Chronicle EditorChristopher Farai Charamba: The Reader
Two years ago, I bought a book, put it on my shelf and completely forgot about it. Stuck with nothing to read, I decided to pick it up solely based on the purple and yellow cover and the man in the bowler hat on the front. Literally choosing to judge a book by its cover, I was in for a treat. The book, “African Delights” by South African author Siphiwo Mahala was, as the name suggests and choosing to be corny, a delight to read.I am a self-confessed fanatic of short stories, partly because I feel that they have an element of African storytelling traditions in them. They read like ngano, now just appearing on paper and “African Delights” lived up to my adoration for this form of literature.
The opening stories are a tribute to Can Themba, a South African who in the 1950s was a journalist and writer for Drum magazine, author of critically acclaimed short story “The Suit” which has been adapted into a play.
First published in 1963, “The Suit”, is a story which takes place in Sophiatown, a township of Johannesburg. It tells the tale of Philemon who returns home to find his wife Matilda in bed with another man.
The other man flees and leaves his suit behind, Philemon thus instructs his wife to treat the suit as a guest in their home and makes her make it food, take it for walks and entertain it until the point where it causes an emotional and psychological effect on her.
Mahala continues the story of “The Suit” in “African Delights”, adding the experiences of the other characters caught in the love triangle, namely Matilda’s lover in a story titled “The Suit Continued” and then a suicide note written by Mathilda in “The Dress that Fed the Suit”.
“African Delights”, a collection of 12 short stories, is divided into four parts with three short stories in each. The first part is “A Tribute to Can Themba”, the second is titled “White Encounters” and talks of different encounters that black people had with white people during apartheid.
The third section is titled “The Truth” and the final section bares the title of the book “African Delights”.
What really drew me to this book, however, before I had even read any of the stories was the foreword by Mandla Langa. It is a lengthy foreword which expresses the culture of literature in South Africa and how Mahala’s work covers various periods and facets of South Africa’s social experience.
In the foreword, Langa writes: “To make sense of and to claim for our own Siphiwo Mahala’s collection of short stories, a smorgasbord of tasty titbits aptly named ‘African Delights’, we first need to understand why Mahala felt compelled to draw us into his imagined universe.”
Langa posits that Mahala wrote for the illiterate which he acknowledges is self-contradictory, but goes on to explain that illiteracy is a darkness which a vast majority of South Africans have been subjected to.
“The readers, in a country like South Africa, might not necessarily need to know the alphabet;” he adds, “but they must be gifted with the patience to listen to a story being read out. As a form, the short story lends itself to being read out and uses fewer formal elements than the novel.”
Langa claims that “Mahala’s African Delights is a timely intervention in our literary life. [He] tackles important themes that relate to human development, triumphs and tears, he maintains a distance that allows him to deploy humour with devastating effect.
“The laughter is not at the expense of his characters; he explores rather than exploits the frailties of his protagonists. He laughs with rather than at his characters.”
There is, however, a change in Mahala’s work when he covers the stories in the African Delights section. Here as Langa states, he turns his sharp wit to the adventures of that class of human colloquially called the tenderpreneur. In these stories, Mahala reflects the bewilderment of this class without mercy.
To conclude Langa states that contemporary South Africa, which is in what he considers a state in flux, “needs to read these stories to understand how it is seen by some of the sharpest commentators that this democracy has produced”.
Online Reporter