Entertainment

Topping the pile: denialism, botched circumcision and justice

December 20, 2009 Edition 1

Maureen Isaacson Edited by Maureen Isaacson

IMRAAN Coovadia's High Low In-between (Umuzi) brings its intriguing dark whodunit plot to this year's top books. A progressive Indian, professor and Aids research scientist, Arif, dies early in the novel - but surely not by his own hand.

Set in the Mbeki era of Aids denialism, this offbeat novel sees Arif and his wife, also a doctor, taking strain.

As the Aids virus spreads its tentacles, old comrades carry the whip and nobody listens when you tell them to get tested. The fact that the plot hinges on the historical axis of the stigma that accompanies denialism, works for the novel; history is vital too.

Coovadia said: "I took four years to write this novel. Was it Faulkner who said, 'The past wasn't forgotten; the past wasn't even past'?"

When Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister under whose watch Aids denialism burgeoned, died this week, I asked Coovadia how he felt about it. He said: "The Harvard School of Public Health estimates at least 330 000 excess deaths because of those policies (executed by Tshabalala-Msimang). It's hard to attach a feeling to a number of that magnitude except, never again! I think the new public health officials agree."

He said that in this novel he "... wanted most of all to create characters who moved, and thought, and felt as if alive. That includes race, politics, history, but the book is first and foremost about feeling, because human beings are first and foremost feeling creatures. Race, class, history, whatever, come to us through our feelings, like a brick through a window. I wanted to make a book that felt real, that gave, in its central character Nafisa, a kind of representative spirit of South Africa (and of the universe)."

Zakes Mda's Black Diamond (Penguin) is a stark departure from his previous novels and in particular, Cion, his penultimate novel, located in the US.

Here is an acid portrait of the BEE crowd, their values are up the wall, their greed and their post liberation richesse. Mda said in an interview that he has in fact raised similar issues in The Heart of Redness (Penguin) in the early 1990s.

A satire that takes no prisoners, Black Diamond's plot revolves around the antics of the magistrate, Kristin Uys, and Don Mateza, her Black Diamond bodyguard, tasked with protecting her against the vindictive Visagie brothers whose darkness knows no bound. If the novel is over-the-top, it is because the people Mda describes have broken all bounds, taking stereotypes to their limits.

In taking no small measure of chances, Mda ends up with a pacy, dramatic romp, successfully incorporating his skills as a dramatist.

On a more sombre note is Thando Mgqolozana's A Man Who is Not a Man, a startling debut novel which opens doors on the suffering and horror precipitated by a botched circumcision, a subject not discussed with such openness before. Although Mgqolozana stresses that "the matters of the mountain should remain on the mountain", he allows us entry into this hitherto taboo world.

I was surprised by his frankness: "What I have written here is true about the way it happens. In traditional Xhosa life, the circumcision is the business only of circumcised men involved in the group who manage it. Sometimes things go wrong. People end up getting their organs amputated ... I chose to write about this sensitive topic because of the human rights violations."

The activism spurring his determination to break the silence surrounding such deaths has not hampered Mgqolozana's fictional flair. The narrative reveals a gift not only for truth but for the depiction of detail, of emotion, and for engrossing, down-home telling.

Another newcomer to the Southern African literati is Petina Gappah, whose stories in An Elegy for Easterly, (faber&faber) which won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award, are peopled by both the snobs and the downtrodden of Zimbabwe.

In an interview Gappah said: "Zimbabweans are victims of each other. I look at the way they treat their women, their servants, their sisters-in-law. The real danger in Zimbabwe is not Robert Mugabe, it is the black middle class."

Gappah has won an award for comic writing but she is serious, too, and has kept her eye on the brutality of, say, "Operation Marambatsvina" (Restore Order), Zanu-PF's demolition of the homes of an estimated 700 000 Zimbabweans in 2005, which finds expression in the title story, An Elegy for Easterly.

But we are invited into the heart of a community and its own brutal conflicts. Gappah resists the title "African writer" but she has brought Zimbabwe and its comic, weird and horrible anomalies to the attention of the world.

Albie Sachs said in an interview about his remarkable new book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, (Oxford University Press) that it was not until he began to write about the creative process of judging that he understood the complexity of the battle between the logic of law and the passion in life.

For him, judges, like the world's workers should unite; he presents the judge as "the storyteller of our time". Some of the stories he relates take us beyond the fight for "bread rights" alongside "freedom rights" - the rights of people living with HIV, same-sex marriage - that earned Sachs a reputation on the Constitutional Court, for giving voice to more progressive views about relationships.

The material of the cases he dealt with form the substantive matter of this work, which is framed by a remarkable life, rebuilt after an attempted shattering by a bomb, which he recounts, introducing new elements about the consequences for one Henri, who was involved with the planning of the bomb.

Alf Kumalo's Through My Lens, A Photographic Memoir (Tafelberg), with text by Tanya Faber, takes you places you have not been. Kumalo, who began his career at the old Drum Magazine in the 1950s, is a superb photographer.