Research Articles (English)

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Unpacking the Makhadzi metaphor in No Longer Whispering to Power : the story of Thuli Madonsela
Mujakachi, Mercy Precious (Informa UK Limited (trading as Taylor and Francis Group), 2025-11-19)
No Longer Whispering to Power: The Story of Thuli Madonsela, Thandeka Gqubule’s approved biography, uses the Makhadzi metaphor to understand the formative events in Madonsela’s life, which culminated in her becoming a fearless and respected Public Protector during Jacob Zuma’s tumultuous presidency. The study explores the Makhadzi’s ambivalent role that inadvertently informed Madonsela’s role as public protector. The Makhadzi is a senior sister of the family head’s or chief’s father, she is the paternal aunt and serves as custodian of values and norms in the VhaVenda culture. Drawing on these customs, Gqubule explores Madonsela through the Makhadzi metaphor and by relying on the trope – appropriated by Madonsela herself – Gqubule, through tropological and metaphorical transference, positions the biographee as a credible, legitimate and morally approvable leader. This metaphoric positioning constitutes the biographer’s navigation of the turbulent scene of South African politics around accusations of corruption and social injustice, especially against Zuma. Following the Makhadzi metaphor, the biography assertions how women can legitimately exercise power in idioms familiar to South Africans. I argue that Madonsela uses the Makhadzi idea but also re-imagines it, and that she and her biographer ignore the patriarchal trappings of the role, thus eliding an important aspect of how the role functions and is understood.
“Close as a kiss, close as your own skin” : exploring the effects of the shadow-chorus of murdered maids in Atwood’s Penelopiad
Best, Nicole (Unisa Press and Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, 2025)
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen female writers revisit ancient stories and characters with increasing frequency. Linda Hutcheon (2013) has argued for the value of adaptation, and these writers certainly engage with classical texts in ways that revise and expand upon the gendered mythological landscape that seems indelibly woven into the fabric of the narratives which have shaped and shadowed Western culture. Ostriker has suggested that “the need for myth of some sort may be ineradicable” (1982, 71), that myth has markedly shaped modern Western culture, and that perhaps transforming these organising and defining myths can transform culture, too. One such adaptation aimed at transforming an existing myth is Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005), which initially seems to engage in classic feminist revisionist mythology by resituating the conventionally othered woman, Penelope, as the main character and narrator of her own story. Yet Penelope’s confessional narration is intermingled with genre-bending interjections by the 12 maids of her household, whose deaths Odysseus eventually orders and who are intent on telling a story of their own. This chorus line of murdered maids undermines Penelope’s polished autobiographical tale and reminds us that, for every story that is voiced, there are countless stories that remain untold, and thus that every narrative is haunted by the shadow narratives that it does not address. In this way, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad engages in complex revisionist mythmaking, which not only gives a voice to previously neglected female characters, but also foregrounds the fraught negotiations inherent in the reshaping of this mythological landscape.
The Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam : a 'middle gound' of ideological values during the long 1990s?
Drwal, Malgorzata; Ham, Laurens (Routledge, 2026-06)
This study examines how international political developments during the long 1990s (1989–2001) influenced the Poetry International Festival, focusing on both its programming and public image. It asks whether changing geopolitical conditions affected the selection of poets and the themes addressed in festival discussions. To analyse the festival’s image, the study employs Jérôme Meizoz’s concept of posture, adapting it so it encompasses a set of auto- and hetero-representations of a collective actor. The analysis is based on five festival editions (1989, 1990, 1994, 2001, and 2002). The findings show that changes in the festival’s auto- and hetero-representations were complex and uneven. In the early 1990s, Poetry International presented itself as a strongly politicized and activist festival, offering a ‘safe haven’ for dissident poets in a divided world. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not prevent Western intellectuals from reproducing Cold War – style divisions between Western Europe and other regions, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, even though non-Western voices sometimes challenged this view. In the early 2000s, the festival gradually shifted towards a more globalized and less explicitly politicized profile, reflecting broader post – Cold War trends in world poetry.
