Gwebede’s Wars: Anglophone black novels in Southern Africa 1965-1989

Abstract

The Cold War is often described in general terms as a single homogenous event, even though it had distinct ‘hot’ phases – the Korean war of the 1950s and the Vietnam war of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example. There were points when the Cold War seemed on the verge of becoming thermonuclear, as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Metropolitan history routinely omits Africa as a site of superpower struggle. Yet Africa, from the dawn of decolonisation, was impacted by rivalry and manoeuvring for position on the part of the USA and the Soviet Union, with Chinese interventions also being a feature of the continent’s politics. Certainly, a period of intense violence and superpower intervention was inaugurated with Congo’s independence in 1960; it lasted until Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, when the level of conflict and violence escalated. For Africans all over the continent, and (arguably) particularly in its southern region, the era of decolonisation was marked by intense hope and expectation, as well as by senses of often acute crisis – what Mbembe and Roitman describe, in a different context, as ‘upheavals and tribulations, instabilities, fluctuations and ruptures of all sorts’. Literature registers the social and political uncertainties of this periods complexly and unevenly. This chapter selects for close consideration a set of novels that, in one way or another, address the topics of politics and war as their key concerns. Although anything like a full survey of how southern African cold-war politics relates to its literatures is next to impossible in a chapter of this length (in part because of a set of disciplinary limitations we touch on below), this chapter sets a scholarly precedent in its cross-disciplinary approach, as well as its combination of broad comparative coverage and precise analytical detail.

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ORCID for Ranka Primorac: orcid.org/0000-0003-1127-1175

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