Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. The Interpreters is a new book that collects the work of 37 authors, all of it writing (plus some drawing) concerned with actual people, places and events.
The anthology is the product of many years of reading and discussion between my co-editor Sean Christie (an experienced journalist and nonfiction author) and me (a writer and professor who teaches literature, including creative nonfiction).
The book is a work of homage to the many strains of ambitious and artful writing that shelter within the unhelpful term “nonfiction”. These include: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony.
To give an idea of the range, energy and risk of the pieces collected in the anthology, here I discuss five of them.
1. Fighting Shadows by Lidudumalingani
We debated for a long time which piece to start the anthology with, and ultimately went for this one, which begins:
One afternoon my father and the other boys from the Zikhovane village decided to walk across a vast landscape, two valleys and a river, to a village called Qombolo to disrupt a wedding.
It’s a quietly compelling opening. First of all, there is intrigue: why the disruption? It could also easily be the first sentence of a novel (maybe even one by famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe). And so we begin with a reminder of how storytelling is such a deep, ancient and fundamental part of societies – an impulse that long predates writing and moves across and beyond the fiction/nonfiction divide. (Lidudumalingani won the 2016 Caine Prize for a short story, so he works across both.)
Fighting Shadows is about the tradition of stick fighting, and how it’s transported from rural areas to urban ones. But it’s also about so much more, about “the dance between then and now”, as the writer puts it later on. The prose is so deft and graceful, as if the author is trying to match the “dance” of expert stick fighters with his own verbal arts. For me it’s a story that could only have emerged from this part of the world: it has a distinct voice, precision and poetry to it.
2. The End of a Conversation by Julie Nxadi
This is the shortest piece in the anthology, but for me one of the most affecting. It traces how a young girl comes to realise that the (white) family she is being brought up with are not really her family. She is the daughter of the housekeeper, the domestic worker:
I was not ‘the kids’. I was not their kin.
It’s probably best described as autofiction, a kind of writing that lies somewhere in the borderlands between autobiography and fiction. Nxadi has spoken of how she decided to write in a way that contained her own life story – the “heartbreak” of that moment – but was also able to carry and represent the experience of others who had gone through something similar.
The piece is also a product of the #FeesMustFall student protests (2015 onwards), when many young South Africans felt able to share unresolved, awkward or shameful stories for the first time.
The End of a Conversation is such a deft, wise and subtle handling of a difficult subject, with no easy targets or easy resolutions. Somehow the writer has found just the right distance – emotionally and aesthetically – from this moment of childhood realisation.
3. South African Pastoral by William Dicey
I co-own a pear farm with my brother. I attend to finances and labour relations, he oversees the growing of the fruit.
This essay by William Dicey thinks hard, very hard, about what it means to manage a fruit farm in the Boland (an agricultural region still shaped by South Africa’s divided past). It is one of the most frank and unflinching accounts of land and labour I’ve ever come across. The writer makes the point that he could easily have stayed in the city, lived in “liberal” circles and not thought about these issues much.
But becoming a farmer confronts him with all kinds of difficult questions (How much should he intervene in the lives of his employees? In family and financial planning, in matters of alcohol abuse?) as he is drawn into an awkward but meaningful intimacy with others on the farm.
The US essayist Philip Lopate suggests that scepticism is often the tool for moving towards truth in personal nonfiction writing:
So often the “plot” of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defences toward deeper levels of honesty.
This is very much what happens in South African Pastoral, and why it is such a mesmerising piece (even while written in such a plain and restrained style).
4. Hard Rock by Mogorosi Motshumi
My co-editor said from the start we should include graphic nonfiction (drawn stories and comics) and I’m so grateful he did. Mogorosi Motshumi’s warm, zany but also harrowing account is about coming of age under apartheid and then the heady days of the 1990s transition.
In his early career, Motshumi was widely known for his comic strips and political cartooning, but this graphic autobiography is far more ambitious. The style of drawing changes and evolves as the protagonist gets older; also, there is something intriguing about seeing weighty subjects like detention, disability, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS stigma approached through the eyes of a wry cartoonist with a keen sense of the absurd.
Hard Rock is a prologue to the graphic nonfiction memoir that he has been working on for many years, the 360 Degrees Trilogy. The first two instalments have appeared – The Initiation (2016) and Jozi Jungle (2022) – and I would urge anyone to seek them out. Mogorosi’s work is a major achievement in South African autobiography and life writing (or life “drawing”).
5. The Interpreters by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele
This co-authored piece is what gave the anthology its name. The Interpreters is a reflection on being a language interpreter during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (1996-1998) into gross human rights violations during white minority rule.
A series of individuals recall the challenges of that process. Sitting in glass booths in the middle of proceedings, they had to move across South Africa’s many official languages in real time, translating the words of victims, perpetrators, grieving families, lawyers and commissioners.
The chapter is also a reminder of how our English-language anthology faces the challenge of doing justice to a multilingual, multivocal society where all kinds of cultural translations happen all the time.
The piece is a blend of many people’s voices, testimonies and reminiscences. As such, it also seemed to symbolise the larger project of The Interpreters: trying to record, render and honour the many voices that make up our complex social world.
