British and African Literature in Transnational Context

6. Embodying Black Ways of Being in the World in the Spatialized Historiography of Postapartheid Literature

6 Embodying Black Ways of Being in the World in the Spatialized Historiography of Postapartheid Literature Clive’s rueful comment at the end of Cloud Nine that Africa will probably become communist once colonial rule is over returns us to the questions of periodization, of beginnings and endings of historical processes, raised in the Introduction. With a slight detour in the previous chapter, the texts analyzed so far have moved geographically from west to east and covered historically the period from colonial contact at the end of the nineteenth centurytothefirstfewdecadesofAfricannations’independence.Inother words,thetextshavetrackedthegeographicalandhistoricalmovementof Africans’ independence—as citizens of their own nations and as writers whose imaginative work coexists with the drafters of constitutions, laws, and institutions to narrate those nations. In all cases I have drawn attention both to the geographical materiality of this process and to the necessity and difficulty for African authors to unwrite the colonial discourse that tended to objectify Africa and Africans as tropes of difference. In reassertingintheirvariouswaystheirautonomoussubjectivity ,writerssuch as Achebe, Emecheta, Soyinka, and Gurnah shuttle between, and often combine,narrativesthatinsistonlocaldifferenceandnarrativesthatinsist on universal similarity. In shifting for this final section to literature from thedeepsouthandthebelatedachievementofblackmajorityruleinZimbabwe (1980), Namibia (1990), and South Africa (1994), we confront a significantly different historical situation as the end of colonialism/settler rule coincides with the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era of globalization. Jeremy Cronin has described this era as a period in which “Politics was depoliticized. . . . Difference was denied. We were all globalconsumersandclients.Thefactthatmillionsofthird-worldpeoples 128 / Part III. Mayibuye iAfrika were profoundly marginalized, alienated, and impoverished by ‘globalization ’ was repressed” (534). The emergence of Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa into fully independent nation status at this particular historical juncture, out of sync with the majority of the continent, presents yet new possibilities for “re-storying” Africa under conflicting pressures to reassert the local, to resist and counter the legal and literary colonial racial legacy without resorting to ethnic or racial exclusion. Nowhere are these issuesmorevividlybroughttotheforethaninSouthAfrica,initsachievement of unitary nationhood in 1994, and in its diverse writers’ subsequent narratives. Most of this concluding section, therefore, will be devoted to South African writing, although chapter 7 also addresses the work of two Zimbabwean women writers. With a history of more than three and a half centuries of European settlement and hence of both political and literary representation in European languages, it is not just literary discourse of South Africa that demands a contrapuntal reading to address the discrepant experiences of whatitmightmeantobeaSouthAfrican.Underapartheid—“racism’slast word,” as Derrida has it—racial difference dominated life in all spheres in South Africa, creating a racialized economic order with one of the most exaggerated gaps between rich and poor in the entire world.1 Since 1994 South Africa has attempted to build a unified nation out of the old divisions , while at the same time constitutionally enshrining the rights of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic minorities within that nation. At the material level, the difficulty of squaring the circle—fostering national unity while protecting subnational community rights—is most clearly illustrated in the struggles over land. In Zimbabwe, the Mugabe regime has presented its disastrous land-redistribution policy as a “third chimurenga,” its rhetoric of patriotism contrasting starkly with international criticism of cronyism, opportunism, and corruption. South Africa, in its second decade of independence, is moving slowly to redress a history of land-alienation even grosser than that of Zimbabwe, and hence potentially even more destabilizing. As the veteran South African exile writer Lewis Nkosi puts it, “the continuing and vexed land question . . . seems unresolvable through the ministrations of the bourgeois nationalist state” (328) posited on a discourse of reconciliation and “an attempt to reconstruct the country in accordance with a new narrative of national transcendence” (328). While matters have not yet come to a head in South Africa to the extent they have in Zimbabwe, the issue of land Embodying Black Ways of Being in the World / 129 redistribution—andnotjustinregardtoruralareas—iscertainlysimmering ,2 which is why literary representations of “this land, South Africa,”3 particularly of the landscape of South Africa as African, have been and continue to be so crucial. For a stark indication of the kind of discursive discrepancyreflectingdifferencesinpolitical/racial/economicideologies we might expect to find in literary representations of land in South Africa, we need do no more than contrast statements by South Africa’s political rulers about land reform with advertisements by South Africa’s high...