Versatile kinship: trans-African family formations and postcolonial disillusionment in Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears

Abstract

Much of the existing scholarship on Niq Mhlongo’s works has engaged with the author’s portrayal of township life and his use of humour and deceit to address pressing contemporary socio-economic issues. This article examines the constructions and contestations of belonging in his novel After Tears with particular focus on the trope of the family and its reconstruction through multiple engagements with migrants from other parts of Africa. Reading the novel against the background of the study of family fictions in the South African transition, I argue that Mhlongo’s employment of the trope is indicative of the novel’s disillusionment with the democratic promise. For spectacular forms of deception and trickery, rather than affective bonds of care and love, hold the family together and become essential characteristics of postapartheid subject formation and versatile forms of kinship. After Tears, I suggest, assesses the possibilities and failures of trans-African family formations, but also (and notwithstanding the author’s appeal for continental solidarity) writes into being more conservative, citizenship-bound notions of family that are tightly interwoven with the characters’ experience of postcolonial disillusionment.

Keywords:

• Niq Mhlongo
• South African literature
• trickster figure
• intra-African migration
• family fictions
• literature of disillusionment

Acknowledgements

I’m very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this article for their invaluable feedback.

Notes

1. Andrew van der Vlies similarly notes that “[g]ay men, lesbians, and bisexuals serve frequently in postapartheid writing as markers of new social possibilities of freedom, but often also trouble narratives of the new national family’s futurity” (2017, 11).

2. Subsequent references to the novel only provide page numbers.

3. See Mhlongo’s description of the after-tears tradition in an interview with Lizzy Attree (2010, 140).

4. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

5. It seems rather odd that Yomi, whose name is clearly Yoruba, would address Bafana in Igbo.

6. The only character recurrently linked to drugs in the novel is Bafana’s uncle Jabu, who sells marijuana alongside vegetables (90). Mhlongo’s delineation of Jabu’s business dismantles the assumption that only Nigerians are associated with drug selling and smuggling in South Africa.