Book cover: Supplied. 
I read The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction over a weekend, submerging myself in a well-curated set of non-fiction essays with excerpts from graphic novels added to the middle. It was like being in a hot tub at the edge of a beautiful forest.
This is no exaggeration.
In a time where social posts are my most ubiquitous form of writing and where I know that audiences read us for an average two minutes with a three minute read regarded as luxury attention, my love for long-form has not dimmed but it has been dunked in the realism of looking at audience data.
And yet, long-form writing is flourishing as this collection of work from the past 30 years edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle shows. I spoke to the authors about their opus of love and time.
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Ferial Haffajee: You write, amusingly, that the term non-fiction is about as much use as calling your clothes non-socks. At the end, this magnificent anthology still uses the term. Tell us how you thought about what to include and what not to include?
Sean Christie: There is no escaping the umbrella term “non-fiction”, unhelpful as it is.
Most of the pieces in this collection are examples of a form of journalism variously called literary, narrative, creative and long-form journalism, and initially this was the kind of writing we set out to collect.
However, as you well know, word rates have always been much too low in this country for anyone to actually do this kind of work with any regularity, unless the writer has another source of income (to take nothing away from those few beautiful beings who take their subsidy from family life, the grocery basket and their own sanity).
In that kind of writing, therefore, there is an element of privilege, and so we started considering additional modes: essays, memoirs, graphic stories and autofiction. We gravitated towards pieces that, we felt, could not have been done nearly as resonantly by another writer, where it seemed that serendipity was in play.
Hedley Twidle: Yes we began with forms of literary journalism and social reporting, but ultimately expanded the anthology into a broader church of non-fiction writing, given that some pieces (like those by JM Coetzee and Julie Nxadi, for example) lie in the borderlands between autobiography and fiction. And because sometimes a personal or reflective essay (William Dicey on fruit farming, for example, or Njabulo S Ndebele on the game lodge experience) is the best tool for the job in rendering certain dimensions of experience, or for getting to hard-to-reach places within our country’s complex social topography.
Non-fiction as a term is, I think, both inadequate (since writerly techniques of realism, or making something appear real on the page, move constantly and promiscuously across the non/fiction divide) and indispensable (because deciding whether a story is truth-directed is one of the first-pass decisions we make as readers or listeners). Another way of saying this: the fact that it may ultimately be impossible to sort texts easily into fiction shelf versus non-fiction shelf does not mean that the divide doesn’t matter.
FH: Who and who not to include?
Sean Christie: It was incredibly difficult to settle on a final mix. We had a long list, perhaps twice as many pieces as we ended up including, and all of them are excellent.
We left out two extraordinary stories about murder, because we had already picked two brilliant murder stories, and having four would have made The Interpreters an even more sombre read than it is.
We left out several highly polished pieces because they were clearly written for an international audience, which imposes a duty to explain South Africa to people who don’t live here, putting quite a drag on the writing.
Some have already noted the absence of a few big names in South African non-fiction, and there is a simple reason for this: a lot of the creative non-fiction that has been published in recent years has been in books, partly because we lack an outlet for anything between a few thousand words and 100,000 words. This has created a situation where authors who achieve success with books early in their careers continue doing books, and in their shorter works, if they exist, you can sort of feel that they are a bit at sea, or perhaps not really trying because it isn’t priority work.
Hedley Twidle: It was a very difficult but enormously enjoyable task reading across so much writing and making these calls. The thing with anthologising is that it’s a very binary decision: the piece is either in or out.
So we needed to have quite frank, forthright and bracing discussions (a bit different to academe, where one has to be more diplomatic). I hope The Interpreters breaks even because we’ve always had the idea of a second volume, one that goes back further in time and collects an even wider miscellany of essays and nonfiction, and also works in translation.
I think what I respond to in the kind of nonfiction writing collected here is the directness, the immediacy. George Orwell, James Baldwin, John Berger, Arundhati Roy — writer heroes of mine who have this mesmerising quality of directness, and who are able to make political writing (which is different to politicised writing) into an art form.
A mode of addressing the reader that makes you feel that there is a fierce will-to-truth operating (even though one of the ways that this manifests is a scepticism towards a single, overbearing Truth).
Also: writing that trusts to a reader’s intelligence — this is near the heart of it. Not writing that tries to ideologically browbeat you with the obvious. But rather writing that imagines a reader being at least as human and aware as the writer themselves.
FH: This is a longstanding work – for how long has it germinated?
Sean Christie: It has quite a long history. We have been friends since schooldays, and corresponded about books throughout our university years, including an eclectic mix of nonfiction, everything from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space to Deneys Reitz’s Commando.
We were into the work of British psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, and his London Orbital, about walking London’s M25 ring road, inspired a very precocious decision to move to Cape Town in the year 2002 or thereabouts to do something similar with the city’s main road, which runs from the Cape Castle to Simonstown.
We completely failed to write that book, but our encounters with contemporary South African nonfiction, and conversations about it, date to this time, which was a fecund time for creative nonfiction. In short order K Sello Duiker had published Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams, both marketed as novels but clearly autobiographical to a significant degree. Jonny Steinberg had just published Midlands, and Chimurenga Magazine was launched, arguably the greatest ever South African experiment in non-fiction.
Hedley Twidle: Yes, two decades in the making, at least. I received my most profound education about my native land from the work of non-fiction writers (which went far beyond anything that I encountered in formal education).
Lewis Nkosi’s agile and fearless essays on Johannesburg, jazz and exile. The confessional outpourings of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. The passion and experimentalism of Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night.
The intellectual nerve with which Jonny Steinberg set about some of the most difficult and dissonant subjects of ‘the new South Africa’ – farm murders, prison violence, HIV/Aids denialism.
