The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction. An anthology co-edited with Sean Christie (Soutie Press, 2025).
Using the term “nonfiction” (some writers of it have remarked) is about as useful as calling the clothes in your wardrobe “nonsocks”, or saying that you had “nongrapefruit” for breakfast. A broad spectrum of compelling, ambitious and artful literature shelters within that unhelpful “non”. This includes: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing in its many variants, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony – all those forms caught up in the alchemy of spoken becoming written.
Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. Collected here is the work in prose of thirty-seven authors, all of it writing (also some drawing: comics and graphic nonfiction) concerned with actual people, places and events. Actual rather than real, since a character in a novel might be powerfully real for a reader, even when invented or imaginary. Fiction in the first person can, after all, impersonate every technique known to autobiography (and has often done so, right back to the beginnings of the novel). Whereas (the other side of the coin) writing about a real- life person does not guarantee that the subject will come to life, or be realised, on the page.
So when and why does this happen? How is it that human beings become vital, vivid and (see Lin Sampson’s portrait of bouncer, breker and photographer Billy Monk) indelible via words? When does nonfiction become not just a way of delivering information but an artform in its own right?
The closing of Cape Town’s Tygerberg Zoo could have been just a quirky news item; in Sean O’Toole’s hands it becomes something far more: a comic but moving reflection on our increasingly scrambled relations with the natural world – and other things besides. Often these things are difficult to explain or point to with certainty: why certain writing comes to life, why it seemed essential to us. But some of the thinking behind our selection (which is just a selection, not the selection, and could easily have been twice as long) is as follows.
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We began looking for forms of social reporting: the kind of narrative- driven, research-based storytelling often called literary journalism in the United States (that is: not journalism about literature, but journalism as literature). We were drawn to assignments that seemed to go beyond their brief. By far the longest piece here is Rian Malan’s 12,000-worder on the transnational odyssey of Solomon Linda’s 1939 song “Mbube” (misheard as “Wimoweh” by Pete Seeger and eventually becoming one of the most famous melodies on the planet). “In the Jungle” is an epic example of a writer becoming obsessed with a subject, and not letting go (as a postscript to the original Rolling Stone piece reveals, Malan’s story ends up changing the story).
Bongani Madondo set off on so many of these quests over the course of his career that we struggled to know which to pick – his profiles of Brenda Fassie, Zahara or Molemo “Jub Jub” Maarohanye? – but eventually went for his account of Enoch Mgijima’s Black Israelites in the Eastern Cape. In it we see the author trying to inhabit a subculture that he can’t quite believe in but nonetheless wants to maintain sympathy with, or some understanding of.
It’s a recurring motif – narrator poised between insider/outsider – and one that has defined the career of Jonny Steinberg. His writing is often filed under journalism, but perhaps better described as some other, more original art form – “some singular admixture of reporting, biography, literary criticism, psychoanalysis”– and one that borrows whatever it needs from novelistic techniques of characterisation, plotting, scene-setting and dialogue. “The Defeated” revisits a KwaZulu-Natal farm murder that was the subject of his first book, Midlands, some fifteen years before. Impelled by a desire to find the truth of the matter, his work is also aware that this might be impossible, given how self-deluding and self-mythologising human beings are; and how difficult it is for genuine understanding to pass across the rifts of a still-divided society. “Behind the ways in which my subjects perform for me, want to please me, resent me, need to conceal things from me,” he remarks, “lies the story of a whole country.”
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Over a year and more of reading, we shifted the anthology’s centre of gravity closer towards other modes: less journalistic, more reflective, more essay-like, sometimes more experimental, even fragmentary. Sometimes even approaching (in Julie Nxadi’s “The End of a Conversation”, for example) a kind of autofiction.
But while some pieces here may be intimate and deeply personal, they are not simply autobiographical. In Rustum Kozain’s “Dagga”, which insists on the right to a fullness of experience and memory – even within a past so shaped by racist social engineering – the self is not the final subject or destination of the work. Rather it is a lens, a means of approach. The personal becomes a way of accessing difficult, risky subjects (risk was another criterion: did the author risk something in writing this?) Of getting to a place that more public, fact-checkable or “objective” voices would not reach.
In Bongani Kona’s reflection on family history in Zimbabwe, it is the inappropriate, unusable pasts that fall between the cracks of public and national memory. In Anna Hartford’s account of IVF, genetic screening and “assisted reproduction”, it is a historical moment, ours, when biomedical technology is surging ahead of ethics, moral thought and even cognition – a moment when we seem to have ever more information but less and less knowledge.
An attempt to win back knowledge, even wisdom, from a world deluged by information (and disinformation): this is also near the heart of it. In an online marketplace of machine-generated copy and ghostwritten op eds, we looked for the antithesis, the antidote. For sentences that are the product of real time and thought; that are set back from the talking points, the discourse, the churn of the 24-hour news cycle.
We gravitated towards pieces that (it seemed to us) only this writer could have written, that their whole life and experience seemed to have tended towards and prepared them for. Is there another pear farmer in the country who could have taken on land and labour relations with the fierce honesty and gentle anguish of William Dicey? Who but Njabulo S Ndebele, in his dual identity as social theorist and storyteller, could have evoked the game lodge experience with such sly seriousness?
In “Nietverloren”, J. M. Coetzee writes a form of autobiography in the third person (or autre-biography, as he has termed it: the story of a younger self perceived as a kind of stranger, an other). Lidudumalingani’s “Fighting Shadows” matches the art of stick fighting with a very particular verbal grace.
