Otherness and Marginal Spaces: Beyond Politics and Race in Contemporary African Novels

Many postcolonial literary scholars associate otherness with the political and racial marginalisation of groups. Indomitable postcolonial voices such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said take this trajectory, thereby negating other aspects of otherness that come with severe consequences for characters in literary works. Current scholarship on otherness focuses on any placement of groups at the margins without emphasis on the political and racial elements explored by Fanon and Said. Othering is viewed as either the inability to see people who are different as part of one’s community or a failure to see oneself as part of the community. This article extends the second argument that otherness goes further than discrimination against a group as a result of race and political ideology. Using postcolonial theory, the article analyses other aspects of otherness by comparing three primary texts: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame (1983) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009). The ideas of Fanon (1961), Rorty (1993) and Powell and Menendian (2016) will form a theoretical basis of interpretation.

National Identity and Xenophobia in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Sigmund Freud describes hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. Hatred is a form of animosity, frustration and hostility, often giving rise to a psychological descent into violence. This essay seeks to explore how Kopano Matlwa mediates notions of xenophobia in Period Pain to determine whether the narrative offers ways of reimagining relations between the “locals” and “outsiders” in South Africa. I am specifically interested in how Matlwa engages with the processes of othering in her third novel. I question how Matlwa employs language to “move people against other people.” I use the core concept of psychotraumatology to argue that the textures of hatred inscribed in Matlwa’s text are internalised echoes from apartheid culture and practices, which live out in the present social moment. Finally, I interrogate the extent to which Matlwa’s text might allow us to understand how she rewrites a new South Africa.

“Body of a Lion, Head of a Soldier”: The Grotesque in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation

Beasts of No Nation (2005) is a novel that invites attention to the plight of child soldiers. The protagonist of the novel, Agu, enjoyed an ideal life as a child with his family and always wished to go through traditional initiation as well as formal education before he was forcibly enlisted as a child soldier. At the battlefront, Agu engages in different types of violence and suffers various forms of abuse, which do not only cause him to lose his childhood but also his humanity, depictions of which draw the narrative into the mode of the grotesque. This article looks at how Uzodinma Iweala creates the picture of the child soldier through animal and bodily images to bring out the ambivalent nature of the child soldier as one caught between life and death, human and beast as well as between child and adult, through the grotesque, which brings up new concepts that are between life and death, fantasy and reality. The paper argues that the grotesque is of central importance to Iweala’s treatment of his central subject, namely, distorted personal development as a result of war. That is, the grotesque is not a chosen mode, but it is the inhuman depiction of the child soldier that draws the narrative into the grotesque mode.

Comparative Postcolonialisms: Alienation, Displacement and Interconnections in South African and Burmese Literature

This article uses a comparative postcolonial approach to investigate colonialism’s displacement and dislocation of all beings, human and non-human, and to locate resistant writing in the selected postcolonial texts—Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Zoya Phan’s Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma—to show the disenfranchisement of the (post)colonised while also attempting to recuperate stories of interconnections and hope. While colonialist texts show the “abject” in troubling terms, I argue that in diasporic texts, the writers are able to show a “plurality of vision” due to their diasporic consciousness in their texts.

The Politics of Space and the Search for Ethico-Moral Rearmament in Zimbabwe in John Eppel’s Hatchings

This article analyses the politics of space and the search for national regeneration in a society that is bifurcated along class, moral, and ethical lines. Whichever way one looks at it, Zimbabwe’s spatialised realities in both denotative and connotative terms stubbornly stand out. Space here is used as a discursive method of inclusion and exclusion. There are opposition spaces, ZANU-PF spaces, church spaces, corrupt spaces and spaces of violence and coercion. What are often dwarfed are those spaces that represent the future, national cohesion and multiculturalism, because they have never been allowed to flourish. This article examines the novel Hatchings (2006) by John Eppel in order to argue that the spaces of national toxicity preponderate over the spaces that represent national development, healing and justice. The article invokes theories of space and place by such theorists as Henri Lefebvre, Setha Low and Ranka Primorac to argue that space is socially produced and imbued with symbolic meaning over and above its physicality. As embodied, space(s) houses metaphors, ideology, behaviours, habits and orientations that can either unhinge or redeem a society depending on the balance of forces at play in given social contexts. What Eppel seems to be suggesting, the article concludes, is that despite the fact that Zimbabwe has been in the tenacious grip of the spaces of looters and immoral personages, the nation possesses within itself spaces for self-renewal that are often ignored or suppressed in the relentless pursuit of self-interest. There is a need for a new national culture and ethos that propels the nation into the future rather than the abyss.

