‘The Interpreters' is outstanding

TimesLIVE

05-06-2025

The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction
Edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle
Soutie Press
Merriman-Webster's first dictionary definition of 'interpreter' reads:
noun; in·​ter·​pret·​er; in-ˈtər-prə-tər -pə-
plural: interpreters
1: someone or something that interprets:
such as
a: someone who translates for individuals or groups conversing in different languages
b: someone who explains or expounds
Its first entry of 'nonfiction' reads:
noun; non·​fic·​tion; nän-ˈfik-shən:
writing or cinema that is about facts and real events
In the introduction of The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction, co-editor Hedley Twidle writes: Using the term 'nonfiction' (some writers of it have remarked) is about as useful as calling the clothes in your wardrobe 'nonsocks', or saying that you had 'nongrapefruit' for breakfast. A broad spectrum of compelling, ambitious and artful literature shelters within that unhelpful 'non'. This includes: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoirs; reportage, features and profile; life writing in its many variants, from private diaries to public biography; oral history, interviews and testimony — all those forms caught up in the alchemy of spoken becoming written ... There are no facts, wrote Nietzsche, only interpretations. There is always a set of choices, absences and emphases (even in the most apparently 'straight' reporting); there is always the work (especially in a place like South Africa) of translation — literal, cultural, metaphorical. The writers collected here have taken up this task of absorbing, shaping and interpreting the overwhelming complexity of our world for the reader — and trusting the reader more than most writing does.
With the definition(s) of 'interpreters' and 'nonfiction' either in mind or placed aside, the reader is in for a singular, genre-riddling, anthological literary ride: from Julie Nxadi's 'The End of a Conversation' which can be read as a free-form form of autofiction to Bongani Kona's 'The Descendants', a cogitation on familial — and political — history in Zimbabwe; Njabulo S Ndebele's 'Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists', which draws on the eponymous title to 'The Closing of Tygerberg Zoo' by Sean O'Toole (which, too, draws on the eponymous title); Rian Malan's (very) longform — as in 12,000 words long — piece 'In the Jungle' on the history of Solomon Linda's 1939 song Mbube to Bongani Madondo's 'AmaSraeli in Fantasia', an examination of Black Israelites in the Eastern Cape; Lidudumalingani's 'Fighting Shadows', an exploration of the history and memories of stick fighting to Kimon de Greeff's 'Underworld', which does a deep-dive into the Hades of zama zamas. And that's not even the half of it! Sjoe.
A quick PSA for the speed-and-skim readers in our midst: this valuable contribution to South African longform narrative writing isn't a sit-down-and- sommer -read-book. Every contribution deserves — nay, demands — time for both fully engaging with the text, and contemplation.
In my (leisurely) reading of the book, I did notice that, other than it being edited by two white men, the remnants of colonialism remain present as the majority of the featured pieces are written by white men. The conquering of the rest by the West aside, a phallic fallacy also reigns supreme: a mere 10 out of 33 texts are penned (or co-penned) by women, yet South African women writers of narrative nonfiction have, over the years, doubtlessly contributed — and continue to contribute — to the genre.
And pen they can.
Anna Hartford, Alexandra Dodd, Madeleine Fullard, Antjie Krog, Zanele Miji, Nosisi Mpolweni, Julie Nxadi, Srila Roy and Lin Sampson deliver compelling and enduring narrative-driven storytelling ranging from a tribute to bouncer, photographer (and — à la Twidle — breker) Billy Monk to a contemplation on the ANC's censorship of Brett Murray's The Spear; gender-based violence and South Africa's unjust and prejudiced judicial system to accounts of luxury houses in Fourways built on land which belongs to the amaNdebele; the Missing Persons Task Team's quest of tracing the whereabouts of people who disappeared in political circumstances and attempts to recover their remains to a harrowing account of fertility treatments. Their words vary from the courageous to the vulnerable; the political to the personal; the arts to the archives.
