Short Story Writers From South Africa

"I'm just always writing, I think it's in my system. The time when I was busiest as a principal's wife with three children in the house, I wrote the most. I've wondered a lot how one quits. At a job you retire, but with writing?"

"My childhood was full of happiness and fun," Dricky told Naln. "Playing pop, kennetji, horseback riding, and so on were daily entertainments. And in the evening in the shiny, white moonlight, we frolicked on the sand dunes. When the summer days were oppressively hot, I often walked through the green vineyards to the river. Under the shady trees as I gazed across the gently flowing waters to the sand dunes on the other side, which held a wonderful charm for those who knew and loved them, my first imaginary reverie began. In my imagination, I imagined many a Bible story so vividly that I was unaware of my surroundings. Later, I started writing stories, but I was very modest about it and carefully kept them deep away."

"Sometimes I just hear something on the radio, in a conversation, and then it captures my imagination. It then becomes a starting point for a new story. For example, a friend told me one day that she dreamed of ripe fruit. This is how Ripe Fruit became the title of one of my books. When a framed photo of my son fell off the wall one day, the frame broke while the glass remained intact. This gave rise to the short story Glass in the Frame."

"There's always such a buzz coming over me when I'm on a farm. A farm you have to live. But you can look at the city, you don't have to live it."

"I am a Christian and deeply religious, and life is a lot of joy and beautiful things for me. I accept each day as he comes, and try to make the best of it. You don't know in advance what will come your way every day. I trust only in the Lord, because He is always with me and not my strength."

"Writing can't be done for leisure, but for me it's a joy of life and I love writing every day."

"I write recreational reading material because I feel relaxed when I write. I never think about a specific target group or a 'someone', but just write for people."

"I can write at any time of the day or night. If someone knocks on the door, I can stop typing in the middle of a sentence. I can then sit and chat and when the gas is gone, just resume waar I quit. I don't have to wait for the inspiration or the mood."

"My favourite genre remains the short story, although it is the most difficult because one has to be able to say so much with so few words. Writing books is much more difficult than for the radio, but with the radio story you work at a pace again and you simply have to write every day."

"And as if you were transported on an escalator from one floor to the other, and could not get off, so time unyieldingly transports you away from your husband's death. But the loss of a son or daughter, it pours out the sadness, also on you, no matter how long ago, it's still there, always there."

"I put my head in my hands and try to get quiet, quieter and quieter, and the thin membrane, the invisible connective tissue around the part of my brain that holds my memory, that allows me to stay focused on the present, begins to slide through - emotion makes it happen easily - and through the thready openings memory begins to come through, healing memory, slowly, in great detail, slowly, there is no rush, it must be firmly built up. From this comes self-healing."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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!"

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

"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?"

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

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

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"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."

"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."

"One could only hope that this country, which had always been poor – not through a lack of resources, but because Portugal had decided that this was to be the country’s fate- would finally develop to its full potential."

"I thought again about the contradiction Mozambique was. On the one hand there were people like Dona Maria, compassionate and caring, and on the other hand there was those who had no concern for the people in this country."

"On the way we encountered many other people: families on the move, women wearily limping along behind their men, carrying bundles on their heads and babies strapped on their backs, their children tottering alongside, dragging behind them bags and baskets overflowing with artefacts of their dislocated lives."

"The deserters and dissenters expelled from the party formed RENAMO, a rebel group committed to snatching power from FRELIMO. Supported by South Africa and Rhodesia, who did not want a socialist government on their doorsteps, RENAMO conducted a campaign of terror, destabalisation and plunder, murdered hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans. It was a tragedy and travesty of the worst kind. It was a conflict that surpassed the brutality of the war in Vietnam: RENAMO, it was said, outdid the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in cruelty, perpetrating some of the most inhumane acts against their own people, with the full knowledge, support and encouragement of Mozambique’s white-ruled neighbours."

"I just hope that it would not go the way of other independent black nations, which had allowed their resources to plundered by large foreign multinational companies and leaders hungry for wealth and power."

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

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

"David had once told me that there was no sky as totally black as the African sky, where the stars hung so low that one could almost reach out to pluck them from the heavens."

"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."

"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?"

"Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his."

"But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you . . . or you me?"

"She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss."

"The sun went and died in the west."

"Yes, Mzukulwana,’ he sighed, ‘the biggest storm is still here. It is in our hearts — the hearts of the people of this land. ‘For, let me tell you something, deep run the roots of hatred here. Deep. Deep. Deep."

"Tatomkhulu was a fund of facts that, although seemingly different, made a whole lot of sense of some of the things we learned at school. He explained what had seemed stupid decisions, and acts that had seemed indefensible became not only understandable but highly honourable."

"One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost. One girl, far away from home. The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe."

"Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter."

"Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was."