Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life
writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi,
Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog,
Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan
Vladislavic have produced a compelling and often controversial body
of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social
transition with great ambition, texture and risk. Experiments with
Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South
African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted
through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously
refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic
journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory
and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It
traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real
people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in
long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of
testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation
and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here
are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage
with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and
the unfinished project of social reconstruction in South Africa.
The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally
innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or
narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like
collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within
them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a
scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African
materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with
other important non-fictional traditions that have emerged at
moments of social rupture and transition. Hedley Twidle is Senior
Lecturer in twentieth-century, southern African and postcolonial
literatures in the English Department at the University of Cape
Town and he also publishes regularly in the press.
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