Introduction : texts and contexts of humour in southern Africa
Makombe, Rodwell; Manase, Irikidzayi (Brill Academic, 2026-04-14)
Different societies around the world have used humour as a medium of communication for many years. From Ancient Greece to the present, humour has been used as an instrument of social critique to sanction excesses of power and caution against deviations from acceptable cultural norms. In his book, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henry Bergson describes humour as “some kind of social ragging”1 intended to discipline individuals who display a rigid and inflexible social disposition. In Bergson’s formulation, navigating everyday life requires a certain degree of flexibility and those individuals who fail to recognize this become butts of jokes. To laugh is, therefore, to recognize (and to seek to correct) some incongruity in behaviour, character, or disposition. Over the years, scholars have explored different aspects of humour, including the context in which it occurs, its purpose and social value, but they have not been able to agree on a definition. This is partly because while humour is a universal human phenomenon, it is not the same everywhere. What is considered humourous in one cultural context may be considered an insult in another. In fact, a joke is not easily transferrable because its relevance depends on many variables such as context, cultural knowledge, and prior conversations. Henry Bergson describes humour as “a living thing”2 that should not be confined to the limits of a definition.
Magical laughter : humour and play as subtexts in Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl (2017)
Ndlovu, Isaac (Durban University of Technology, 2025-12)
Angela Makholwa’s novel, The Blessed Girl (2017), suggests that the blesser-blessee phenomenon is an extreme manifestation of uncurbed lust and unbridled urge for material accumulation. Thus, both the blesser and blessee are figures of discontentment and mirror the dominant attributes of contemporary urban South Africa. Makholwa relentlessly satirises the pervasive spirit of sexual greed and the extreme desire for material goods through her sustained humorous and playful depiction of the infamous South African blesser-blessee phenomenon. Makholwa’s achievement lies in that humour and play are not dispensable and auxiliary communicative strategies subordinated to a seemingly urgent need to pass moral judgement. Humour and play are integral to the articulation of the thematic concerns of the novel. They serve as the subtext of Makholwa’s fiction that satirises the toxic and destructive nature of the blesser-blessee relationships in order to give, in the Nietzschean formulation, aesthetic delight rather than moral pleasure.
The ethics of hesitation in Coconut Kelz’s Guide to Surviving This Shithole (2019)
Thompson, Jarred (Brill Academic, 2026-04)
While Lesego Tlhabi’s satirical persona, Coconut Kelz, has been studied for her widely shared vlogs, little attention has been paid to her satirical ‘how-to’ guide to surviving contemporary South Africa. In this article I argue that Tlhabi’s satirical ‘how-to’ guide frames the character of ‘the coconut’ as a critical site for interrogating racialised habits of perception, thought, and embodiment. Through close-reading of the text, I show how Tlhabi’s use of hyperbole, paradox, mimicry, intertextuality, and a deliberate misreading of racial bodies exposes the inherent irrationality, and indeed comedy, of the South African colonial imaginary. Each of these techniques undergirds what Alia Al-Saji (2014) has described as a “phenomenology of hesitation” which I identify operating throughout Tlhabi’s guide. Through highlighting an ethics of hesitation, the satire disrupts the perceptual habits that naturalise race-thinking by producing indirect strategies of uncertainty which keep open the possibility of inhabiting a future beyond the colonial imaginary. This ‘beyond’ is paradoxically intimated in Tlhabi’s play with racialised rhetoric, a play that marks Kelz, and ‘the coconut,’ as a heterotopic figure whose comedic failure to inhabit both Blackness and whiteness fully emphasise the unending evolution of what it means to be ‘Black’ and/or ‘white’ in South Africa.
Black lives, black crimes, and black consciousness in Gomolemo Mokae’s The Secret in my Bosom : a new vision of the police detective and democracy in South Africa
Guldimann, Colette (Sage, 2026-03)
Crime fiction and the police procedural subgenre have come under media scrutiny in the Global North, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Questions have been raised about the genre in relation to police brutality and whether the representation of police violence in the procedural might serve to normalize such action. Academic critics have also pondered the procedural, with some categorizing it as part of the ideological state apparatus, where the police force eradicate the threat of social disruption, thus reinforcing the status quo. The emergence of crime fiction and the procedural in several African countries has been concomitant with a shift from political repression to democratic reform. South Africa is a prime example as crime fiction rose to prominence following the end of apartheid in 1994. There are now recognizable local variations and crime fiction is widely seen as the new form of the political novel in South Africa. The Secret in my Bosom (1996) by Gomolemo Mokae, published shortly after the transition to democracy, is a groundbreaking, hybrid — and overlooked — detective novel, the first by a black writer after apartheid. While it draws on the police procedural frame, it also subverts the subgenre in significant ways. This hybridization of genre is used, I argue, to produce a bold new version of African crime fiction: with a black detective, and a vision of a new black police force and the country’s future — all in line with Black Consciousness thought in South Africa.
