The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Southern Africa

Several of the nations in southern Africa were among the last on the continent to gain independence, Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia only in 1990. The largest country in the region, South Africa, remained a pariah state until 1994, when it finally ended its policy of racial segregation (apartheid). But even during apartheid, South Africa was a significant political, economic, and cultural power in the region and exerted considerable influence. The most developed regional book market was (and continues to be) in South Africa, but until 1994, due to apartheid, opportunities for authors who were not white were limited. Throughout the area, English-language (and in South Africa, also Afrikaans) writing still dominates the market, though a small amount of fiction from regional languages is available in translation.

Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) novel of frank feminism and theological soul-searching, misleadingly entitled The Story of an African Farm (1883; originally published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron), is widely considered the first South African novel. Significant works of the early twentieth century include several written by black authors, such as Sol T. Plaatje’s (1876–1932) Mhudi (1930), set during the regional conflicts of the 1830s, and Thomas Mofolo’s (1876–1948) classic Sesotho novel Chaka (1925, English 1931, 1981), loosely based on the great Zulu leader.

Alan Paton’s (1903–1988) Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), published while the legal framework for apartheid was being assembled, grapples with many of the issues that would be of concern in the following decades. Depicting disenfranchised and uprooted blacks turning to violence and a white population seeking to preserve its privileged position even at the cost of social unrest and uncertainty, the novel offers only a little hope.

The officially entrenched second-class treatment of blacks was common throughout much of colonial Africa even after World War II, and only with the wave of independence that swept the continent in the 1960s did South Africa’s policy of apartheid truly set it apart. Much as almost all the fiction from the Soviet Union that was published in the West either described the shortcomings and horrors of the Communist system or satirized it, the South African fiction published abroad almost inevitably dealt with the consequences and costs of apartheid.

Writers like Ezekiel (E’skia) Mphahlele (1919–2008) and Alex La Guma (1925–1985) spent much of their life in exile. Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1977 after two decades abroad, and his major works are informed by his experience of exile. In The Wanderers (1971) the protagonist, Timi Tabane, has the same experiences as Mphahlele did, sharing his frustration over the few possibilities for a black man in South Africa but finding conditions elsewhere in Africa to be difficult as well. Chirundu (1979), whose central character is a cabinet minister fallen from grace and power, is about the abuse of power in an unidentified newly independent African country, a danger that Mphahlele saw across the continent. Alex La Guma’s novella A Walk in the Night (1962), published before he left South Africa in 1966, offers a vivid picture of the bustling shady life in District Six, a largely “coloured” (mixed-race) neighborhood in Cape Town. La Guma’s tale of murder and criminal activity reveals another dark side of South African life. Although race also plays a role here, it is a secondary one and only a part of these characters’ searches for identities.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, Nadine Gordimer’s (1923–2014) fiction closely mirrors South African conditions since the beginning of apartheid, ranging from her more personal and relatively hopeful realist works in the 1950s to the darker experimental works of the 1970s and 1980s and then novels exploring the new uncertainties that came after the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994. Despite her long-standing opposition to official policies on race, Gordimer always was committed to remaining in South Africa, and almost all her novels are set there. She wrote more than a dozen novels and even more collections of short stories. Often simpler than her longer fiction, her precise realist style works to best effect in her stories.

Burger’s Daughter (1979) is one of Gordimer’s best novels. Unlike most of her fiction, it is presented in a number of voices and perspectives. The novel follows the lives of both the Communist activist Lionel Burger and his daughter, Rosa, who must decide to what extent she wishes to follow in her father’s footsteps. In describing Lionel’s political engagement over several decades, culminating with his life sentence and death in prison, Gordimer recounts the history of opposition to official policies. However, Lionel’s actions also seem quite paternalistic. After her father’s death, Rosa goes abroad to try to distance herself from her homeland and the issues to which her father devoted himself, but she ultimately finds that she must return and become active too.

