Macaulay Mowarin's novel Veiled Currents (2024) illustrates the psychological consequences of extractivism and oil industrialisation in Nigeria, underlining how corruption, militancy, and structural disparities undermine the nation's social and cultural fabric. The story points to the entrenched, corrupt environment stemming from the capitalist and imperialist mindset of government officials and the ruling elites, exacerbating the factors contributing to environmental violence, neocolonial injustices, and fragmentation in society. My study examines how Mowarin's narrative portrays the harsh and degraded realities of existence within the framework of extractive capitalism, and examines how diverse developmental initiatives, manifested as infrastructural transformation, lead to severe existential crises. This pervasive vicious cycle, I argue, perpetuates the conditions of 'slow death' - where Nigeria's institutionally vulnerable populations, particularly impoverished indigenous communities, are driven into extreme poverty, depletion, and deterioration. However, the novel I posit not only depicts a squandered culture but, more importantly, it suggests the potential for shared life, solidarity, and healing. In so doing, my contention is that Mowarin's story exemplifies the narratorial potential of optimism and 'slow hope' for cultures dominated by brutal capitalism and disposability.
This essay uses the genre of creative nonfiction to reflect on some powerful examples of rural women's environmentalism in the Mtubatuba region of KwaZulu Natal. Written as an autoethnographic journey narrative, it describes visiting the region over a few days. I begin by meeting three women whose practice of agroecology and prioritising local varieties of farmer-saved seed constitutes both a radical act of resistance to massive seed companies like Monsanto and a forward-looking preparation for climate resilience. I then spend a day with women farmers living near the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi game park, who have been drawn into activism by the ruthless encroachment of the Tendele coal mine on their ancestral land. Here, the term 'environmental justice,' a US import which was taken up in South Africa as an extension of the anti-apartheid struggle into the environmental sphere, has become part of the language of rural people. In each case, the farmers' heart-filled encounter with the multinational giants of monoculture and mining seems microcosmic of our global predicament.
This article argues that Empty Hands, A Memoir, One Woman's Journey to Save Children Orphaned by Aids in South Africa (2015) positions Abegail Ntleko as a heroic figure whose caregiving during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in rural KwaZulu-Natal constitutes a site of black women's epistemology and epistemic resistance. Extending Clenora Hudson-Weems's Africana womanism and decolonial lenses, the article examines how Ntleko and Zulu women navigate cultural bottlenecks to reconstitute new identities while addressing the social and moral crises wrought by HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. By adopting and caring for children orphaned by the pandemic, Abegail Ntleko constructs a heroic identity in the Zulu community. Unlike self-serving adventure-type heroism, Ntleko's heroic identity emerges as social and moral agency, demonstrating and restoring dignity and belonging to those affected within her community.
Friendship is a significant and unexplored aspect of intimacy in South African women's fiction, which warrants more attention. It offers a lens into women's everyday lives across political and personal worlds. This article explores friendships between women in selected short fiction from celebrated writer, poet, and activist Makhosazana Xaba's Running and Other Stories. It asks how the collection depicts women's daily lives in post-apartheid South Africa, and the role of women's friendships within them. Focusing on friendship gives space to the networks of care and concern between women that characterise many of this collection's stories. The friendships in Running and Other Stories offer women profound sites of resistance and solidarity as they navigate their racist, heteronormative, and patriarchal societies. This article demonstrates that centring friendship can enrich current dialogues around love and intimacy in South African women's writing.
This article engages Matthew Condon's novel The Trout Opera (2007) in a form of South-South dialogue. As a South African literary studies academic, with an interest also in the environmental humanities and trout themselves, I bring perhaps different questions to this Australian novel than those raised in the critical literature I have found on the novel. Australian critics and reviewers seem to focus on the novel's status as national narrative or allegory. This is a common theme in colonial and postcolonial writing, and it was a recurrent theme in both critical and creative writing in South Africa, especially in the post-apartheid period. But, perhaps because it is so clear that any coherent national narrative has failed or was always doomed to failure in South Africa, my reading of The Trout Opera is less concerned with its implications for my own somewhat resonant historical and political context, than instead with what seem to me the novel's more far-reaching implications: its narration of interspecies relationships between humans and animals (mainly trout) in ways that are enormously important in this age of the Anthropocene and the post-humanist.
The 533-page literary history, Southern African Literatures, was published in London in 1996. To date, the book has garnered over 600 citations, a figure that continues to increase, 30 years on. Yet the initial publication invoked an angry response from several influential literary commentators in South Africa. Whose story had the author, Michael Chapman, wished to promote? More pointedly, had Chapman elevated politics talk above art talk? After returning to the reception of the study at the time of its publication, this article - from the vantage point of 2026 - considers key points of initial controversy, particularly the relationship of art and politics: a difficult, 'transactional' relationship in societies in which disjuncture exceeds conjuncture.
Yvonne Vera's Butterfly Burning and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's The Theory of Flight unsettle normative conceptions of agency by foregrounding heroines who often resort to unconventional modes of pushback against environmental constraints. The heroines conjure up unfamiliar geographies of freedom as they realise mobility and transcendence in otherwise immobilising circumstances. In these scenarios of contested mobility, even death becomes a reaffirmation of life, an act of transcendence and the ultimate face of beauty. Through a close reading, this article explores how Vera and Ndlovu deploy symbolic enablement to narrate the ethics and politics of transcendence adopted by a cross-section of female characters in defiance of patriarchal surveillance and policing. The article argues that the two novels open vistas into the political dimensions of mobility in society's margins and, in the process, underscore how beauty and self-affirmation can be realised even in the most dehumanising circumstances. This situates the novels within the broader politics of refusal in African literature and cultural production.
