Essayists From South Africa

"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."

"But Sara has spent enough time in the darkness to know that you often have to remain there for a long time before you’re ready for the light again."

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

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

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

"From the day whe arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name."

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"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"

"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?"

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

"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 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?"

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

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

"What happened wasn’t a revolution. It was a deal. The creation of a new bunch of entrepreneurs who could be more easily manipulated by international capital."

"I’m busy documenting a thousand stories about Johannesburg. Oral histories? No, stories. People don’t always speak the truth."

"This is Africa, my friends … These folks do things differently. Sven Taxel, who regards himself as an expert on South Africa because he has read Wilbur Smith, Rian Malan and André Brink, tries to calm his fellow congregation members."

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

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

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

"In one convulsive moment Zenzile died."

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

"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?"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"History provides one of the most fertile silences to be revisited by South African writers because the dominant discourse of white historiography (...) has inevitably silenced, for so long,so many other possibilities."

"Attempt to grasp, with the creative imagination, the past and its silences."

"Specific silences imposed by certain historical conjunctions."

"...flotsam from the fatherland."

"Address two silences simultaneously: that created by the marginalization of women,and that effected by a (white-dominated) master-narrative of history."

"[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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"She did what no one had thought possible."

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see."

"Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets."

"This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere."

"I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish."

"I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”"

"A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power."

"I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them."

"How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!"

"Truly the world should belong to singers and dancers."

"At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach."