51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 S ABINE B INDER * Reading South Africa as an Adolescent Abstract. Current literature from South Africa reflects some of the country’s vast cultural diversity and helps illustrate many of the challenges associated with struggles for equality, against the background of a painful and continuing history fraught with injustices. This article makes an argument for engaging with these literary texts in the secondary EFL classroom and proposes a reading of five contemporary texts featuring young adult protagonists. Taking a combined context-reader approach, it contends that such texts are not only conducive to rich cultural learning, but also to personal development at learners’ particular stages of self-formation. Involving themselves in some of South Africa’s historical, cultural, and moral complexities through literary texts offers adolescent learners a lens through which to view, reflect on, and potentially validate and consolidate some of their own multifaceted, possibly contradictory experiences, as selves-in-progress within their own diverse social contexts, and it provides language with which to do so. 1. Navigating transitions and transculturalities: What can adolescent readers gain from an engagement with South African literary texts? Under the rubric “Focus on cultures” the Swiss curriculum for EFL in lower secondary schools in German speaking areas 1 explicitly links the recognition of a plurality of cultural practices, norms, and values in the English speaking world to a recognition of similar or parallel pluralities in the learners’ own world (D EUTSCHSCHWEIZER E RZIEHUNGSDIREKTOREN -K ONFERENZ 2016). While a notion of cultures as discrete, separable units remains implied, the new Swiss curriculum acknowledges pluralities at home and elsewhere and thus allows for a less monolithic, more multifaceted approach to cultural diversity. 2 It is in this transcultural spirit that this article seeks to demonstrate how an engagement with selected contemporary South African texts written in English can lead adolescent learners to recognise and reflect on the cultural diversity and fluidity of both South Africa and their own environments. It arguably * Address for correspondence: Dr. Sabine B INDER , Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich, Lagerstraße 2, CH-8090 Z ÜRICH . E-Mail: sabine.binder@phzh.ch Research areas: English language teaching methodology, literature in foreign language teaching and global literatures in English. 1 The Swiss Curriculum, Lehrplan 21, has also been enforced in the Principality of Liechtenstein. 2 See the claim for “[w]idening the horizon” in this respect made by Frauke M ATZ and Michael R OGGE (2020). 60 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 allows them to recognise contradictions and irreconcilabilities for what they are and offers a space to discuss potentially difficult topics with peers in their own diverse EFL classroom. What is more, reading about young South Africans’ struggles for equitable treatment and status amidst persisting conflicts and injustices might pave the way for learners to negotiate diversity, not only between themselves and others but also within their own adolescent selves-in-progress. It may enable their views of themselves and others to go beyond received categories and exclusionary practices. Amongst the key developmental tasks adolescent learners at secondary level must grapple with are finding out who they are and what characterises them as persons (cf. T HOMSEN et al. 2018: 92). While the crucial centrality of this complex task is undisputed, terms of reference vary. A person’s “self-concept”, as T HOMSEN et al. (ibid.) call it, entails their knowledge about themselves and is of a cognitive-descriptive nature. It usually consists of a multitude of self-descriptions of personal characteristics, abilities, facts, interests, and habits, and - importantly - it is located in several temporal dimensions. Knowledge of self thus includes knowledge of one’s present, one’s past biography, and a projection of one’s future self (ibid.: 93). In a cognitiveconstructivist view, the self-concept is formed in a process of active absorption, processing, and storing of information from various sources. These include internal attributions by one’s self, and external ones by others (cf. ibid.: 95-97). In adolescence internal attributions gain significance, which means that knowledge about the self is increasingly generated through self-reflection and self-awareness. Such knowledge is also increasingly aligned with prior experience and becomes more abstract (cf. ibid.: 98). However, with the accumulation of self-knowledge and growing awareness comes the challenge of having to tolerate and negotiate multiple, divergent, and possibly conflicting images of the self. These complexities are heightened for adolescents in transcultural contexts. Tensions can be hard to tolerate and frequently manifest in