Margie Orford, Mark Gevisser and Masande Ntshanga chatted to Jenny Crwys-Williams on CapeTalk and 702 recently about their “heritage books”, with each author picking the two books they think most illustrate South African history and values.
The show was aired on 24 September, celebrated as Heritage Day in South Africa, and Tony Leon and Max du Preez also contributed their favourite “heritage reads”.
Mark Gevisser chose Marguerite Poland‘s Shades, which he calls “one of the great unsung novels of South African literature”, and AC Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, The Wrath of the Ancestors in English: “a book about what came out of the colonial encounter”.
“The books are twinned,” Gevisser says, “and I read them both when I was researching The Dream Deferred and trying to understand a little bit about Thabo Mbeki’s history, and specifically the history of what Jacob Zuma derogatively calls ‘clever blacks’. So the history of the first colonial encounters in the Eastern Cape, and specifically the extraordinary generation of very learned readers and writers who came out of that extremely rich encounter.”
“They’re both brilliant reads. I love them,” Gevisser says.
Margie Orford chose Mhudi by Sol Plaatje: “an astonishing book, very exciting and beautifully written”, and Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee.
On Mhudi, Orford says: “Plaatje finished it in 1920, and it was then published in 1930. It’s the most gripping story. Mhudi is the heroine of the novel, and one of the things that fascinates me about that book is that literally the first African novel has at its heart an incredibly powerful, independent woman … it encapsulates for me the incredibly powerful women that populate South African and African fiction. She set the tone.”
Orford says her second choice, Waiting for the Barbarians, is “totally my favourite of all the books JM Coetzee has written”.
Masande Ntshanga’ choices are his favourite K Sello Duiker novel, Thirteen Cents – which he says contains “a profound amount of insight, as well as empathy” – and Age of Iron by JM Coetzee.
“I think as far as national narratives go,” he says, “how we commemorate heritage for example, there’s always the risk of forgetting about society’s more vulnerable members, and Sello was very gifted in his ability to hone in on them. Thirteen Cents particularly, with the almost documentary precision of how it details the life of one of society’s most vulnerable members, the black child, was something I found very inspiring and also moving.”
Of Age of Iron, Ntshanga says he appreciates the novel on a formal level and well as for its content, adding: “It’s probably one of JM Coetzee’s most self-aware and self-conscious books, but without being arch.”
Thirteen Cents and Age of Iron were published 10 years apart, and Ntshanga says “they communicate with each other in ways you wouldn’t anticipate”.
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Book details
- Shades by Marguerite Poland
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EAN: 9780143530237
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- Wrath of the Ancestors by AC Jordan
EAN: 9780868522289
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- Mhudi by Sol T Plaatje
EAN: 9781868590131
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- Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee
EAN: 9780099465935
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- Thirteen Cents by K Sello Duiker
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EAN: 9780795704925
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- Age of Iron by JM Coetzee
EAN: 9780241951019
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Uitspraak: wortel
