“Plunging into the Mire of Corruption and Pleasure”: Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home

Abstract

This article presents a close reading of Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home, particularly its representation of the post-apartheid nation-state as a place of excess or, indeed, what James Ogude might call a “a site of eating”. To begin, I locate Mhlongo’s oeuvre within the long and rich tradition of black-centred artistic expression that is preoccupied with black masculinities and the politics/performance of ‘hustling’. Turning to Way Back Home specifically, I argue that the novel functions as a critique of the excesses, including the kleptocracy, of the ruling elite. I show that the novel ultimately reveals the underside of South Africa’s euphoric discourse of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. I wish to evoke not only his novel’s interrogation of the notions of home, belonging, desire and the unheimlich in post-apartheid South Africa, but also the sense in which failure is always already a certainty in postcolonial states which adopt and function within structures that were never designed for African progress.

Keywords:

• Mhlongo
• novel
• South Africa
• disillusionment
• nation-state

Notes on Contributor

A Yolisa Kenqu is currently reading towards her PhD in Literary Studies at Rhodes University. Titled, From Euphoria to Disenchantment: The Intangible in Black Post-apartheid Fiction, her thesis is a study on failure and disillusionment in black post-apartheid literature, and it traces the move from social realism to more experimental narrative modes. She teaches postcolonial literature in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Bhekizizwe Peterson who first drew my attention to these specific dimensions of hustling in our correspondence.

2. As Fanon explains, “this economy has always developed outside the limits of their knowledge. They have nothing more than an approximate, bookish acquaintance with the actual and potential resources of their country’s soil and mineral deposits; and therefore they can only speak of these resources on a general and abstract plane. After independence this underdeveloped middle class, reduced in numbers and without capital, which refuses to follow the path of revolution, will fall into deplorable stagnation” (1968: 151).

3. The details of this event can be found in the Cape Times newspaper, in an article by Tyrone August entitled “Eating Cake on Behalf of the People is Just in Poor Taste”.

4. See Lindokuhle Nkosi’s illustrated blog entry, “The Culture of Cake”, for example.

5. See “South Africa’s Second Coming: The Nongqawuse Syndrome” (2006: 2).

6. These jazz novels include Wally Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, Fred Khumalo’s Bitches Brew, and Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things. In these, John Coltrane and Miles Davis are utilised as muses and jazz takes on the role of a character in its own right, in contradistinction to Mhlongo’s novel in which jazz merely serves as artificial marker of affluence. I am indebted to Salim Washington, who drew my attention to this reading in his article, “Miles Davis as Literary Muse for post-1994 South Africa: An Examination of Fred Khumalo’s Bitches Brew and Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things”, presented at the Artistic Intersections as Tools of Resistance: Musical-Literary Crossovers in Contemporary South Africa conference at JIAS, on the 15–16 September 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) [SAHUDA].