In a celebrated series of essays written in a burst of intellectual and creative energy in the mid 1980s, Njabulo Ndebele set out some key terms for considering the history, trajectory and imperatives of South African literature. Some of these terms – ‘spectacle’, ‘interiority’, ‘information’, ‘counsel’ – will come up again for discussion in this chapter, as will the wider resonances of Ndebele's contribution. Beyond the terms themselves, however, there is a deeper – one might say foundational – aspect in Ndebele's approach, which may be even more significant in considering writing in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s – the long decade of its ‘interregnum’ through the final years of apartheid. It is an aspect on one level simple, but nonetheless profound – that Ndebele established a perspective for considering the history of South African literature on formal grounds. Moreover, these were not the formal or generic grounds of standard literary history – realism, romanticism, experimentalism – though such terms can and do have their place. Rather, these formal terms had to do with what informed South African writing – what shaped it, gave it perspective: its own versions of ‘interiority’, as it were.

The implicit challenge in Ndebele's formal approach has not much been taken up in the writing of South African literary history, but along with a number of other patterns in the period, it does allow us to reach towards certain features at the heart of the era.