In Mahlangu’s Penumbra, South Africa tastes green

SONGEZIWE Mahlangu is a young South African writer and member of the post-evil-A-word generation. However, Mahlangu’s voice is strong and a good testimony of South African literature.

   In his debut novel, Penumbra, published in 2013 by Kwela Books, an imprint of NB Books, the 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize-shortlisted writer takes his reader through the post apartheid era of South Africa; carrying them in such a manner that they are consciously left waiting for the end. 

  Mahlangu’s writing is compact and shuns wordy descriptions  – it is crisp and direct. The book is well-written, clever and everything a contemporary South African fiction should be.

   The 212-page book, divided into three parts —- The Moon Is Dying, A Turn Under The Sun and Before The Sun Rises —- dissects young, urban slackers in South Africa with startling precision.

   Penumbra opens with the narrator flitting around the streets of Rondebosch, Cape Town, paranoid and anxious, reading significance into everything and clasping at his bible in a state of delusional fervour.

    The novel takes the reader through the life of Mangaliso Zolo, Manga as he is known. A hapless recent graduate, Manga has an office job at a large insurance company, but he is anonymous and overlooked in this vast bureaucracy. 

    In an attempt to become an important voice, the young, black middle-class UCT graduate lives, moves and parties across boundaries and barriers of Cape Town. 

  In fact, Manga’s ability to move between yuppie Vredehoek, bohemian Observatory, suburban Kenilworth and Gugulethu for gigs breaks down apartheid’s racialised boundaries. 

  It’s his capacity to interact with township people, gangsters, prissy white suburban girls and immigrants, which gives this novel its interest. And surprisingly, one of the strengths of this novel that dwells on sex, drugs, violence and mobility.

  The book equally charts Manga’s daily struggles with mental illness and the twin pull, from his many friends and acquaintances, between a reckless drug-fuelled lifestyle and charismatic Christianity.

   Penumbra is a journey through the varying states of mental breakdowns of Mangaliso Zolo, the protagonist-narrator, who desperately wants to be a writer, but simply isn’t: all aspiration with no substance.

   In the 212-page fiction, the message that echoes is that of a disillusioned young black South African caught up in a dead-beat job, with dead-beat friends and a life going nowhere. His frustration seeps off the pages and symbolises his weary approach to those around him.

   The novel also brings an alternative experience of Cape Town, possibly, Johanesburg, to life, one far removed from both the gloss of tourism brochures and the familiar poverty that the 2010 World Cup hid. 

   Mahlangu presents an unfamiliar Cape Town to many; an underbelly of drugs, prostitution, religious cults and the tyranny of every-day blandness.

    Mahlangu never makes conscious effort to describe all the places to which his narrator travels.  The reader is, therefore, unwillingly drawn into the ‘obscurantis excursus’ into Riverside Mall, Rondebosch Pick n Pay, Tagore’s, Trenchtown, Liesbeeck Gardens, Groote Schuur and Kenilworth – places only listed and not explored, which will have no meaning for anyone other than a handful of Capetonians. 

   Mahlangu’s writing verges on stream of consciousness. He carried the story with occasional commentaries so as to make the characterisation robust. Therefore, expect  unfinished plot lines. And, in terms of plot, there are a lot of loose ends that Ieave the reader wondering. Painfully, they are never tied up. 

   One of the seedier scenes of the novel has the protagonist sleep with a woman who he presumes to have HIV. The coupling leaves her “naked, her face buried in her knees”, “coughing hard, the heaving accentuating the outline of her spine”. The narrator is found afterwards, celebrating in the bar, “satisfied, with a beer and cigarette”.

    Though, it fails to provide the reader with any coherent, plotted storyline or  character that  could be identified with, it, is, however, one book a reader will find difficult to drop because of its form, content and technique.

  The print is clean and editing. However, there is a serious error on page 18: “She soon agreed to leave with me.” It should have been: “”She soon agreed to live with me.”

  Be that as it may, the book is encouraging and best exemplify life in contemporary South Africa.