West-Pavlov, Russell B.2015-08-242015-08-242015-01Russell West-Pavlov (2015) Apocalypse Now, Never … or Forever: Venter and Medalie on the Everyday Politics of Post-Apartheid South Africa, English Studies in Africa, 58:1,42-55, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2015.10451600013-8398 (print)1943-8117 (online)10.1080/00138398.2015.1045160http://hdl.handle.net/2263/49460This article undertakes an analysis of the narrative temporalities and of the narratives of temporality, specifically those of apocalypse or end-times and of living-on respectively, to be found in two recent South African novels, Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2008) and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows (2006). Against Venter’s hyperbolic narrative of catastrophe, which also turns out to be a critique of the residual elements of the erstwhile apartheid era, I posit that Medalie’s litotic and patchwork narrative offers a more appropriate narrative of the slow transformation of the post-apartheid South African polity. I use Venter’s and Medalie’s oddly complementary novels as a template for exploring an emergent sense of a non-teleological ‘minor narrative’ of liberation in a time ‘after postcoloniality’.en© University of the Witwatersrand. This is an electronic version of an article published in English Studies in Africa, vol. 58, no.1, pp. 42-55, 2015. doi :10.1080/00138398.2015.1045160. English Studies in Africa is available online at : http://www.tandfonline.comtoc/reia20.Anti-teleologyCatastrophismFuturityPost-apartheidPost-post colonialismTemporalitySouth Africa (SA)Postprint Article