What if perhaps : how Ekari Mbvundula disobeys history
Stier, Jordan (Routledge, 2026)
Academic discussion of the science fiction (SF) genre has engaged prominently since the 1970s with the ‘novum’, defined by Darko Suvin as a type of cognitive information allowing a SF text to deviate from reality in a reasonable, rational manner. Theorists have problematized the term’s assumption of an overarching ‘cognitive’ epistemology. In the wake of these debates, this article focuses on one particular subgenre of SF — alternate history (AH) — showing how Ekari Mbvundula disrupts it with her 2015 short story “Montague’s Last”. Just as the Suvinian novum is problematic for relying on the assumption of secular epistemology’s global universality, so too is AH’s dependence on the assumption of a singular, knowable, and universally agreeable historical narrative from which to deviate, because it overlooks how Eurocentric understandings of history are determined by global power relations, in both the past and the present. While the question inherent to AH is usually thought to be ‘What if x had happened differently to the historical narrative’, I argue that Mbvundula’s story posits that ‘Perhaps x has in fact happened differently to the historical narrative’. The story thus disobeys Eurocentric assumptions both in dominant critical definitions of SF and in History’s grand narrative.
From eco-pessimism to eco-activism : trends in selected South African teen literature
Noomé, Idette (Taylor and Francis, 2025-05-07)
This article explores the response in selected South African teen fiction to a sense of impending ecological disaster in the face of global warming, environmental exploitation, and political, social, and economic manipulation with an ecological impact. A broadly ecocritical literary approach is followed to examine relevant aspects of Helen Brain’s Elevation trilogy (2016–2019), Jayne Bauling’s New Keepers (2017), and the Eco-Warriors trilogy by Joanne Macgregor (2011–2016). These novels go beyond the interpersonal to address ecological concerns in a southern African space. Two genres are used—Brain’s Elevation trilogy and Bauling’s New Keepers are dystopian fantasy novels set in a post-apocalyptic future, while Macgregor’s Eco-Warriors trilogy is a school story set in contemporary South Africa. All seven novels draw on the local landscape in their world building. They position the protagonists as potential rescuers of their world, or as activists for better management of that world. The dystopian fantasy allows for awareness-building around social and environmental (in)justice, while the realist school story is an ideal vehicle to convey ecological information, laying a groundwork for change.
A watery umwelt : intercorporeal currents in Virginia Woolf’s the waves and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
Krynauw, Marieke (Taylor and Francis, 2025-07-31)
This article explores possibilities of narrative and textual Umwelten or relational systems in The Waves in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology. It reads the text as concerned with various forms of intercorporeality: that is, the shared tangibility and relationality between bodies, parts of one flesh or times and places, and the intervals or gaps between these. It traces a variety of narrative and textual kinships in The Waves, exploring the congruencies and divergences between the two thinkers in relation to their approaches to life as an interconnected weave of the human and nonhuman. Ultimately, it suggests that situating Woolf’s practice as intercorporeal allows one to think differently about the potential of literary language to foster dynamic meaning-making environments that avoid hierarchization or anthropocentrism.
Polar fried chicken? Tensions between public engagement and fast-food marketing in KFC South Africa’s beyond the sea campaign
Van Eeden-Wharton, Adrienne; Lavery, Charne; Iqani, Mehita; Brundrit , Jean (Taylor and Francis, 2025-06-26)
In this article, we offer a slightly sideways approach to polar science communication and public engagement by focusing on a recent marketing campaign by fast-food restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in South Africa. KFC’s Beyond the Sea campaign prominently features Marion Island – part of South Africa’s southernmost territory and the site of significant long-term scientific research and monitoring programmes. It tells the story of two fictional overwintering expeditioners at the South African research station on the remote sub-Antarctic island who miss home (or rather, the taste of KFC) so much that they head out in a rigid inflatable on the 2,000 km journey back to the fast-food chain’s nearest outlet on the mainland. The integrated advertising campaign – which includes radio teasers, a filmic commercial, vox pop reels and a mobile game – blends promotional material and ‘unbranded’ science communication. This article provides a thematic analysis of the Beyond the Sea campaign within the context of South Africa’s polar histories and existing public engagement programmes. The campaign raises key questions about whether, and if so how, corporate advertising can contribute to or detract from public awareness of and engagement with the polar regions, particularly in relation to the objectives of ‘science communication for social justice’ and encouraging Antarctic artistic and cultural production from Africa.