When Supper was Ended

This short story engages with the urgency around violence against women. It tells the story of Enita, a 14-year-old girl who finds herself in a web of sexual and physical abuses in places where she should gain protection. She is raped by her Parish priest, Fr Xavier, who her mother had willingly allowed her to go help with settling into his new rectory. Her boyfriend's brother, Siomanu, caught Fr Xavier raping her. Siomanu would rape her too in exchange for keeping Fr Xavier's rape as a secret.

A Turn of Events

A short story that challenges a preconceived understanding of what qualifies as rape, following ideals of gender positions and who can be labelled as victim and attacker. Presenting a different point of view on a topic many avoid, deny or simply ignore.

“Born Free”? Youth Reflections on Post-1994 South Africa in Thought We Had Something Going

The condition of being young and a “born free” South African is the central issue that young writers featured in the 2015 e-anthology Thought We Had Something Going, edited by Thando Sangqu, contend with as they make their own contributions to South African literary discourses and writings. The writers find their niche in an online media space to make personal reflections and representations on what it means to be youth in post-1994 South Africa. The focus of this article is specifically on the stories and thought pieces “Hashtag #WhiteGirlsInNyanga: An Anecdotal Reflection on Racial Affinity and Racial Identity in a Post-Apartheid South Africa,” “The Youth Is Dark and Full of Bullshit” and “Skhothane Behaviour.” I explore the paradoxes that characterise the writings and are associated with characters’ lived experiences; and drawing on the concepts of space and conspicuous consumption, I examine how remnants and legacies of apartheid continue to shape and define youth spatial, political and social experiences and lifestyles. The main contention in these writings and in this article is that the label “born free” is superficial and far from a true reflection of the conditions of being the youth in post-1994 South Africa.

The Representation of Women in Kenneth Bhengu’s Novel Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi

This article analyses the representation of women in the novel Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi (Kadebona: The King’s Hero) by Kenneth Bhengu. The novel was written in 1958 at the height of apartheid and is set in an African society in the post-Impi yaseSandlwana era (post-Battle of Isandlwana era). The story is a biographical account by the protagonist, Kadebona, of his heroics and how fate thrust him into situations of both danger and opportunity. In analysing the novel both discourse analysis and thematic analysis are used. This article argues that women’s representation in the novel is ambivalent in that the author highlights both positive and negative characteristics of women. On the one hand, the author holds stereotypes about women such as those of other African writers, for example that they are weak, too sensitive, vulnerable and helpless. On the other hand, the author also represents women as deserving of love, as steadfast and as beings who must be protected from violence. The implication of these findings is that in Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi women are not represented as equal to men. This differs from the current discourse of rights which advocates the equality of women and men. Also, the analysis is important because it highlights the literary work of Kenneth Bhengu whose literary contributions are largely unrecognised in South African literature.

A Conversation with Nigerian Playwright and Public Intellectual Ahmed Yerima

The concept of the public intellectual is yet to be well engaged in Nigerian scholarship. While it has been implied in many critical works on writers, activists, journalists, lawyers, and others, the concept of the public intellectual has not been exclusively engaged to study historic and current Nigerian public figures. In this article, although much of it is an interview with the award-winning and prolific Nigerian playwright, academic, former Artistic Director of the National Troupe, and Director General of the Nigerian National Theatre, Ahmed Yerima, I briefly establish the public intellectual history in Nigeria before engaging the playwright on this subject and interrogating his status as a public intellectual or cultural critic. During the course of the interview, Yerima also touches on other subjects facing Nigeria and the intersection between one of his plays, Abobaku (2015), and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975).