A Guest of Honour (1970) is one of Gordimer’s few novels not set in South Africa but instead in an imaginary African country that has just made the transition to independence. The central character, Evelyn James Bray, is a former colonial administrator, and the scenario in which Gordimer places him allows her to consider the complex relationship between the new and old holders of power. Even though independence allows for local rule, the new leadership displays many similarities with the old, and Bray becomes a pawn between the forces trying to determine the country’s future. In July’s People (1981), Gordimer goes further with her invention, imagining what South Africa might look like when the old order is finally upset, in a vision that is far more violent than what actually came to pass in the 1990s. In the novel, all the characters find their positions radically changed as a civil war rages, with July sheltering the Smales family, for whom he worked as a servant.

South Africa’s other Nobel laureate, the brilliant J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940), moved to Australia in 2002, the year before he won the prize, and has since become an Australian citizen, but much of his work is explicitly South African. Coetzee’s writing is precise, and though his careful exposition can seem coldly rational, he manages to convey deep emotion as well. Despite the similarities in many of his works, including Coetzee’s frequent use of obvious alter egos, his writing is varied. He is constantly trying to reshape the novel’s form, often with dazzling results.

Several of Coetzee’s novels deal with brutality, whether devastating to an entire people or only the individuals on whom he focuses. His books also commonly include writers, diarists, and others who have a story to tell, even though they often are unable to readily do so. This is most obvious in his variation on Robinson Crusoe, Foe (1987), in which Friday is rendered literally speech-less, having had his tongue cut out. Coetzee also frequently explores the relationship between author and text. In The Vietnam Project, the first of the two novellas in Dusklands (1974), Eugene Dawn is charged with writing a report on the use of psychological warfare in the Vietnam War, an undertaking that drives him to a nervous breakdown. In Diary of a Bad Year (2007), the narrative follows first two and then three different tracks on the same page: essays—both political and personal—running along the top part of each page, with their fictional author providing commentary below, eventually joined by the diary-like comments by Anya, the neighbor whom he employs as a typist and to whom he is attracted. In his frequent use of characters that bear his name—Eugene’s supervisor in The Vietnam Project is named Coetzee, for example—or bear a strong resemblance to him—from the “Señor C” in Diary of a Bad Year to Elizabeth Costello of the eponymous novel (2003) and Slow Man (2005)—Coetzee constantly examines questions of personal culpability and the role of the writer.

Coetzee’s novels frequently deal with mechanisms for survival, whether in a violent South Africa, in novels such as Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), or in confronting old age in novels like Slow Man. While not necessarily pessimistic, his stories are often very dark. Disgrace’s clinical honesty about the characters’ failures and suffering is typical. In that novel, David Lurie is a professor whose unwillingness to go through the motions of apology and remorse in a case of sexual harassment leads to his being forced from his university position in disgrace. He flees to his daughter Lucy’s farm in the countryside, where she lives and works alongside newly and increasingly empowered blacks. Although she is gang-raped, she, like her father, chooses to avoid allowing the authorities to handle the situation. Despite both being very strong-willed characters, they also can be seen as misguided. Disgrace is, among other things, a novel of trying to find one’s place in post-apartheid South Africa. Perhaps tellingly, Coetzee himself abandoned the country only a few years later.

Since the mid-1960s, Zakes Mda (b. 1948) has lived mainly in both Lesotho, a small landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa, and abroad. Best known in South Africa for his plays, Zakes Mda has also published several notable works of fiction, beginning with Ways of Dying (1995). Toloki, the protagonist of that novel, is a professional mourner, hired to grieve at funerals in post-apartheid South Africa. Like Noria, the childhood friend with whom he reconnects, and many others encountered in the novel, he is a broken man, but he also manages to channel his despair and retains some sense of optimism. While Mda does not confront sufficiently some of the horrors his characters face, Ways of Dying is full of well-conceived scenes and stories. Mda brings Toloki back in Cion (2007), in which the now more worldly character changes pace by traveling to the United States. The outsider’s commentary on 2004 America and the many stories Mda weaves into the narrative make for an engaging read, but it cannot match the sad charm of Ways of Dying.