The graphic nonfictions of Anton Kannemeyer and Mogorosi Motshumi are both stories of coming of age under apartheid, yet refracted into such distinctive visual styles: Kannemeyer’s influenced by American underground comics and European bandes dessinée; Motshumi’s emerging from a career of political cartooning and much-loved comic strips.
The closing essay, Adrian Leftwich’s “I Gave the Names”, is a reflection on selling out his comrades in the struggle, “an essay in the politics of failure and betrayal” that took him fifteen years to write, to be able to write. It is a work steeped in time: a lifetime of thought and reckoning.
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Almost every selection in this anthology appeared previously as a standalone piece, in publications ranging from the eminent and international (the New Yorker, Granta) to the lesser-known and more local (Prufrock, Mampoer). Some appeared on personal blogs or in short-lived zines. No book excerpts, we decided: we wanted the commitment and compression of the single, self-contained text.
The interplay between local and global set up another kind of criteria. Because of the extraordinary human disaster of apartheid, then the 1990s transition to democracy, the Mandela presidency, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – because of all this there is an important and honourable journalistic tradition of filing a report on “the situation in South Africa” for the rest of the world. But this is not without its problems. You can all too easily become explainer of an entire country to “the cross-border reader”(in Lewis Nkosi’s words), with all the insidious pressures to simplify (and make explicable) that come with it.
We shied away from this “letter from South Africa” kind of writing. Some of the selections here do take on flashpoints in our recent history (Alexandra Dodd on the Spear controversy and the Zuma presidency’s response; Kwanele Sosibo on xenophobia; Srila Roy on domestic violence; Anton Harber on a heavyweight clash between Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee over Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses); but these are approached in unexpected, immersive or otherwise vivid ways. Often the key historical markers are glimpsed obliquely, or in the rear-view mirror. The death of Nelson Mandela, in the epilogue to Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon’s “Dispossessed Vigils”, is all the more affecting for being so far removed from any official forms of commemoration.
Compiling an anthology like this takes you into a history of where innovative nonfiction has been able to find a home over the years: notably the Mail & Guardian and the shape-shifting pan-African gazette Chimurenga. Some come from previous anthologies: Stephen Watson’s A City Imagined includes Michiel Heyns’ glorious memoir of cruising the public conveniences of central Cape Town; Bongani Kona’s Our Ghosts Were Once People introduced us to the writing of Madeleine Fullard. Her “Investigation Pieces” takes the reader into the ongoing work of locating human remains, long after the TRC has departed from global headlines, and handles them with such care.
We are indebted to all the editors who created and nurtured these spaces, and to the authors who have allowed us to reproduce their work. Many of the essays here can be found online, sometimes in ways (see Lindokuhle Nkosi’s homage to Miriam Makeba at herri.org.za) that allow a blending of image, music and text impossible to recreate in print. Nonetheless, we hope that collecting these pieces in book format gives them a new life, and a quality of attention they so deserve.
The one exception to our rule about no book excerpts is “The Interpreters”, a chapter from a longer, co-authored work by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. It is about simultaneous interpretation as used during the TRC hearings, between April 1996 and June 1998. Years later, those who worked as interpreters speak in matter- of-fact ways about the task of rendering multilingual hearings – involving victims, perpetrators, grieving families – across different languages in real time (their interpretations then forming the basis for published English transcripts). The chapter serves as reminder of a fundamental limitation to this anthology: it is all in English. But to what extent can this language – which lends itself to the flattened idiom of finance and governance – honour the multilingual and vernacular richness that it exists between and among, and is all too often oblivious of?
The relation between English and other Southern African languages raises the question of whether to italicise, or not. Different authors had different thoughts on the matter, and maintaining a strict house style across such a multifarious set of writings proved impossible; so please treat non-standardisation as a feature, not a bug.
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There are no facts, wrote Nietzsche, only interpretations. There is always a set of choices, absences and emphases (even in the most apparently “straight” reporting); there is always the work (especially in a place like South Africa) of translation – literal, cultural, metaphorical. The writers collected here have taken up this task of absorbing, shaping and interpreting the overwhelming complexity of our world for the reader – and trusting that reader more than most writing does.
A line in Krog, Mpolweni and Ratele’s chapter describes the TRC’s interpreters (sitting in their glass booths) as “language practitioners who were in strangely ambiguous ways highly visible and at the same time virtually transparent.” This also seems to evoke the kind of nonfictional persona at work in our selections: pieces written with all the fullness of self, and yet also evacuating that self, in service of a larger social task.
This attention to the human voice in “The Interpreters” (and The Interpreters) – from Truth Commission hearings to the whole chorus of overlapping speakers and stories that make up a social world – for me it resonates with the words of Svetlana Alexievich, one of the few writers to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for nonfiction. Her polyphonic documentary works also respond to a massive political transition – the collapse of the Soviet Union – and one happening at roughly the same time.
“I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone”, says Alexievich: “It is something fragmented, there is so much to it, the truth is varied and scattered across the world.” She goes on:
So, what do I do? I gather together the feelings, ideas, words of everydayness. I put together the life of my times. I’m interested in the history of the soul, the being of the soul. All that the larger history usually misses out on, all that it is condescending towards. So I work on all the history that goes missing.
March 2025
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some singular admixture … Katie Roiphe interviewing Janet Malcolm, “The Art of Nonfiction No. 4”, Paris Review 196 (Spring 2011).
the ways in which my subjects perform for me … Jonny Steinberg interviewed by Daniel Lehman, “Counting the Costs of Nonfiction”, River Teeth 11.2 (2010).
I have always grappled … Svetlana Alexievich interviewed by Elizabeth Kuruvilla, “A History of the Soul”, Mint (11 November 2016).