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ABSTRACT
For South African author Mongane Wally Serote, art and activism can only operate in tandem. In the 1970s and 1980s, Serote took leadership roles in revolutionary and anti-apartheid organizations and movements, and in his writing and in these activist roles he mobilizes the one as a means to achieve the ends of the other. In his novel To Every Birth Its Blood, he uses narrative to experiment with chronology and perspective, and explore the physical spaces of township, exile, and state in ways that challenge the apartheid regime’s authority to regulate the lives of South Africans. Serote deploys the novel form against apartheid’s policies, social organization, and legacy. Through this work, he indicts the regime for human rights abuses, and imagines a new world order shaped by inclusive forms of community that carry forward the fight for equal rights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Patel, “Poet of Revolution,” 191. Patel describes Serote in this period as “profoundly dedicated to the culture of the oppressed and exploited, as well as being actively engaged in asserting the highest ideals of the revolution. The development of Serote’s poetry is indeed consonant with the momentum of the liberation struggle against apartheid” (187).
2 Chapman, “Literature Struggles,” 238–39.
3 Serote and Solberg, “Interview,” 180.
4 Es’kia Mphahlele explains that “South Africa issued a blanket ban in 1966 on all its black writers living abroad. This means that their writings are forbidden circulation in South Africa, a measure entrenched in the Internal Security Act” (Mphahlele, “Africa in Exile,” 45).
5 Narismulu, “Serote’s Poems,” 84.
6 Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, 15.
7 Baucom, “Afterword,” 714.
8 Borzaga, “The Present in Pain,” 65.
9 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 50.
10 Ibid., 52.
11 Ibid., 55.
12 Ibid., 23.
13 Borzaga, “The Present in Pain,” 69.
14 See: Titlestad, “Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth its Blood,” 110; Green, Novel Histories, 250; Sole, “‘This Time Set Again,’” 53.
15 Sole, “This Time Set Again,” 70.
16 Serote, “Power to the People,” 194.
17 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 131.
18 Ibid., 139.
19 Ibid., 141–142.
20 Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity, 15.
21 Serote and Solberg, “Interview,” 182.
22 Nkondo, “The Works of Wally Mongane Serote,” 54.
23 Sole, “This Time Set Again,” 70.
24 Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 5.
25 Ibid., 6.
26 Tsi pays a fee late for his pass, and is threatened with even more restriction to his movements as a penalty: “My turn came, I gave them their ten rand, they warned me not to owe so much, threatened to cancel my permit if I did, they gave me a slip and I left” (Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 38).
27 Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 7.
28 Barnard describes how “the very design elements that the planners advocated for functional, scientific, and aesthetic reasons – the broad streets, the ‘green areas’ between the cities and the townships, and the bold, graph-like patterns of the roads and houses – were simultaneously also strategic devices. The broad streets permitted access to armored vehicles (they were wide enough to allow a Saracen tank to make a turn); buffer zones and limited road access allowed the townships to be sealed off from the cities in times of unrest; and the orderly repetition of identical houses on a geometric grid facilitated surveillance by police and informers. The ‘modern’ solution to a housing shortage amounted, in short, to a mechanism of control.” Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 6–7.
29 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 36.
30 Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 8.
31 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 11.
32 Ibid., 11.
33 Ibid., 95.
34 Ibid., 171.
35 Ibid., 172.
36 Washington, “Silence, Music, Revolution,” 101.
37 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 7, 8, 9, 9, 16, 17, 20. Serote’s cultural sensibilities here may have been influenced by having grown up in Sophiatown. Rob Nixon discusses the cultural renaissance in Sophiatown in the first chapter of his book Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, entitled “Harlem, Hollywood, and the Sophiatown Renaissance.”
38 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 27.
39 Washington, “Silence, Music, Revolution,” 116.
40 Washington, “Silence, Music, Revolution,” 96.
41 Serote and Solberg, “Interview,” 182.
42 Green, Novel Histories, 252; emphasis added.
43 Timol’s name also appears in Gods of Our Time (31), alongside the names of Steve Biko and Looksmart Khulile Ngudle.
44 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 89.
45 Bernstein, South Africa, 1.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Inquest, Case No. M. 1804/71. Ismail Essop v. The Commissioner of the South African Police and Colonel Greyling. 25 February 1972. Collection AK2336, Historical Papers Research Archive (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg): 18.
49 Ibid., 19.
50 Nkondo, “The Works of Wally Mongane Serote,” 58.
51 Inquest, Case No. M. 1804/71: 19.
52 Bernstein, South Africa, 53.
53 Popescu, At Penpoint, 111.
54 Ibid., 123.
55 Serote, “Now We Enter History,” 15.
56 Sartre, “Introduction,” 20.
57 Ibid.
58 Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood, 45.
59 Ibid., 74.
60 Ibid., 78; my translation.
61 Ibid., 86, 88.
62 Serote and Solberg, “Interview,” 180.
63 Patel, “Poet of Revolution,” 191.
64 Serote, “Power to the People,” 196.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carolyn Ownbey
Carolyn Ownbey (PhD McGill University) studies contemporary anticolonial literature, and theories of democracy, citizenship, and state. She has published in Law & Literature, Textual Practice, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Safundi. She is currently Associate Director of Research at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.