These stories from the closing days of apartheid rule in South Africa won the Noma Award, Africa's highest literary award, and announced Njabulo Ndebele as an assured and impressive literary voice. He has gone on to become one of the most powerful voices for cultural freedom on the whole of the African continent today.
Ndebele evokes township life with humor and subtlety, rejecting the image of black South Africans as victims and focusing on the complexity and fierce energy of their lives. “Our literature,” says Ndebele, “ought to seek to move away from an easy preoccupation with demonstrating the obvious existence of oppression. It exists. The task is to explore how and why people can survive under such harsh conditions.”
The stories in Fools and Other Stories deal with the formative experiences of growing up in a Johannesburg township during the Apartheid years. “Fools,” the title story of the collection, is a tale of generations. Zamani, a disgraced middle-aged teacher and Zani, a young student activist, are inadvertently bound together by affection and hostility in an intense and unpredictable relationship. Finding each other means finding the common ground of their struggle. It also means re-examining their lives—and, notably, their relationships with women.
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