Several of Damon Galgut’s (b. 1963) novels of contemporary South Africa are set in isolated and apparently quiet parts of the country, but Galgut’s plots reveal much that at first passes unseen. In The Impostor (2008), middle-aged Adam Napier loses his job in the city, replaced by the black intern he trained, and imagines he can reinvent himself by pursuing his old dream of becoming a poet. He moves to the countryside but, rather than finding his muse, drifts into questionable and ultimately dangerous activities, having an affair with his neighbor’s wife and then getting drawn into the neighbor’s opaque business dealings. Adam’s self-deluding attitude is a defensive mechanism in a world in which all the rules seem to have changed and everyone is something of an impostor. The Quarry (1995) is even more obviously about an impostor, as it begins with a fugitive hitchhiker killing the minister who picks him up and then assuming his place. Galgut’s lean prose adds to the tension in his novels, and both The Impostor and The Quarry read almost like thrillers. Indeed, the sequence of short chapters at the end of The Quarry mirrors the breathless rush toward its conclusion.

Ivan Vladislavić (b. 1957) is another South African novelist in a line that extends from Gordimer through Coetzee, writing fiction that shifts between playful and direct. The narrator of The Restless Supermarket (2001) is a retired proofreader living in the Johannesburg district of Hillbrow as apartheid’s grip loosens. He is a keen if idiosyncratic observer of details, finding signs of decay—moral and social as well as physical—in everything around him. In The Folly (1993), the protagonist, Nieuwenhuizen, imagines building an immense, elaborate house on an empty plot of land. Although this all remains in his head, it takes on a reality of its own in an appealing parable of imagining and constructing something entirely new. It ends, however, with the edifice’s destruction. The three-part Double Negative (2010), dipping into photographer Neville Lister’s life at three points in his life from 1982 to 2009, is a beautifully and subtly wrought character portrait that also addresses issues of identity, the past, and change in contemporary South Africa.

• Zoë Wicomb’s (b. 1948) fiction is set in South Africa.

• The title of Phaswane Mpe’s (1970–2004) short, powerful novel of contemporary urban South Africa is Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001).

• Niq Mhlongo (b. 1973) wrote Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2008).

• Lauren Beukes (b. 1976) cleverly mixes science fiction and thriller elements in novels set in South Africa, such as Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010).

Njabulo S. Ndebele’s (b. 1948) Fools and Other Stories (1983) is a collection of stories mainly about childhood and township life, and it continues to be widely read. But his more recent novel mixing fact and fiction, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003), also deserves attention. The novel describes four women who, for different reasons, have endured the common South African lot of having been separated from their husbands for extended periods of time. They have spent much of their lives awaiting their return, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus. Part of the novel has them each presenting imagined conversations with the mother of the nation, Winnie Mandela, who endured a similar ordeal—but much more publicly. In the time in which the book is set, Winnie Mandela was a fallen idol, and Ndebele’s work is a fascinating semifictional exploration of history, personality, and how South African women dealt with the long absences of the men in their lives.

Writing in Zulu

Zulu (or isiZulu) has about 10 million native speakers. There is a fairly extensive body of Zulu literature going back to the early part of the twentieth century, though only a small part is available in English translation. Despite the continuing efforts to encourage and sustain writing in Zulu and other indigenous languages—South Africa has eleven official languages—these have had little success to date. But along with improvements in the educational system, they should eventually help in developing stronger literary cultures in these languages. Certainly, the relatively large number of native Zulu speakers ensures its long-term viability as a literary language.

Much of Zulu literature is based on the strong oral tradition of Zulu culture, and Mazisi Kunene’s (1930–2006) two verse epics, which he translated himself, are excellent examples. Emperor Shaka the Great (English 1979) offers another reading of the great Zulu leader, while Anthem of the Decades (English 1981) is a poetic rendering of the Zulu creation myth.

