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Winnie Mandela: Homophobia and Dystopia in One of Achmat Dangor’s Forgotten Short Stories
Abstract
This article focuses on a transition-era short story by Achmat Dangor, “Mama & Kid Freedom” (1995, Index on Censorship 24 [3]: 108–13), which has thus far been wholly overlooked by literary scholars. The story depicts a political dystopia that is characterised by assassinations, arbitrary violence, and the mass incarceration of those deemed to be homosexual. There are also clear overlaps between the eponymous character Mama and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The story reproduces the binary tropes that surround Madikizela-Mandela and her then estranged husband, Nelson Mandela: whereas he is cast as the hero of the narrative of nation-building, she is cast as its villain. In this article, I argue that Dangor weaves a story that pulls together two particularly salient transition-era political discourses: Madikizela-Mandela as a homophobic and violent woman, and sexual rights as a bellwether of the country’s project of democratic modernity. The story evidences a homonationalist logic in which the recognition or non-recognition of sexual rights comes to be read as the axis on which post- apartheid democracy and human rights depend.
Achmat Dangor's novel Bitter Fruit (2001), nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2004, is one of several important works of fiction that comment on the imperfections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering a polemical critique of South Africa's on-going transition. In this article, I examine two significant ways in which Dangor's novel questions the work of the TRC. First, I posit that the story represents the TRC's model of transitional justice as being too determined by a "forgive and forget" approach that is inadequate as a means of providing reconciliation and thus fundamentally flawed. Second, I argue that, overall, the novel depicts the national reconciliation project as a mission that has in a way resulted in the appropriation of justice from - instead of its delivery to - some victims of Apartheid-era crimes. The aim of this article is not to present Dangor's fictional text as a one-dimensional reflection of complex social realities, but rather to foreground the practical and imaginative means that his inspired realist narrative offers for dealing with the aftermath of the massive social injustices perpetrated in South Africa during the Apartheid era.
Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages. 'Out in Africa' charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contexts through the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts that present, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketches out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires. Chantal Zabus holds the IUF [Institut universitaire de France] Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13 and at the Universities Sorbonne-Paris-Cité, France I. She is author of 'Between Rites and Rights'; 'The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel', and 'Tempests after Shakespeare'.She is presently Editor-in-Chief of the on-line journal 'Postcolonial Text'.
In this essay I begin by contextualising South African queer/alternative writing against a global postcolonial backdrop. I examine the representation of queer in Coetzee's Disgrace, and outline a cluster of attributes which are absent in that text, but which are present in texts published after 2000: queer sexuality viewed with interior depth, a coming‐out narrative, the normalisation of queer, progressive engagement with gender issues, and technical innovation. I analyse a range of texts by male and female authors which exemplify these features of postcolonial pomosexuality, paying particular attention to works by K Sello Duiker, Barbara Adair, Jane Bennett and Lauren Beukes.
Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? explores the ways in which the imaginative reconstruction of post-apartheid South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has been produced from images of women that dismember their bodies and disremember their historical presence. From Krotoa-Eva and Sarah Bartmann to Nongqawuse and Winnie Mandela, author Meg Samuelson tackles the figurations of some of the most controversial and significant women in the making of modern South Africa. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist theory, and close textual readings of literary and cultural texts produced during the first decade of democracy, her analysis offers a provocative critique of the formation of nationalist and feminist collectivities. The book explores the constraints of subjection and the performative power of subjectivity, as well as the ways in which women have been able to form collectivities on new terms.
The late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a political figure who excited strong views; these continue in the immediate aftermath of her death. Most analyses of her utilise the binary trope of good/bad mother and wife, and seek either to excoriate or to sanctify her. In this article, I re-examine the key incidents in her ‘fall’ from political grace, when the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) embarked on a series of violent actions in the mid 1980s. Using a feminist lens, the article argues that Madikizela-Mandela deployed gender as a political resource, but that she went beyond the boundaries set for women in South African liberation politics to become a populist leader in her own right. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela exemplified the radical rejection of political negotiations in South Africa and supported an accelerated and, if necessary, violent confrontation with the apartheid government. The article revisits the 1997 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing into the activities of the MUFC, exploring Madikizela-Mandela’s testimony as a performance of the refusal of the terms of the democratic transition. Rather than accepting the contingent, messy and sometime compromised arrangements that accompanied the end of apartheid, Madikizela-Mandela articulated a set of radical positions that were in tension with the position of the African National Congress (ANC), a movement of which she was a leading member. Against the dominant position that a political compromise was necessary, she held on to the fundamental argument that only a thoroughgoing overturning of apartheid (not just legal forms but economic and social dimensions) would be acceptable, and that, if necessary, this should be achieved by violence. This radical position remains attractive to important sections of the left, but leaves key questions of politics – in particular the place of revolutionary violence, and the terms on which friends and enemies are identified, unanswered.
