The JRB presents an excerpt from Masande Ntshanga’s essay ‘Technologies of Conquest: On Writing the Dystopian through South Africa’s Past, Present and Possible Future(s)’, from the newly published The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning.
The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning
Edited by Sally Ann Murray and Michèle Betty
Dryad Press, 2024
Technologies of Conquest: On Writing the Dystopian through South Africa’s Past, Present and Possible Future(s)
Masande Ntshanga
We are the black violators
of the machine rhythm
in plastic cities …
(Gwala 37)
The year is 1986, and my mother has just been driven home from the maternity ward where she gave birth to me. Frere Hospital is in East London, which is considered a part of White South Africa, and even though my place of birth makes me South African, my mother and I are denied citizenship, restricted instead to residing in its labour reserve, the Ciskei homeland. Here, we settle inside the Bantustan’s biggest township, Mdantsane. My mother, a journalist, owns her first house in NU 1, or Native Unit 1, which I’ll later learn is what we are: Natives inside Unit 1. This narrative is an arrangement of human beings that will never leave me. During the nineties, the division into Native Units will be sanitised into Zones, and even though I don’t know it yet, I will repurpose the word Zone in my second novel, three decades later, to describe a future form of social engineering. In adulthood, I will also come to think of the homelands as technologies of conquest, and of our first house—which was founded on the National Party’s experimentation with eugenics—as my first introduction to science fiction, and the first seeds of my second novel, Triangulum (2019).
***
The year is 1991, and my mother and I have moved from the township of Mdantsane to Bhisho, the capital of the Ciskei homeland. Nelson Mandela has been released from prison and I’m lying on our driveway, bleeding from my forehead. Later, when my mother asks me what happened, I’ll tell her I jumped off our front gate, believing I could float. That I saw it on TV.
***
The year is 1992, and during the interregnum, before the ANC’s negotiations can be concluded, the political agitation has seeped into us as children, and we are warned against approaching unattended packages on the street, explosives to obliterate our limbs. There is also a ban on singing liberation songs in public, where ‘hippos’, or armoured trucks, still patrol our neighbourhoods. In my room one morning, I use yellow, black and green crayons to scrawl the liberation party’s colours on a wall. I look at this image and do not know what it means.
***
The year is 1993, and I miss the long walks I used to take around our neighbourhood. I miss the long walks I used to take around our town itself—from Tyu Tyu North to Parliament Hill. I miss the fragrances of friends’ houses and being alone at the shops in the strip mall on Circular Drive. I miss absorbing the architecture of the CBD and watching the multitudes of men, women and children that course around its edges like a river. Eating bowls of umvubo in front of my mother’s woodgrain Panasonic TV, I sit on our carpeted floor with my legs crossed, watching episodes of ‘Captain Tsubasa’, a Japanese animation programme that is broadcast in the afternoons on CCV-TV. I make an attempt at drawing the characters from the show in my school exercise books, and often fall asleep on our lawn, watching complicated cloud formations, pregnant with sunshine and rain.
***
The year is 1994, and in her efforts to keep me indoors as much as possible, my mother returns from work one afternoon with an 8-bit gaming console. The machine is packed inside a rectangular box with a label that reads ‘Golden China TV Game’, accented with golden flourishes to emphasise its name. Peeling the tape from the cardboard box in our living room, I do not know that what I own is, in fact, a ‘famiclone’, which is a replication of the original Japanese Family Computer, or Famicom, also known as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I also do not know that the NES has become a behemoth, popular enough to warrant duplication such that in the former Eastern Bloc (the former Soviet Union), and now too in the Ciskei homeland, the Golden China TV Game is a common alternative to the original NES, cheaper and sold with cartridges crammed with hundreds of games instead of one. The cartridge my mother’s brought home with her this afternoon contains ‘Rockman’, a science fiction platform game in which, during the year 20XX, artificial intelligence robots, designed for industrial purposes, have turned against humankind. The hero is a humanoid called Mega Man, and by the time the game reaches me, it has sold over a million copies across the world. From this afternoon onward, I adore and treasure the device, waking up in the middle of the night to admire it, and turning it on with the TV muted, in order to delve into its 8-bit universe without waking my mother. I lose myself for hours inside its green and blue pixels, which are not only an insulation from the violence outside, but also an introduction to science fiction as a narrative form, the soil in which the seeds of my second novel, Triangulum, will germinate.
***
The year is 2000, and I’m fourteen and reading an issue of TIME magazine inside the public library in King William’s Town (now Qonce), seated alone at a desk and learning about the capture of Onel de Guzman. De Guzman is a working-class computer science student, and an introvert like me; he’s authored a global pandemic from the Philippines, infecting more than 45 million computers with the ILOVEYOU virus. Later, it will come out that De Guzman couldn’t afford the Internet and had written the application to steal passwords in Manila so he could access it for free. His worm, which exploits a bug in Windows 95, will be discovered to have the same code as the application he’d described in his thesis at AMA Computer College, the school that had rejected the work the previous year. During his arrest, De Guzman is pictured with a pair of black oval shades. His skin is pocked from acne and his face is without expression. He is famous for his bashfulness, which I recognise. My understanding of the relationship between the poor and technology is cemented. I want to become a hacker.
