Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001009
J. Kumwenda
Creating a situation that is beyond the ordinary stems from the author’s desire to create utopia amidst the engulfing dystopia and the search for relevant aesthetics to satisfy that desire. It therefore requires the reader to unravel the illogical through which such texts create their meanings and assert their ideologies. Using the case of Legson Kayira’s writing, this paper observes that the surreal takes many dimensions and is the main vehicle for expressing ideology among many African writers in the sense that the dominant narratives and counter-narratives of the texts are aligned with it. As such, whether a text is wholly surrealist or merely informed by the surrealist mode of expression, there is a particular logic that is shrouded in the illogical, the extraordinary and the impractical. I draw on Legson Kayira’s Jingala (1967) and The Detainee (1974) to show how these texts rely on the surreal as the main vehicle for interrogating the postcolonial African reality and positing the author’s ideology.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001012
Y. Owuor
The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That the world, its presumptions and assumptions, certainly regarding civilizational apotheosis, is today in a state of befuddlement is no mystery. What is mysterious is the persistence of hollow ideas of the character of relationships among peoples, and the distribution of terminologies to refer to these—first world, third world, developed, undeveloped, colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, immigrant, expatriate—in a time when these neither make sense nor offer anything meaningful to the world. The essay finally retreats to the ‘autopsy table’ for inspiration: it imagines that the contradictions and confusions of the present era could also be read as an invitation to humanity to ‘look at itself again and really see’, and to, perhaps, this time, do so with that long-absent courage, truthfulness and humility that speak to human realities and allows for an examination of debris from unexplored past and present relationships that now disorder the human future.
{"title":"Reading Our Ruins","authors":"Y. Owuor","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That the world, its presumptions and assumptions, certainly regarding civilizational apotheosis, is today in a state of befuddlement is no mystery. What is mysterious is the persistence of hollow ideas of the character of relationships among peoples, and the distribution of terminologies to refer to these—first world, third world, developed, undeveloped, colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, immigrant, expatriate—in a time when these neither make sense nor offer anything meaningful to the world. The essay finally retreats to the ‘autopsy table’ for inspiration: it imagines that the contradictions and confusions of the present era could also be read as an invitation to humanity to ‘look at itself again and really see’, and to, perhaps, this time, do so with that long-absent courage, truthfulness and humility that speak to human realities and allows for an examination of debris from unexplored past and present relationships that now disorder the human future.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78144860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001010
Anas Tabraiz
This article connects the disparate references to India in Coetzee’s writings to his core debate on ethics. Coetzee’s novels are in dialogue with the Western philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that privileges an intersubjective reality over the reality of the objective world. This tradition sees the common Indians, and the natives of colonies, indifferently poised at the threshold of humanity. Being barely human these indifferent multitudes are seen as dispensable objects devoid of ethical claims. Coetzee’s metafiction highlights the ways in which the intersubjective community uses language and signification to produce a closed consensual reality against the open truths of the objective world. Coetzee’s snippets from India interweave the reality of a world oblivious to Western sentience and cognition. His efforts at pulling the obscure into the divine light of the rational community becomes comparable to drawing the divine seed to fertilize an abandoned and banished version of the Eternal Feminine.
{"title":"Drawing the Divine Seed","authors":"Anas Tabraiz","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article connects the disparate references to India in Coetzee’s writings to his core debate on ethics. Coetzee’s novels are in dialogue with the Western philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition that privileges an intersubjective reality over the reality of the objective world. This tradition sees the common Indians, and the natives of colonies, indifferently poised at the threshold of humanity. Being barely human these indifferent multitudes are seen as dispensable objects devoid of ethical claims. Coetzee’s metafiction highlights the ways in which the intersubjective community uses language and signification to produce a closed consensual reality against the open truths of the objective world. Coetzee’s snippets from India interweave the reality of a world oblivious to Western sentience and cognition. His efforts at pulling the obscure into the divine light of the rational community becomes comparable to drawing the divine seed to fertilize an abandoned and banished version of the Eternal Feminine.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89768295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001008
Marie Kruger
Constitution Hill, a unique and hybrid memorial site in the centre of Johannesburg, commemorates the violence of apartheid in the city’s infamous prison complex. Based on a series of workshops with former inmates and prison staff, the permanent exhibitions emphasize the importance of personal objects and testimonials for understanding the human rights violations of the past and their significance for the present and the future. In response to Yvonne Owuor’s appeal to remember the vulnerability of those human bodies who no one “[has] bothered to mention, to mourn”, my article attempts to map a new path towards responsible forms of spectatorship as we walk through the former Women’s Jail and listen to the witness accounts of Deborah Matshoba and Nolundi Ntamo.