characteristic teenage insecurity, fickleness, and self-consciousness. Acceptance, integration, and reconciliation of these diverse aspects of the self are part and parcel of a stable self-concept and help smooth transition to adulthood (cf. ibid.: 98f.). South Africa’s transition to democracy has been similarly fraught with tensions, given the country’s broad linguistic and cultural diversity and its violent history of colonialism and apartheid. Acknowledging differences and conflicting points of view, cultural entanglements and intersecting subjectivities, has been key to ensuring relative peace in recent decades, whilst producing many stumbling blocks on the way. South African writing, including South African young adult fiction, has partaken in these struggles, documenting and mirroring them. As Judith I NGGS (2016: 4) notes in this respect, South African young adult fiction “differs considerably from that published elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Many of the works reflect the story of a society in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing itself over a period of thirty years of turmoil and transition”. The five texts selected for my discussion - three novels, a short story and a comic - are testament to this. They have been chosen with a view to (lower) secondary EFL learners (CEFR levels A2 to B1) and to cultural accessibility. With regard to the latter, Judith I NGGS maintains that a basic knowledge Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 61 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 of the history and politics of the country is essential for students of South African literature (2016: 4). This will partly, but not entirely, be mediated through the fact that some texts are written for an international readership and/ or employ literary genres familiar to global audiences. Relatability for EFL learners in terms of topics and perspective is aided through young adults appearing as protagonists and main focalisers in all the texts. Not all of the texts discussed are young adult fiction in the narrow sense of the term, but they all follow the criterion proposed by Frauke M ATZ and Anne S TIEGER (2015: 122, based on B UCHER / H INTON 2010: 9) insofar as they are relevant for teens and provide a roadmap for young readers in their personal development. While the choice of texts is of course not comprehensively representative, it is illustrative of many key South African issues and can serve as a basis for further engagement with South African literature. Their authors, Trevor N OAH , Malla N UNN , Kagiso Lesego M OLOPE , Mohale M ASHIGO and Loyiso M KIZE all have a strong connection to South Africa, be it through birth and/ or residence. The approach this article makes to the texts can be situated within the conceptualisation for teaching foreign language literature proposed by Jasmijn B LOEMERT , Ellen J ANSEN and Wim VAN DE G RIFT (2016: 173-174), mainly adopting what can also be termed a combined context-reader approach. In this understanding, a literary text is reflective of its own and its author’s cultural, historical, and social contexts. While thus providing unique access to these worlds, it also encourages a change of perspective, transcultural learning, and critical cultural awareness. Next to context, the readers and their personal response to the text, as well as their critical thinking skills, are regarded as constitutive of meaning making (174f., 178). It is in this vein that texts are read in the EFL classroom for personal development (cf. B LOEMERT / P ARAN / J ANSEN 2020: 14). As Werner D ELANOY (2015: 30) notes of the “pedagogical encounter” between reading individuals and literature, the latter “can only come alive when it is experienced as personally meaningful. Also, the open focus, and concomitantly the whole-person orientation of [a reader response] concept can make such experience rich in personal appeal, since readers can weave manifold personal links between themselves and the text”. The following structure of this article mirrors the temporal dimensions that the development of the self-concept is anchored in according to T HOMSEN et al. (2018: 93). It begins with a discussion of a memoir that focuses on knowledge of the past. In the subsequent part, questions of present social belonging and its constraints will become prominent. It finishes with two texts that envisage possible futures. 