Boundaries of empathy and identity: Olufemi Terry On Cape Town and Coetzee’s long shadow

The Sierra Leone-born author reflects on finding himself strung between two very different literary poles in South Africa’s ‘sleepy city’

By Olufemi Terry for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

In February 2008, a few days before I began my MA in creative writing, an administrator in University of Cape Town’s English department asked me if there were any particular writer I wished to have for my advisor. The one I had been originally assigned, an American, had been let go, apparently so that the department could make a quota hire. Rumor said a Zambian poet had been taken on but I never learned the truth of this, nor ever met the poet. It was an incident of significance: Apartheid was not yet fifteen years dead and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), South Africa’s affirmative action program, was a contentious issue in the worlds of sport, academia and business.

While inquiries went out to a novelist I admired, an interim advisor was named for me, a well-established Afrikaans-language writer who warned, on meeting me for the first time, that I should not expect much in the way of friendliness from Capetonians. He may have said something about Table Mountain having something to do with this, about nature exerting an influence on the temperament of locals but it may be a false memory.

‘Cape Town, as it seemed, promised something intermediate between New York and Nairobi’

'It seemed the mark of an excellent novel that it should piss off black and white alike in this fractured country'

Chimurenga was a refutation of Cape Town’s major tropes – romantic isolation, exceptionalism, sacred nature

'It was in Cape Town that the last vestige of New York went out of me'

Continue reading...