IWIS
South African Literature:
Metaphors and Metamorphosis
Aims and objectives
• To engage with texts from South Africa,
understanding the context of Apartheid in
which they were written
• To think about ideas of metaphor and
metamorphosis in South African literature
• To discuss how we can take these texts
into a classroom
• To discuss how to write a self-reflective
journal
Apartheid: A brief history
• system of racial segregation enforced by
National Party governments of SA
between 1948 and 1994
• white supremacy and Afrikaner minority
rule
• apartheid as an official policy introduced
following general election of 1948
• classified inhabitants into 4 racial groups:
native, white, coloured, Asian
Apartheid: A brief history
• segregation: residential areas, education, medical care,
beaches, public services
• black people deprived of citizenship, political
representation
• internal uprisings and violence – met with increasing
repression and state-sponsored violence
• 1980s – mounting opposition, reforms to apartheid
• 1990s President Frederik Wilhem de Kerl began
negotiations to end apartheid
• multi-racial democratic elections in 1994
Nadine Gordimer
• b. 1923
• Nobel Prize in Literature – a woman ‘who
through her magnificent epic writing
has…been of very great benefit to
humanity’.
• Moral, political, and racial issues,
particularly apartheid
The Ultimate Safari
• From whose perspective is the story
written?
• What metaphors do you notice running
through the story?
METAPHORS - Animals
p. 7 – ‘but all the same our country is a country of people, not
animals’
p. 8 – ‘He said we must move like animals among the animals,
away from the roads, away from the white people’s camps’
p. 8 – ‘It was hard to be like the animals’
p. 9 – ‘If they saw us, all they could do was pretend we were not
there; they had seen only animals’
p. 10 – ‘even if you lie, like the animals, under the trees’
Lions as the Bandits:
p. 9 – ‘Panting, like we do when we run, but it’s a different kind of
panting: you can hear they’re not running, they’re waiting,
somewhere near’
METAPHORS - Safari
Watching / Being watched:
• p. 7 – ‘the places where white people come to
stay and look at the animals’
• p. 9 – ‘We could see the fires where the white
people were cooking in the camps and we could
smell the smoke and the meat’
• p. 14 – ‘Some white people came to take
photographs of our people living in the tent’
METAPHORS - SHOES
Hope / Future plans
• p. 14 – ‘No other children in the tent have
real school shoes. When we three look at
them it’s as if we are in a real house again,
with no war, no away.’
• p. 14 – ‘I want them to learn so that they
can get good jobs and money.’
Exercise 1: Celebrity Furniture
1) Think of a celebrity
2) Think of a piece of furniture:
3) Complete the sentence:
_________ is a _________ because
___________
Athol Fugard
•
•
•
•
b. 1932
playwright
political plays opposing apartheid
Tsotsi is his only novel, made an Academy
Award winning film in 2005
What are the tsotsis?
• ‘menace…a force of unbridled violence as
pitiless and unthinking as the sharks that
lay in wait outside the nets off Durban
beach.’ [Jonathan Kaplan]
• young black men, gangs, turning on those
lower down the survival chain
• product of the process of Apartheid
• death methods – medically accurate
Tsotsi
• p. 170 ‘Instinctively, but for no other reason than having awoken, he
put his hand under his pillow to find his knife. Before he found it,
another thought crossed his mind…’
• p. 171 ‘Where’s his front teeth, Tsotsi thought, and then, why the hell
am I thinking that.’
• p. 172 ‘A spider spinning a web – but most of all my mother. He had
to return to that thought. Everything started there. It was the
beginning of himself, and of his memories, spinning like silk thread
out of the soft shimmer of her humming on a day long, long
forgotten.
• p. 172 ‘One word. Finished. What now?’
• p. 173 ‘So we start again, Tsotsi, hey man. It was like this then. So
now we find a couple of others and we start again and…’ The baby
started crying.
• p. 175 ‘He rejoiced in the very things that had disgusted and
angered him in the past…’
Tsotsi
• Some key themes:
becoming
rebirth
life / death
past/present/future
• The metamorphosis that takes place in Tsotsi is
one of reclaiming the past to reshape the
present and the future.
• Tsotsi is about turning points.
• ‘It is when Tsotsi rediscovers his memory that he
realises he is alive’ [Jonathan Kaplan]
Nelson Mandela
• b. 1918
• former President of South Africa (19941999)
• anti-apartheid activist
• 27 years in prison (sabotage and other
charges), Robben Island
• 1990 – released, led part to first multiracial democracy
• 1993 Nobel Peace Prize
Long Walk To Freedom
• autobiography
• published 1995
• covers early life, coming of age, education,
and prison life
Long Walk To Freedom
• p. 109 ‘I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became
politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the
liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa
means that one is politicized from the moment of one’s
birth, whether one acknowledges it or not.’
• p. 109 ‘This was the reality, and one could deal with it in
a myriad of ways. I had no epiphany, no singular
revelation, no moment of truth…There was no particular
day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to
the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found
myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.’
District 9
• Christy Lemire (Associated Press):
“District 9 has the aesthetic trappings of science fiction
but it’s really more of a character drama, an examination
of how a man responds when he’s forced to confront his
identity during extraordinary circumstances”
• Clips: Scene 3, 12, 26
• At what point does Wikus become the ‘Other’?
• What are the symbols of this metamorphosis? (physical /
mental / emotional?)
• How is the film presented?
How to write a self-reflective journal
• ‘The journal should show evidence of a
variety of approaches to creative learning,
and where possible the use of different
literary forms from different cultural
contexts in the context of the classroom.’
How to write a self-reflective
journal:
• Use anecdotes about particular placement
experience
• Critical reflection – what perhaps didn’t
work so well but why you think it didn’t
work
• Analysis – what would you have done
differently?
• Samples of previous journals are available