This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short story anthologies since the late 1980s, we argue that short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary South African short story writing has consistently emphasized the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country. Critics have frequently observed a shift from the overtly politicized short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present. In this special issue, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction, and erotic fiction. Short stories also increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or gender-based norms.
This article considers how Nelson Mandela’s immediate family members intellectualised themselves within his legacy when he was terminal and upon his death. These specifics sublimate and set him apart from the eulogising tendency such as it has energised the scholarship on him. The tactics highlight tradition as an analytical category. Citing succession as a key episteme, the discussion delineates how tradition rarefies in non-hegemonic, mobile and fragile subject positions. In this approach, the paper invokes subtleties in the African Customary Law of Succession in South Africa.
On 28 and 29 July 1997, a special committee of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard the testimonies of women who had been abused and brutalized during the years of apartheid rule by white South Africans. Seizing this unique opportunity to liberate their minds and voices, long suppressed by a heartless patriarchal system, the women told their tales within the traditional frame of oral performances. But the lack of a truly gender-sensitive format forced their testimonies into evasive strategies born partly of an ingrained resentment of male domination and partly of codes of secrecy under which blacks waged a long military struggle against the system.
Since the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at reconciliation have been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of post-transitional South African literature and criticism has taken up the question of how to effect reconciliation, particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand of South African literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical responsibility in which the individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact hospitality toward others. This view draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby responsibility entails radical vulnerability with no assurance of reciprocation. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision of reconciliation, recognizing that for many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise to what Annie Coombes refers to as a “dissolution of [the] self”, and any effort at building a more inclusive society must redress that dissolution. This article argues that Jo-Anne Richards’ My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) present reconciliation as a product of two opposing endeavours. On the one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a sense of self in taking on responsibilities for others. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming a sense of self by asserting one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new spaces of belonging.
In addition to introducing this seminar of five contributions concerning South African apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, this article contextualizes and surveys the history of our literature of pessimistic prediction. It characterizes the representation of dark horizons as predominantly the expression of white political, cultural and existential anxieties. Given this understanding, the argument considers the ideological valence and import of this literature. In particular, it explores relations between political history and affect, suggesting that apocalyptic prediction depends on a teleology that inhibits an ethical understanding of the complexities of South African political history. The article goes on to consider the creative and critical dangers of circumscribing the apocalyptic imagination and concludes with a defence of public pessimism.
Winnie Mandela, an emblematic figure in the anti-apartheid struggle throughout her husband's imprisonment, attracted particular public attention in the mid-1980s as her advocacy of political violence earned her approbation amongst many activists at the forefront of the struggle. While presenting herself as an emblem of militancy, she simultaneously constructed a maternal self-image, fostering her reputation as 'Mother of the Nation'. However, between 1986 and 1989 Winnie Mandela allegedly advocated and participated in forms of violence that contravened struggle norms of militancy and popular notions of 'good' motherhood, causing her media transformation from 'Mother of the Nation' to 'Lady Macbeth'. This article analyses societal perceptions of female militancy and violence in 1980s South Africa through media reports, court transcripts and oral history interviews, exploring the ways in which Winnie Mandela utilised, expanded and ultimately transgressed acceptable norms of womanhood, wifehood and motherhood.
This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Similarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narrative of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.
After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post‐apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post‐transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I develop the conceptual frame of homonationalism for understanding the complexities of how acceptance and tolerance for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated. I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation's status as gay-friendly has become desirable in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it.
The representations and the writing self of three South African writers, two white women and one male of Malay descent, are explored against apartheid identity paradigms and the postmodernist revisioning of the Enlightenment notion of the self as complex and constantly shifting. The focus in the article is on the reformulations of the self by the crossing of actual and conceptual boundaries to show dominating patterns as well as failures, silences, displacements and transformations.
One might argue that narratives in fiction may…involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery and the Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving an at least plausible “feel” for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods.
Unless the enquiries of the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] are extended, complicated and intensified in the imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future.
