Books for the long road
Great South African reads
September is Heritage Month. Why not take some time to relax and read great books written by four celebrated South African authors.
Intruders
Mohale Mashigo
These short stories have been described as “subversive, electric and yet achingly familiar” by fellow South African best-selling author Lauren Beukes.
The word ‘intruders’ has many synonyms - trespassers, interlopers, prowlers, invaders, encroachers - and all are present in Mashingo’s stories of unremarkable people facing extraordinary situations. Nobodies who discover that they and their worlds have significance.
The author (also born in Soweto) does not like being referred to as a representative of Afrofuturism, but has been described thus by many after reading her debut novel, The Yearning, in 2016. This novel was awarded the University of Johannesburg’s prize for South African debut writing and was long-listed for the international Dublin literary prize.
But Afrofuturism does come through in Intruders, which has also been called electric and provocative and an “exploration of real South African issues set in a future rooted in a past”.
Reading her work is a delight that starkly brings to the fore the agony of not belonging, but also the strength to face obstacles and the turmoil of the human existence.
Thirteen Cents
K Sello Duiker
This novelist, born in Orlando, Soweto, came to prominence when he was awarded The Writer’s prize for Best First Book, African Region for Thirteen Cents at the turn of the century. He wrote Thirteen Cents in just two months and soon other books, and an award, followed.
Duiker, the eldest of three brothers, grew up during the height of apartheid and was a brilliant but troubled soul. Drug abuse and psychiatric disorders led to him being institutionalised and 2005, at the age of 30, he committed suicide.
But his body of work lives on and he continues to garner praise. The new edition is the sixth impression of Thirteen Cents, a modern South African classic, which still cries out to be read. The protagonist is Azure (pronounced Ah-zoo-ray) - “a name given to me by my mother…it’s the only thing I have left from her”.
Azure has blue eyes and a dark skin and lives as an orphan under a bridge between sea and mountain in Sea Point, Cape Town. It is a hazardous life for this orphan in his early teens. He struggles against hunger, thirst and abuse. He speaks to us and tells us where to find food with not too many contaminating flies. He can smell evil, knows about the ugly things in sewers, the drug and body dealers, gangsters, the beauty of soft rain, how to watch out for policemen and how to suffer and survive brutality and prostitution, hustling and cruising the streets.
It is a disturbing book, wonderfully written.
Soweto under the apricot tree
Nic Mhlongo
Mhlongo uses the apricot trees of Soweto as the possible storytellers of life, happiness and despair. This is his second short story collection and one’s imagination is filled with wonder at the range of the author’s satirical look at life under the apricot trees.
Mhlongo is also a born Sowetan who studied journalism and writing at various universities and institutions, including during his time as Artist in Residence at the Akademie der Kῢnste der Welt in Cologne, Germany.
The vibrancy of the author’s birthplace colours his post-democratic South African writing. He looks at everything surrounding and of Soweto, from funerals to ancestors, xenophobia, beauty, misery and the bittersweet of life. Just like the fruit of the apricot.
Mhlongo writes with flair and insight, spicing his storytelling with a satirical touch that makes for intriguing and attention-grabbing reading.
The Scent of Bliss
Nthikeng Mohlele
Scent is indeed a bliss …to read and to ponder for a while. This slender volume of lyrical writing holds the reader’s attention word after word, paragraph after paragraph. The reader gets to know a mind which is self-described as “cerebral-idealistic and drawn to life though at times it is coloured by its limitations”.
It is a little book to be cherished, written by an author who feels the greatest treasure in life is to read a book turgid with ideas, feelings and secrets. The Scent of Bliss is true to all three.
