The missing pages of SA's journey to democracy

The Missing Pages: Short Stories; and The House of Truth & Bloke and His American Bantu: Two Plays

Siphiwo Mahala, Focal; and Wits University Press

***** (5 stars)

This week, South Africa's fashion industry was rocked by the passing of Vanya Mangaliso of Sun Goddess, one of the country's foremost brands in womenswear. While the globe had a firm interest in futuristic aesthetics and skimpy recession clothes in the 2000s, Managaliso spoke to the local burgeoning 60s and 70s revival with a modern thread. She was not the only creative behind this, with the likes of Siphiwo Mahala penning works that have brought Sophiatown into the millennium. 

I never had the luck of reading his previous works or debut novel, When a Man Cries, so I leapt at the chance to read his latest offering Missing Pages and his two plays The House of Truth & Bloke and His American Bantu.

It has become common to explore black experiences through the lens of speculative fiction but in Mahala's works, everyday people give cyber trucks and burdened royals a break while battling for their sociopolitical existence.

This is especially the case with The Missing Pages collections, a look at the lives of South Africans living in pre- and post-apartheid SA. Rather than build over-complicated narratives about blackness, Mahala goes to the core of it all to explore the complicated feelings of what it means to be a child of the soil, and how far back the traumatised roots go.

The powerful opening short story touches on this — Moses is sent to fetch his brother's diary. This being the 1800s with black lives flung between the sparring British and Afrikaners, Moses is treated with brutality when he is caught fetching the book due to its politically conscious content. He retrieves the diary after months of torture, only to find some of the pages ripped out. It becomes, as the narrator puts “the missing pages of the white man's war”, with the rest of the stories feeling like found objects in South Africa's journey to democracy.

This rings true in tales like Bhontis's Toe and White Encounters where two young boys narrate the perils of racism and what it can lead to. White Encounters sees Sipho spiral into chaos as he navigates the white people of authority in his parents' lives. In contrast, Bhonti's Toe closes with a playful soccer game between a group of black and white boys to highlight the grim death of another. The brutality in both is a sobering sucker punch. A beautiful soccer game between black boys from a township and white child soldiers ends in a serene rainstorm while a child many of them bullied is murdered. Not familiar with racism or white people, Sipho's confusion is amusing at first but becomes poignant as his parents face an onslaught of racist tensions.

These tales prime you for gut-wrenching stories like The Asylum where a family fights tooth-and-nail to have their mother home for Christmas, while Hunger and The Lost Suit are great for newbies like me who haven't read Mahala's work but want to explore his peek at what the old South Africa looked and felt like. While we celebrate a struggling student in Hunger and what feels like a modern-day folklore story in The Lost Suit, it's in the pages of The House of Truth where Mahala really lets loose, bringing yesteryear back to modern audiences. His portrayal of Can Themba in the play does not waste time obsessing over a bygone era with nostalgia, but is rather a discerning look at Themba as a debater. Born from Mahala's lust for a creative outlet, Themba invites the audience in on the opening of his home as a place for honest conversations and difficult debates. From Mandela to his Drum magazine family, the play is brimming with ideas of what South Africa was and could be from the whiskey-tinted perspective of a fierce defender of creative expression.

With that said, The Missing Pages and Bloke and His American Bantu had ample space to embrace stories told from the perspective of a woman, an element that feels neglected considering how immersive and relatable Mahala's work is. It is especially felt in cases of language, when characters are communicating or narrators are explaining their beliefs. In Xhosa, it is often said asitolikwa (not translated) due to the beautiful complexities of the language that don't stick when translated into any other language.

Mahala captures the nuances of how people in different cultures communicate through his dialogue, with very little space to hear this in accordance to women of the time. It would have been great to experience the forgotten slang of the mothers, daughters and revolutionary women of the pre-democratic South Africa.

Ultimately, Mahala offers a wonderful walk down memory lane. Whether you love his previous work or wish to have a starting point, the two books are complementary introductions to the masterful mind of a Can Themba literary torchbearer.