Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University and co-editor of Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, Peter Vale cuts a troubled figure as he marks the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Where are we going as a nation? What have we lost and how can we get it back? he asks, in an article that ranges from Invictus to Jawaharal Nehru:
DESPITE the silken promises of the World Cup, South Africa has marked the 20th anniversary of FW de Klerk’s famous speech with distinct bleakness – a torpor close to despair.
To appreciate this requires a viewing of the film Invictus, Hollywood’s account of SA’s victory in another World Cup, rugby’s, 1995 competition. More than anything else, the movie highlights the sense of awe that South Africans felt as they searched for a new identity and their realisation that in order to achieve it, they would have to sacrifice.
Of course, this country is not the first to experience the rush and the excitement of a new national beginning. On the eve of Independence – August 14, 1947 – Jawaharal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, delivered a speech which began with two dramatic sentences: “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Two reports appeared in the Mail & Guardian this week on the Xhosa initiation ritual of circumcision for boys – cultural rites and trials of endurance that are currently taking place in many spots in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces which, because of infectious conditions, cause the deaths of a number of initiates each year, and leave even more mutilated for life.
The death toll for 2009 is approaching fifty:
Four more boys have died because of botched circumcisions in the Eastern Cape, bringing the death toll to 49, health officials said on Friday.
“Three of the boys died in Mdantsane in East London and the other in Mount Ayliff last week,” Health Department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said.
“These cases were only reported to us today [Friday],” he said.
Thando Mgqolozana’s first novel, A Man Who is Not a Man, tackles Xhosa circumcision head on, as journalist Percy Zvomuya learned when he attended the book’s launch in Grahamstown. Zvomuya’s subsequent feature on the book is part reportage from the launch, part review, and part sociological treatise. He compares A Man Who is Not a Man with Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. The piece is well worth a read: (more…)
There are, we think, some profound notions in what he says, like “breaking the silence” around circumcision – as this ritual has been a total secret for generations, especially from the mothers of the initiates.
In fact, the author received a text message from a young lady who had attended the launch at Wordfest, who said that her brother had undergone the circumcision ceremony as a youngster, and had committed suicide shortly thereafter. After hearing what Mgqolozana had to say, she bought the book for her mother so that she could read and understand what actually happens, and hoped that this would bring closure to a very sad event.
An important speech for our times:
* * * * * * * *
Imagine that you live in a world where innocent young boys are dying, eaten by a cultural practise gone wrong. They die, sometimes get amputated and loose their manhood, but certainly all the time they take with them a baggage of physical and psychological trauma, for life.
You are their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.
Talk about lifting the veil. When I catch up with Thando Mgqolozana at the Cape Town Book Fair, I discover that he is of course aware that his debut novel, A Man Who Is Not A Man (KwaZulu-Natal Press), will court controversy.
A botched traditional circumcision results in the narrator emerging from this harrowing experience with an “abnormal penis” after narrowly escaping death.
The topic chose him, Mgqolozana says. “I was circumcised when I was 18. I am now 25. I had a similar experience, although without necessarily the same result. I have chosen to write about this and to take the consequences. I feel I have earned the right to do so – the problem is that the minute you write about this, you subject your own manhood to scrutiny.”
The narrator nonetheless does not hold back in the telling of a gritty tale of pain and triumph. It opens doors on suffering and horror not discussed with such openness before. He takes us up the mountain where the circumcision takes place – although he stresses often that “the matters of the mountain should remain on the mountain”.
But Mgqolozana has been so reviled, through no fault of his own, because of the processes that went awry that it seems he has little to lose.
“I want to open the debate around the failings of those who conduct the circumcision. I want to be a voice for the voiceless,” he says.
Such activism has not hampered Mgqolozana’s essential novelistic gifts. He cut his fictional teeth on a few short stories, he says, and he has allowed his imagination free rein.
He has chosen EL Doctorow’s epigram to preface his story: “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction and non-fiction, there’s only narrative.”
Mgqolozana is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar completing a Masters in medical research at the University of Western Cape. He is spirited, ardent, challenging.
“Have you ever wondered what happens to those bakhwetha whose circumcision fails at the bush?” asks the narrator in the prologue. “What happens to them at the mountain? And who do they become afterwards? That’s an important one – ‘who do they become’?”
Dramatically escalating prices of raw materials, driven by rapid industrialisation in China and other countries of the global South as well as by looming world shortages, had for the few years preceding the financial meltdown and global recession of 2009 promoted a new scramble for Africa’s natural resources. It signalled a brisk turnaround in prospects for what The Economist had dubbed the “hopeless continent” as recently as 1999. However, while average growth rates across the continent have increased, the implications for Africa’s development were and remain at best dubious. (more…)
Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on “rights talk” and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of ‘the end of politics’?
In From Revolution to Rights in South Africa, Steven Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, social movements and other civil society actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy, producing a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge. (more…)
Ways of Writing is the first volume of essays devoted to a critical appraisal of Zakes Mda, the award-winning South African novelist and playwright.
In his plays and novels, which draw on both Western and indigenous performance traditions, Mda engages with the history of southern Africa during and after apartheid. Writing from a position of exile, as well as from within his native country, he examines the lives of ordinary people and the ways in which they come to terms with the effects of apartheid.
Mda has distinguished himself not only as a playwright and novelist, but also as a literary and cultural theorist and activist. He is a significant voice among the many in contemporary South Africa that exploit innovative forms to explore a culture in transition. (more…)
Peace versus Justice?: The Dilemma of Transitional Justice in Africa offers fresh insights on the so-called ‘justice versus peace’ dilemma, examining the challenges and prospects for promoting both peace and accountability, specifically in African countries affected by conflict or political violence.
Editor Chandra Lekha Sriram’s book draws on the expertise of many insider analysts, individuals who are not only authorities on transitional accountability processes, but who have participated in them, whether as legal practitioners or commissioners. While the primary focus is on processes in Africa, many of the contributors also draw on lessons from earlier processes elsewhere in the world, particularly Latin America. (more…)
Since the democratic elections in 1994, there have been concerted efforts to redress race and gender inequalities in South Africa. Learners and teachers have responded in their own ways to change and this nuanced analysis reveals their struggles to realise gender equality by living gender differently.
In distinguishing short-term interventions to change behaviour from institutional approaches which seek to transform school structures, Towards Gender Equality offers a new framework for understanding gender-equality initiatives. The book was compiled by an authorial team consisting of Robert Morrell, Debbie Epstein, Elaine Unterhalter, Deevia Bhana and Relebohile Moletsane. (more…)
The question usually asked about Africa is: “why is it going wrong?” Is the continent still suffering from the ravages of colonialism? Or is it the victim of postcolonial economic exploitation, poor governance and lack of aid? Whatever the answer, increasingly the result is poverty and violence.
In Africa: the Politics of Suffering and Smiling, Patrick Chabal approaches this question differently by reconsidering the role of theory in African politics. Chabal discusses the limitations of existing political theories of Africa and proposes a different starting point, arguing that political thinking ought to be driven by the need to address the immediacy of everyday life and death. (more…)
Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University and co-editor of Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, Peter Vale cuts a troubled figure as he marks the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Where are we going as a nation? What have we lost and how can we get it back? he asks, in an article that ranges from Invictus to Jawaharal Nehru:
The question usually asked about Africa is: “why is it going wrong?” Is the continent still suffering from the ravages of colonialism? Or is it the victim of postcolonial economic exploitation, poor governance and lack of aid? Whatever the answer, increasingly the result is poverty and violence.
