62. Innards: Stories | Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
the legacy of life under apartheid
TW // apartheid: white supremacist violence/murder; torture; death.
Friends,
The first thing I do when I land in South Africa or Namibia is find a bookshop. Books written by Southern African authors are not easy to find in the UK unless they are deemed ‘bestsellers’ by UK publishers. Those are not the books I’m interested in. I want to read non-fiction books about apartheid, life from the perspective of living in a township1, written exclusively by Black authors that I have not yet heard of.
For those unfamiliar with the history of South Africa and the violent legacy of apartheid (1948-1991), the only books readily available to us were written by white (mostly men, mostly christian) authors. Black authors writing about their experiences of apartheid were deemed to be terrorists in the eyes of the Afrikaans Nationalist Party and those books were never sold in shops.
I was absolutely delighted to find Magogodi’s book in a huge bookstore in Windhoek, Namibia where they dedicate entire sections to African authors. Not a single white author amongst them which, for someone living in the UK, was a joy to experience. I loved the cover she’d chosen and also the blurb on the back:
When was the last time you went on an adventure led by a black South African woman ready to serve you gutsy innards? Let me take you through the Soweto of my childhood, where Mandela was still in jail and apartheid threatened to swallow us whole. You'll meet a girl who goes mute after stumbling on a burning body and an old man who sells gritty gizzards from his rickety bicycle, among many resilient souls.
This is South African Makhene’s debut collection of short stories about life under and after apartheid2, largely set in the township of Soweto where she was born. These are beautiful stories but not easy to read, please heed the trigger warning at the start of this post.
'A gut punch of a collection...it astonishes as it reveals how malignant political forces can both ravage and vitalise the human spirit.' New York Times
Children feature in several heart-wrenching stories. In “Star-Coloured Tears”, a young boy returns home from a fishing trip with friends to find that his mother, an anti-apartheid activist, has been taken away by the police. In “The Caretaker”, a mother and her children are made to witness the killing of their dog at the hands of a Boer policeman. In “Black Christmas”, an 11-year-old schoolgirl stops speaking after she comes across a Black man being “necklaced” or burned alive for his suspected collusion with apartheid forces. Another thread of the story concerns the girl’s schooling within the strictures of the Bantu Education Act, dramatising clearly and forcefully how apartheid sought to induct Black South Africans into a life of subservience and manual labour.
A note on the various languages used by Magogodi in her book, by Kirkus Reviews:
Throughout the stories, Makhene peppers her prose with Dutch, Afrikaans, and South African English. Quick internet translations will reward diligent readers, but the book's most striking multilingual moments arrive when characters add their own flavour of interpretation. In “Star Coloured Tears,” a young man reflects on the word ninkumpupie, which sounds like “something you maybe drop from your mouth because it is hot inside from all the sweet potatoes you eat.”
I really wish this book had been available to me to read during my childhood in South Africa, but as they say in Afrikaans ‘beter laat as nooit’.3
Recent reads & other media
I recently visited Soweto for the first time and can highly recommend the tour I took.
Please meet Kudzanai-Violet Hwami - the Zimbabwean artist who painted the cover of Magogodi’s book.
Magogodi Makhene in conversation about her book with SABC News:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_(South_Africa)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid#:~:text=%22separateness%22%2C%20lit.,1948%20to%20the%20early%201990s.
Translated in English as ‘better late than never’.
I’ll have to pick this up asap - it sounds so great!