2. The past: Where do I come from? South Africa’s awareness of the need to review its violent history was pivotal for the country’s peaceful shift to democracy (cf. K RÜGER 2007: 41). The interrogation of the past was institutionalised in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which aimed at facilitating reconciliation through truth-telling. The TRC elicited and 62 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 recorded the testimony of thousands of victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of human rights violations during the apartheid era. Many of them told their own version of the ‘truth’ in public hearings (cf. H AYNER 2001: 42f.). Autobiographical writing in a postapartheid South African context can thus be read as harking back to the practices of the TRC. Trevor N OAH ’s memoir resonates with this testimonial moment, which allows both acknowledgement and processing of personal stories of suffering. Importantly in a diverse community with a shared legacy of violence, it may raise the awareness that there is never just one single narrative about the past, but many diverse and often conflicting histories. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood (2019) 3 by Trevor N OAH Trevor N OAH was legally “born a crime” as the son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss father in South Africa in 1984, as during apartheid the so-called Immorality Act prohibited any sexual contacts between white people and people from other racial groups (cf. N OAH 2019: 285). In Born a Crime (BaC) the well-known comedian and host of the American television program “The Daily Show” tells the story of his often traumatic childhood and youth in South Africa in the years of the transition. N OAH ’s use of own personal experiences allows his tale to speak to the young reader with apparent directness. It allows him to share intimate personal ‘truths’ that immediately involve and touch the reader. His recounts of typical adolescent struggles with questions of identity, belonging, and first love are especially relatable for teenagers around the world. At the same time, these common experiences are clearly shaped by the social and political structures in South Africa at the time; even though apartheid is officially over, the impacts of its racial categorisations persist. N OAH exposes them through personal incidents, such as his being dropped by his valentine when she gets an offer from a less intelligent, but better-looking and lighter-skinned boy (cf. BaC: 135). Racial constructions work in N OAH ’s favour though, when he gets away with shoplifting while his darker-skinned friend does not (cf. ibid.: 145-152). By sharing his personal experiences N OAH lays bare the mechanisms and vocabularies of exclusion in a more general way, thus providing abundant food for thought and discussion material about both South African and domestic cultures in a secondary EFL classroom. As Britta F REITAG -H ILD (2019: 369-370) maintains, critical reflection on received categories that include others’ and one’s own perceptions is one of the key principles of transcultural learning. With young adulthood the effects of South Africa’s structural violence came to be felt ever more urgently for N OAH . Unlike his friends he has the freedom to choose to leave the township, thanks to his education, his mother, and his skin colour. The mechanisms underlying widespread gender-based violence are made evident in the last chapter by N OAH ’s account of his mother’s abuse and near murder by his violent, alcoholic stepfather. N OAH ’s incisive social commen- 3 I use the adapted version for young readers (2019). N OAH ’s original (2016) memoir is available as an annotated text in the Cornelsen Senior English Library series, in German translation and as an audio book. Numerous study guides can be found online, e.g. on https: / / www.gradesaver.com/ born-a-crime. Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 63 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 tary and critique allow for his autobiography to move beyond the individual. While it offers cultural understanding on a personal level, it also encompasses the broader social and historical context. As Marianne T HAMM states in her review: “The book is essential reading not only because it is a personal story of survival, leavened with insight and wit, but because it does more to expose apartheid - its legacy, its pettiness, its small-minded stupidity and its damage - than any other recent history book or academic text” (2016: paragraph 14). Besides this, the book sheds light on numerous cultural topics, ranging from the various South African ethnicities, religious denominations and languages to education. This caters to the need for contextual information for readers not familiar with South Africa, as does the added chapter on apartheid history (cf. BaC: 281-294). N OAH ’s use of American terminology (e.g. “hood” and “ghetto” instead of “township”) and explicit cultural comparison further facilitate understanding as well as transcultural learning. He frequently compares America’s and South Africa’s histories of racism, for example, while at the same time offering a radically different, South African perspective on European history. Not only does this relativise the latter and work against a narrowly Eurocentric view of the world, it also raises awareness of the necessarily fragmented and partial nature of any historical account. From a European perspective it is for instance shocking to learn that the