Writing in Afrikaans

Afrikaans, which is closely related to Dutch, has about 6 million native speakers in South Africa. Several major South African authors write in both English and Afrikaans, most notably Breyten Breytenbach (b. 1939), best known for his poetry and autobiographical works, and André Brink (1935–2015). Whereas Brink originally wrote most of his fiction in Afrikaans, he wrote his epic thriller, An Act of Terror (1981), in English. It is the story of a botched political assassination attempt, which forces the Afrikaner protagonist, Thomas Landman, underground and then increasingly desperately on the run as the police close in. While Brink is not entirely comfortable with the genre, he creates a good deal of suspense and uses this simple and standard plot to present a fascinating picture of many aspects of South African life from an Afrikaner perspective, especially the different shades of resistance, complicity, and guilt. In A Dry White Season (1979, English 1979), perhaps his best-known work, Brink presents the dawning of the characters’ realization of the true depths and depravity of the state security system.

Several of Brink’s novels that do not directly deal with contemporary events are also of considerable interest. A Chain of Voices (1982, English 1982) is based on a historical slave uprising in South Africa in the early nineteenth century. The chapters are monologues in which dozens of characters touched by these events tell their stories and reflect on what happened. Brink is less concerned with presenting a realist account here than with exploring the relationships between blacks and whites and the background of slavery and, by extension, apartheid. In his very amusing novella The First Life of Adamastor (published in the United States as Cape of Storms; 1988, English 1993), Brink goes back further, spinning a ribald myth around the first encounters between Europeans and South Africans in the late fifteenth century. A white woman is abandoned there and Brink’s Rabelaisian hero, T’Kama, a local chieftain who is endowed with a very inconveniently oversized sexual organ, falls in love with her. T’Kama narrates the story from the present, looking back on what happened five hundred years ago and describing how he also lost her, which he includes as part of a cycle of black/white encounters that has continued ever since.

Marlene van Niekerk’s (b. 1954) huge novels Triomf (1994, English 1999) and Agaat (published in Great Britain as The Way of the Women; 2004, English 2006) offer detailed, intimate pictures of South African lives. Triomf is a raw and comic family portrait of an often overlooked social class. The Benades are a white-trash family living in the Johannesburg suburb of Triomf, confronting a rapidly changing world that left them behind a long time ago. This is made all the more obvious now, in 1994, as they anticipate the first post-apartheid elections as well as the fortieth birthday of their son Lambert. In The Way of the Women, Milla de Wet is crippled by a degenerative disease that leaves her able to communicate only by blinking. She is cared for by Agaat, the black woman who was both a foster child and a servant in the farming household. As Milla now tries to sum up her life, it becomes even more obvious how intertwined it is with Agaat’s. Van Niekerk skillfully overlays five decades of South African history and life onto Milla’s own decaying physical and mental state by using the shifts in the uneasy relationship between the two women.

• Ingrid Winterbach’s (b. 1948) fiction is striking.

• Etienne van Heerden’s (b. 1954) crowded magical realist novels are Ancestral Voices (1986, English 1989) and The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2000, English 2002).

South African Crime Fiction

Much of the African crime fiction known to international audiences has had a significant social and political slant, if only because apartheid South Africa was one of the few areas from which such fiction was available. Expatriate South African James McClure’s (1939–2006) Kramer and Zondi series, beginning with The Steam Pig (1971), stands out for its depiction of the South Africa of 1970s and 1980s while the apartheid legacy still colored much contemporary crime fiction. Deon Meyer (b. 1958) has written, in Afrikaans, some of the most impressive post-apartheid thrillers. Though still prone to letting furiously paced action sequences dominate the resolutions of his novels, in books like the quest tale Heart of the Hunter (2002, English 2003), Meyer uses the past that proves so hard to overcome. The imposing character of Thobela “Tiny” Mpayipheli, who also plays a major role in Dead at Daybreak (2000, English 2000), is a larger-than-life figure with a shadowy history as a foreign-trained lone assassin who tries to change his life but finds his past catching up with him as he repeatedly is drawn into the problems of the new South Africa. Meyer saddles Tiny with a great deal, as the character becomes a stand-in for so much of South Africa, but the heroic figure can almost bear all of that in these very solid thrillers.

Publishing and writing flourished for some time in Zimbabwe after it became an independent state in 1980, and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, founded in 1983, was the continent’s preeminent book fair for some two decades. Unfortunately, by the early years of the twenty-first century, the policies of Robert Mugabe’s regime and the reactions to it had severely undermined the nation’s economy, affecting every aspect of local life and making it impossible to maintain this high level of literary culture.

