And yet, access to books and the written word is limited for many South Africans, due to the past law of apartheid and its remnants in daily life. Books are a rare commodity and fiercely guarded in South Africa. I still haven’t worked through what my reading life in Cape Town has meant.

I spent a year as a grad student at the University of Cape Town in 2011, and I adored the main library’s Recreational Reading Room. It was a cozy wood-floored room filled with loveseats and novels by African and British writers, whose books never made it to American circulation desks.

Another gem of UCT was the library at Hiddingh Campus—an enclave of just a few Dutch colonial buildings in Cape Town proper. Hiddingh Campus was the Art School. The art and philosophy library (next to the campus art supply store) was my heaven amidst the madness of Cape Town. Walking there meant being aggressively (and I mean physically) pan-handled by strung-out child beggars.

However, anyone who set foot in either of these libraries without an active university ID would be denied entry by the dogmatic (and armed!) university security guards. The guards might take people to a clandestine location to interrogate them. If you tried to get into one of these libraries and couldn’t produce university ID, you were “renditioned” for a day.

(Do I need to state that this never happened to me, a white American student? But that for a time I was dating a South African student, a Coloured student, an absent-minded student, who once forgot his ID and tried to get into the library and ended up cuffed to a chair in the basement instead? I checked out books for him for the rest of the semester. But that’s not justice, is it?)

And so, books for South Africans who aren’t university students can be hard to come by.  Cape Town had some nice book shops, but the price of new books was prohibitively expensive. $30 USD for a new paperback is steep to me, even by current US standards. But in that world where wages and general standard of living were lower, $30 translated back into South African Rands was a pile of money. I couldn’t see how anyone could afford to read new books. When I last lived in Cape Town, the country also had no broadband infrastructure—so Internet access was prohibitively expensive, too. A world of words is online, but proved too expensive to dive into.

And then, the public library went missing. No, this isn’t a magic realism tale. I lost the Cape Town Public Library.

The Main Collection was at one point located in the City Hall building in Cape Town proper. (On Darling Street. By the taxi rank.) But the last time I lived in Kaapstad, in 2011, no one could tell me where the public library stacks were. THE MAIN COLLECTION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY WAS MISSING! I was convinced I’d stumbled into a Borges short story, because no one ever cleared this up for me. To this day I have not learned where the main library’s books have been moved.

I read a lot in Cape Town, and I tried to read things that I could only get in South Africa. But the fact that I could do this was a mark of my privilege—as a white person, as a US citizen. The written word isn’t the resource that most Westerners think of exploiting when they think of South Africa. I didn’t want diamonds and I didn’t want gold, I wanted to get to know the works of Alex La Guma, Steve Biko, and Nadine Gordimer.

I still have some ambivalence regarding South Africa, the intractable racism and classism there, and my own compliance with unjust systems. But that isn’t to suggest that there aren’t excellent organizations there, working to make education and access to literature more equitable, or to make South Africa a reading nation.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Journalism. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

The post Literary Treasure Hunting in Cape Town appeared first on Newfound.

I was captivated.

When I decided to reread it nine years later, all I could remember was that it was indulgent. In the opening pages, eighty-year-old Chris Minaar sets up the premise: He’ll recount every woman with whom he’s slept over the course of his long, debauched life as a white South African novelist.

Things get interesting when we meet a lover named Daphne. It’s the 1970s; apartheid is at its height in South Africa. Minaar is twenty-something and Daphne is a willowy, blonde dancer. During a private dance, she reveals that she always wears a tight rope belt around her midriff. She is bruised, in constant pain, and abstains from sex. The reason she gives for torturing herself: “It’s this country. Don’t you see?”

A little background: This encounter takes place after the Soweto uprising of 1976, in which tens of thousands of Black African student protesters demonstrated against the designation of Afrikaans as the official language of national education. These peaceful protests were met with violent government retaliation. Many Afrikaans-speaking whites felt helpless and frustrated by the government’s injustice.

As I reread the book, I wondered about Daphne, and found myself wishing Brink had given her more of a voice. Daphne’s belt reminded me of Simone Weil’s hunger strike, and I was intrigued by the way she adopted her country’s agonies into her own body. Given more than one line of dialogue, would Daphne have expressed something similar to Weil? At twenty, I was the consummate student. I sought more words to consume, more information. I wanted authors to speak to me and I wanted to hang on every word.

Nine years of studying and reading and critiquing later, I am comfortable taking a book to task. This time around, it was Minaar’s character that stood out to me as most lacking.

Minaar likens himself to Scheherazade, claiming he retells the stories of his loves to amuse others and make sense of his life. This promises the reader exaggeration and magic, which Minaar delivers.

Nevertheless, Minaar differs from Scheherazade in a crucial way: Scheherazade is fighting for her life, against terrible odds. Minaar, on the other hand, is the portrait of privilege: white, straight, male, professionally successful. He’s more like King Shahryar, who beds and kills a new wife every night. Upon this reading, I felt that the novel fails because readers cannot draw convincing parallels between Minaar and Scheherezade.

Most of Minaar’s lovers have been white South Africans or Europeans, with a few exceptions. When we catch up to the modern day, Minaar is nostalgic over a Black South African woman he employed as a “Girl Friday.”

The nudge-nudge language suggests readers should be charmed by such a naughty tryst. But on my recent read, my antennae raised: this woman is much younger, from a historically disadvantaged ethnic group and social class, and Minaar’s employee. Can a relationship with such an unequal power dynamic have started with consent at all? We cannot know—we’re never told how it began, only that it ends, “ Like so many others. Married…what a waste.”

In fact, every woman of color with whom Minaar sleeps is his employee. While a pretty accurate portrayal of racial separateness in the New South Africa, the issue is never taken head-on by the narrator, nor discussed by any other character. The narrator’s blindness to these inequalities is his biggest shortcoming; the book’s is its reticence to comment on such matters.

I am also critical now of how convenient so many of the fantastical parts are. Minaar’s lovers are impossibly good-looking and insatiable; of course they could only be satisfied by a weedy novelist. Taken with an ironic avoidance of the realities of race and class in the New South Africa and some murky issues with consent, there were times I could not believe I used to love this novel.

Rereading the book was like holding up a mirror and seeing a past self. The past reader loved any words that were strung together, and wanted others to tell her how the world worked. Reading again, I wanted to demand that she demand more of what she read.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

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