The representation of personal and collective trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2003) disrupts the surface of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa and works to foreground the complex and enduring ramifications of apartheid. The novel represents interacting layers of trauma in South Africa arising from structural and symbolic racial oppression and acts of extreme violence under the apartheid regime. Bitter Fruit casts doubt on the ability of universalized Eurocentric models of trauma (located within a specific history and set of cultural practices) to account for South African trauma without suppressing the heterogeneity of experiences and responses to trauma in that locale. Homogenizing accounts exclude the particular historical, social, cultural, and personal contexts of trauma. Within postcolonial discourse, for example, Elleke Boehmer observes that there are “those among the once-colonised for whom the silences of history have not ended” (132). Boehmer pays particular attention to the marginalization of gender in male-authored postcolonial theory and the “silencing” of homosexuality in postcolonial and African writing (172). In a similar way, Ato Quayson emphasizes the need to articulate postcolonial experiences from “ex-centric” positions in order to include views that fall outside “the perspectives of sanctioned historical tellings of the nation” (192). Bitter Fruit suggests the importance of taking into account the specific context in which individual and collective traumas unfold by representing voices and experiences that cannot be subsumed into generalized models of trauma. The novel indicates ways in which gender, race, sexuality, class, age, religion, and language constitute and differentiate South African identities and experiences, past and present; but it focuses particularly on two ex-centric positions in the South African context. Bitter Fruit subverts Manichean representations that simplify South Africa’s racial problems in terms of black and white (see Wicomb and Kruger) by representing colored experiences. In focusing on the sexual (and racial) violence of Lydia’s rape, Bitter Fruit addresses a widely known but often unspoken area of experience in South Africa. The novel also draws attention to violence against homosexuals within the colored community as well as the wider homophobia in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Bitter Fruit suggests that many traumas remain unspoken and invisible, eluding the representation of a collective South African experience.
In the novel’s central narrative, the silenced memory of Lydia’s rape by a white policeman nineteen years earlier (which her husband Silas was forced to listen to) erupts into the post-apartheid present, forcing a confrontation with the suppressed traumatic past. Following the rape, Lydia and Silas have lived in a cold and non-communicative marriage, becoming increasingly isolated from each other as the years have gone by. The unspoken trauma overshadows their relationship and also affects their child Mikey, who is the unacknowledged product of Lydia’s rape. Mikey is initially unaware of the rape and his own embeddedness in this traumatic history. When he reads Lydia’s diary, he is forced to confront the fact that “he is the child of some murderous white man,…a boer,…who worked for the old system, was the old system” (131) and has to readdress his past and reassess the meaning of his life. When the buried trauma is unleashed after Silas’s encounter with Du Boise (Lydia’s rapist), the tentative familial bonds, already fraught and fragile, disintegrate completely until Lydia, Silas, and Mikey, living in absolute isolation, eventually go their separate ways. Lydia “knows” that Du Boise is the father, and Silas also suspects this, but this knowledge is never brought out into the open. These personal experiences of trauma take place against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation...
This article explores the paradoxical prominence of seemingly private family stories and memories in the democratic public spheres emerging in the wake of the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina and apartheid in South Africa. In part because the discourse of the family was used in these cases to both uphold and protest dictatorial regimes, individuals who lost family members to state violence became powerful moral agents in the post‐dictatorship and post‐apartheid periods. Narratives told by and about these individuals – ranging from personal testimony given in each country’s truth commission to representations in theatre, fiction and film – have worked to constitute what may be called a ‘public private sphere’. They not only express personal grief, but also (and especially in wider cultural circulation) have been emplotted and mobilised to construct democratic publics. These may or may not correspond to the nationwide publics envisioned in state discourses of reconciliation. Using genealogical fiction surrounding ‘disappeared children’ in Argentina as a lens to analyse South Africa, this article argues that stories of children attempting to piece together their family histories reveal this dynamic as they become sites for convening democratic publics and critiquing transitional politics.
As Zoë Wicomb observes in “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa” (1998), the country's history of miscegenation has been silenced by the very people whom the practice has created: “it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse” (Wicomb quoted by Attridge & Jolly 1998:92). In chronicling the ways in which the color bar was constantly and continually being subverted through interracial couplings, Kafka's Curse (Dangor 1997) works to challenge the silence surrounding miscegenation as well as the idea that pure categories of race could even exist. But the categories must not be ignored altogether. Kafka's Curse cautions against a total rejection of attachment to origins, obscure, distant or elusive as those origins may be. It must be the project of the new South African literature to examine the role of ethnic identification in nation‐building, and to consider how “remembrance” can be harnessed toward it.