Because Zimbabwe achieved independence only in 1980, Zimbabwean writers continued to intensively explore the legacy of colonial rule—landownership (largely in white hands), the economic gaps between blacks and whites, the civil war—at a time when authors in most other sub-Saharan countries had moved beyond it. In particular, the long-lasting (1965–1979) civil war figures in many works of Zimbabwean fiction. Among the best works directly addressing the civil war are Stanley Nyamfukudza’s (b. 1951) The Non-Believer’s Journey (1980), Shimmer Chinodya’s (b. 1957) Harvest of Thorns (1989), and Alexander Kanengoni’s (b. 1951) works.

Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987) remains a very influential literary figure in Zimbabwe, possibly as much for his personality and wild life—which included a great deal of drinking and his expulsion from Oxford—as for his writing. His collection of loosely connected autobiographical stories, The House of Hunger (1978), was a strong first book. Marechera was more interested in psychological than political insight, and his writing is visceral and raw. The angry-young-men novels written in Africa until that time were directed against colonial and racial injustice, but in The House of Hunger and the only other work of fiction published during his lifetime, Black Sunlight (1980), Marechera rages much more widely, addressing societal problems and existential questions. Black Sunlight is a less cohesive work, as Marechera largely forgoes plot in his increasingly dreamlike odyssey of its photographer-narrator.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s (b. 1959) autobiographical novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), is considered the first novel published by a Zimbabwean woman. The life of the narrator, Tambu, who was raised in patriarchal rural Rhodesia, is contrasted with that of her cousin, Nyasha, whose formative years were spent abroad. For Tambu, education is an opportunity, but it also makes her increasingly aware of the backwardness of aspects of her family’s life. Nyasha is more obviously torn between cultures, which eventually is manifested in an eating disorder and a nervous breakdown. Dangarembga’s penetrating scrutiny of young women determining their identities and roles in an unstable society is one of the strongest novels about African women. A sequel, The Book of Not (2006), covers Tambu’s high school years, which coincide with the final years of the civil war and culminate in Zimbabwe’s independence. With the character of Nyasha much less of a counterpart here, the novel does not work nearly as well as Nervous Conditions.

• Yvonne Vera’s (1964–2005) fiction is lyrical, though it may seem too extravagantly poetic to many readers.

• Shimmer Chinodya’s (b. 1957) fiction offers the broadest introduction to Zimbabwean life over the past few decades.

• Chenjerai Hove’s (1956–2015) novels are Bones (1988), Shadows (1991), and Ancestors (1996).

• NoViolet Bulawayo’s (b. 1981) strong first novel is We Need New Names (2013).

• Solomon Mutswairo’s (1924–2005) Shona novel is Feso (1956, English 1974).

Several foreign authors have chosen Botswana as the locale for some of their fiction, most famously Alexander McCall Smith’s (b. 1948) series featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998). In more than a dozen charming works, Smith’s detective tries to set right the small wrongs affecting her clients. Smith uses his appealing protagonist to present all facets of Botswanan life, and he knows how to tell a good story.

American author Norman Rush (b. 1933) worked in Botswana in the Peace Corps from 1978 to 1983 and has set much of his award-winning works of fiction there. The stories in Whites (1986) explore the experiences of white foreigners who find themselves in Africa. Rush’s novels Mating (1991) and Mortals (2003) are intellectual exercises full of games between men and women. Both are set in Botswana, and Rush uses the African backdrop well, but his main concern in these novels is his characters’ emotional lives.

