as a phase of events, an identifiable period, is, as Titlestad suggests, marked by routine indeterminacy, in which a ready-to-hand telos gets twisted out of shape and doubles back on itself. Dialectically, the conceptual nexus suggested by the term ‘transition’, including its wayward temporality and deep ambiguity, has proved useful in critiquing popular rainbow discourse. It has broadly served as a kind of grammar for contextualising contentious events, culminating in the corrupt crony-capitalist administration of Jacob Zuma, and the concomitant economic empowerment of party loyalists. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the country swings between extremes of optimism and disappointment. The events of 1994 were nothing less than epochal. Uniquely, more than 350 years of bloody contestation over land and resources, over power and ideology, seemed to be settled in a way that was acceptable to everyone, both inside and outside the country. A violent revolution was forestalled, disaster averted. There could be no doubting the historic shift, the switch to democracy. South African Air Force jets performing a fly-past at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as head of state in Pretoria on 10 May 1994 signalled the birth of a new South Africa, and people all over the world bore witness to an event that many had long believed impossible. The seeming loss of such a wondrous breakthrough, its gradual dismantling, and the subsequent critique and lamentations constitute a churn in which postapartheid and its subjects remain entrapped.
The reclamation of narrative
If the ‘forward march’ version of transition has been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place, then one of the unambiguous success stories emerging from the transition is the restorative value of story itself, or, more broadly speaking, narrative. In postapartheid writing, a great diversity of form and content emerges, constituting a body of work that is itself significantly transformed, despite its subject matter often being about the failures of transformation. This is a key point. For, regardless of the perceived loss of plot in political and social terms, the space of postapartheid is one in which a great many voices have found their pitch in public discourse, in more conventional as well as new media forms. Such speaking out, self-validation and identity reclamation, not to mention public position-taking (or posturing), is surely one of the most notable achievements of postapartheid writing, and of the ‘silent revolution’ in general.
Njabulo Ndebele’s essay ‘Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative’ underlines the regenerative power of story, and the link between testimony, memory and narrative. ‘Time has given the recall of memory the power of reflection associated with narrative’ (‘Memory’ 20), Ndebele argues. This reflective capacity, ‘experienced as a shared social consciousness’, is posited as the ‘lasting legacy of the stories of the TRC’ (20) – one that gives ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’ (20), and functions as an ‘additional confirmation of the movement of our society from repression to expression’ (20). Whereas the state attempted, in the apartheid era, ‘to compel the oppressed to deny the testimony of their own experience, today that experience is one of the essential conditions for the emergence of a new national consciousness’, Ndebele writes, adding that ‘[t]hese stories may very well be some of the first steps in the rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (20).
Ndebele here captures one of the core impulses of transitional and post-transitional narrative in general: the restoration of ‘legitimacy and authority’ to previously silenced voices, and the emergence of a ‘new national consciousness’. In concluding his essay, he argues that a ‘major spin-off’ resulting from the ‘stories of the TRC’ is the ‘restoration of narrative’. He sees this event as a rare opportunity to take narrative beyond testimony, towards imaginatively creating what he calls ‘new thoughts and new worlds’ (28). Writing in the year 2000, Ndebele sets a challenging agenda for postapartheid writing as a whole. The criterion, as he sees it, is that the narratives resulting from ‘a search for meanings’ (20) in the wake of apartheid ‘may have less and less to do with the facts themselves and with their recall than with the revelation of meaning through the imaginative combination of those facts’ (21, emphasis added); for, at that point, Ndebele writes, ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21).
It is striking that Ndebele’s sense of the imagination follows an arc that traverses fiction and nonfiction, testimony and invention, fact and fable. Accordingly, postapartheid’s many sources of (formerly muted) self-expression and storytelling condense into metaphor, into an imaginative amalgam, whether the writing is autobiography or poetry, whether it bears witness to or fictionalises a lived reality; the pressing need is an imaginative reconstruction of experience via memory, which has regenerative ‘moral import’. This proves a testing criterion as many works engage in a ‘search for new meanings’.
In particular, the capacity for newfound self-affirmation, the recuperation of formerly repressed and often still-marginalised voices, positions and identities, has been one of the more emphatic, and unambiguously affirmative, yields of postapartheid literary culture. A culture of authentic self-expression in response to centuries of patriarchy and racism has emerged, as evidenced by a work such as Samuelson’s Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Andrew van der Vlies argues that ‘Samuelson’s project ... is informed by a desire to “restore” to these historical women [Krotoa-Eva, Nongqawuse and Sarah Baartman] some of their strangeness and challenging heterogeneity, that which does not necessarily serve the purposes of normative, naturalising national discourses’ (954). Similarly, Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is Slavery to Me? seeks to problematise appropriations of slave heritage in order to reconfigure group identity, just as Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims tracks South African cultural expressions of Muslim identity. The reclamation or recuperation of formerly repressed identities and subject positions, coincident with the transition and its aftermath, also involves the politics of appropriation and the dangers of being subsumed into larger, newly repressive, or normalising, narratives. In an important sense, the post-transitional literary-cultural sphere is a locus of contending scripts, characterised by keen vigilance about who speaks for, and about, whom, and under what authority.
If there is a golden, affirmative thread in postapartheid writing, one might find it in narrative reclamations of identity, the excavation of buried or repressed selves, in unfolding self-expression. Such speaking out satisfies, in spirit at least, Ndebele’s vision of narrative as giving ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’, confirming the ‘rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (‘Memory’ 20). Further, as Ndebele notes, it is the revelation of meaning through the ‘imaginative combination of ... facts’ (21) so that ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21) that is important. Hence the prevalence of memoir-type or confessional/autobiographical writing by a wide range of South African subjects, whether from township streets or prisons – or universities. Indeed, academics are more likely nowadays to write their own variants of memoiristic witnessing or reflection than pen ‘appreciations’ of ‘great writers’, as earlier generations were inclined to do. Notable recent examples of this trend include Stephen Clingman’s Birthmark, Mamphela Ramphele’s A Life, Steven Robins’s Letters of Stone and Leslie Swartz’s Able-Bodied. Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael argue that the ‘flourishing of the autobiographical voice has emerged alongside the powerful informing context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it is also a symptom of the decompression, relaxation, and cacophony of the post-apartheid moment in general’ (298). They contend that the ‘autobiographical act’ is ‘more than a literary convention’; it ‘has become a cultural activity’. In a multiplicity of forms, including ‘memoir, reminiscence, confession, testament, case history and personal journalism’, such ‘biographical acts or cultural occasions’ see narrators take up ‘models of identity that have become widely available’; these have ‘pervaded the culture of the 1990s and have spread into the new century’ (298). Nuttall and Michael continue:
Particularly since the political transition of 1994, personal disclosure has become a part of a revisionary impulse,
