Title: ‘Penumbra’
Author: Songeziwe Mahlangu
Publisher: Kwela Books, Cape Town
Pages: 212
Reviewer: Funke Osae-Brown
Life in post-apartheid South Africa could be very tough. It is the toughness of trying to find a place in a society where discrimination was once and still rife is what Songeziwe Mahlangu seeks to do in his novel ‘Penumbra.’
The novel tells the story of Mangaliso Zolo, a graduate who lives in the Southern suburbs of Cape Town. Manga, an abbreviation of his name, Mangaliso, works with a large insurance company, but he is anonymous and overlooked in the vast bureaucracy.
‘Penumbra’ details 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. The novel brings a substitute experience of Cape Town to life that is far removed from the highly publicised side of Cape Town as a beautiful tourist destination. It creates a vivid picture of another side to Cape Town, where aspiring young graduate finds it hard to live a decent life as they find it difficult to pay their house rent, drive a car of their choice, and generally have the basic things that make life comfortable.
The narrative reveals the sharp contrast between the beautiful mountainous landscapes synonymous with Cape Town to the dirty-looking cramped flats in downtown.
One will not be wrong to tag ‘Penumbra’ as a psychological novel like Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power.’ While Head chronicles the psychological effects of apartheid on South Africa, Mahlangu writes on the psychological effects of apartheid on post-apartheid South Africa. Both novels highlight what it means to be traumatised.
However, the authors depict trauma on two different levels. In ‘A Question of Power,’ Elizabeth, the main character in the novel, is not mad but she is deeply traumatised. The apartheid system attacked her identity in an existential way, which disrupts her relation to the people around her and to herself. She is kind of doubly colonised by the apartheid institutions outside and by the perpetrators she has internalised.
In ‘Penumbra,’ Manga struggles with mental illness caused, worsened by drug and alcohol abuse which he takes part in with his friends. ‘Penumbra’ gives a new perspective of Cape Town as a white dominated society that is depraved and depressing. It shows the psychological trauma of an average black South African who is struggling to independently start a life.
Furthermore, the author revisits the age-long, almost legendary disparity in the employment opportunities available to an African with different levels of Western education and their white counterpart. The very well-educated Africans who graduate with good grades are the new bourgeoisie. This is highlighted in the conversation between Manga and his prospective employer when he went for a job interview on page 76. The interviewer tells him thus:
“Look, you speak well and you look smart, but that does not count for anything. You must stick it out at Trice, even it means being skivvy. Appreciate that you are getting advice from successful people.”
Likewise, the identification of oppressed oppressors does not evade the treatment of the author. The black agent of imperialistic subjugation and neo-colonialist errand boys as exemplified by Bra Menzi and the very pretentious Mfundo who always want to prove he belongs to the new emerging black middle class.
Government’s lukewarm attitude towards the living conditions of the people and its insensitivity to the plight of the masses are other areas the author covers. There are no jobs for graduates and those who are employed lack job satisfaction. The pittance they are paid barely covers their living expenses.
All the characters in Penumbra are traumatised by the poor socio-economic conditions they find insurmountable in post-apartheid South Africa. Their trauma is a sort of implosion, a painful, dialectical struggle between different temporalities, multiple contradictory worlds that translate into extraordinary, spectacular phenomena both at the level of the psyche as well as of the body. That is why Manga and his friend resort to drinking alcohol, taking weed and cocaine and sleeping with different women and at will.
In sum, Mahlangu’s voice is unlike anything South African literature has seen as his novel scrutinises young, urban idlers in South Africa with startling precision. Mahlangu’s style is original and his fast paced and descriptive writing is very striking and captivating. He does not pretend to bore the reader as he tells his story using short sentences and brief paragraphs. The reader does not get muddled in any form of murkiness with his style of writing and use of language.
In addition, the title of the novel, ‘Penumbra’ is apt, it sums up the lifestyle of an average black in South Africa where he is like a partial shadow outside the complete shadow of the obscure mass of other inhabitants.