young N OAH did not find the name Hitler offensive, and that his grandfather thought “a hitler” was an army tank (cf. ibid.: 187). Yet as N OAH asks his readers to consider: [T]he name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. (ibid.: 188) N OAH challenges learners’ own views of the world and thus facilitates their adoption of multiple perspectives, another principle of the transcultural literary classroom (cf. F REITAG -H ILD 2019: 369). Born a Crime is inspirational not least because it is a story of resilience. The fact that the young N OAH did not fit in any social and racial category is the result of both deeply personal circumstances and apartheid politics (cf. BaC: 119f.). He is open about how much this left him isolated, which may well resonate with teenage readers. He also shows how he coped and turned this to his advantage. His adoption of a fluid, chameleon-like nature in terms of appearance, demeanour, and language (cf. ibid.: 51-59) exemplifies his resilience and may well be viewed as a potential model for his readers. The topic of the adolescent’s search for belonging is continued in the next section, this time from young female perspectives. 64 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 3. The present: Where do I belong? Being young and female in a society riven by racial and class tensions as well as by gender-based violence, one’s search for belonging is cumbersome and often involves examining received ‘truths’, as Malla N UNN ’s and Kagiso Lesego M OLOPE ’s protagonists exemplify. As Judith I NGGS (2016: 4) points out, “[a] specific feature of young adult fiction in [the South African] context is that writers have often encouraged young people to question and even reject the moral basis of society, in contrast with other literatures which have served to encourage young people to accept the status quo of the social institutions in which they live”. Or as Malla N UNN puts it in an interview: “Part of growing up is recognizing the contradictions in the world around you and deciding how to respond to them” (N UNN 2019a: paragraph 20). Both N UNN ’s and M OLOPE ’s protagonists eventually reject the status quo, albeit with very different consequences as shall be shown. 3.1 When the Ground Is Hard (2019) by Malla N UNN Malla N UNN ’s historical young adult novel When the Ground Is Hard (WGH) is set in Swaziland (now eSwatini), which is almost fully encircled by South Africa. At the time her novel is set, the mid-1960s, Swaziland was not under apartheid rule, but de facto racial segregation was in place and racial hierarchies were comparable to the ones in South Africa. Through her protagonist, the 16-year-old Adele Joubert, and the boarding school she attends, N UNN explores the difficult search for belonging in a hybrid social space that is characterised by invisibility and instability. Like Trevor Noah, Adele is a product of proscribed interracial love. She has a White South African father and a Swazi mother of colour. So Adele, her brother, and her mother are “an add-on to Father’s regular life […] the secret well that he drinks from when no one else is looking” (WGH: 9). While he cares for them financially, he is a “sometimes father” only (ibid.: 18f.), since he has a White family in Johannesburg - who “naturally take top billing” (ibid.: 9) as young Adele informs us. What further sets her apart from her more affluent and more “respectable” classmates is the fact that her parents are not “properly married” (ibid.: 37). Here N UNN draws on a discourse that combines racism with sexism, namely the “stigma of shame around those of ‘mixed descent’”, as Zimitri E RASMUS (2001: 18) calls it. E RASMUS recounts that growing up as mixedrace or Coloured in South Africa meant “that I was not only not white, but less than white; not only not black, but better than black […] The humiliation of being ‘less than white’ made being ‘better than black’ a very fragile position to occupy” (ibid.: 13, original emphasis). This position is not only fragile, but one that has been associated with “immorality, sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity and untrustworthiness” (ibid.: 17) in South Africa. Swazi society likewise constructs Adele and her mother as sexually promiscuous (WGH: 163). Malla N UNN (2019a: paragraph 3) remembers from her own childhood in Swaziland that “[s]hame and humiliation at our mixed and ‘dirty’ blood made for a poisoned environment”. Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 65 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 When Adele is dropped by her presumed friends for a new, wealthier girl at the beginning of term and is consequently made to share a room with Lottie, an outsider who is stigmatised for her poverty, she has her seemingly stable world shaken. Within the following weeks Adele is forced to review most of her assumptions: about herself, Lottie, and the world around her. Adele’s deeply unsettling experience of social rejection within the boarding school cosmos and her shaken sense of self will likely evoke an emotional response from teenage readers. What is more, they can witness how Adele is forced to examine some of her own personal ‘truths’, her own prejudices, and to reconcile conflicting images of herself, a challenge that arises both during the development of one’s self-concept as well as in intercultural encounters. Frauke M ATZ and Anne S TIEGER maintain that young readers have their own “activated schemata of acting and thinking […] called into question” when confronted with such disconcerting situations in fiction - a fact that can be beneficial for “processes of self-reflection […] identity construction [and] the development of intercultural competences” (2015: 123f.). Adele’s changed perspective and the ensuing friendship with Lottie further allow her to recognise and transgress some of the social restrictions that are in place for women. Her growing awareness of the constructedness of gendered and racial categories and norms can be used by teachers to promote critical thinking in EFL learners, and to help them detect similar mechanisms in their own environment. Eventually, Adele emerges a stronger and a more critical person. What the novel suggests is that enculturation, a sense of belonging, remains fraught for women of colour in this sexist and racist world. Yet “[a]re we forever helpless? ” Adele asks (WGH: 256). The answer is given in the proverb from which the title derives: “When the ground is hard, the women dance” (ibid.). Adele realises that gendered and racial constraints remain - “The ground itself can’t be replaced, but it can be changed. It can be made new. That’s why the women dance. They dance to bring joy. They dance to soften the ground beneath their feet. They dance for change” (ibid.: 256). There is less hope for change for young women in the edgy novel by Kagiso Lesego M OLOPE set in present-day South Africa. 3.2 This Book Betrays My Brother (2018) by Kagiso Lesego M OLOPE I like to imagine that there are people in the world for whom uncomplicated truths remain. These people may go to the end of their lives without having these truths tested—without ever losing a grip on the things they’ve always counted on. Without feeling that deeply disconcerting sense of their world crumbling around them. I am not one of those people. (M OLOPE 2018: chapter 13) In M OLOPE ’s award-winning novel This Book Betrays My Brother (TB) the world comes crumbling down indeed for Naledi, the 13-year-old first-person narrator, when she witnesses her brother Basi raping his girlfriend Moipone. To make matters worse, family and community go into denial about the event and mark Naledi and Moipone 66 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 as liars. They refuse to believe that the popular, handsome, supposedly justice-loving Basi, who “is as special as raindrops on dying crops” (ibid.: prologue) is also a rapist. So, the ‘uncomplicated truth’ that Naledi has tested is her image of her brother. She has to try and reconcile his incompatible aspects with her conflicting feelings of disgust, fear, and the love and trust she has felt for him, all while mourning the fact that she has lost him, her closest friend and ally, over the rape and its aftermath. As a result, Naledi is forced to re-evaluate her family and the society she has grown up in, as they are exposed as profoundly misogynist and homophobic in M OLOPE ’s young adult novel. 4 Set in South Africa in the post-transition period, the novel is pervaded by gender-based violence, beyond solely Basi’s act, and as such it is reflective of the real, ongoing crisis of gender-based violence in South Africa. The country’s rates of gender-based violence are among the highest in the world (cf. H UMAN R IGHTS W ATCH 2021). Pumla Dineo G QOLA (2015: 15) and many others note that despite being constitutionally empowered, “South African women … are living with the constant fear of violence”. While modes of explanation vary, there is widespread consensus on the fact that in South Africa there is a ‘culture’ of rape and - in G QOLA ’s words “Rape culture renders rape acceptable” (ibid.: 12). M OLOPE ’s novel unmasks the social complicity and the concomitant narratives that sustain such rape culture, such as victim blaming, shaming, and trivialisation (cf. TB: chapters 18, 20, 22). Given the novel’s poetic yet simple language and teenage narrative voice and perspective, adolescent readers can relate to the ways in which socio-cultural frames impede upon Naledi’s self-formation and ability to bond with peers. They gain a nuanced understanding of the strains that come with navigating first love and first sexual encounters in a society that condones gender-based violence. They are led to empathise with a distressed Naledi who is battling with how to handle relationships with boys who are both best friends and rapists: “And how did you know? I thought. How does any girl know? ” (ibid.: chapter 