The title is also borrowed from the chapter, 'The Interpreters', of which two of the three writers are women: Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni, alongside Kopano Ratele. The trio predominantly focused on researching simultaneous interpretation in courtroom settings, with Krog, Mpolweni and Ratele drawing on their participation in a Truth Commission interpreters' workshop held at the University of the Western Cape in April 2006. Comprising transcribed dialogue taking place between panellists and those present at the TRC hearings, the chapter focuses on general interpretation challenges, vocabulary and style, and the emotional toll the TRC hearings took on those who bore aural witness to the testimonials of the atrocities people were subjected to by the apartheid government.
If a second anthology were to realise (yes, please!), I'd very much like to see more womandla! — and less manmandla — asseblief.
Though no longer based in South Africa, the works of Jonny Steinberg and JM Coetzee are included, with Steinberg's 'The Defeated', which returns to his literary reportage about a farm murder which occurred in KZN and became the subject of his first book, Midlands. In 'Nietverloren', Coetzee employs a third-person narrative in recalling his memories of the eponymous Karoo-farm. An autre -biography, as he dubbed it. (Genres, nè?)
Genres also amalgamate, with co-editor Sean Christie's 2016 book Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: Life Among the Stowaways depicted as graphic nonfiction in the form of the comic, 'Stowaway Boy', brought to visual life by Alastair Christie and Warren Reysdorf.
On the topic of comics: synonymous with a satirical take on Afrikaner nationalism, Anton Kannemeyer AKA Joe Dog's 'Jeugweerbaarheid' ('Youth Preparedness'), originally published in 1994's Bitterkomix No. 4, graphically depicts his memory of an 'oh-no-thy-shan't' lecture by a Christian skoolhoof regarding onanism.
J Mogorosi Motshumi's 'Hard Rock: One Cartoonist's Journe y' portrays his a luta continua — and perseverance — as cartoonist during the struggle, and in 'Tale of an Aardvark' Daniël Hugo delivers a visual critique of anthropocentrism.
Whether a writer begins crafting a story with a working title in mind remains an intriguing facet about the writing process, alongside the interpretation of the title — be it literal, metaphorical or potentially deliberately misleading.
Poet Rustum Kozain's 'Dagga' isn't a straightforward homage to marijuana but a reflection on growing up in a devised, Group Areas Act-era Paarl; his recollection of living under enforced segregation formed by recalling still-present memories of his relationship with zol, with the narrative of his account shaped by questions concerning belonging.
Niren Tolsi, renown for employing sport — often cricket — as a lens to examine South Africa's racially divided past and its still extant presence, is another example of potentially deliberately misleading titles: his contribution 'Salem' isn't a nonfiction adaptation of The Crucible but a deliberation on colonial and postcolonial land claims in the Eastern Cape town of Salem, with the Salem Cricket Club as focal point of dispossession, the uprooting of the amaXhosa by 1820s colonial settlers, and South Africa's pervasive inequality.
In 'Dispossessed Vigils', Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon explores the displacement, dehumanisation, and crude handling of the dead — the majority being immigrants — living in Johannesburg's 'dark' or 'hijacked' buildings, owing to an indifferent and cruel system. Written with dignified empathy, Wilhelm-Solomon creates a narrative set against the death of Nelson Mandela, drawing comparisons between the commemoration of one life and the disregarding of many lives.
The deceased author, too, is present in the anthology, with the final piece 'I Gave the Names' written by Adrian Leftwich, a student leader active in the 1960s anti-apartheid movement, who died in 2013. This is an honest and vulnerable account of his sense of betrayal when the former NUSAS president turned state evidence against his struggle comrades in a 1964 bomb plot with the African Resistance Movement. 'I had behaved disgracefully, appallingly,' he wrote. 'I could not change what I had done: I would have to live with it. However much I regretted it, the past cannot be altered ... There is simply no other way to be: to remember and take responsibility for the past in order to live in the present and contribute to the future; to learn from the past so as never to be like that again; to pass it on.'
Genre may be open to interpretation for some, yet the nonfiction analyses in this anthology are second to none. Pass it on.