The Lion on the Freeway: A Thematic Introduction to Contemporary South African Literature in English, and: The Novels of Alex La Guma (review)

The Lion on the Freeway: A Thematic Introduction to Contemporary South African Literature in English, by Theodore F. Sheckles, Jr. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Xxi + 250 pp. ISBN 0-8204-2625-3 cloth.

The Novels of Alex La Guma, by Katherine Balutansky. Boulder: Three Continents/Lynne Rienner, 1990. 142 pp. ISBN 0-89410-558-2 paper.

From the vantage point of 1999, the apartheid era in South Africa looms both as a powerful ghost and still a real presence in the lives of South Africans. Both books under review, with different degrees of success, concentrate on the imprints of racism and the ways in which different South African authors have grappled with the tensions around identity, political meaning, and authenticity within a racist order. In Balutansky's book these questions force a confrontation between liberal ideals of "pure" literary production free of political bias, and the realities of apartheid South Africa that to a large degree determined who could claim the position of neutral intellectual and who had to battle with discrimination and racism. In this respect Balutansky's work is a worthwhile contribution to African literature. She demonstrates through a discussion of La Guma's five novels that while he is best known for his detailed descriptions of marginality under apartheid, his oeuvre powerfully elaborates an "esthetics of conflict" (127) precisely because he was politically engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle. Balutansky is, perhaps, a little too invested in demonstrating La Guma's success in this venture. The reader might appreciate a more critical edge, the kind that surfaces in the chapter analyzing Time of the Butcher Bird, but overall this is an interesting work.

While The Novels of Alex La Guma succeeds in raising questions about the relationship between politics and literature, unfortunately The Lion on the Freeway does little to advance the state of scholarship. The book proposes to examine the production of an English literary tradition from the earliest works by Olive Schreiner in 1883 up to the early 1980s. This reader's unease, awakened in the brief preface, began in earnest in chapter one, which surveys South African history. While certainly intended as an introduction, the information is so ineptly presented (the discussion of apartheid is particularly muddled) that it hinders rather than helps the reader. In addition, this reader found the author's analogy of black South Africans being a lion the kind of colonial stereotype that bears no repeating (47, 63). The book is a poorly written description, under chapter headings such as "Suffering," "Attacking," and "Ignorance," of the novels of writers such as Miriam Tlali, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Lewis Nkosi, and the poems, a welcome intrusion, of Dennis Brutus and Mazizi Kunene among others. Published in 1996, the book shows no evidence of having incorporated critical analysis of South African literature produced in the 1990s; it also does not cite Abdul JanMohamed's 1983 intervention on African literature, Manichean Aesthetics (U of Massachusetts P). The book will probably do little to awaken the interest of undergraduates and offers little to reader s already familiar with South African literature.

Pamela Scully

Pamela Scully teaches African and women's history at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

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