The system of racial discrimination that persisted in South Africa during much of the 20th century is an inexhaustible source of inspiration or evocation for writers, journalists and essayists who have taken that historical period as a basis for their stories. On the 12th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death, we recover some of them in a selection that, by necessity, is neither exhaustive nor thorough.
If literature is a fruitful way of learning, as the Nobel Prize winner in Literature Abadelrazak Gurnah defended in his speech accepting his doctorate honoris causa by the University of Lleida, it may be that apartheid It is one of the historical processes that has generated the greatest volume of knowledge in recent decades. Can we, therefore, know through books what the relationship between whites and blacks was like in South Africa in the 19th century? apartheid? And what was it like after the 1994 elections? Will we be able to unravel whether the changes that occurred took root in the spirit of South Africans? Or were they just cosmetics?
Damon Galgut centers The promise (Asteroid Books, 2022) in a white family. The Swarts live on the outskirts of Pretoria. Upon the mother’s death, the children consider whether or not to fulfill the commitment their father made so that Salome, the black woman who took care of them throughout their lives, inherits the house in which they lived all that time. But this plot also helps us glimpse the formal changes in the country after Mandela came to power. Anton, one of the sons, on his way to the family farm, sees the Union buildings, headquarters of the Executive: «I wonder if Mandela is there now, in his office. From the cell to the throne, I never thought I would see something like this.
Long before Galgut, Nadine Gordimer proposed in July’s people (Círculo de Lectores, 1988) a world turned upside down. Faced with the riots that were shaking the country, July, the black servant of a white family opposed to the system of privileges, suggests that the Smales couple move with him to their hometown. The personality of the domestic worker mutates and the comfort and status of the family fades. Gordimer pays attention to the small details: «I didn’t have a nail file; “She often sat examining her broken nails, removing the dirt from under them, as she did now, with a piece of wire.”
The Nobel Prize winner in Literature JM Coetzee with his autobiographical works Childhood, Youth and Summer (Debolsillo, 2004, 2004 and 2011, respectively), he portrayed himself, but also the circumstances that surrounded him. In Summer reads an entry dated May 31, 1975: “At this point the police and those who direct them (like hunters direct packs of dogs) have more or less freedom to do what they want.”
Personal experience permeates one of the last contributions (if not the last) to this look at the South Africa of segregation. The work is signed by José Carlos Rodríguez Soto in the News Now Nigeria Editorial (2025): Insubordinates. A mixed marriage in South Africa, heir to the apartheid. The author traces the life of Phillip, a member of a prosperous white family, and Hazel, from the province of Limpopo, where she grew up in a humble environment. Although they married after 1994, their story was forged in a context in which marriages between whites and blacks were prohibited (it is necessary to remember here Forbidden to be born, by Trevor Noah –Blackie Books, 2017–, who has appeared on these pages at various times).
One of the emerging South African writers, Kopano Matlwa, tells in coconut nut (Alpha Decay, 2020) how the lives of its two protagonists, Ofilwe and Fikile, converge and repel each other in the years after the fall of the apartheid. The first, to which this volume owes its title, is a coconutblack on the outside and white on the inside. Member of a black family that has prospered, which has chosen to educate its children in schools that were previously forbidden territory only for whites, Ofilwe does not know how to deal with black people. The second, a resident of a ghetto, aspires to be like her friend. In this struggle for identity, one of the scars of South Africa can be seen. post-apartheidthe difference in class, although there is no difference in skin color. Ofilwe’s parents, in the middle of a family argument, remind her where she needs to look: “Now you need to start surrounding yourself with the right kind of people.”
The question is not trivial: what is the right kind of people? We will have to read to reach a conclusion.
