Reading:

• Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, Woza Albert!
• Two selections from The Anti-Apartheid Reader: "South Africa in Brief" and "Chronology"
• Rob Nixon, "Mandela, Messianism, and the Media" (Transition 51 [1991]—HSU users only)

In hearing three years of public testimony from apartheid's victims and victimizers, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to fulfill a "need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu (the African philosophy of humanism) but not for victimization." Indeed, the commission found this task so mammoth and paradoxical that it believed it necessary to diverge from the restrictions of factual and objective truth, turning its attention to what was termed "personal or narrative truth," "social or dialogue truth," and "healing and restorative truth." One candidate for the TRC helped explain what was meant by these neologisms when he said, "Only literature can perform the miracle of reconciliation."

--from Benjamin Austen, "The Pen or the Gun: Zakes Mda and the post-apartheid novel" (Harper's Magazine, February 2005)

• Background/History: "South Africa" (Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas | CIA World Factbook)
• "King Kong"--influential black South African musical play (Soul Safari weblog)
• South Africa (and South African Lit) Since Apartheid:
  • Neil Cooper, "Woza Albert!: South African Pioneers": a review of a new (summer 2012) revival of Woza Albert!
  • Loren Kruger, "Staging South Africa" (Transition 59) (HSU users only): the "protest paradigm" and post-apartheid South African theater
  • Rachel L. Swarns, "South Africa's Writers Explore a Free Society's Tensions" (New York Times 24 June 2002): an introduction to the new generation of post-apartheid writers
  • Annie Gagiano, "Adapting the National Imaginary: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels" (Journal of South African Studies 30:4 [December 2004])
  • Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission (Handspring Puppet Theatre | Wikipedia)
  • Naomi Klein, "The New Apartheid" (The Nation 16 December 2002): a review of Ashwin Desai's "We Are the Poors": Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa
• Saint Mandela: some reflections on Mandela myth-making, on the occasion of his passing
  • Benjamin Fogel, "The Two Mandelas" (Jacobin ): Mandela as revolutionary. "The truth is that in South Africa much of what constituted apartheid still exists, enforced no longer through the laws, decrees and brute force of the state, but by new forms which reproduce themselves through the market. It from this basis that an honest assessment of Mandela’s legacy must begin."
  • T.O. Molefe, "Mandela's Unfinished Revolution" (New York Times 13 December 2013). "South Africa's economy still stifles the aspirations of most of its black citizens."