TRICKSTERS, HUSTLERS, AND MORAL SAINTS: Students and Other Strangers in Post-Apartheid South African Literature

Abstract

Engaging with post-apartheid South African bildungsromane, and social scientific studies of contemporary South African youth and the “Fallist” student protest movement, this chapter analyses the subjectivities of middle-class black South African university students and recent graduates. Analysing the semi-autobiographical novels of Niq Mhlongo and Songeziwe Mahlangu, this chapter observes the apartheid-era figure of the “trickster,” focused on outwitting an unjust system, transformed into the cynical “hustler” of the precarious post-apartheid present, contrasted with the self-monitoring “moral saint” evident in contemporary activist subjectivities. Continuing South African literature’s “rediscovery of the ordinary,” as Njabulo S. Ndebele termed it, looking beyond spectacular political struggles and unifying opposition to apartheid, Mhlongo and Mahlangu’s protagonists confront a society of students and other strangers, lacking a signature literature, as Jonathan Jansen has argued, and a common vocabulary to express their alienation.