Even the
Dead, this volume is a comprehensive view of one of South Africa's most popular
poets. Now a member of Parliament and an SA Communist Party leader, Cronin's
first poems were the result of his incarceration by the apartheid regime, and
Inside became possibly South Africa's best-selling work of poetry. With irony,
compassion, honesty and a firm commitment to justice for all, Cronin's accessible
poems speak about a wide range of South African experience.
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Transfer
By Ingrid de Kok |
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This second volume by the acclaimed Cape Town poet registers the sea-changes
that have taken place in our society, but through the sensitive and exact lyric
voice of one dealing with memory, grief, love and motherhood: "the ladder of
light / sent down from land above / where hands write words / to work the winch
/ to plumb the shaft below".
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If I Could Sing: Selected Poems
By Keorapetse Kgositsile |
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An African National Congress stalwart who spent many years in exile, Keorapetse
Kgositsile is the author of the famous lines: "Need I remind /anyone again that
/armed struggle /is an act of love". His work over many years, collected in this
volume from several books, brings together the historical imperatives of the
struggle against apartheid with related personal concerns in free-flowing, imaginative
verse.
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