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Abstract My dissertation interrogates the ways in which Zakes Mda has made women central to his novels. I argue that the women characters in Mda's novels are key to the idea of the rebirth of Africa (and the simultaneous birth of a (South) African identity) a rebirth made necessary by years of dispossession through colonialism and apartheid. I will explore how on one level Mda, through magical realism, represents women as symbols of both destruction and construction; and how on another level he represents them as complex characters existing as agents of history. Mda’s novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays With the Darkness (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000) and The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) critique the topdown approach of the postapartheid, postcolonial discourse of African Renaissance a discourse which aims to reverse the damage done to the lives of Africans who have been brutalised by history. Mda writes an African renaissance (with a lower case “r”), which acknowledges and explores the ways in which people on the margins of power, recreate and transform their lives, without necessarily waiting for politicians to come up with policies and solutions. The renaissance of ordinary people privileges the spirit of ubuntu, whereby the individual strives to work with the collective to achieve a more humane world. Mda’s female characters are central to the debate on renaissance and reconstruction in that he questions existing gender roles by ii highlighting strongly the rights still denied African women his challenge to the discourse is whether a renaissance is possible if the humanity of women (and others marginalised by class, age, location, ethnicity, and other categories) continues to be denied. I ask the question whether Mda, goes further, and envisions women participating as leaders in traditionally male spaces.

This thesis examines the trope of the child in South African literature from the early years of apartheid to the contemporary moment. The chapters focus on some of the most established and prolific authors in South African literary history and roughly follow a chronological sequence: autobiographies by the exiled Drum writers (Es'kia Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane) in the early 1960s; Nadine Gordimer's writing during the apartheid era; confessional novels by Afrikaans-speaking authors (Mark Behr and Michiel Heyns) in the transitional decade; and J. M. Coetzee's late and post apartheid works. I argue that, while writing from diverse historical and political positions in relation to South Africa's literary culture, these authors are all in one way or another able to articulate their subjectivities-with their underlying ambiguities, contradictions, and negations-by imagining themselves as the child or/and through childhood. My analyses of the works under discussion attend to the subversive and transformative potential of, and the critical energies embedded in the trope of the child, by investigating narrative reconfigurations of temporality and space. Firstly, I will be looking at the ways in which the images, structures, and aesthetics making up the imaginings of the child disrupt a linear temporality and serve as critique of a teleological historiography of political emancipation and the liberation struggle. Secondly, I will pay attention to the spatial relations with which representations of the child are bound up: between the country and the city, black townships and white suburbs, the home and the street. By attending to specific transgressions and reorderings of these spatial relations, my reading also explores the ways in which spatial underpinnings and ideological boundaries of national identities are contested, negotiated, and restructured by forces of the transnational, the diasporic, and the global around the figure of the child.

Thesis (diploma in librarianship)--University of the Witwatersrand.

Thesis (diploma in librarianship)--University of the Witwatersrand.

Afrikaans, the world's youngest language, is not known to many outside South Africa. Mahala, a novel in that language by a major writer, has been translated as an example of South African literary resources yet to be made accessible to English readers. Chapter One (the Foreword) contains historical notes on the Afrikaans language and on Barnard's biography, including his publications and literary awards. Chapter Two is a complete translation (currently the only one) of Chris Barnard' s Mahala. Analysis of and comment on Mahala are reserved for Chapter Three (the Afterword), wherein the structure of the novel is discussed, selected characteristics of the book compared with those of recognized English writers, and commentary upon translation supplied. The Bibliography contains reviews of Mahala, backgrounds of South African literature, the history of Afrikaans, aspects of translation, and dictionaries.

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Olu phando luza kugxila kuphononongo lobume bengqondo ephazamisekileyo, lujonge izimo zabalinganiswa nendlela abacinga nabenza ngayo izinto. Kuza kube kugocwagocwa ubume bengqondo yabalinganiswa abakwezi ncwadi zintathu zilandelayo: Incwadi kaTamsanqa ethi, „Buzani Kubawo,‟ ekaJordan ethi, „Ingqumbo Yeminyanya‟ neka Jongilanga ethi, „Ukuqhawuka Kwembeleko.‟Apha kuza kukhokela intshayelelo equlathe izinto ezininzi eziquka amagama amatsha aza kusetyenziswa, indlela oza kuma ngayo umsebenzi kunye nembali ngababhali. Oku kulandelwa yingcingane eza kuthi ibe sisiseko solu phando, ingcingane yobume bengqondo, ingcingane yemeko engaqhelekanga kunye nezayamileyo; ingcingane yokuqonda kunye nengcingane yenkcubeko nentlalo. Kuza kuthi kutyhilwe iimeko abantu abaphila phantsi kwazo emakhaya nasentlalweni ngokubanzi. Iingcali zophando zizamile ukuza neendlela ezizizo zokwazi unobangela wokuphazamiseka kwengqondo ukuze zikwazi ukuza nonyango oluchanekileyo. Ekugqibeleni kuza kuthi kushwankathelwe wonke lo msebenzi, kuvezwe namacebo anokunceda abafundi nababhali kuncwadi. Kuza kucetyiswa ababhali ukuze babethelele ingcamango yokuba kubekho uncedo okanye unyango kubalinganiswa abanesimo sengqondo esiphazamisekileyo, xa kuphononongwa le ngcingane yesimo sengqondo.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [284]-294).

Damon Galgut has been a prolific contributor to South African literature since the early 1980s, but has only recently gained recognition as a significant presence in our cultural landscape. This thesis considers what the vicissitudes of Galgut’s critical reception — which have seen him, by turns, celebrated, ignored and even explicitly discounted as a noteworthy South African author — reveal about the shifting standards of cultural legitimacy which have been set for local writers since the late apartheid years. It offers, in turn, an extended close reading of each of his novels and considers the challenges which they pose to hegemonic assumptions about developments within the field of South African literature over the past three decades. I demonstrate that no coherent line of transition can be traced across the individual novels which make up Galgut’s oeuvre. They represent, instead, shifting degrees of discordance and concordance with an epochal metanarrative of South African literature and the progressive transformation of the field which it implies. In so doing, they enliven us to the thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity which has always already constituted the field.