{"title":"Witnessing the Ruins of Apartheid","authors":"Marie Kruger","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Constitution Hill, a unique and hybrid memorial site in the centre of Johannesburg, commemorates the violence of apartheid in the city’s infamous prison complex. Based on a series of workshops with former inmates and prison staff, the permanent exhibitions emphasize the importance of personal objects and testimonials for understanding the human rights violations of the past and their significance for the present and the future. In response to Yvonne Owuor’s appeal to remember the vulnerability of those human bodies who no one “[has] bothered to mention, to mourn”, my article attempts to map a new path towards responsible forms of spectatorship as we walk through the former Women’s Jail and listen to the witness accounts of Deborah Matshoba and Nolundi Ntamo.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72640635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001011
Michael Green
In this creative/critical paper, a recent migrant to the UK attempts to negotiate ideas of Africanness and Englishness through the rewriting of places linked by a statue in a small Northumberland village commemorating the death of a local officer killed in the ‘Anglo-Boer War.’ Drawing on two recent and influential theoretical developments, the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences and the ‘spectral turn’ in cultural criticism, this paper is a ficto-critical experiment in finding an appropriate creative form to test the generic implications of the major, and yet largely still unreflected, issue of migration and immigration/emigration in post-apartheid writing. It explores the unsettling ways in which places are not so much geographically fixed as implicated within complex circuits at once contingent and the product of material relations of power.
{"title":"Ghosting Through Our Ruins","authors":"Michael Green","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this creative/critical paper, a recent migrant to the UK attempts to negotiate ideas of Africanness and Englishness through the rewriting of places linked by a statue in a small Northumberland village commemorating the death of a local officer killed in the ‘Anglo-Boer War.’ Drawing on two recent and influential theoretical developments, the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences and the ‘spectral turn’ in cultural criticism, this paper is a ficto-critical experiment in finding an appropriate creative form to test the generic implications of the major, and yet largely still unreflected, issue of migration and immigration/emigration in post-apartheid writing. It explores the unsettling ways in which places are not so much geographically fixed as implicated within complex circuits at once contingent and the product of material relations of power.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78717618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001007
S. David
When the Nigeria-Biafra civil war ended in July 1970, the Commander in Chief of the Federal Army, General Yakubu Gowon, declared that there was “no victor no vanquished” and, consequently, drew an iron curtain on a painful historical moment. This closure foreclosed further engagements with the events of the war in a manner that imposed a “code of silence” on its historiography. However, in the face of this silence and the silencing of public remembrances, private remembrances have continued to bloom. And in recent times, these remembrance(s) have fertilized a virulent demand for secession. I argue that literary accounts of the conflict question its ‘closure’ through what I call ‘lack of return.’ Relying on Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela’s conception of narratives as spaces of healing, I engage in a close reading of one fictional account—Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy—and two memoirs—Achebe’s There Was a Country and Chukwurah’s The Last Train to Biafra—to examine how narratives of Biafra call attention to the persistent freshness of the wounds and trauma of the war by creating stories that lack denouement. I find that in these texts, the silencing of ordnance doesn’t herald a return home—whether spatially or mentally. Consequently, these stories could be read as palimpsests that reveal a need for spaces of narrative engagements, abreaction, and healing.