22, original emphasis). Naledi’s account can further function as an analytic tool to examine social complicity in teenage readers’ own worlds, as after all, discourses and practices around sexual violence are not unique to South Africa. M OLOPE hints at this when she has Naledi directly address the reader: “You do know my brother, don’t you? ” (ibid.: epilogue). In the end, memories of the traumatic events keep haunting Naledi. At the same time, she still suffers pangs of remorse for having spoken out and thus betrayed her brother. Unable to break the family’s and society’s silence and receive their loyalty and support she is left isolated. Rather than enculturation, hers is a case of adolescent distancing, a ‘dis-culturation’. It is testament to the fact that sometimes growing up necessitates growing apart or even breaking away from your family in order to escape being defined or stifled by their norms. For both young adult girls, Adele and Naledi, the search for belonging in a patriarchal society involves being forced to face uncom- 4 For a detailed discussion of homoand transsexuality in M OLOPE ’s novel see Sandra S TADLER (2017: 112-114). Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 67 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 fortable truths, transgressing boundaries, and eventually a realignment or breaking of one’s social ties. In any case belonging remains troubled. From belonging and realist modes of writing, the last section moves to dreaming the new self beyond such frames in fantastic genres. 4. The future: Who will I become? The teenage protagonists this section focuses on remain rooted in their real, contemporary South African worlds, yet they also move beyond and transform them. Their creators, writer Mohale M ASHIGO and comic artist Loyiso M KIZE , straddle the real and the fantastical in their works that loosely conform to categories of speculative and genre fiction. In her introductory essay in the short story collection Intruders, M ASHIGO (2018: xi) envisages a project that predicts South Africa’s “future ‘postcolonialism’” and future post-apartheid as “opposite [of] our present reality where a small minority owns most of the land and lives better lives than the rest”. In order to imagine such a future, “a future where our languages and cultures are working with technology for us”, she frequently draws from South African folklore and urban legends (ibid.: xii). For her, this signifies a change from “walk[ing] around with fake swagger, trying to hide that we are wearing sneakers that aren’t made for our feet” (ibid.: xiv) to “wearing takkies [trainers] that fit us” (ibid.: xv). M ASHIGO ’s move is a decolonising one, one which aligns with what Achille M BEMBE terms “own-creation” in his critique of the violence South African students resorted to in 2014/ 2015: “After all, we are the majority here. […] We are here […] not as anybody else’s creation, but as our own-creation” (2015: paragraphs 45-49). Both M ASHIGO ’s and M KIZE ’s fictions embody such acts of mental own-creation as they “imagine [unique] futures or even reimagine a fantasy present” for South Africa (M ASHIGO 2018: xi). Such fiction speaks to teenage readers beyond South Africa as an encouragement to search for the shoes that really fit them, to use M ASHIGO ’s metaphor. Projecting a future self, imagining who to become, what impact to make, and what responsibilities to assume in the world at large, is, after all, a task teenagers have to undertake. 4.1 Intruders (2018) by Mohale M ASHIGO Intruders is a collection of 12 short stories. As one reviewer notes of its characters, “[t]hey might be werewolves, mermaids, apocalypse survivors or vampires, but they also feel familiar as their author taps into emotional worlds which are common to most of us” (S ZCZUREK 2019: paragraph 4). Two of them, Petyr and Phatu, appear in the short story “Once Upon a Town” (“OUP”), where we learn it was “love at first sight” when they met at the age of 12 (“OUP”: 153). “It was in a gutter when he first saw her, mouth inelegantly clasped around the spine of a rat”, and Petyr is the first to recognise Phatu’s true nature, saying: “I know what you are” (ibid.: 152). On one level Phatu and Petyr are street children who have made an abandoned zoo their home, 68 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 complete with guinea fowls and stolen pigs as pets, and a daily routine of domesticity. On another, less familiar level, they are werewolves. Their ‘special powers’ allow them to survive on the streets and to take care of each other. For example, on each full moon Phatu makes sure Petyr is locked in a cage, thus preventing him from running away and rejoining his old street gang, which equates with a pack of wolves (ibid.: 158). During these periods she keeps him entertained until sunrise, using storytelling as a life-saving tactic reminiscent of Scheherezade. Combining African oral traditions with storytelling and mythical creatures from European and Middle Eastern traditions, M ASHIGO can be seen to be wearing the unique shoes that fit her. The same is true of her choice of title: “Once Upon a Town”. The conflation of “time” and “town” draws our attention not only to that specific, albeit unnamed, “city by the sea” (ibid.: 153) the story is set in - Cape Town - but also to its colonial past. The zoo they live in was “built by an old colonist […] a murderer who wanted a menagerie” (ibid.: 157). 