Latest news with #post-Apartheid
Indian Express
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Author Karen Jennings on her latest novel Crooked Seeds and how social media has impacted our sense of history
You've said that the vision of the lighthouse from An Island (2019) came to you in a dream, during an afternoon nap. What about the story of Crooked Seeds? I'm afraid it was a lot less neat and tidy. In fact, it is hard to trace the process or progression clearly. Some of the ideas or aspects of the characters go back as far as the 1980s, when I was a little girl and overheard a conversation between my dad and his colleague. She told him about growing up, how her mother had always favoured her son and treated her daughters as inferior to him. Other aspects of the novel go to my mid-20s when I passed a ditch being dug by the municipality. Each day, when I passed that ditch, they had dug up more artefacts — nothing interesting, just old handbags and bottles and bits of cutlery and rope and plastic. I remember knowing there was something important here, in this digging, the finding of things. I didn't know what, though. Countless other little experiences and thoughts and dreams made their way into the chaos in my mind and came out (hopefully) neatly on the pages. The South African landscape is almost a character in the novel. Is it at all possible to write about South Africa and Africa without talking about socio-political issues? Can one write about anywhere without including socio-political issues? I am a proud South African. South Africa is my home. I love its people and places. I am not afraid to say it publicly: everything that is good in this country is because of the South African people. For the bad, yes, we can blame history, but we can also blame a government that puts cronyism before the people. Most days, I want to ask our president: How do you sleep at night? Aren't you ashamed of your spinelessness? In the novel, there are also themes of memory, trauma and historical reconciliation. How did you approach post-Apartheid South Africa? A lot of reading. I make sure to read widely when doing research — newspapers, interviews, diaries, letters, fiction, non-fiction. We all understand, of course, that fiction is not meant to be focused on fact-giving. But in order for fiction to have value – in order for it to have an essential authenticity — research must be done. In addition, I spend a lot of time 'in place' — walking, looking, observing. The 17th century Japanese Haiku master Basho said that if you want to write about the tree then you must go to the tree. I believe that completely. Go to the tree — physically and through research. How has the landscape for postcolonial African literature changed since you began writing? This is an interesting question. Recently, someone from a different country in Africa indicated to me that young Africans don't know what colonialism is. It is something 'too far back' in history to be thought of — yet we still see the socio-economic consequences of it to this day; we still see knock-on effects such as cultural appropriation. Whatever the young know or don't know about colonialism or postcolonialism, they don't seem to be learning it from books. A few days ago, I was explaining to a student of mine that the only thing she needed to work on in her essay is to write smoother sentences. She asked me if I could recommend a TikTok channel to help her with that. I said, 'How can you ask me that? What you need to do is read, not watch Tiktok!' An Island and Crooked Seeds have a nonlinear narrative and yet it's effortless to envision the story. Talk us through your writing process. Short answer: agony. Long answer: lots of agony. The very dismal truth is that I write draft after draft after draft, on and on and on and on until I am sick and depressed. But by the end I know my character and my story completely. Your portrayal of marginalised characters has been praised for its nuance. What responsibility do you feel writers have when representing voices that have historically been silenced? This is a tough question. One must always approach one's writing with sensitivity. Even when one comes to it with good intentions, there is always a worry about appropriation or being offensive. Thorough research can help, as can using third-person narrators and avoiding giving characters accents or using patois that can come across as condescending. These are all practical matters. But consider the forgotten people in history — not necessarily heroes, just ordinary people whose role in our country's past and therefore in its present might be forgotten unless you write about them. Last year, I wrote a number of short stories related to slaves and servants at the Cape of Good Hope/Cape Colony in the 18th century. These stories were based on archival and other research. If I don't write about them, will someone else do it? Will AI remember our pasts for us and write about it for us? Already most South Africans don't even know the truth about South Africa's slave past. Shouldn't they know that history and the people it affected and in what ways? May that inspire them too to explore, to research and to write. Mazumdar is a Delhi-based independent writer
Time of India
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
‘South Africa once excluded black people from land — the state now seeks peaceful reform'
William Beinart is Emeritus Professor at the African Studies Centre, Oxford University. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke , he discusses the issue of land — and its fruit — in South Africa : As seen at the Donald Trump-Cyril Ramaphosa interaction recently, we are hearing allegations now about white farmers in South Africa being thrown off their lands and even killed — how historically accurate is this? It's an absurd inversion of history. South Africa's history has been about the dispossession of black South Africans from their land, with the Apartheid system ensuring they could not get access to it until the 1990s and the political transformations that took place then. By that time, only a small proportion of land in rural areas was owned by Africans, with most whiteowned farms, which were largely commercial in nature, having workforces almost entirely composed of these people. The new South African government, after the transition post-Apartheid and the move towards democracy, put land reform quite high on its agenda — it was entirely justified in doing so. The system had cemented racial exclusion for so long. They've gone slowly and I'd say they have done reasonably well. The large farm sector has not been destroyed — on the contrary, becoming one of the most rapidly-growing parts of the economy over the last two decades, it has done quite well. The state also instituted a 'willing buyer, willing seller' system of land reform — if the authorities target particular areas, government buys