South African Past and the Centrality of Exile
Viewed against the preceding decades of apartheid, South African literature written as
from the mid-1990s strikes one as literature evolving out of exilic antecedents. That this
is an obvious fact is ordinarily sufficient to preclude an examination of how the past
impacts on literature of the post-apartheid era. However, the very knowledge of the exilic
antecedents compels one to explore, first and foremost, the dynamics of the past as the
overwhelming context of exile was only operational because it was the logical
consequence of an informing socio-historical and political order. Once accepted as a
necessary conjucture that must the negotiated, even the apparent fact of exile begins to
acquire a complexity that transcends its ordinary import. On this score, the South African
experience must be seen as fundamentally connected to the hub of the pan-African
narrative of subjugation that dates back to the 15th century. The implication of the
relations of power that such revelation presupposes foregrounds the impact of Western
modernity in the convoluted history that presents itself on the discourse of the nation
today. Apartheid remains the last reminder in the subjugation spectrum of a continent by
a Western civilizing project gone most awry in the Southern part of Africa. What is
worse, it is arguable that whatever universalizing merit the agenda purported to espouse
was compromised to the point of creating spiritualities and cultures well outside its
expectations (Kelwyn Sole: 2005: 188). In all this, the fetishization of white racial
superiority was at the core of the extremism, which this cultural subjugation represents. It
was the experience of the extremism upon which the idea of racial superiority was based
in the prosecution of settler colonialism in this part of Africa by European explorers that
first set the tone for the various tensions and crises that followed. For instance, the
various wars prosecuted by both white settlers and Black natives were underpinned by
racism.^68 Colonialism, in the spatial sense of the word, and the granting of independence
that came after in the beginning of the 20th century for South Africa also functioned along
68
Even the Anglo-Boer war, which culminated in the institution of the Union in 1910, was fought in order
to gain ultimate supremacy over the black natives then known as Africans or derogatorily called natives. As
of this time, it was fashionable to refer to the white in South Africa as Europeans and not African.