Loving children: allegories of nation and family in selected South African texts

Abstract

The adult world crucially encompasses children, but research in South African literature has mainly focused on adult worlds, whether white or black. The child, however, is a prominent figure in the poetry and fiction that has tried to capture South African experience in the past, present, and, importantly, implicit projections of the future, through the ways in which children often embody hope for the future. In South Africa, the child is caught up in the politics of the nation through the politics of love and past shame. While it is expected that the child will be loved unconditionally and unfailingly, narratives of love for the child demonstrate the shameful failures of love. Njabulo Ndebele, in Fools and Other Stories, attempts to rewrite the fate of the nation as struggles over black independence emerge, but as Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples shows, loving the child is irrevocably caught within national shame.