Duncan Brown

Narrative, memory and mapping: Ronnie Govender's "at the edge” and other Cato manor stories

Abstract In “At the Edge” and Other Cato Manor Stories, Ronnie Govender offers a series of narratives of life in Cato Manor from the 1940s until its destruction in 1958/9. Against the strict delineation of identity, the control of space, a state narrative of racial separation and displacement, and an official cartography (of race and economics), Govender sets an unofficial cartography of knowing, belonging and growing, a stature in ordinary character, an oral‐influenced mobility of storytelling, a carnivalesque chorus of voices, the ingenuity of tactic – as well as the desolation of suffering and destruction which was to follow the bulldozing of Cato Manor and the forced removal of its residents. While the stories deal specifically with the destruction of Cato Manor, they resonate with larger claims about South African Indian identities, without simply essentialising or valorizing them, and without constructing them as identities of exclusion or glossing over areas of difficulty or prejudice; questions of alienation, belonging, immigration, rootedness, exclusion, exoticism and indigeneity swirl through the narrative landscape of the collection.

Environment and Identity: Douglas Livingstone's A Littoral Zone

Abstract In this article I argue that in ‘A Littoral Zone’ Douglas Livingstone undertakes a remarkable project of mapping his identity and work — as poet, scientist, human being — onto the landscape in which he lived, worked and moved: that he claims belonging — in terms of myth, DNA linkages, history, biology, relationships, literature — while acknowledging estrangement — through personal loss, pollution, greed, rejection, despoliation, history, loneliness, death. The volume explores these issues in ways which are at once locally specific and broadly global: the particular place is made to resonate with wider, and profounder, implications. This does not mean that there are not also problematic aspects to the mapping of identity onto place, and I consider some of these, including Livingstones evocation of his relationships with black writing in South Africa.

'Modern prophets, produce a new Bible': Christianity, Africanness and the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho

Abstract In this article I consider how one might approach the apparently singular figure of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Xhosa woman who produced an extraordinary series of Christian izibongo in newspapers in the 1920s: through what kind of language, from what critical perspective, might one think and write about her? There have been various attempts to write about Mgqwetho, and there are certain obvious possibilities in terms of approach and methodology, which I explore briefly, but I want to suggest a mode of reading which provides a richer, more engaged and more engaging understanding – one which reads with and through, rather than onto or against, her African Christian articulations

Oral poetry and literary history in South Africa

Karin Barber and P.F. de Moraes Farias (eds). 1989. Discourse and its Disguises: The Interpretation of African Oral Texts. Birmingham University: Centre of West African Studies. 209pp. Russell H. Kaschula (ed). 1993. Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press (The African Studies Reprint Series: Volume Two). 382pp. Jeff Opland (ed). 1992. Words that Circle Words: A Choice of South African Oral Poetry. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker. 328pp. Leroy Vail and Landeg White. 1991. Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. London: James Currey. 345pp.