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MaBiyela, the patriarchal mother-in-law of Jezile, is a comparatively minor character in the novel And They Didn’t Die, and so she might seem an unusual focus through which to discuss Lauretta Ngco...

For his trader-protagonists’ migration from India to South Africa, Coovadia uses a comic mode to represent the protagonists taking their home-grown linguistic habits across the Indian Ocean, habits which reflect the hierarchical divisions and suspicions of Indian life, and which are perpetuated through the strife in which the marriage of Ismet and Khateja Nassin begins in Durban. This article will trace the ways in which change comes about in the intensely private love story which Coovadia represents as unfolding against the larger history of Indian settlement in colonial Durban at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will show how the devices of comedy are used to resolve culinary and sexual conflict. It will also explore, through Coovadia’s use of a grandson-narrator, how and why the novel’s conclusion is shifted away from romantic comedy to accommodate future generations in the wider story of diasporic life trajectories. In focussing on the ambiguities of settlement and cultural continuity, the ...

I would like to echo Prof. Jacobs's thanks to the English Academy and the University of KwaZulu-Natal for organizing this Commemorative Lecture to honour Margaret Lenta. It is a pleasure to be able...

This paper discusses strategies employed in the representation of selfhood in fiction and autobiography by three South African women writers, focussing chiefly on Zoe Wicomb's novel, Playing in the Light. Its protagonist, Marion Campbell, is the centre of consciousness but cannot be used to narrate parts of her history as her sense of betrayal when she discovers that she is not a white Afrikaner and that her parents were ‘play-whites’ means that much of her past has been pushed beyond her imaginative capacities. As a stratagem for clarifying the issues in Marion's self-formation, I set Wicomb's representation of her protagonist's stunted growth in intertextual relation to autobiographical writing by Agnes Lottering and Rayda Jacobs. I also consider Wicomb's own use of intertextuality which enables the narration to work around the protagonist's limitations and to make known what has remained unspoken in Marion's mother's story in particular.

What could fiction and cultural debate bring to readers of the magazine Africa South? In the late 1950s this magazine published political, economic, legal and other analyses of social life in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as polemics and journalism by writers variously but militantly opposed to the apartheid government’s policies in South Africa. The purpose of its editor, Ronald Segal, was to foster a broad front of opposition to racism at home and to connect with international intellectual movements opposing colonialism and racism. This article argues from Bakhtin’s observations about the radical instability of the sign in fiction, that fiction requires a different kind of reading from factual report. It demonstrates how the short stories in Africa South could enjoin on readers a conscious responsibility for sense-making and interpretation. This awareness created a questioning relation to text and thence to external realities that was in itself fundamentally oppositional and hospitable to the subject of socio-political change, for which the magazine as a whole argued. The writers considered here include both the famous and the forgotten: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alan Paton, Tony O’Dowd and Noel Frieslich. Attention is on the semiotics of reading rather than on the contents of the short stories discussed. Because expectations of fiction change with the times, my question is necessarily an historical one. The article goes on to compare the climate of the 1950s with that of the more revolutionary 1980s, and with the present. For the present era Njabulo S Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela stands as a possibly representative text.

Stephen Gray's volume of interviews reflects a convergence of his oppor? tunities and his interests. It is organized chronologically and the earlier interviews are longer and more focused in their exploration of writers' work and ideas. Of the first twelve writers (Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Guy Butler, Douglas Livingstone, Sipho Sepamla, Fatima Dike, Alan Scholefield, Ross Devenish, Doris Lessing, Jeremy Cronin, Gcina Mhlophe, and Dennis Brutus), all but three were, when interviewed, resident in South Africa. Then there is a sudden shift and of the remaining eleven writers (Edouard J. Maunick, Taban Lo Liyong, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nuruddin Farah, Ahmadou

(2001). Writing autobiography and writing fiction: Interview with Doris Lessing, London, 28 July 2000. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 7-21.

(1996). Contexts for ‘literature’: On ‘Literary’ and ‘Cultural’ Studies in an English Department Syllabus. Scrutiny2: Vol. 1, No. 1-2, pp. 78-88.

Summary Autobiography, in exposing how the meaning of a life is constructed in language and through the writer's interaction with cultural codes, helps in creating the understanding on which a society may be built. But making meaning from within an oppressor's language may imperil as well as empower the subject. The meanings chosen by Kuzwayo and Mashinini as they present themselves as wives and mothers in their autobiographies, expose the problems of living and writing between two competing but unequally matched cultural codes. Their writing also affords glimpses of how family relationships are being given new force: the creative resistance to hegemony, which western women writers and theorists have sought in the presentational processes of autobiography, may be seen to be occurring in the life depicted in black women's autobiographies.

Muponde, Robert and Mandi Taruvinga (eds). 2002. Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare: Weaver Press; (2003) Oxford: James Currey. 236pp. Newell, Stephanie. 2002. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life.” Manchester: Manchester University Press. 242pp. Woodward, Wendy, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds). 2002. Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Cross / Cultures Series, 57. 356pp. The three books considered in this article are accounts of revisiting the past, in fiction and in fact, and of finding alternatives to the currently dominant views of power, agency and gender that circulate in postcolonial studies. All three rely on a theory of fiction which accounts for its capacity effectively to revise our understanding of historical circumstances and events; this is that fiction’s unstable, liberated signifying system allows writers and readers a speculative scope in which to imagine alternative interpretations of what happened. Such revisioning – of the place of women in history, for example – occurs in the novels of Yvonne Vera. A challenge to historians who unfailingly allocate the agency which created African polities to European powers is also within fiction’s scope, as in Bessie Head’s semi-fictionalised account of Botswana in the late nineteenth century. An empirical approach to the ‘facts’ of history and postcolonial cultural studies can also be liberating: Newell’s research into the uses of literacy in early colonial Ghana has yielded just such a challenge to accepted views of cultural transmission for she finds that the ‘scholars’ (non-elite men and women) who formed reading clubs in the early twentieth-century Gold Coast were not cowed by the coloniser’s alien culture. This article argues that Newell’s findings about the interpretative practices of recently colonised readers complement, or could inform, some of the questioning of conventional cultural dichotomies that is now happening in South African research, and that of all the concepts that are theorised in the Woodward and the Muponde collections, gender is the one that is most likely to challenge overly settled habits in thinking about postcoloniality.