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With debates about the issues of liberation, centering, and empowerment dominating the African literary landscape, particularly in works written by women, it is not surprising to find that the issue of ‘waiting’ occupies centre stage in Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Much, of course, has been written on this work, which focuses on the peculiar problems facing women in contemporary South Africa, but the object of this essay is to examine the theme of waiting as it is made manifest in the literary production of the Third-World level of South African life under apartheid. The background to this literature is infiltration, colonialism, and exploitation in the lives of simple people struggling for survival and meaning in a harsh world. Through complex negotiations, women are attempting to come to terms with their increasingly visible role as breadwinners in the absence of their menfolk. This produces unexpected reconfigurations, personal and familial. One question addressed is whether these reconfigurations represent a crisis in the relations of social reproduction or a transition to new forms of family life. The novel is characterized by elements of the fantastic and mythical woven into a deceptively simple story that scrutinizes society at its base in a state of post-apartheid hangover. With debates about the issues of liberation, centering, and empowerment dominating the African literary landscape, particularly in works written by women, it is not surprising to find that the issue of ‘waiting’ occupies centre stage in Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Much, of course, has been written on this work, which focuses on the peculiar problems facing women in contemporary South Africa, but the object of this essay is to examine the theme of waiting as it is made manifest in the literary production of the Third-World level of South African life under apartheid. The background to this literature is infiltration, colonialism, and exploitation in the lives of simple people struggling for survival and meaning in a harsh world. Through complex negotiations, women are attempting to come to terms with their increasingly visible role as breadwinners in the absence of their menfolk. This produces unexpected reconfigurations, personal and familial. One question addressed is whether these reconfigurations represent a crisis in the relations of social reproduction or a transition to new forms of family life. The novel is characterized by elements of the fantastic and mythical woven into a deceptively simple story that scrutinizes society at its base in a state of post-apartheid hangover.
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