Short Stories by Gordimer, Ndebele and the DRUM Writers - Dr Nwabisa Bangeni (Stellenbosch University)

Dr Nwabisa Bangeni from Stellenbosch University discusses short stories by Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and the group of writers associated with the DRUM magazine in the 1950s. Dr Bangeni examines how their writing reflects the social and political complexities of life under apartheid. She explores the dynamics of interaction between the racialised, gendered and classed individuals represented in Nadine Gordimer’s ‘What You Were Dreaming’ (1985) through analysis of language and register. In her reading of Njabulo Ndebele’s ‘Uncle’ (1983), Dr Bangeni then explains how his 'rediscovery of the ordinary' represents the family, community, maturation and socialisation in Black townships. Finally, in her analysis of the stories and reports collected in The Drum Decade, Dr Bangeni outlines the role of DRUM in fostering a distinctive urban African voice, and recording and archiving the pressures of everyday life under an oppressive system.

Further Reading

Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005)

Bongi Bangeni, Nwabisa Bangeni and Stephanie Rudwick, ‘Begging for “authenticity”: Language, Class and Race Politics in South Africa’, in Southernizing Sociolinguistics: Colonialism, Racism, and Patriarchy in Language in the Global South, ed. by Bassey E. Antia and Sinfree Makoni (Routledge, 2022)

Michael Chapman, ed. The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012)

---, Southern African Literatures (Longman, 1996)

Dorothy Driver, ‘Drum Magazine and the Spatial Configurations of Gender’, in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. by Kate Darrian-Smith et al. (Routledge, 1996)

Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (Penguin, 1989)

---, Jump and Other Stories (Bloomsbury, 1991)

---, Loot and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, 2003)

---, Telling Times: Writing and Living 1954-2008 (Bloomsbury, 2010)

Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories (Pearson, 1987)

---, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester University Press, 1994)