Reading List: Lily Saint

The author, a regular contributor, summarizes four new books she's been reading.

Man reading newspaper on Johannesburg street. Image: kool_skatkat (Flickr CC).

The first book on my list is Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl Nightingale (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the world history of segregation, highlighting the notorious role played by South Africa in dividing communities along racial lines (a central case study is Johannesburg). As Nightingale reminds us, segregation in South Africa began long before it became formally instantiated as apartheid. And while divisions between people in cities goes back to Mesopotamia, the practice became entrenched as part of European colonialism’s urban planning, glaringly depicted, for instance, in the separation between the Casbah and the European quarter in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

In his examination of segregation in the United States, Nightingale looks at how division along racial lines continued after the abolition of state-sanctioned segregation laws. Certainly in the second half of the twentieth century apartheid laws were the exception rather than the rule, and it does us well to think about how urban patterns of racial division persist when the state no longer directly enforces them.


A difficult but rewarding book, The Event of Postcolonial Shame by Timothy Bewes (Princeton UP, 2011), zeroes in on the shame that inheres for writers in the postcolony when the question, “how to write without thereby contributing to the material inscription of inequality?” remains hard to answer. Focusing on works by a cross-section of writers from the global south, Bewes examines “what possibilities exist for a literary form that might be adequate to the ethical complexity of the postcolonial world” suggesting particularly that South Africans Zoë Wicomb and J.M. Coetzee, as well as the Caribbean writer, Caryl Phillips, address explicitly in their themes, and implicitly in their formal choices, the ethical imperatives at stake after slavery, colonialism, and apartheid.

If Bewes is correct that “in a certain strain of postcolonial scholarship informed by Spivak’s conceptualization of the subaltern…the real histories of national liberation in Third World countries disappear into an abyss of epistemological méconnaissance,” Susan Andrade’s book The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (Duke UP 2011) provides a useful corrective. It explores how women writers who wrote during the mass wave of continental decolonization were vitally involved in representations of political realities, despite the simplistic tendency to equate women’s writing with domestic spheres seemingly cut off from the public sphere. Instead Andrade makes clear how writers such as Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Tsitsi Dangarambga, and others, depicted worlds very much inflected by the changing political field, and exposed the disappointments and tragedies of independence as much as its optimism. Including an examination of more recent work by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Andrade’s book reminds us how much these women’s work informed and continues to inform the language of political debate.


Finally, A.B. Xuma. Autobiography and Selected Works (Ed. Peter Limb. Van Riebeck Society, 2012) reminds us of the importance of primary materials for scholarly work on African history. The compilation of works by Alfred Bitini Xuma, president of the ANC from 1940-49, gathers his (mostly) unpublished autobiography along with a variety of other genres, including letters, speeches, eulogies and pamphlets, much of which level overt critiques of the state’s white supremacist segregation policies. Xuma fell out of favor for being less radical than Young Turks such as Mandela and Sisulu of the Youth League. However Xuma, cosmopolitan and nationalist, is finally getting some of the attention he deserves here, as ideological divisions in the early history of the ANC no longer require obfuscation for the sake of presenting a unified political front. In an interview on the Africa Past & Present podcast, editor Peter Limb relates that he hopes the book will “open up more research on a range of issues such as [Xuma’s] life and times, related themes of medical, social and ANC history; the history of African women in politics; intellectual history and social biography…. to facilitate textual analysis in South African historiography and draw attention to the need to develop the study of the genre of the works of black authors.” This book could certainly begin to do this.

Further Reading

A power crisis

Andre De Ruyter, the former CEO of Eskom, has presented himself as a simple hero trying to save South Africa’s struggling power utility against corrupt forces. But this racially charged narrative is ultimately self-serving.

Cinematic universality

Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.

The meanings of Heath Streak

Zimbabwean cricketing legend Heath Streak’s career mirrors many of the unresolved tensions of race and class in Zimbabwe. Yet few white Zimbabwean sporting figures are able to stir interest and conversation across the nation’s many divides.

Victorious

After winning Italy’s Serie A with Napoli, Victor Osimhen has cemented his claim to being Africa’s biggest footballing icon. But is the trend of individual stardom good for sports and politics?

Breaking the chains of indifference

The significance of ending the ongoing war in Sudan cannot be overstated, and represents more than just an end to violence. It provides a critical moment for the international community to follow the lead of the Sudanese people.

The magic man

Chris Blackwell’s long-awaited autobiography shows him as a romantic rogue; a risk taker whose life compass has been an open mind and gift to hear and see slightly into the future.

How to think about colonialism

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

More than just a flag

South Africa’s apartheid flag has been declared hate speech by a top court. But while courts are important and their judgments matter, racism is a long and internationally entrenched social phenomenon that cannot be undone via judicial processes.

Resistance is a continuous endeavor

For more than 75 years, Palestinians have organized for a liberated future. Today, as resistance against Israeli apartheid intensifies, unity and revolutionary optimism has become the main infrastructure of struggle.

Paradise forgotten

While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.

The two Africas

In the latest controversies about race and ancient Egypt, both the warring ‘North Africans as white’ and ‘black Africans as Afrocentrists’ camps find refuge in the empty-yet-powerful discourse of precolonial excellence.