Novelists From South Africa

"You write in English and already you are touching things that should not be mentioned."

"That was the heart of it there, where it was almost as light as day. I could see cars and trams clearly. And the outlines of people moving. White people. To the left, and a little towards me, was Malay Camp, an inky black spot in the sea of light. Couldn't see anything there. Dark folk move in darkness: white folk move in light. Well, Malay Camp wouldn’t be a slum if it were as light as the city. Slum is darkness. Dark folk live in darkness."

"I turned and looked at the city. A sea of twinkling, multi-colored lights leaped to the eye. They threw up the outlines of buildings. They made the wide streets shine. They spelled out advertisements. I could map the city by its lights."

"Who had given him the scholarship? The Bantu Welfare Trust? No one I asked seemed sure. I put out feelers. The Welfare Trust was only for pure-blooded Africans. And though the Africans might accept me as one of themselves, the whites who administered the trust would not. Those to whom I spoke thought it crazy, but there you are."

"Dressed in an orange sack. Three holes in the sack allowed for his head and arms to come through. About his waist was a piece of rope that gathered the sack in and made it hang like some monkish garb. He was barefooted."

"It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers"

"Dear God! Has earth a fairer land? Can there be one as fair? And if there can, can I feel for it as for this? And can my heart ever ache for the people of another with the purity it does for the people of this? The whites here sing a love song to the land, from within. Would they have me sing it from without? A little self-conscious and ashamed at the intensity of my emotions. New feelings, elusive and uncontrollable, played on my heart and mind. A need different from all the other needs I had ever known moved me to longing. And I did not know what I longed for."

"All the years of his life had been spent walking through the land; from east to west, then back; from north to south, then back."

"You are Colored. There are three kinds of people: white people, Colored people, and black people. The white people come first, then the Colored people, then the black people. Lee asks “Why?” but Aunt’s answer is, “Because it is so."

"Twenty-second Street, the street where we lived, was strange and alien. The noise was frightening after the quiet of Elsburg."

"Light is white: dark is black."

"It seemed to me there was no sense in life. Things happened and no one seemed to know why."

"A woman finds a man and the whole world is a new place. And the fighting stiffness that was ever in her body, goes. And the hardness of her head stops and she does not think any more with her head but feels with her heart. Yes, it is ever so. And with a man it is so too. His shoulders square and a smile is not far from his lips and there is a new certainty in him. Yes. It has ever been so and it will ever be so when a man and a woman love. **Page 123"

"If a woman loves a man she does that which is good for him."

"I pushed my nose and lip...I was inside the raindrop away from the misery of the cold damp room. I was in a place of warmth and sunshine, inside my raindrop world."

"If a man loves a woman he loves her. That is all. There is no bad and there is no good. There is only love. The only thing that is bad is if a man loves a woman and she loves him not."

"Really these streets and trees, almost the clean air I breathed here were: RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY. I was the intruder. And like the intruder, I walked carefully lest I be discovered. I longed for what the white folk had. I envied them their superior European lot"

"It is not enough to destroy, you must build as well. Build up a stock of faith in your breast in native Zuma, mine boy, who has no social conscience, who cannot read or write and cannot understand his wanting what you want. **Page 69."

"The natives did not like locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp."

"I remember the many people who suddenly invaded the house, making me feel stranger in my own home...With his (father’s) going, the order and stability that had been in my life dissolved. There was no breadwinner. So we had to leave the place that had been our home."

"The only place where he was completely free was underground in the mines. There he was a master and knew his way. There he did not even fear his white man, for his white man depended on him. He was the boss boy. He gave the orders to the other mine boys. They would do for him what they would not do for his white man or any other white man."

"His white man had even tried to make friends with him because the other mine boys respected him so much. But a white man and a black man cannot be friends. They work together. That's all."

"He's just a mine boy ... Yes. Grand, but not a human being yet. Just a mine boy."

"Johannes drunk and Johannes sober were two different people."

"No! I don't want you to touch me."

"He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza. And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her."

"A man's a man to the extent that he asserts himself. There's no assertion in your mine boy. There is confusion and bewilderment and acceptance. Nothing more."

"He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands. Eliza had gone out with that sickly monkey dressed in the clothes of a white man. Why, even his hands were soft."

"Leah left him and he collapsed in a heap. She looked down and spat. The she raised her heel and brought it down on his face."

"I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it."

"Out of your feeling and out of your pain it must come. Others have found it. You can too. But first you must think and not be afraid of your thoughts. And if you have questions and you look around you will find those who will answer them. But first you must know what you are going to fight and why and what you want."

"So many people who consider themselves progressives have their own weird notions about the native, but they all have one thing in common. They want to decide who the good native is and they want to do good things for him. [...] They want to think for him and he must accept their thoughts. And they like him to depend on them."

"In that time I had been accused of theft, I had been called all the pet names of abuse reserved by whites for blacks; I had carried heavy loads to the tram stop, and women had conveniently forgotten to pay."

"Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Many other places had been killed thus."

"I prayed that, for once, the predictions of the brassheads would turn out to be as hollow as the ravings of forgotten saints and prophets, medicine men and bone throwers. Everybody wanted to know the future but it made us miserable when we did."

"“I want to find out who is supplying items to a government agency. Is there an easy way to find out?” The librarian folded his handkerchief into a square on his palm before he answered. “This is Brazil. There is no easy way to find out anything.”"

"I wondered how he could be so trusting of the universe to lie asleep in the middle of it."

"The power of prime numbers: the key to the new world and the solution to the mysteries of the infinite."

"In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible—assuming it is safe to be bored out of your wits."

"“The real question you should be asking is quite different: Why is Section able to function at a time when the larger Agency is paralyzed?” I said, “I don’t like riddles. Why is it?” “Because, for centuries, Section has kept its files on paper, not inside a machine. Muller couldn’t wipe them out…. “We’ve learnt that you cannot control information once it’s in electronic form. You can trust a key; you can trust a lock because it has a defined physical location. It can be made in such a way that it is difficult to duplicate. Numbers, no matter how difficult they are to guess, can be copied perfectly. We use physical objects.”"

"The Mother Superior came forward and put her hand out to me. She was as tall as me, her stony-green eyes highly dilated. No doubt she was under the influence of one or another compound meant to enhance the quest for divinity and ready the soul to make a reckoning. The religious orders were legendary for their chemical dependencies."

"Controlling the leakage of information is always the key to success in counterintelligence."

"The twentieth century had actors and actresses. They didn’t rely on acting algorithms or fantasize about digital actors. For all its cruelty, I find the old world sympathetic for that reason alone."

"I try as a reader to put myself in places I’ve never been to, in the shoes of people I would never meet"

"I don’t think all women need to birth themselves"

"I write for myself and then I edit for the reader, to make things easier for them, to refine the ideas"

"I definitely feel the world lacks a sense of humour"

"It seems as if the whole country is falling apart, so why be a good person, why be good to yourself, when the country is not being good to you, it’s not giving you the opportunities you need"

"It’s always the youth that are making the sacrifices. When I think about the Soweto riots in 1976 in South Africa, it wasn’t people that stopped working and said, we are going to fight against these policies, it was the school children"

"I birthed myself; it was bloody and painful but now I’m standing on the roof of a city as something new."