Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (English)
This study examines patterns and discontinuities in the cultural and literary articulation of nationalism and public memory across transitional periods in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Nigeria after the return to democracy in 1999. The selected South African texts are: Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit (2001); Niell Blomkamp’s feature film District 9 (2009); and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009). The Nigeria texts are: In the Shadow of a Saint (2000), a biography of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa written by his son, Ken Wiwa; Helon Habila’s novel Measuring Time (2007); and the controversial BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos (2010). These texts, from three different genres, are interrogated for the ways in which they represent social identity, history, and nationhood in the changing contexts of on-going socio-political transition. The analyses foreground critical features of the evolving cultural history of the respective countries, both of which are representative of highly contested postcolonial spaces. The study reveals important intertextual relationships between what is theorized herein as post-dictatorship Nigerian writing and post-TRC South African literature. With particular regard to the two sites under focus, the study makes evident the ways in which narrative contributes to the shaping of the social imagination, especially in a post-conflict, transitional setting (see Ndebele, 1998; Andrews and McGuire, 2016), and how it is invariably implicated in legitimizing the truth claims upon which existing social categories are reinforced and new ones founded (see Moon, 2008). The first chapter provides a background to so-called ‘third-generation’ Nigerian writing and ‘post-transitional’ South African literature, which are theorized respectively as ‘post-military dictatorship’ (or post-dictatorship) and ‘post-TRC’ in chapter two. Each of the next three chapters presents a dialogic reading of one Nigerian and one South African text. The (auto)biographical texts In the Shadow of a Saint and Native Nostalgia are discussed in chapter three, with a focus on literary historiography and the texts’ portrayal of changing social categories. Chapter four explores the perspectives of the marginal protagonists in the novels Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit, while chapter five interrogates the films Welcome to Lagos and District 9 for their representation of slum urbanism as a key feature of contemporary transition in each country and in Africa at large. The final chapter foregrounds the salient features of post-dictatorship and post-TRC writing as...