Post-apartheid South African literature is beginning to explore new languages for imagining the nation. These explorations engage with new human rights violations in the new South Africa: xenophobia towards continental Africans; the stigma attached to HIV/ AIDS; the increasing desperation of poverty as the economic differential widens in the context of our entry into a neo-liberal, globalised world economy. In the face of these new challenges, and given the continued presence of the old, some writers are offering ways to find the right words to figure ourselves differently. The possibilities of freedom are explored even as the impediments to our recognition of our shared humanity are acknowledged.
This paper will look at two recent novels, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows (2006) in order to explore how these texts imagine the possibilities of human connection in the new South Africa. Both novels offer tropes for human connection that confound our naturalized understandings of cultural and racial differences. Both insist that it is possible to conceptualise freedom in the new South Africa, even in the face of all the impediments to a language of common humanity. Ultimately, both novels suggest a new discourse of human rights, based on the imagining of family connections between all South Africans. In the face of much theory which problematises the easy invocation of a European-developed humanism in postcolonial contexts, these novels offer a radical new humanist theory for the 21st century.