The crisis of representation : the contradictions of writing a feminist biography in Redi TIhabi’s Khwezi : the remarkable story of Fezekile Ntsukela
Mujakachi, Mercy Precious (Taylor and Francis, 2025-05-12)
This article explores the contradictions of writing a feminist biography through a reading of Redi Tlhabi’s Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela. In particular, it notes the tensions that inevitably arise between the desire to do justice to the life of the biographical subject and the feminist biographer’s desire to tackle the injustices of a patriarchal society. I argue that TIhabi’s biography falls short of conforming to the conventions of biography because her feminist political project to reclaim Fezekile’s voice, a young woman who was vilified by a patriarchal society for laying a rape charge against the former South African president Jacob Zuma and stalwart of the ANC, takes precedence over the writing of a life. I argue that Tlhabi’s voice becomes dominant, drowning Fezekile’s story. The author’s project to retrieve the biographer’s voice is limited by the process of biographical writing, which necessarily entails reconstructing the story from the biographer’s perspective. I set this discussion in the context of recent scholarship on the biographer’s objectivity and neutrality in relating her perspective of Fezekile’s story.
African urbanisms and their hinterlands : contemporary cultural imaginaries of spatial connections
Fasselt, Rebecca; Eromosele, Femi; Songsore, Lwanga (Routledge, 2024)
This article introduces the special issue on “African urbanisms and their hinterlands: contemporary cultural imaginaries of spatial connections”. It conceives of the relationship between the urban and the hinterland as non-dichotomous and makes an argument for the complex entanglements of African rural and urban cultural Imaginaries. Here, the interland is offered as a concept with diverse uses and appropriations across a range of African cultural forms.
The development of academic and plain English parallel word lists and subtitles for undergraduate students
Kruger-Marais, Elmarie; Cooper, Trish (Routledge, 2025)
Subtitles in tertiary education can enhance language inclusivity. This study compares the effectiveness of academic versus plain English subtitles in discipline-specific videos, using a corpus-based approach to create and evaluate word lists. The findings suggest that plain English subtitles, supported by word lists, clarify scientific terms, especially when following subtitling conventions. However, adjustments are needed when plain English subtitles deviate from these conventions. Additionally, academic subtitles often contain complex terms in Latin and Greek, making a parallel plain English word list essential for aiding students in specialised fields.
A reading of The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022) : Sir Ben Okri’s fire that burns and heals
Gray, Rosemary A. (Indiana University Press, 2024)
This article proposes a reading of Ben Okri’s novel The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022) through the prism of an animist unconscious lens drawing, in particular, from Harry Garuba’s theory of Animist Materialism with its correlative Animist Unconscious. It seeks to show that the animist unconscious may lead to a reenchantment in an age of disenchantment and to a conjoining of African traditional and Western myth. The discussion begins with a brief reference to the historical-mythological figure of Sango, god of lightning in Nigeria, birthplace of Okri and Garuba, by way of explaining the paradox inherent in the cosmological axiom “fire that burns and heals” and to suggest that Sango’s “non-death suicide” and deification signifies a new principle that can unite permanence and change in a reflection of the melding of history (the catastrophe of slavery) and the narrative of resilience and love in the novel. This is followed, first, by pointing to the link between the Sango symbolism and Africa’s historical and cultural heritage and, secondly, by outlining Garuba’s Animist Poetics. The core of the essay focuses on the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the magical in the reading of the novel, where the magical signifies an expansion of consciousness. The presentation argues that Okri writes against the rift of magical realism, a phrase all too often used in critiques of the symbolic mode and alchemical writings of this Nigerian-born Londoner, concluding that the deployment of an animist unconscious lens serves to re-imbue the natural world with its lifeforce, spiritualizing the phenomenal world of Nature and its objects, a strategy that reedifies the reading, accentuating the artistic creativity that immortalizes the mythical tribe of itinerant Master Artists. And, as Alberto Manguel presciently observes in A History of Reading: “We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function” (7). But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?—Denis Diderot (1796)
Unfathomable depths : deep into sacred terrain in Sir Ben Okri's the secret source from tiger work (2023)
Gray, Rosemary A. (Taylor and Francis, 2024-03-04)
Tiger Work is a search for new horizons: at once a cri de coeur for Planet Earth and a call for existential creativity that equates to Ben Okri’s third millennium “Imaginatio creatix.” Premised on the urgency to address contemporary man-made disasters, this collection of stokus (an amalgam of short story and haiku), poems, and essays is underpinned by the mystical celebration of the wonderment of Nature that we also encounter in “The Tyger” from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. This article focuses on the core story at the end of this collection entitled “The Secret Source,” embedded in the pure vision, the pure song of the “immortal hand and eye” that “dare[d] frame thy perfect symmetry” in Blake’s poem. This is the framework that informs Okri’s new poetic aesthetic that obliges writers to confront the truth of Western civilisation’s dung heap proactively. The approach attempts to map the inherent literary mysticism of the medieval symbolism of the Holy Grail as detailed in Rudolf Steiner’s Christ and the Spiritual World and the Quest for the Holy Grail, where pure, uncontaminated water functions as simulacrum for that which sustains Life as we know it. The crucial message that informs the entire collection is one of hope: the onus is on humankind to take responsibility for our destabilised ecological equilibrium; to find the way forward; to go “deep into sacred terrain,” plunging unfathomable depths. Evincing a transcendent post-colonial rather than reactionary decolonial thrust, the stoku advocates for a claiming of agency as it seeks the fresh horizons necessary for all human beings, if we are to persist at all.
