On the front cover of the South African writer Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s impressive debut collection of linked stories about life under and after apartheid, a young Black girl, primly attired in a collared dress, holds in each of her hands a chicken – defeathered and seemingly gutted. Look closer and you’ll notice the horns on the girl’s forehead and a sinuous stream of blood down her left leg. Her eyes stare ahead, whether in resignation or pain or provocation. Makhene’s book, like this image – an oil painting by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami – melds the ordinary and the spectacular, grief, grit and horror, in novel and arresting ways.
Largely set in the township of Soweto, the stories follow characters as they unsnarl racially flecked feelings of anger, disappointment, indignity, culpability and betrayal in the aftermath of injury and loss, both personal and shared. In Indians Can’t Fly, Krishna is tortured at the infamous John Vorster Square detention centre after she fails to provide information on her husband, a freedom fighter who has gone incommunicado. When Krishna is released, she attempts to find out his whereabouts, only to realise that he may have turned against his co-insurgents, becoming an “askari” – a collaborator. (We hear of him again in a slice of gossip in the centrepiece story, Innards; and we meet him as a character proper in the darkly comic Dr Basters, where we learn how he reinvented himself after apartheid ended.)
