Includes abstract. / Maal, a collection of short stories, addresses the displacement and state of being of individuals in different cities in Africa and Europe. These individuals often experience nutrition and food as a metaphor of psychological angst, loneliness or consolation. Food is invoked in the title as it can be seen in the actions of, for instance, a character using intravenous drugs, a character literally eating earth, or a character not being able to eat at all. On the other hand, food in its many sophisticated forms can be found in the upper class spaces of Cape Town, Paris, Zurich and other cities, whilst elsewhere it is tellingly absent. It is further investigated as a ritual - both in a familial and social sense - and as a forming and shaping force in the characters' lives, often paradoxically. Maal also refers to the way in which these characters are hurled about by their own existence, by experiences of migration, illness, family intrigue and death. Therefore life becomes a meal and characters themselves are being eaten and ground.

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The Black South African literary oeuvre has as its dominant background township life. There has been a considerable neglect of village or rural setting. Even the proliferation of writing that has been regarded as depicting genuine African experience has fallen short of remedying this malady. There is a paucity of writings that endeavour to depict rural communities, and even where South African writers attempted to depict rural community, theirs has been an indolent attempt, as evinced by a lack of insight in such writings. One example is Matshoba's Call Me Not A Man. which is merely a glimpse into the rural setting. This shortcoming, coupled with a travesty of the rural setting, suggests a non-existence of the rural community. Whether South African writers, especially, Black writers, eschew rural setting deliberately or not is open to debate. Hence my project has as its paramount aim an endeavour to expose authentic rural realities. This collection, therefore, portrays rural life against the backdrop of city life. This paradoxical juxtapositioning is a deliberate attempt to enable the reader to extricate real-life happenings from both scenarios, and have a sound judgement about his/her observation.

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Before the Bittersweet is an American story about the experiences of five teenagers during one summer in a small town on a lake in New England. The plot offers a realistic representation of what can happen in a Middle American society where ambition is often lacking, boredom is plentiful and the loss of innocence happens all too quickly. This story, foreshadowed by the natural beauty and darkness of its setting, runs about 46 000 words and brings a tone that is somewhat similar to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

The billboard that nearly caused John Woods to swerve off the coastal road stood much higher than existing legislation permitted. He knew this because he had recently taken a position as a community reporter on a local rag, and he was starting to get a hang of municipal legalese, whether he liked it or not. A hundred yards on he contemplated its mysterious message, identically phrased in the reverse view, and set against the same blue background that had Woods thinking, for a subliminal moment, that the Billboard was part of the ocean beyond, the white letters nothing more than gently ruffled caps of water. The Wait is Almost Over. He looked around at the green mountainside and the gently waving forest of kelp, which flanked the ocean road. Not an impatient scene, exactly. Not a single soul waiting for a god-damned thing. He read the slogan again, and as its meaning dawned (an understanding that it must mean some development was imminent: that almost over portended the very worst for a perfectly beautiful section of mountainside, untouched for all time) he became aware of an increasing tightness in his chest, as if he were taking on pressurised air. He felt the desire to shout something back at the slogan, something equally presumptuous, equally menacing. He picked up a rock, a nice blade of Cape sandstone, and hurled it. (The missile struck with a clang, and dropped to the ground.) Next he tried to pull the billboard over, but since it was not a supple birch, the thing would not begin to lean, no matter how high he climbed. When Inspector Claude Grey rounded the corner on a routine patrol he intercepted Woods at that point of his destructive endeavours where he had attached a tow-line to the structure's left leg, and was proceeding to push the engine of his car through higher and higher revolutions as white sand spurted out from beneath his balding tyres. On the charge sheet the following information was recorded: Name: Jonathan Woods Occupation: Community Reporter, Environmental Affairs. Offence: Destruction of property Mason Construction PTY (Ltd), to whom the billboard belonged, went ahead with the prosecution. It was not to be the last charge laid against the reporter (then a young man) by that company. The story that follows is, in a sense, an account of this long and bitter feud.

The Road to Absalom is set in contemporary South Africa, where, for much of the predominantly young population, the country's ancien regime is little more than a childhood memory. David is a young articled clerk living a hedonistic and carefree life with his model girlfriend, Georgina, in Cape Town. When the entire family of the Xhosa chief of a remote rural valley is murdered he is sent in search of any remaining heirs. The new chief would be a lucrative client for the law firm. The search begins at the site of the massacre. David discovers that the only surviving heir, Absalom, has been missing for several years. He picks up the trail at Absalom's old university, where an ex-lecturer tells him about Absalom's early political consciousness (dismay at his family's collaboration with the white regime), his increasing rebelliousness, and his eventual disappearance. Local gangsters tell David more about Absalom's life as a criminal and an exile from his own family, circumstances which led him to move to Soweto. David drives across the interior of South Africa to Soweto, but does not find Absalom. His contact there arranges a meeting with Absalom's mentor and protector - Pius, a chief drug-smuggler resident in Swaziland. The hours of driving give David the time and perspective to reflect on his life in Cape Town: his dysfunctional relationship with Georgina, his fixation on his mixed-race high school lover, Angeline, his unwanted job and his ambivalent relationship with his family. He suspects that his supposedly convenient life has been constructed from fear or self-deception, and he is forced to re-evaluate his motivations. The meeting with Pius uncovers broad issues involving local and global politics that have contributed to Absalom's family's massacre and to his disappearance. However, Absalom has left to train as a Sangoma. David drives to Durban, where another sangoma gives him directions to the initiate's retreat in the Drakensberg mountains. He finds Absalom's spiritual master, a secretive bushman shaman, who explains that Absalom had abandoned his spiritual studies when he was told to do so by a powerful Spirit of nature. With the shaman's help David experiences a vision of Absalom's new hide-away on the coast. In the morning David follows the directions of his vision until he finds Absalom. The pair combine their knowledge: it emerges that their respective pasts have locked them into their present trajectories. David's family and his law firm (as well as a giant construction company and the World Bank) are involved in the events leading up to the massacre, while the past betrayals of the chief's family helped bring about their deaths. However, the pair abstain from the roles described for them by history, choosing instead to construct their own responses in an attempt to continue towards self-determining lives.

Turning Compost is a collection of forty poems, two of which, Seven Kakhaiku and Tres Troubled Triolets, are multiple poems intended to be read as units. The poems have been ordered so that there is a flow of connected or contrasting ideas from poem to poem, therefore it is recommended that they be read in the order presented. The themes covered by the poems are varied, but principal amongst them are memory, nature, dreams and symbols, family and friends, and the search for meaning; they appear in roughly that order. Death, and its challenges to meaning, is a theme which recurs throughout the collection, something which is reflected in the collection's title which is borrowed from one of the poems. Included is one poem, Pig People, which was written specifically for children. The poems are written in a variety of forms, evincing the poet's conscious rejection of stylistic consistency as a goal in developing his voice.

Lynette Langman's telephone rang on a Sunday night in 2001, heralding the call that would unravel her life. For forty long years, she had waited to hear news about the son she gave up for adoption when she was virtually a child herself. His birth had remained a closely guarded secret, hidden even from those who knew her best. And now his disclosure would unleash years of bottled questions and confessions.

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