Litnet

"This is not a novel that wants you to feel comfortable, and its structure won’t let you, either."

"The bittereinder dying of typhoid in a Bloemfontein camp and the black child buried without a name in a Free State field are not statistics in a structural argument; they are the argument. A curriculum that cannot make a schoolchild feel the weight of those deaths in their own chest has failed at its most essential task."

"This essay concerns itself with a recurring structure in Western historical consciousness: the production of fear as a precondition for domination. Fear, in this tradition, is rarely spontaneous. It is cultivated, narrativised and subsequently moralised until it acquires the character of providence."

"The parallel with contemporary South Africa is difficult to ignore here also. One hears, in the fading rhetoric of former liberators, echoes of a language that once mobilised masses but now dissipates into the air, uttered with conviction and received with indifference."

"Cape fever is a thoughtful and evocative work, probing the quiet violences and lingering spectres embedded within Cape Town’s social history. Beneath the city’s contemporary image – its wealth, its postcard beauty, its carefully curated cosmopolitanism – lies a deeper archive of stories too often suppressed. Davids’s novel, through the intimate drama of a haunted household, draws those buried histories back into the light."

"There are seasons in which grief is not a mere abstraction, but a habitation. In such seasons, one reads and watches everything differently – as I recently reread Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet and watched the movie of the same title, with different eyes. It became a revelation of what happens when private loss hardens into art."

"But to acknowledge complexity is not to erase hierarchy. Staphorst suggests that my argument assumes identity is fixed. It does not. Identity is layered, contested and always in motion."

"For formerly colonised peoples, restoring indigenous names is not nostalgia; it is epistemic independence. It declares: We are not what conquest called us."

"Roger Lucey’s How to build a house in the mountains is a book about constructing a legacy from your own ruins."

"The lesson of history is clear: When political anxieties dictate who may speak, the marketplace of ideas collapses. Every writer’s freedom suffers, not just that of the one targeted."

"For now, I continue reading – lifting the dust of archives, tracing the moral DNA of empires. The covenant demands it. And dust, after all, is where every story of human belonging begins."

"The best writers are not merely stylists; they are custodians of sensibility. They bring with themselves the heaviness of culture, memory, grief, humour, private ghosts, inherited silences and the rest of the untranslatable textures of lived experience. They write from the grain of their mother tongue. They write from provincial landscapes that the internet has never indexed, not yet anyway. They write from the pain of exile, from the taste of a city’s dust and from history that refuses to be archived. AI, for all its omnivorous reading, knows only what is online."

"Beneath its quiet surfaces, Szalay’s novel probes the cultural unease of our time – the exhaustion of liberal optimism, the backlash angst against 'wokeness' and the waning of faith in collective redemption."

"It is not often that a volume of poetry captures the public imagination in South Africa. Yet, Siphokazi Jonas’s Weeping becomes a river has done just that. This is an unlikely and heartening success in a literary landscape where poetry is often treated as the private language of a select few. One wonders, inevitably, about the reasons behind this resonance."

"Morafe: Person, family and nation in colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s is a landmark achievement. Khumisho Moguerane has written a history that matters for our time by filling the lacunae in southern African historiography."