In 1964, South African–born Bessie Head (1937–1986) moved to what is now Botswana. She was born in the mental institution to which her mother had been committed and later also suffered from mental illness herself, as chronicled in her autobiographical novel, A Question of Power (1973), and reflected in some of her other fiction. Both her debut, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), and Maru (1971) deal with the possibility of renewal and fundamental societal change. In When Rain Clouds Gather, the South African exile Makhaya is one of several outsiders who become involved in efforts to reform farming in the village where he settles. Some of the traditional power holders oppose these communal ideals, making the novel an allegory of a young nation (Botswana) and how its future is to be shaped. The racial conflict in Maru is between the powerful Batswana and the despised, lowly Bushmen (Masarwa). Margaret is posted as a teacher to a village where Bushmen are still commonly kept as slaves. She too is a Masarwa, but not obviously and immediately identifiable as such. When her identity becomes known, this upsets the local order, especially when two rivals, Maru and Moleka, fall in love with her. Positive change and increased tolerance result, but when Maru wins Margaret, he takes her far away from his homeland, unwilling to confront its deeply ingrained racial tensions.

Little fiction from the former Northern Rhodesia has attracted much notice outside southern Africa. Dominic Mulaisho (1933–2013) held important political posts in the government of Kenneth Kaunda, and his two novels of political power struggles, The Tongue of the Dumb (1973) and The Smoke That Thunders (1979), are solid, if somewhat dated, works. The novels by Binwell Sinyangwe (b. 1956) deal more directly with the often bleak everyday life in contemporary Zambia, and both Quills of Desire (1993) and A Cowrie of Hope (2000) focus on the importance of education as an opportunity to be sought at any cost.

Hastings Banda’s ultraconservative rule of Malawi lasted more than three decades and ended only in 1994. American author Paul Theroux (b. 1941) was deported while working there for the Peace Corps in the mid-1960s, and his novel Jungle Lovers (1971) is still among the most insightful into the early years of Banda’s rule and conditions in Malawi. Not surprisingly, it was banned by Banda’s government. Typical of Theroux, this is a comic novel of failures abroad, the story being about two foreigners who want to effect change—one, Calvin Mullet, by selling the locals insurance, the other, Marais, by inciting violent revolution.

The first Malawian novel, Aubrey Kachingwe’s (b. 1926) No Easy Task (1966), is a good example of the African novels of that period. The imaginary nation in which it is set is going through the political difficulties common to countries all across Africa as they achieved independence, and the journalist-narrator is an observer who must decide what role he wants to play in the new nation.

In James Ng’ombe’s (b. 1949) Sugarcane with Salt (1989), the protagonist, Khumbo Dala, returns from England with a medical degree but finds much has changed for the worse in his homeland. Particularly devastating to him is how the strong family unit has been undermined by his brother’s and his mother’s embrace of modern, self-interested ways. Their willingness to engage in dangerous and compromising activities affects all those around them. Ng’ombe’s dark novel explores the tension between traditional social structures and the possibilities in a new world order, which include both the positive—Khumbo Dala’s advanced medical training—and the destructive—his brother Billy’s drug dealing.

• Steve Chimombo’s (b. 1945) massive novel is entitled The Wrath of Napolo (2000).

Though large in size, Namibia has one of Africa’s smallest populations. Independent only since 1990, its literary scene is underdeveloped. Among the few works of fictions to come out of Namibia is Neshani Andreas’s (b. 1964) The Purple Violet of Oshaantu (2001). Set in the bucolic hinterlands, the novel is narrated by Mee Ali, who is concerned about her friend Kauna’s unhappy marriage, which ends with the suspicious death of Kauna’s husband. It is a colorful but typical social novel of contemporary village life, focusing on the role and status of women in an economy in which husbands are often absent for extended periods of time.

A large island off the coast of Mozambique, Madagascar is a former French colony that achieved full independence in 1960. Aside from the work of pioneering poet Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo (1901–1937), who wrote in both Malagasy and French, little literature from Madagascar is available in English.

A bilingual anthology of Francophone writing edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa, Voices from Madagascar (2002), includes both poetry and fiction, much of it very recent. It is still the best basic introduction to the literature of Madagascar. Colleen J. McElroy’s (b. 1935) account of her time on the island, Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (1999), is a personal travel and research narrative, but it also examines the Malagasy oral-storytelling tradition and contains many local stories and poems. McElroy’s supporting material provides a useful context, making this a good introduction to a form of narrative that is largely unknown in the English-speaking world.