The heart of the south african film industry

In Njabulo S. Ndebele’s essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” Ndebele observes that South Africa’s “overwhelmingly oppressive” social formation prompted a school of literature that orientated itself towards spectacle. From coast to coast, the absurdity of colonialism and apartheid created a fractured and cratered landscape of a country, and any attempt to reconcile these fragments into a coherent narrative work inevitably found itself in the realm of sensationalism. The true measure of any South African storyteller isn’t to out-sensationalize a country spoiled rotten with it, but to rummage through the noise and find the tender root of how South Africans live and relate to themselves…