Decolonising the humanities : reimagining black intellectual life and personhood in Southern African contexts
Sandwith, Corinne (PINS-Psychology in Society, 2024-06)
This review article explores possibilities for transdisciplinary entanglements between the disciplines of critical psychology and literary criticism through a reading of the volume, ʻFoundational African Writers’, edited by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba. In this article, ‘Foundational African Writers’ is approached as a distillation of Peterson’s investment in excavating the world-making activities, writing lives and activities of ordinary people as a central dimension of the project to decolonise the Humanities. As this edited volume attests, Peterson’s creative and critical oeuvre continues to provoke thinking about the ways in which the reading of the African literary archive can assist in the wider project of decolonising and re-imagining intellectual and creative history in the Global South while also providing opportunities for new modes of thinking about personhood and psychic life in contexts of precarity, intergenerational trauma and economic exclusion.
Chaucer’s Pardoner : food, drink, and the discourse of desecration
Goedhals, John Antony (Routledge, 2024)
The centrality of food and drink in the ‘Introduction to the Pardoner’s Tale’, the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue’, and the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ itself has been shown by a number of scholars, in particular Martin Stevens & Kathleen Falvey (1982), Clarence Miller & Roberta Bux Bosse (1972), Joseph Millichap (1974), Robert Nichols (1967), and Frederick Tupper (1914). This essay builds on their insights by showing that Chaucer deliberately constructs a semantic field of words relating to food, some of which are neologisms. The scholars mentioned above show how the bread and wine of the texts have deeper metaphorical resonances with the Mass. But their insights can be taken further, by demonstrating that Chaucer subverts this layer of meaning with yet another discourse set: words and deep metaphors relating to brokenness, violence, and death, as opposed to the whole, the healthy – the holiness of Christ’s body and blood, and its representation in the Christian Mass. In carrying this out, the Pardoner is one of Chaucer’s most evil characters, but also becomes one of his most ethical constructions, as he demonstrates what a Christless world would be like.
Ways of being : water spirits in Mia Couto’s sleepwalking land (1992)
Joseph, Confidence (Routledge, 2024)
Mia Couto is a Mozambican writer known for an aesthetics of the fantastic in his numerous works. In most of his writings, he blurs the distinctions between the human and the non-human, land and water, the natural and the supernatural. This is particularly evident in his 2006 novel Sleepwalking Land, set in the context of the Mozambican civil war. This paper argues that the elusive figure of the water spirit is an ideal lens by which to read Sleepwalking Land to capture the complexity of the horrendous civil war. Drawing on magical realism, I consider Couto’s use of water-based indigenous beliefs to underscore ideas of flexibility and mobility in a land ravaged by war, while revising the myth of powerful water spirits in line with the raging civil war. The chaos of war is amplified in the novel through actions of spirits that encroach on the human world, influencing events and problematizing the laws of logic, time and space. Their intractability enables Couto to foreground ambiguity and hybridity with characters who assume different forms at different stages of the fragmented plot, mirroring the raging war.
The desiring girl in South African young adult fiction
Kneen, Bonnie (Routledge, 2025)
Girls in South African young adult (YA) fiction typically represent a heteropatriarchal, sexually passive model of femininity that allows for neither sexual autonomy nor sexual desire. This article examines six prominent South African YA novels that are unusual in that the sexual desires of their teenage heroines play an important role in shaping plot or character: S. A. Partridge’s Dark Poppy’s Demise (2011); Adeline Radloff’s Sidekick (2010); Sonwabiso Ngcowa’s In Search of Happiness (2014); and Lily Herne’s Mall Rats series of three books. The study finds that even in these rare examples of South African texts that treat girls’ desires as significant, desire mostly remains ambivalent or is treated evasively, while violence, by contrast, is embedded in each novel’s social context and routinely described at length, in explicit detail. South African girls live in a violent world, but the article argues that reducing their lives to a single violent dimension only perpetuates that violence. And in correlating girls’ desire indissociably with violence, these texts normalize the violent punishment of girls whose femininity is not sexually passive.

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