This thesis studies failure and disillusionment in black post apartheid South African fiction. As it officially ‘comes of age’, South Africa, like many post liberation states on the African continent, is trapped in the mire of disillusionment: there is a perception that the past continues to hold the present ransom, coupled with a recognition of a ‘newness that cannot yet be born’, to paraphrase Gramsci (276). There is thus an ongoing sense of crisis and liminality a state of in betweenness, or of being caught, both physically and psychologically, between (an unfinished) past and (an ambiguously constituted) present. Accordingly, much contempor ary post apartheid political commentary falls under the rubric of a ‘discourse of disillusionment’ a discourse that reflects the pressing concerns of what Ivan Vladislavić terms a “disenchanted democracy” (n.p). This disillusionment has elicited alternat ive (and urgent) ways of apprehending and re evaluating the ‘now’ in South Africa as has become increasingly evident in burgeoning protests about service delivery and, more recently, student activism and solidarity around the #FeesMustFall campaign and o thers. What I investigate in this thesis, however, is how the current mood of disillusionment is
reflected in literary texts by black writers, specifically. In other words, I establish the existence of a contemporary literary trajectory that speaks to the notion that, as Justice Malala puts it, “We are losing our way” (30), and explore the extent to which recent South African fictional narratives by black writers critique the triumphant (imaginary?) spectacle that was previously evoked by the notion of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. In this regard, I am particularly interested in the ways in which a spate of recent novels have turned to what might be termed ‘enchantment’ or the intangible the mystical, sacred, spiritual or spectral in their efforts to negotiate t he dis enchantment of the present, since this emerging trend constitutes a divergence from the social realism which has dominated most black South
African writing (and especially the protest tradition) in the past. I begin my discussion with with a broad, albeit brief, overview of the literature of disillusionment in the African literary canon, to locate and contextualize the current mood of disappointment in this country and, indeed, what Bhekizizwe Peterson paradoxically describes as South Africa’s “anticipatory yet already belated” relationship to Turning to black South African literature, more specifically, I trace the move from social realism to narrative modes that may be understood as antagonistic to realism. M y close
reading s of Za kes Mda’s The Hea r t of Redness [as an early Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home and Unathi Slasha’s Jah Hills , reveal an interesting turn t oward more spectral and undecidable narratives. In grappling with post liberation failure and discontentment , these primary texts not only reach into the past in order to reflect the complicated present, but also evoke spirits, ghosts and other intangible figures to narrate trauma and the crisis of an enduring sense of liminality or transition, amo ng other concerns.