5 The explicit reference to colonial history is there, but M ASHIGO does not let it define her two young protagonists. To the contrary, she has them transform it. They turn captivity and death into a safe space and life; into a menagerie and a household of a new kind, a roofless home that allows them to gaze at the stars at night (ibid.: 157). Likewise, present Capetonian gang culture 6 , structural violence, the harsh reality of the most deprived, most marginalised and most vulnerable members of society - street children - is not glossed over by M ASHIGO , but is imbued with magic and significantly reframed. What is gained for the secondary EFL learners by this transformed and transformative perspective that is typical of all Intruders stories? Through recognisable real referents M ASHIGO ’s speculative fiction acknowledges deprivation, marginalisation, and social inequality, and establishes cultural-historical as well as global links. She thus encourages an engagement in the EFL classroom with local, South African issues of social justice that in a globalised world are not disconnected from learners’ own realities and localities. Yet she does not stop there, and hence the teaching of her stories must not stop there. Like many characters in Intruders, Phatu and Petyr are victims on various levels, but they are always much more than that: they have agency, they develop self-worth, self-efficacy, a strong sense of responsibility for each other, and they are in control of their own lives. As such they embody the process of mental decolonisation as M BEMBE advocates for it, and thereby also transcend one-dimensional discourses of negativity and victimhood. As ‘own-creations’, characters like Phatu and Petyr can have a powerful effect on young readers and their transcultural learning: by transcending disabling representational practices of victimhood the author allows learners to view South African teenagers differently and to encounter them, who tend to be othered by their own society (and by the Global North), as 5 The reference is to Cecil Rhodes who built the now abandoned Groote Schuur Zoo on the slopes of Table Mountain in the 1890s (cf. S OUTH A FRICAN H ISTORY O NLINE 2019). 6 For more information on Cape Town’s gang violence cf. Don P INNOCK (2019) and Dariusz D ZIEWANSKI (2020). Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 69 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 equals. Last but not least, young learners experience the transformative power of transculturality as a space (and a model) for their own self-transformation. It may encourage them to dream their own empowered future selves within and despite constraining realities. As the collection’s blurb describes it, “These are stories of unremarkable people thrust into extraordinary situations by events beyond their control” (M ASHIGO : 2018). The very same holds true for Kwezi, the young protagonist in the comic series of the same name. 4.2 Kwezi (2016) by L OYISOMKIZEART Kwezi is South Africa’s first Black superhero comic, an ongoing series published in English, French, Sesotho, isiXhosa and isiZulu (cf. P ARKER 2018: paragraph 1), featuring the eponymous superhero. The series is a creation of L OYISOMKIZEART , a collective of illustrators, colourists and story/ script writers including Loyiso M KIZE , the creator of Kwezi, Clyde B EECH and - as of issue 4 - Mohale M ASHIGO . Like M ASHIGO ’s short stories, Kwezi is set in a real environment: Gold City, aka Johannesburg. The first of so far four collector’s editions (issues 1 to 3) begins the 19-year-old superhero Kwezi’s coming-of-age story. Kwezi makes his first appearance in the midst of a crime which is common in Johannesburg, a cash-in-transit heist. We first see him as a reflection in one of the gangsters’ vizors, in full action mode, about to stop the criminals and hand them over to the police (L OYISOMKIZEART 2016: issue 1, 3-6). This is possible through his recently acquired special powers, which include superhuman strength and the ability to fly. While he is “helping the good guys” (ibid.: issue 1, 6), his ‘good deed’ is still mainly a means for self-marketing on social media. Revelling in his instantaneous celebrity status, Kwezi is soon called upon by a mysterious “traveller” on horseback, Mohau (ibid.: issue 1, 10). Mohau is a member of the ancient star people who have returned to this world after millions of years following an old prophecy. Much to his dismay, Kwezi learns he is a descendant of the star people and therefore his powers are to be put to use in a mission to save the world from the evil doings of super-villains (ibid.: issue 3, 2-5). Kwezi is unceremoniously pushed into maturation and a realisation that his powers come with responsibility. Rather than empowering the teenager for a life of independence, autonomy, and narcissistic stardom, his special abilities are destined for the greater good of the community that is this wider world. Such an interdependent understanding of adolescent self-development is characteristic of collectivist cultures that view the individual self as always in relation with community (E SCHENBECK / K NAUF 2018: 25). 