Abstract
David Medalie
AN ALTERNATIVE TRAJECTORY FOR THE POST-APARTHEID NOVEL: NJABULO NDEBELE'S THE CRY OF WINNIE MANDELA
The work of J. M. Coetzee has been so influential that there is a danger that it may overshadow debates about the directions open to and taken by post-apartheid literature. There are other pathways and other possibilities. One of these is implicit in Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela , published in 2003.
It is difficult to over-estimate the importance, during the last decade of apartheid and the interregnum years, of Njabulo S. Ndebele's writings about contemporary South African literature and culture. Published in book form in 1991 as Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture , his essays were tendentious, proscriptive and controversial. Whether one agrees with the views put forward in them or not, one cannot ignore their impact. Essays such as ‘Turkish tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction', ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa', ‘Redefining Relevance' and ‘The English Language and Social Change in South Africa', became (and remain) key texts in debates about the literary and cultural legacy of apartheid.
Although Ndebele is not a prolific writer of fiction, what he has produced in that sphere has also been influential. As one might expect, there is a close relationship between the theoretical stance assumed in his criticism and his fictional practice. One may go as far as to say that Fools and Other Stories , published in 1983, is an enactment of the kind of late-apartheid writing which Ndebele was urging at the time, which he believed to be possible and necessary – especially where black writers were concerned. The mode of writing and the subject matter serve the ideology of ‘ordinariness' as he defined it in his critical work.
However, Ndebele's essays were not merely an analysis of present conditions and the circumscriptions which apartheid imposed upon its writers; they were also prognostic, even prophetic. Contained within the argument for a more capacious apartheid literature is a vision of what a post-apartheid literature might look like. And now, twenty years after ‘Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction' was written and almost a decade after the first democratic elections in South Africa, Ndebele has published a post-apartheid novel of his own: The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)
This paper considers The Cry of Winnie Mandela in terms of the visions for the future expressed in Ndebele's earlier critical writings. Is it the kind of post-apartheid text he was preparing us for in the 1980s? In Fools and Other Stories , he sought to demonstrate the possibilities of a certain kind of apartheid writing. What post-apartheid possibilities does his current fictional practice – as exemplified in this novel – imply?