The Wanderers
An interwoven father-daughter story, Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s ambitious novel The Wanderers is a philosophical examination of the legacy of South African apartheid.
Although apartheid ended when Ruru, now a doctor, was still a child, she lived her life in its shadow. She never met her father, Phaks, whose activism forced him to flee the country before her birth; he died years ago. Still, Ruru moves to Tanzania, Phaks’s last known place of residence, in an attempt to track down whatever information she can. There she acquires his diaries, stretching from his boyhood through the time he spent abroad in service of the anti-apartheid “Organisation” and his existential musings while he went through the final stages of AIDS.
The novel is composed of three strands: Ruru’s present-day quest, the text of the diaries, and a set of letters that a teenage Ruru wrote upon the early death of her mother. The picture that emerges is both quotidian and extraordinary. It covers everyday life in the poor townships and rural homelands that apartheid set up, as well as the lengths to which the fight against such a system went, sending its foot soldiers as far as Moscow for training.
Predominantly intellectual in its approach, the book is marked by extended ruminations and a plethora of erudite references—as a high school student, Ruru reads St. Augustine, for example. There is an overall lack of emotional engagement, a factor echoed in the dropped storyline of Ruru’s reconnection with a lost love. Still, the novel soars in its unvarnished takes on South Africa’s current situation and in its presentation of a Black South African story.
The Wanderers is a cerebral novel that depicts South Africa’s modern history through the story of an absent father.
Reviewed by
Carolyn Wilson-Scott
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