Novelists From South Africa

"To hear, after nine years, that they had found a child that might be yours, was not news that you could take lightly. And if it was the child they had found, only the Lord in Heaven could know how he had got over the mountain to the Long Kloof."

"The women are experts at waiting - for husbands, for rain, for unborn children."

"In the foyer of the offices of the petroleum company where Isaac worked, a woman with tired, bleached hair and the face of a painted wax doll accidentally left near a fire and then hastily retrieved, kept guard in the little telephone exchange behind polished plate glass and mahogany."

"All along the path into the village we encountered rebel militiamen – barefooted, wearing ragged uniforms, carrying rifles and bandoliers. They were obviously locals recruited from surrounding villages. This was rebel territory, and men like these, who seemed to flit in and out of the bush like shadows, dispersing at will, were the very foundation of the revolution. It was this shadowy existence that allowed them to survive incursions by the military. The women were no different: they milled around us, full of curiosity, babies in one arm and a rifle on the other. Their needs were simple. They were men and women who had spent their lives surviving in the forest and who knew that environment better than anyone else. They needed very little to flourish there, and could subsist on berries and whatever small creatures the forest floor offered. Because families like these endured incessant harassment and even bombardment from military forces, they were able to cope with extreme hardship. They owned nothing, except what they could roll into a small bundle and carry with them."

"The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and otherwise irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive."

"It was once said that religion explains in terms of agents what science explains in terms of processes."

"It galled him that anybody should think him inferior."

"Things in the country moved at a snail's pace, but they did arrive in the end, and when they did they would crash in fury over people's heads"

"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."

"In one convulsive moment Zenzile died."

"Yet, he knew that he did not understand anything about the place or its people or its problems."

"And we do not want passes. They have enslaved our men—and we do not want to carry them."

"He said it all depended on his employer; but what did his employer know about her, or her body or their need for a baby? How could he plan their life without them?"

"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"

"And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement."

"The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!"

"Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!"

"Bohm’s solution was simple and logical. We have been wrongly interpreting the nature of matter and the universe itself. The message never travelled across space and time at all because both these constructs are an illusion brought about by the brain. In fact the two particles were really one particle all the time and as such they both ‘knew’ what was happening to each of them."

"We are all God's children.....Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren."

"Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth."

"My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture."

"What is it that is troubling you? You’re young, but your eyes are old."

"An ostrich took a mate for life. It was their nature. Why try and mess up nature? Was the new prosperity not enough for them? …Where would it end?"

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways."

"...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined."

"...the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. In the old days - taking one aspect of the matter - there were colonists who, like the Biblical patriarchs or monarchs, had their official and their unofficial households, their white wives and their Hottentot hand-maids. But they used their slave-women as Abraham used Hagar rather than as Solomon used the Shulamite."

"Get your hands to work, Selling, none of us can understand it."

"For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write."

"Trouble. There’s always trouble.’ He spoke as if trouble was something he experienced all the time, but trouble was a stranger to her."

"No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens."

"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"

"So I am not exactly sure what I imagine and what I remember. Is there a difference? Not much, if you ask me."

"My education had equipped me to suffer in silence, a form of passive endurance. Even though I know nothing about being brave, I soon realised that self-denial was like self-immolation. It was a state of stasis that relieved one of the responsibility to change things."

"In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…"

"It didn’t matter which side you were on. It was an empty, cavernous world in which young boys groped around in the dark, dreading the next step, which might be on a landmine or into a booby trap. It was a world of death. No one came out of it unscathed. It was a world with only one law: kill or be killed."

"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"

"Violence our language. A land hostile, empty, strange: it does not talk back, remains inaccessible. Which forces this violence from us,its motive achingly pure. On and one we move through the evermore arid landscape, sowing destruction as we go (....) An orgy of blood (...) with the single purpose of leaving on that virgin barren place the scrawl of our progress. We were here to acquire, to conquer, to have, to possess: I have therefore I am. Land, you are woman. Woman, you are mine."

"I believe more and more that as a man I owe it to herat least to try to understand what makes her a person, an individual,what defines her as a woman."

"Attempt new strategies which will convert previous defeats into victory."

"How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to leave their mark on a woman's body. As if despair lies behind it, and fear, (..) In each theneed, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave his mark. And only her body available for their inscription."

"She did what no one had thought possible."

"Uncovers the dark places into which we may fear to look."

"Even during the days and nights when she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (There is no pain and no badness,) she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in her ear, that a story cannot cure."

"...flotsam from the fatherland."

"Specific silences imposed by certain historical conjunctions."

"These damnable laws which dictate to you where, and next to whom, you shall walk, sit, stand and lie... This whole abominable nauseating business of toilets and "separate but equal facilities"... What is one to do anyway? One is forever in a trap from which there is no escape... except suicide..."

"My handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands, but also my soul."

"[t]hrough perceiving the world as a story to be told and endlessly reshaped, I would argue, the reader is actually encouraged to act upon the world (..) literature becomes more, not less, potent"

"Don't call me Nanny, your Nanny is looking after your kids at your house."