ike all myths worth revisiting, K Sello Duiker’s begins with an ending.
Before his death in 2005, the award-winning writer published two books – Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams – that spoke candidly of race, sexuality and Cape Town’s class divide. The Quiet Violence, his magnum opus, is a discomforting story about Tshepo, a journalism student who finds himself at odds with his sanity after being admitted to a psychiatric hospital for cannabis-induced psychosis. Rendered in a rich, lyrical prose style, the book is often regarded as a semi-autobiographical account of Duiker’s time in the mother city.
Duiker’s Cape Town is unlike what many outsiders would have imagined it to be at the time. The city is a purgatory where the supernatural and mythical exist side by side with reality. Drugs, sexual assault and the threat of violence always loom large and in both Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence, the city seems intent on breaking the protagonists into pieces.
“Sometimes I just pray for the light of day when I will be able to breathe again instead of holding my breath with fear … Every day is hard. And every day is different because moods change. Faces become masks and silence becomes the cross you bear,” says Tshepo, when he is first committed to Valkenberg psychiatric institution. Later in the novel, he escapes, is recommitted, released and then raped by his flatmate before giving himself to the streets as a sex worker.
Indeed, Duiker was instrumental in starting something of a literary subgenre in South African writing about young black males coming undone in Cape Town.
Songeziwe Mahlangu’s award-winning, semi-autobiographical novel, Penumbra, deals with similar themes. Mangaliso, the novel’s main character, is a recent graduate battling to keep afloat in a job he hates and in a city on the verge of swallowing him whole. He is already having difficulty keeping sane when we’re introduced to him.
“This is not how things are meant to be,” the book opens, as Mangaliso walks around the city in the middle of a full-on mental collapse. “I walk past sickly people in the street. One man’s face is charred, with pink lips that have been licked by spirits. He moves like he is dying.” The book also deals with Cape Town’s racist rental practices – Mangaliso views a flat and upon seeing the landlord is white, knows he won’t get it – and Cape Town’s spatial apartheid is discussed at length.
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