This article is a discussion between literary scholar, Michael Chapman, and ecological artist, Nic Human, on his paintings of endangered sea turtles from the KwaZulu-Natal coast. Human explores the role of art in the Anthropocene debate by focussing on the genre of ecological art as art activism. Select paintings are unpacked that reveal place-based reflexivity while portraying scientific details and visual metaphors. Examples of aesthetic-related terms enter the Anthropocene, such as connective aesthetics, indigenous aesthetics, incidental aesthetics and garbage aesthetics, that directly influence Human's artworks. The article concludes with current considerations for aestheticising single-species and multi-species conservation as an environmental commitment.
This article concentrates on Nthikeng Mohlele's short stories, as included in his two collections The Discovery of Love (2021) and A Little Light (2023). It is argued that Mohlele's stories offer a distinct and original approach to South African literature through their nuanced psychological depiction of passivity, inaction, disappointment, and nostalgia. Rather than being plot-driven, the stories focus on the thoughts and feelings of their protagonists, exploring the reasons behind their inability or unwillingness to take action and regain agency in their lives. The protagonists' sense of impasse can be interpreted against the background of South Africa's social, political, and economic situation, particularly the frustrations and disillusionments of the new dispensation. Mohlele's stories display considerable psychological depth, as they shed light on the ambiguous, dynamic and, at times, contradictory motivations of their protagonists.
Angifi Dladla's The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep (2001) offers a searing poetic exploration of fear, trauma, and memory, articulated through a rich network of symbolic language and semiotic structures. Set against the turbulent backdrop of apartheid and its post-apartheid aftershocks, Dladla's verse becomes a dynamic site of both personal mourning and collective remembrance. This paper investigates how Dladla employs semiotic strategies drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic model of the sign (icon, index, symbol) and Roland Barthes's theory of myth to inscribe trauma into fragmented images, disrupted domestic spaces, and recursive metaphors that destabilise linear temporality.
This article investigates two texts written between 1936-1953 and 1974-1975. The first is by the anthropologist Wade Davis, the second by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Davis's text explores the plant discoveries made by the American scientist Richard Evans Schultes between 1936 and 1953 and those of his pupils Wade Davis and Tim Plowman between 1974 and 1975. These discoveries of a rich and diverse plant life in South America were to revolutionise medicine around the world. The second text, by Vargas Llosa, dramatises the story of the narrator's relationship with a colleague who becomes the hablador or storyteller of the remote Machiguenga tribe living in the forests of Peru. Both texts are rooted in indigeneity and both alternate Western notions of time and space with indigenous storytelling. The narrative structure of each text is analysed following Clifford Gerts's insight that no consideration of social phenomena can be separated from an author's subjective perspectives. Thinking is not a simple reproduction or representation of 'data,' but a 'forming' process which gives meaning and value to facts. A coda to my textual explorations has been inserted. Published in March 2024, Nemonte Nenquimo's We Will Not Be Saved is the moving story of her successful protection of the Amazonian rainforests. Both Davis and Plowman would have cherished this text.
Frank Chipasula, one of the well-known Malawian poets, committed most of his poetic output to criticising the dictatorial regime of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1964-1994). Unlike his counterparts, such as Steve Chimombo and Anthony Nazombe, Chipasula wrote most of his poetry from exile in the United States. This allowed him to censure the Banda regime without political reprisals. In this paper we examine Chipasula's use of imagery in his collection Whispers in the Wings to expose the greed of the politicians and the sexual exploitation of women during Banda's reign. We argue that in his use of evocative imagery, Chipasula shows that Banda and his cabal were a grotesque bunch that sexually exploited women and the country's meagre resources for their selfish ends. We also show that in exposing the moral corruption of Malawian politicians of the time, Chipasula justifies their removal from power.
This open-form essay reflects on issues of poetics, politics, and ethics by analysing a series of texts that use images of stone. Authors of the texts include W B Yeats, Nelson Mandela, T S Eliot, Solomon, Seamus Heaney, William Plomer, Douglas Livingstone, W H Auden, the apostles John and Simon Peter, and Jesus.
This article discusses the experiences of acute trauma, the possibilities of free will and cultural conditioning in Shana Fife's memoir Ougat: From a Hoe into a Housewife and Then Some (2021). I investigate the nature of the expectations placed on South African Coloured women by their communities, society at large, and themselves. I consider what happens when the individual no longer feels a sense of belonging and is confronted with a 'culturally "schizophrenic" space.' I delve into how trauma presents in notions of identity formation, suppression, oppression and subsequent expressions of intimacy, and examine how all the above influence our perceptions and understandings of South African Coloured women in Shana Fife's memoir.
This article returns readers to an undeservedly neglected achievement: the early short stories of Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer. Published in New York and London, Gordimer's collection, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952), contributed a new and innovative voice to the world of the short story. Although overshadowed by her politically challenging novels, the short stories capture, in resonant miniature, the key to Gordimer's success, whether in the novel or shorter forms of fiction: a keen observation of human behaviour in socially constricted times.
