National dreams

With the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and, even more decisively, with his election as president in April 1994, South Africa set off on a new course. This did not mean that a unified national culture, bridging earlier divisions between black and white, between literary and linguistic traditions, between expatriate and local writers, or between the privileged and the deprived immediately came into being. Indeed, while optimistic terms like the ‘rainbow nation’ or ‘the new South Africa’ pervaded political discourse during the 1990s, more cautious literary commentators always preferred to use those terms in scare quotes. Loren Kruger, for one, suggested that much South African writing from this period should be termed ‘post-anti-apartheid’ rather than ‘post-apartheid’ literature tout court (“‘Black Atlantics”’, p. 35). More recently, scholars have found a need to mark a distinct shift in mood that occurred in the course of Mbeki's presidency. Some have even proposed the term ‘post-transition’ to describe the more disenchanted writing that has emerged in the new millennium. The implication is that we can no longer – nearly two decades after the official end of apartheid – rely on themagic word ‘transition’ as ’a convenient label to positively connote an evolution and to make and justify a social, economic, or political “lack”’ (Popescu, South Africa, p. 162). The experience of rampant poverty and crime, AIDS and AIDS denialism, and the erosion of the new democracy's moral authority in the international sphere has proven too dark for that.