the land from white farmers there. White farmers being thrown off the land is just not the case. Image credit: iStock When Maize is a maze... Apartheid plundered black South Africans — whites, who are 7% of the population, reportedly still own half the country's land, with 30% redistribution aimed at by 2030 In addition, it is important to emphasise that South Africa has been a very violent place for many years, going back to the Apartheid era — this didn't change much post-1994. Rates of murders and violent crimes remain high in urban and rural areas — however, proportionately, the numbers of white farmers attacked or killed is relatively small. The people most susceptible to violent crimes are actually young men in cities. Yet, this narrative has been picked up by the global right-wing and the Trump Presidency for a range of reasons. They are unhappy with the position of the current South African government on many issues — and Elon Musk , who was born and raised until university in South Africa, is plugged into right-wing Afrikaner groups which have become very effective propagandists on a global scale. Musk apparently didn't always take these views — but he's chosen to champion them now, both in the United States and in relation to South Africa. What are some of the main climatic changes South Africa confronts now? Global warming is already having an effect there — even 25 years ago, people had predicted the western half of South Africa, along with much of Botswana and Namibia, would experience significant reductions in rainfall. That seems to be happening now. On the eastern side, particularly across the coastal zones, there is an increased intensity of stormy rainfall — there is already frequent flooding across these regions. South Africa is reasonably fortunate in having had over a century of intensive dam-building — this enables a fair amount of water capture in many places but there is a crisis developing in urban water supply now. It's not just reduced rainfall but a lack of investment driving this. The challenge of water is huge, with 60% of the country being semi-arid and arid. This is a difficult situation also for South Africa's successful commercial agriculture — citrus fruit is a very large product, the single biggest agricultural export today, well beyond wine, wool and older goods. The sector offers a lot of employment and is also very valuable in terms of providing nutrition for poorer people. Growing citrus does need sustained irrigation though — dangers lie thus in this fairly rapid global climate change and there needs to be more effective and coordinated state engagement. One area where the state has been quite successful in association with the private sector is conservation and the beginnings of biodiversity restoration — a significant part of South Africa is now seeing some return to greater biodiversity. This increase in wildlife is also valuiStock able for water retention and the rejuvenation of watersheds. Of course, there is the question of whether work like ecotourism can replace agrarian activity and generate similar revenues — it's important to note this brings highly differentiated benefits, with ecotourism essentially for relatively well-heeled global travellers and its profits tending to reach those who own land already. While he has Trump's ear: Elon Musk supports claims of white South Africans being hounded Can you tell us about your research on South Africa's prickly pear plant? An aspect of environmental history which interests me deeply is political ecology — why are resources important, to whom do they become necessary, how do they get commodified and who wins and loses in this process? Prickly pear is a Mexican plant, found extensively over central America. It's a cactus and suited well to semi-arid areas. It was brought to the Cape as it was to India, the Mediterranean, northeast Africa as well as other places around the world — I've heard you can discern traces of destroyed Palestinian villages by spotting the remnants of prickly pear there. This plant has multiple uses. Firstly, the Opuntia ficus-indica has juicy fruit and blossoms for about three months every year. It doesn't need much water and reproduces by itself, birds spreading its seeds or its leaves dropping to the ground and sending out new roots. It expanded across the semiarid areas of South Africa and it was eaten by both white and black people — but it became particularly important to impoverished black people because they had no land. They were marginalised also by the commercialisation of agriculture and the expansion of private land holdings which was largely controlled by white people. The prickly pear was like a gathered plant — its fruit was eaten and its leaves used for fodder, fencing, etc. It became very important for the rural poor. Image credit: iStock Fruits of change: South Africa's prickly pear (L) & citrus (R) Now, prickly pear also has spines and its fruit has spicules — if commerically valuable animals like sheep eat these, it can be quite damaging. So, a huge eradication program started in the 19th century, reaching maturity in the 20 th century — this managed to get rid of about 90% prickly pear. That story — of this food of poor black people vanishing, while the state and wealthy farmers exterminated it — has intrigued me.
France 24
21-05-2025
- Politics
- France 24
Hard sell diplomacy? Ramaphosa-Trump sit-down turns testy
Ramaphosa reportedly now offering a workaround of post-Apartheid local Black ownership laws, laws to address historical inequality in a nation where whites make up 7-percent of the population but still own 70 percent of the land. Adding pressure on Donald Trump's visitor, a lie that's even appeared unsollicited on Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot. Grok talking up a supposed genocide against whites in South Africa – a country that's got way too high a homicide rate for sure, but where in reality one percent of the victims are whites. Trump himself talking up the trope and offering refugee status to whites. So how should the nation that currently hosts the rotating chair of the G20 handle its relations with the United States? How should it handle the South African-born Musk who enjoys outsized leverage it seems? And more broadly, what path for a South Africa that needs foreign investment to fulfill its potential?
eNCA
27-04-2025
- Politics
- eNCA
SA's stride since the dawn of democracy
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa marks 31 years of freedom today. Today commemorates the first post-Apartheid election, held on this day more than three decades ago. Now while many are critical about our political, financial and economic freedoms, we should never forget the gains that we've made. Historian, poet, multi-award winning sculptor and activist in the struggle against Apartheid, Professor Pitika Ntuli discussed the strides made since the dawn of democracy.
