Staff Writer 
By Diana Rodrigues
Edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle
Soutie Press, 488 pp., May 2025, 978-1-0370-4783-1
The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction, an anthology of creative nonfiction recently launched by Soutie Press, a dynamic publishing house in Cape Town, is taking the literati by storm at events and literary festivals in Cape Town, Franschhoek, Stellenbosch and Johannesburg.
Edited by published writers and literary journalists Hedley Twidle and Sean Christie, the collection reveals a mesmerising selection of creative nonfiction, reflecting social changes in South Africa in the years following the end of apartheid in 1994. After ‘many years of reading and discussion’, these inspired young editors have made a selection of stories capturing the essence and voices of South Africa’s recent past.
While the choice of essays, memoirs and narratives represents a very South African collection, there are also contributions from Zimbabwean academics, and numerous references to characters and events in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s close neighbour. Homeboy Percy Zvomuya, prolific writer and critic, describes, in Chasing Mermaids, a mystifying event that took place near his kumusha in the district of Mhondoro.
A dam built in the 1990s at the boulder-strewn edges of a river surrounded by kopjes came to be inhabited by an njuzu, aka mermaid. In poetic language interlaced with trepidation, Zvomuya describes how a ‘fantastical creature, half-woman half fish thought to cause people to disappear, drive some into madness and make healers of others, had become a denizen of the pool.’
The area became a shrine, and in spite of a spate of weird and unexplained happenings at the lake, a branch of the Mapostori, a religious group blending Christian and traditional African beliefs, began to use the location as a place for prayer. With the help of a local spirit medium, permission was obtained for worshippers to use only one side of the pool. In addition, devotees should not be guilty of ‘philandering’ or using ‘bad medicine’. Tragedy struck when a leading prophet, hoping to take over the whole area, led two of his congregants ‘on a wild mermaid chase early one morning’. Wading into the dam trailing broken shards of clay pots tied to pieces of red cloth, a colour known to enrage mermaids, their intention was to ‘chase the mermaids who are stopping us from praying’.
After interviewing a member of the church about the ill-fated encounter with the mermaid and subsequent drownings, Zvomuya felt a sense of fear when passing by the dam at dusk to get back to the aunt’s house where he was staying. Happy to get home safely, he recalled the sense of a similar dread in a short story in a collection entitled by Doris Lessing entitled This Was the Old Chief’s Country, when ‘even the birds seem to call menacingly, and a deadly spirit comes out of the trees and rocks.’
In Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists, Njabulo Ndebele, eminent academic, poet and writer, describes, with a slightly teasing tone, a visit in 1997 to a game lodge in Kwazulu-Natal. While searching for ‘relief from the accumulated stresses of professional life’ he gradually comes to the conclusion that ‘the game lodge has become a leisure sanctuary where moneyed white South Africans can take refuge from the stresses of living in a black-run country.’
While the lodges are luxurious, they are built on stilts, and Njabulo has a niggling fear that ‘creeping things’ will make their way up while he sleeps. But all is well, and safe within the protected clearing surrounded by bush, he begins to enjoy campfire pre-dinner drinks with convivial fellow-guests, game drives and walking trails. But as a black tourist, he finds his new role as a ‘leisure colonialist’ disturbing, and resents having to listen to conversations around the campfire about ‘lion kills and hunting jokes’ in which he has little interest.
In his biography, Njabulo describes his exhilarating years at The University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS) at the Roma campus in Lesotho. In the many hours he describes spending with his fellow students debating and studying the decolonisation of Africa, and the Third World countries yet to achieve their independence, might he have envisaged his future visit to a game lodge and how, as a black leisure colonialist, it would be ‘difficult to distinguish being treated like a pampered guest or like a black guest who is doing “white things”’.
South Africa is considered to be LGBTQ-friendly, but readers unfamiliar with gay literature will find Michiel Heyns reminiscences about cottaging in Cape Town startling. (The Oxford English Dictionary defines to cottage as ‘to use or frequent public toilets for homosexual sex’.) In On Graciousness and Convenience: Cape Cottaging c1960-1980, Heyns bemoans the loss of Cape Town’s old station, demolished to make to make way for the Golden Acre, and the closure of upmarket department store Suttafords; public conveniences there once provided opportunities for gay cruising and for the ‘errant flock’ to socialise.
In 1939, South African singer Solomon Linda and The Original Evening Birds recorded Mbube, a song that became internationally known as The Lion Sleeps Tonight. A gifted composer and performer, and pioneer of a high-pitched falsetto voice, Linda sold his rights to the song to Gallo Recording Company in Johannesburg, for $2. In his captivating narrative In the Jungle, Rian Malan describes how Mbube came to be known as The Lion Sleeps Tonight, becoming ‘a song the whole world knows’ and ending up on the soundtrack of The Lion King, a musical film produced by Walt Disney. When sung by white voices, the chorus ‘uyimbube’ (‘you are a lion’) became ‘Wimoweh’, prompting party goers of all ages to leap to the dance floor. Satisfyingly, Malan describes how Solomon Linda’s daughters eventually secure a settlement entitling them to a share of the royalties from The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
This impressive anthology, comprising excerpts from some of South Africa’s finest writers of literary nonfiction, offers captivating insights into the South African psyche. The post-apartheid Rainbow Nation comes to life in the vivid encounters, memoirs and experiences expressed in the pages of The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction. While editors Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle will have employed a disciplined and methodical process of judgement and selection, their excitement and sense of achievement in the result is palpable.
