Apocalypse Now, Never … or Forever: Venter and Medalie on the Everyday Politics of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article undertakes an analysis of the narrative temporalities and of the narratives of temporality, specifically those of apocalypse or end-times and of living-on respectively, to be found in two recent South African novels, Eben Venter's Trencherman (2008) and David Medalie's The Shadow Follows (2006). Against Venter's hyperbolic narrative of catastrophe, which also turns out to be a critique of the residual elements of the erstwhile apartheid era, I posit that Medalie's litotic and patchwork narrative offers a more appropriate narrative of the slow transformation of the post-apartheid South African polity. I use Venter's and Medalie's oddly complementary novels as a template for exploring an emergent sense of a non-teleological ‘minor narrative’ of liberation in a time ‘after postcoloniality’.

Keywords:

• anti-teleology
• catastrophism
• futurity
• post-apartheid
• post-post-colonialism
• South Africa
• temporality