Mark Gevisser’s biography of Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Dlamini’s Askari, Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys… the list goes on. There are brilliant and momentous works of non-fiction in every direction, and in every genre. Sean and I have been discussing and admiring these for years, along with similar writing from the rest of the world. Compiling this anthology, as he put it, was the culmination of a long conversation. What a pleasure.
FH: Is it “new” non-fiction or is it generational — it is a work that seeks to “cover” 30 years?
Sean Christie: It is “new” in the sense that most of the pieces were published after 1994. Creative non-fiction of the type we’ve collected in The Interpreters is strongly rooted in the American New Journalism of the 50s and 60s, which was a pyrotechnic reaction to what the writer Tom Wolfe called the “beige tone” of newspaper journalism at the time.
However, it never really caught on in South Africa, although some of the Drum magazine writers of the 50s and 60s were doing something similar. Context shapes literary traditions, and in South Africa of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s the media was both constrained by censorship laws and fixated with hard news — barren soil, in other words, for creative approaches to non-fiction, although some extraordinary pieces appeared from time to time, like Lin Sampson’s profile of the photographer and bouncer Billy Monk, published in 1982 — the oldest piece we’ve included in The Interpreters, incidentally, not because it represents the start of anything, it’s simply too good to leave out.
In the ’90s, some newspaper editors realised that the historical focus on pugilistic investigative reporting was a poor fit for South Africa’s complex social and political transition, and started commissioning longer pieces. An important milestone was the Weekly Mail’s 1995 series of long-form pieces by South African writers and thinkers, including Mark Behr and Antjie Krog.
From around this time, there is a stronger flow of longer, more ambitious non-fiction pieces in South Africa’s media, and it is really this period that we were interested in, and which we refer to as “new”.
Hedley Twidle: I also see it in some ways as not only a post-apartheid but also a post-TRC collection, in the sense that many of the pieces here deal with the unresolved, the unreconciled, the awkward and inappropriate elements of the past that persist (even as these interlock with the emergent, the new, the unexpected). I think that the “new” also signals a body of work where the moral absolutes and clarities of the anti-apartheid Struggle give way to a more complex and confounding social and political terrain.
Even in the piece that is most squarely about the TRC — the chapter by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele — you have the simultaneous interpreters who worked in the TRC hearings looking back on that process from a long time after, and reflecting on the (often squandered) promise and possibility that historical moment. It’s moving to hear them speak about it from that kind of historical distance.
FH: The writers you assemble are magnificent. There are the big names, but also new writers. How did you find their work?
Sean Christie: We started by writing down those pieces we’ve read in the last 25 years that we keep returning to, and these pieces formed the core of the collection.
We then went crowdsourcing among the country’s community of non-fiction writers, sharing our list and asking, what have we left out? Bongani Kona was very helpful in directing us to several brilliant pieces we had not encountered before, as was Bongani Madondo. We owe a lot to them.
Hedley Twidle: Again, we drew on a large archive of reading and discussions over many years.
Sean has a great deal of experience as a journalist and consulted many editors and writers from that world; I brought in my research on and teaching of South African literature for many years at UCT. But yes, we received so many pointers and suggestions from so many people. People were very generous. WhatsApp voice notes flew back and forth for months…
FH: In my world, journalism, there is little appetite for literary journalism any longer — either by journalists or by the audience. And yet it is beautiful, meaningful and creates meaning and knowledge more than any number of social posts, blogs or breaking news. What are your thoughts on this?
Sean Christie: In an era of clickbait, churnalism, listicles and AI-derived snackable content, it is important to prise apart, and talk about, different forms of truth-telling, and to recognise writing that actually teaches us something about this country of ours, in which, to quote Rian Malan, “mutually annihilating truths coexist completely amicably”.
Take, for example, recent news stories about South Africa’s Afrikaner “refugees”, or the outing of that chap who was posting misinformation about South Africa. What did we learn from these news stories, and the thousands of op-eds they spawned?
That we are an angry, divided, mistrusting people.
Now, had someone bothered to do an intuitive long read about these refugees and their motivations, or a nuanced, humane profile of X-Boer, perhaps we would have learned a thing or two about ourselves. We seem to be stuck in loops of righteous indignation and confirmation bias, and good creative non-fiction is an antidote to that.
Hedley Twidle: I want to add that the voices in (and contributors to) this book go far beyond just the names on the contents page. So many of the pieces come alive via the voices and stories of others: people the writer is talking to, interviewing, responding to, thinking of, quoting.
Alexandra Dodd’s piece on The Spear controversy is a good example: it is a dense mesh of voices, including those from social media and (to give just one example) a Facebook post by the artist Senzeni Marasela.
It is one of the most powerful responses to the Zuma presidency that I have ever read; and now it is remembered, preserved and printed within Dodd’s piece. I think also how warmly and deftly Mark Gevisser renders the voices of “Edgar” and “Phil”, two gay Sowetans, in his piece “Edenvale”. There are so, so many interlocking voices that make up this anthology: it is truly a polyphonic book.
FH: How would you like this work to land in the world? It is a gift of love and a work of life.
Sean Christie: Internationally, there has been a resurgence of interest in long-form, and we believe the audience appetite for this kind of writing is very much alive and gurgling in South Africa, and that even within the crushing budget realities local media face, there are possibilities, especially to foreground voices at the limits of the Anglosphere.
We are hoping that people will read these extraordinary pieces, which have been retrieved from old newspapers, discontinued magazines, journals and personal blogs, and be left thinking, more, I want more!
Hedley Twidle: I’m so glad that you consider it a product of love, because that is exactly what it felt like: a love for courageous use of the written word, in all the forms that this takes. DM
The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction is edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle and published by Soutie Press and is also available for purchase from the DM Shop.