7 His duty to his society and to making a difference is material for discussion in a transcultural EFL classroom and can serve to explore differing cultural expectations in this respect. Like M ASHIGO ’s stories, Kwezi taps into a transcultural 7 See also the African principle of ubuntu which views human beings as fundamentally related. According to ubuntu “the individual’s existence and well-being are relative to that of the group” (M OKGORO 2012: 317, cf. also M ENKITI 2017: 466). 70 Sabine Binder DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 51 • Heft 1 heritage while at the same time often transforming it to subversive effect. For example, the depiction of Mr Mpisi, the super villain, seamlessly blends local imagery with elements of both fantasy and the real. Mr Mpisi is a shape-shifter with the ability to take the form of a hyena, who intends to assume power over Gold City (issue 3, 9). A greedy corporate magnate, he has several corrupt politicians in his pocket (ibid.: issue 2, 14). As visible in illustration 1, Mohau’s and his companions’ regalia draw from South Africa’s vastly diverse cultural terrain: the ethnic groups of the Sotho (Mohau, far left), the Zulu (Azania, second right) and the Khoisan (Khoi, far right) (cf. S MIT 2018: paragraph 7, 15). M KIZE states in an interview that “[i]t’s just a really great reimagining of the African body, our cultures and who we are. Not always the expected negative connotations of when you look at a person from the continent. It’s taking charge of the narrative - and being fun with it as well” (P ARKER 2018: paragraph 26). M KIZE first and foremost draws and writes with young South Africans in mind, yet as a young, action-loving superhero who succumbs to social media culture, Kwezi has strong identificatory potential for teenagers beyond South Africa. Illustration 1: Cover page Kwezi, issue 3 (C OMIC V INE ) 5. Conclusion Being written in English and originating in a complex transcultural terrain such as South Africa, Trevor’s, Adele’s, Naledi’s, Phatu’s, Petyr’s, and Kwezi’s tales make for rewarding reading in the secondary EFL classroom. Primarily, this article has Reading South Africa as an Adolescent 71 51 • Heft 1 DOI 10.24053/ FLuL-2022-0005 demonstrated these texts’ particular educational potential for transcultural learning intended to promote insights into the hybridity, fluidity, and entangledness of cultures and subjectivities as they are experienced by learners not just in a South African context, but also in relation to their own biographies and classrooms (cf. F REITAG -H ILD 2019: 369). EFL teachers will thus find ample opportunity to adhere to the three methodological principles Britta F REITAG -H ILD details for teaching culture through literary texts, namely multi-perspectivity, dialogue, and reflexivity (ibid.). Moreover, these texts from South Africa have been shown to be meaningful and relatable to young learners with a view to personal development during adolescence, allowing development of critical thinking. These texts provide templates for norms and patterns of behaviour. Through the presentation of their adolescent characters, who are all on their way to becoming their “own-creations” (cf. M BEMBE 2015: paragraph 49), learners are invited to probe, appropriate, or reject them. In line with Laurenz V OLKMANN ’s aspects of competence development via literature, the texts provide orientation insofar as they offer “vicarious experiences” through “fictionalized forms of ‘playingthrough’ important scenarios of human interaction”, and they call for ethical response “by staging inner dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts in the fictional realm and also by asking readers to become involved and to relate these issues to their own life situations” (2015: 52). Direct emotional and ethical involvement and relatability are greatly facilitated by the characteristic immediacy with which these South African texts speak to young learners. As a consequence, they are likely to positively affect not only their knowledge, but their attitudes and skills too, as required by school curricula. Bibliography Primary sources L OYISOMKIZEART (2016): Kwezi: Issues 1-3. Collector's edition. Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip Publishers. 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