***
The year is 2002, and I’m sixteen and enrolled in a boarding school in Pietermaritzburg. It’s a fortnight before our summer break and our grade has been taken on a week-long camping trip to Greater St Lucia, a protected wetland along the coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Here, all three classes that comprise my grade are packed into a wooded resort close to an estuary, where we’re put up in bunk beds inside rooms we share between four of us. In the mornings, we wake at dawn to hike the dirt trails that spider jaggedly from the resort like a net of arteries, concealed under the dense lid of the nearby forest. During these hikes, we encounter barren earth, where the resort has felled trees for timber and mowed the forest floor into manmade meadows used for obstacle courses. Having been instructed to do a dozen laps, we hike back down the trails, limp from exhaustion, the sun beating down on the backs of our necks like a hammer. Inside our rooms, we take turns under a shower head, gasping at the pellets of icy water. In the evenings, the school enlists a team of local conservationists to educate us about the wetland, and so it is that one night, after dinner, I learn about the Dukuduku Forest. Earlier that afternoon, we’d ziplined from a cliff face and gone white water rafting through the Mfolozi’s muscular torrents. Now exhausted, we sit around a campfire before being told about the troubles in the region. Two years before our trip, they tell us, the Dukuduku Forest was incorporated into the Greater Wetlands Park, into St Lucia itself, and, owing to its rare ecosystem, it was named a world heritage site. Later, I’ll learn that this means that its indigenous communities—a human population that had settled inside the forest for centuries and was reliant on it for shelter, medicine and sustenance—would have to be displaced. The local conservationists tell us that the forest’s inhabitants are squatters with no legal claim to the land, that their presence poses a threat to the delicate landscape; for homework, we have to come up with ideas on how to assist them to see reason. The grade is silent. Then, a moment later, our boarding master, a man of German origin, gets up from his seat and turns to us, beaming with pride, confident of our compliance. Ensconced inside the ring of teenage bodies around the flame, I can tell this moment is instructive, but I cannot make sense of it. It will take me more than a decade and a half to make an attempt at doing so. I will decide to do this through a novel.
***
The year is 2005, and in my first year of university, I unenrol from computer science in order to major in English. In a tutorial one afternoon, I read a poem that likens living under apartheid to living inside a B-movie. It is meant to describe the ersatz civilisation of White South Africa, but the poem’s lines transport me to the pregnant silence of the Ciskei capital, where we’d filled up water bottles and called them petrol bombs for play, an eerie peacefulness gliding over a foundation of violence.
***
The year is 2013, and after several unsuccessful writing years, I finally complete a story titled ‘Space’. It is set in Bhisho, where I spent some of my childhood, and it follows a group of prepubescent boys on an expedition to find an extraterrestrial that is rumoured to have landed in their neighbourhood. I choose this setting deliberately, finding the town’s absence conspicuous in South African literature. The story wins a PEN International Award, and after that, I decide I want to write about Apartheid using science fiction, and with a focus on the Ciskei homeland, emphasising those elements that felt alien to me. Like the poem.
***
The year is 2016, and I’m on a tour in the United States for my first novel, The Reactive. I am coursing across the plains of Middle America when I conceive of Triangulum as a book. My tour began in New York City, during the Brooklyn Book Festival, and is set to end at Litquake1 in San Francisco. Most of the tour has entailed a journey by car. My publisher, his production assistant and I spend hours talking and listening to music on the road, stopping over in small towns and cities for readings and book signings, eating vegan burgers and drinking cans of Miller Lite. As we travel, I realise that the landscape is beautiful. One afternoon, driving past an enormous cornfield, I imagine a character who is not quite human, but has spent her life on Earth, living and working as one of us, and now provides an appraisal of humankind, an account of her experience of the planet in the form of a manuscript. Later, I’ll realise that the idea of her as an alien life form is not literal, but is instead the book asserting its genre to me. I will also learn that it is the writing process that helps me understand that the protagonist often feels alienated, as do I. I begin writing notes in the back of the car, en route to giving a talk and reading from The Reactive at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Something is happening.
~~~
- Masande Ntshanga was born in East London and has a bachelor’s degree in Film and Media, an honours in English Studies, and a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. He is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award and is author of the novels The Reactive (2014) (winner of a Betty Trask Award in 2018) and Triangulum (2019) (nominated for the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Novel in 2019). He has also authored a collection of poetry and prose, Native Life in the Third Millennium (2020), published by his experimental press, Model See Media (MDL SEE).
~~~
Publisher information
The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning is available from better bookstores nationwide and can also be purchased online at the Dryad Press bookstore, which is currently offering a 25% discount.
In a world where artistic expression and creative endeavours hold the power to shape reality, The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning delves into the intricate and transformative nature of artistic practice. This collection of essays explores the challenges of producing creative work, the intersection of diverse media, and the generative encounter of inspiration, idea, materials and innovation. Spanning a broad spectrum of artistic fields—from visual arts to music and literature, and from podcasting to performance and dance—these essays shed light on the creative processes and critical insights that occur when imagination meets discipline.
A poet making complex cultural inscriptions from words; a dance curator rechoreographing performance as contested space; a critic mulling over the practice of reviewing; a creative-writing teacher re-shaping the writing workshop; a novelist posing speculative fiction as a genre through which to re-view South Africa’s past, present and possible future(s): these and other essays in the collection push the boundaries of art as makerly process and critical reflection. They offer inspirational routes for making, even as they acknowledge failure, and harness vulnerability as a catalyst for artistic breakthrough. The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning celebrates the interplay of imagination and skill, trial and error, daring readers to unlock their own potential as thoughtful artistic practitioners.
Editors, artist and other contributors
Sally Ann Murray (editor and author)
Michèle Betty (editor)
Gabeba Baderoon (the Foreword)
Henrietta Scholtz (artist)
Vonani Bila (author)
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (author)
vangile gantsho (author)
Ashraf Jamal (author)
Liesl Jobson (author)
Lliane Loots (author)
Wamuwi Mbao (author)
Kobus Moolman (author)
Stephanus Muller (author)
Masande Ntshanga (author)
Uhuru Portia Phalafala (author)
Annel Pieterse (author)
Meg Vandermerwe (author)
Simon van Schalkwyk (author)