The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001) 111-143
When Ratunya Mochi opened her eyes on the second day—still wracked with cholera and a disease of scabs on her arms and legs—she had no idea that where she lay was Africa. . . . She had barely survived a forced journey of six months from . . . a village near Hyderabad. . . . She looked into the faces of the family crowded around her, sold also into sugar slavery, . . . and murmured that she had decided to die.
—Ashwin Desai, Arise Ye Coolies
I am Majiet from Ahmedabbat, a prince among princely people. But through our land strut soldiers of the British RAJ. . . . They burnt my home down. Ransacked the mosque in my village. And searched, even under the fallen folds of Indian women. . . . I shipped out on a Portuguese trader. Goa, Cairo, Delagoa Bay. Until one winter morning we arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. . . . I came as a slave.
—Achmat Dangor, Majiet—A Play
These two vignettes—of Indians in slavery in South Africa—are striking for several reasons. In the first place, they depict slaves in South Africa, rare in fictional as in historiographical narratives and almost nonexistent in popular accounts. Unlike African American writing on the Black Atlantic, which includes canonized narratives of capture, slavery, and liberation, South African accounts of slavery, fictional, historical, and otherwise, are few. In the second place, even more astonishing, these vignettes portray Indians as slaves, whose journey to the place navigators called the Cape of Storms followed what might be called a “Black Indian” route, with ports of call from Madras and Goa in India, to Mauritius and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and to the Cape of Storms (or of Good Hope), where Indian and Atlantic Oceans collide. The first scene, a fictionalized depiction that opens an otherwise nonfiction account of Indians in South Africa, takes as its point of reference the standard account of arrival, in which Indians were brought by the British to the colony of Natal on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa, as they were to the British “West Indies” as indentured laborers (mostly employed on sugar plantations), but departs from that account by calling the workers slaves, arguing that many were captured rather than coming of their own accord. The second scene, from a play named for a Muslim Indian slave, which juxtaposes present-day homeless people with slaves owned by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century and kept in the Company Slave Lodge (now the South African Cultural Museum), depicts the life of one such slave; it debunks what one Cape Muslim historian has called the “myth of the 1860 settlers,” the presumption that there were no Indians in South Africa before the SS Truro arrived at Durban Harbor in 1860, carrying mostly Tamil- and Telugu-speaking Hindus from southern India. These indentured laborers were followed by “passenger Indians,” Muslim and some Hindu traders mostly from Gujarat (northwestern India) who, like similar migrants to British East Africa and the island of Mauritius, had the means to pay their way and the desire to attain middle-class, even white, status through capital investment and self-representation as “Arabs.” The notion of a clearly demarcated arrival of an intact body of Indians has been matched by an almost willful ignorance of the fact that the majority of first-generation slaves brought by the Dutch to the seventeenth-century Cape Colony were from Bengal and Madras rather than Malaya, as is still commonly supposed.
The setting of the scene in the play also challenges an equally pervasive myth from the Cape, which holds that present-day Cape Muslims are the descendants of “Malay” slaves and exiles rather than, as the historical record shows, the issue of a heterogeneous group of people who were brought by the Dutch primarily from the Indian coasts and the Indies archipelago and only rarely from the Malay Peninsula and whose first languages ranged from Javanese and Malay to Bengali and Kannada, even though many slaves and traders (Arabs, Gujaratis, and Europeans) used the regional trade language Melayu as a lingua franca...
Johannesburg: Pan MacMillan
- Achmat Dangor
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- Annie Devenish
Odyssey to Freedom: A Memoir by the World-Renowned Human Rights Advocate, Friend and Lawyer to Nelson Mandela. Houghton: Random House
- George Bizos
Kafka’s Curse: A Novella & Three Other Stories. Cape Town: Kwela
- Achmat Dangor
Bitter Fruit. Cape Town: Kwela
- Achmat Dangor
The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela
- Sisonke Msimang
Almost, Both, Neither: Fragmented Identities in Contemporary Black-to-Jewish Passing Literature
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- Brenna Munro
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- Busani Ngcaweni
A Reflection: Searching for Winnie’s Legacy.” Daily Maverick
- Rebecca Redelmeier
Reconsiderations: South African Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture
- Ronit Frenkel
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- Robert Kirby
Youth Inspired Anew by an Icon They Barely Knew.” Daily Maverick
- Nkateko Mabasa
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- Lester Venter
Horrelpoot. Cape Town: Tafelberg
- Eben Venter