Editor’s Notes

Like the country itself, writing nonfiction in South Africa has long been a beautiful, complicated, and often dangerous business.

Naming names and recording history under the long shadow of institutionalized racism poses immense risk. The implications of true stories, grist for an academic dust-up in more tranquil locations, in the old South Africa too often boiled into matters of life and death. Truthful writing required courage; details sometimes had to be elided and names changed to nourish the painful struggle toward freedom.

And then the soul of South Africa burst forth with its rich web of tribes, tongues, colors, and cultures when the nation elected its first democratic government in 1994.

The immediate project for nonfiction writers in the new South Africa was to document the truth of its turbulent past. Writers like Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Antjie Krog, both featured here, burrowed into South Africa's secrets in the first years after apartheid as a necessary step toward understanding. Krog covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as Archbishop Desmond Tutu summoned apartheid's victims and perpetrators to the venue that promised amnesty for the price of honesty. And, as a member of that groundbreaking commission, Gobodo-Madikizela subsequently wrote A Human Being Died That Night, a riveting account of her personal efforts to reach painful understanding, and even forgiveness, with Eugene de Kock, South Africa's most notorious apartheid death squad assassin.

The work of these powerful writers emerged from a strong muckraking tradition in South Africa typified by artful journalists who documented the rise of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party and race laws following World War II. Typical was Drum magazine writer Henry Nxumalo, who in the best tradition of American radical John Reed managed to get himself arrested in 1954 so that he could report on conditions in the Johannesburg Central Prison.

His crime: violating pass laws that classified native Africans, restricted their movement, and forced them to carry identification passes at all times. The temerity to resist racial classification drew swift and harsh punishment: arriving at the prison, Nxumalo was slapped, stripped, and thrown into a cold shower with no soap or towel. "I was unable to make out my own clothes after the shower," he reported later in Drum. "The warder kicked me in the stomach with the toe of his boot. I tried to hold the toe of the boot to protect myself, and fell on my face. He asked if I had had an operation to my stomach. I said no. He looked at me scornfully. I got up, picked up the clothes in front of me and ran to join the others squatting on the floor." For the crime of being black without a race pass, Nxumalo was beaten daily for four days and forced to defecate in a communal bucket with scores of other prisoners and then to empty the overflowing bucket each morning before he could eat his breakfast of mealies (corn) swimming in pork fat.

Though it would take many decades to force real change, Nxumalo's first-person prison story riveted his nation—particularly the black African communities surrounding the gold capital of Johannesburg—drawing instant readership and credibility for brave journalists willing to write the truth as they saw it. (The story is available in The Drum Decade, a collection published by the University of Natal Press.) From that brave tradition emerged the Staffrider journalists of subsequent decades and a host of brave writers—black and white—who helped draw the world's attention and eventual outrage to what was happening on the tip of Africa in one of the world's most beautiful but contradictory countries.

As anyone who has seen the lovely Oscar Award–winning film Tsotsi knows, South African life a decade after apartheid—while teaching the rest of the world about forgiveness—faces real and continuing challenges. Economic disparity remains immense, AIDS is killing a generation, and violent crime too often holds the nation in its thrall. Andie Miller's story of life in modern Johannesburg—painful, yet hopeful—suggests both the tribulation and the promise of the new South Africa. And so the editors dedicate this...