BEYOND RACE, FICTIVE AND ILLUSORY: K. SELLO DUIKER'S THIRTEEN CENTS AND THE QUIET VIOLENCE OF DREAMS

Abstract

The world has been distressed for centuries. Almost all nations have experienced all sorts of traumatic events and feelings in time. Among those nations, the Blackman seem to be the most unlucky and ill-fated, suffered from traumatic disasters. However, among those black nations, the natives of South Africa have been the most piteous. Their misfortune began with the oppression and persecution of white European colonists and settlers on natives. Those natives were not allowed to have equal rights with white people and to share same environment in public premises. The natives put up resistance against the racial and colonial practices of white settlers which excluded them from all living spaces; that culminated in the democratically elected government in 1994. Today their exclusion and violent racialism still go on and they are still subjected to inferior treatment by (post)colonial dominant white powers as shown in most post-apartheid narratives. This study aims at explicating how Duiker has reflected on the trauma, black people of South Africa have experienced as a consequence of racist practices. As Duiker's works make eminently clear, the era of struggle literature is over in South Africa. Today, the country is contending with the complications of freedoms. A racial divide once enforced by law has become an economic divide that falls mostly along racial lines. Everyone is profoundly uncertain of his place. This paper is informed by an old-fashioned liberal humanist vision and demonstrates clearly that a nation is a place where people can only consider themselves as one entity belonging to the same nation if and only if, they are willing to accept one another. If such a will is absent, then division and hatred become the norm as demonstrated by Duiker's characters.