尼日利亚-比夫拉内战于1970年7月结束时，联邦军总司令雅库布·戈文将军宣布“没有胜利者也没有被征服者”，从而为痛苦的历史时刻画上了铁幕。这种关闭阻止了对战争事件的进一步接触，以一种对其历史编纂施加“沉默准则”的方式。然而，面对这种沉默和公众记忆的沉默，私人记忆继续绽放。最近，这些记忆助长了分裂的恶毒要求。我认为，通过我所谓的“缺乏回报”，对这场冲突的文学描述质疑了它的“终结”。依靠Van der Merwe和Gobodo-Madikizela关于叙事作为治愈空间的概念，我仔细阅读了一个虚构的故事——saro - wiwa的《sozaboi》——和两部回忆录——achebe的《有一个国家》和Chukwurah的《前往比夫拉的最后一列火车》——来研究比夫拉的叙事是如何通过创造缺乏结局的故事来唤起人们对战争创伤的持久关注的。我发现，在这些文本中，军械的沉寂并不预示着回家——无论是在空间上还是在精神上。因此，这些故事可以被解读为重写，揭示了对叙事参与、发泄和治愈空间的需求。
{"title":"Lack of Return in Nigeria-Biafra Civil War Literature","authors":"S. David","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 When the Nigeria-Biafra civil war ended in July 1970, the Commander in Chief of the Federal Army, General Yakubu Gowon, declared that there was “no victor no vanquished” and, consequently, drew an iron curtain on a painful historical moment. This closure foreclosed further engagements with the events of the war in a manner that imposed a “code of silence” on its historiography. However, in the face of this silence and the silencing of public remembrances, private remembrances have continued to bloom. And in recent times, these remembrance(s) have fertilized a virulent demand for secession. I argue that literary accounts of the conflict question its ‘closure’ through what I call ‘lack of return.’ Relying on Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela’s conception of narratives as spaces of healing, I engage in a close reading of one fictional account—Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy—and two memoirs—Achebe’s There Was a Country and Chukwurah’s The Last Train to Biafra—to examine how narratives of Biafra call attention to the persistent freshness of the wounds and trauma of the war by creating stories that lack denouement. I find that in these texts, the silencing of ordnance doesn’t herald a return home—whether spatially or mentally. Consequently, these stories could be read as palimpsests that reveal a need for spaces of narrative engagements, abreaction, and healing.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90924646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001002
H. Wittenberg
{"title":"Obituary of Michael Wessels (1958–2018)","authors":"H. Wittenberg","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79198055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001005
M. Wessels
Zakes Mda’s novel She Plays with the Darkness has been characterised as a magical realist novel. It is notable, though, that the magical elements are reserved almost exclusively for the sections of the novel that relate to the major character, Dikosha, and her world of music, art and dance. Central to this world are the Barwa, better known as the Bushmen or San. This article is chiefly concerned with the novel’s representation of Dikosha’s relationship with the Barwa. It also examines the depiction of the Barwa way of life and the symbolic resonance they possess for the present.
{"title":"Separating the Magical from the Real","authors":"M. Wessels","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Zakes Mda’s novel She Plays with the Darkness has been characterised as a magical realist novel. It is notable, though, that the magical elements are reserved almost exclusively for the sections of the novel that relate to the major character, Dikosha, and her world of music, art and dance. Central to this world are the Barwa, better known as the Bushmen or San. This article is chiefly concerned with the novel’s representation of Dikosha’s relationship with the Barwa. It also examines the depiction of the Barwa way of life and the symbolic resonance they possess for the present.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83519292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001004
S. Viljoen
This hybrid autobiographical/critical paper takes its cue from Yvonne Owuor’s paper in this volume, “Reading our Ruins: A Rough Sketch.” In her piece, Owuor combines a meditation on ruins—as physical, human, social and political—with the perspective of an autopsy, or “seeing for oneself”. In my paper I try to “see for myself” and in myself what it means to consider the ruins of District Six and the responses, individual and institutional, to its violent destruction. More specifically, I try to account for a recent oral history project completed by the District Six Museum which resulted in the writing of a food story and cookbook, District Six Huis Kombuis Tafel: Food and Memory Stories Cookbook (2016). My paper intersperses this critical account with italicised fragments of my own memoir (a work in progress) on District Six, apartheid’s psychic violence, home and food, that relate directly or tangentially to the critical segments. The memoir fragments provide a parallel tale of inner life that at times relates to and supplements the critical discourse, but also at times casts it into doubt.
{"title":"Writing out of Ruins","authors":"S. Viljoen","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This hybrid autobiographical/critical paper takes its cue from Yvonne Owuor’s paper in this volume, “Reading our Ruins: A Rough Sketch.” In her piece, Owuor combines a meditation on ruins—as physical, human, social and political—with the perspective of an autopsy, or “seeing for oneself”. In my paper I try to “see for myself” and in myself what it means to consider the ruins of District Six and the responses, individual and institutional, to its violent destruction. More specifically, I try to account for a recent oral history project completed by the District Six Museum which resulted in the writing of a food story and cookbook, District Six Huis Kombuis Tafel: Food and Memory Stories Cookbook (2016). My paper intersperses this critical account with italicised fragments of my own memoir (a work in progress) on District Six, apartheid’s psychic violence, home and food, that relate directly or tangentially to the critical segments. The memoir fragments provide a parallel tale of inner life that at times relates to and supplements the critical discourse, but also at times casts it into doubt.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74836737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-14DOI: 10.1163/18757421-05001014
Frank Schulze–Engler
{"title":"Geoffrey V. Davis (1943–2018)—In Memory of a Roving Scholar","authors":"Frank Schulze–Engler","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05001014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85233467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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