Dispossession and Repossession in the Published and Unpublished Works of A. S. Mopeli-Paulus

The paper examines how A. S. Mopeli-Paulus deals with the theme of dispossession (primarily, of livestock) under the apartheid regime and how his imaginary frames repossession as the recovery of a lost pastoral idyll. Three texts are examined: the autobiography The World and the Cattle, the poetry collection Ho Tsamaea ke ho Bona, and the unpublished novel Tongaland. The paper argues that while Mopeli-Paulus's account of dispossession has a material basis (though the coherence of this account is questionable), his framing of repossession in the form of a pastoral idyll is extremely fragile.