A family’s life during apartheid: a superb read
ACHMAT Dangor is an award-winning poet and novelist whose titles include Kafka’s Curse (1997) and the 2004 Booker shortlisted title
Bitter Fruit. He is a former chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
His fifth novel is Dikeledi, a complex and moving tale about ordinary life during the height of the apartheid era. It follows the lives of a family and particularly the women of various generations, who are named Dikeledi.
The narrative is superbly and sensitively observed and crafted. It vividly captures the feel of the turbulent days in which it is set. With the focus on family drama within a difficult social setting, detailing their everyday struggles, one is immediately drawn into the characters and the situations in which they find themselves.
There are many novels in which the story is a bit thin, but the standard of the writing makes up for it in some measure. In Dangor’s book, the writing is top-notch and the narrative is brimful of incident.
The South African literary scene of today has many works, both of fiction and non-fiction, in which life under apartheid are key features. In Dikeledi this reality is cleverly placed in the experience of the Tau family. The effect of apartheid on much of their daily lives is interspersed among the drama of the family’s relationships and their individual struggles for identity.
The time-frame might be a bit confusing, but Dikeledi’s central threads are strong, thought-provoking and pertinent, and its evocation of a past era makes for a really good read.