Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa

By Phaswane Mpe

Book Overview

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbingride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow-microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everythingis there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people's lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow-living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821419625
• ISBN13: 9780821419625
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

Post-Apartheid fiction

Much of South African fiction deals with, by necessity, with the history of racialized oppression. This book takes a look at the post-apartheid South Africa where the old narratives no longer apply so neatly. The result is a wonderfully engaging book that deals sensitively with its characters, flaws and all. The author writes beautifully and really delves into a number of extremely tough issues (aids, xenophobia, poverty) without being preachy. The story concerns the lives and loves of a couple of lovers and the people around them as they travel from the villages of the Limpopo province to the roughest inner-city neighborhood in Johannesburg. Love is betrayed with painful consequences to their relationship, their lives and those around them. Like any good novelist, Mpe is able to bring to life not only the characters who are struggling to move from poverty and apartheid to prosperity and education in a democratic South Africa, but the society around them. My words are not doing justice to what a warm, sensitive and humanistic account of South Africans in their very troubled present.

haunting and tragic, often brilliant

This book was recommended to me as a way to understand what I was seeing as a visitor to S Africa, to get a bit into the inner lives of the characters that I saw as I was working. It is a very sad story, in the form of a monologue to a dead boy - a squandered talent - and to his lost loves. While the voice is a bit off-putting, addressing the boy as "you" and then referring to everyone else in the third person, I got into the characters and the scene in great depth.This is a chronicle of several failed attempts to leave a backward and xenophobic village, for a huge ghetto near Johannesburg. It is painful to read, but very very rewarding and an accurate reflection of the crisis in S Africa today, where the entire society seems to be breaking down in violence, Aids, promiscuity, and rape. According to my friends here, it is chillingly real and felt so to me.Warmly recommended.