Nakanjani G. Sibiya’s first collection of short stories in English is a comprehensive and timely collection that oozes maturity and skill. It should be considered in the same category as the best SA authors such as Professor DBZ Ntuli, Professor Otty EHM Nxumalo, and Fred Khumalo. Its strength lies in the timeless evocation of the Zulu storytelling prowess of yesteryear. Sibiya is the award-winning novelist, essayist, and storyteller. He writes mainly in his native language, IsiZulu. We have spun these threads for over 30 years, in the process winning multiple awards, including the M-Net literary award. He is an academic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg campus). This is your first foray into storytelling in English.
Sibiya has produced a storytelling masterclass carried out with such intelligence and ingenuity from a village storyteller, if not the village teacher. His characters are real people, warts and all. It goes where even angels fear to tread. For example, in her opening tactic, she tells a story of friendship, love, loss, and male rape. It is so well done that you forgive the blood and blood that permeates the air. It warns us of rampant xenophobia that has the potential to destroy our shared humanity. While it speaks to a possible xenophobic topic, it cleverly mixes it with race relations between Africans and Indians that are thriving but still need the spark to flourish. It shows us what is possible when we work together rather than against each other. It touches on important issues of mixed-race couples and gay love, in the context of traditional leadership succession. Can a son who marries outside his race succeed his father and become an Inkosi (Chief) in the depths of Zululand? Well, maybe not if her father has something to do with it. The complexity, of course, is that the next child in the line of succession is gay. Can a gay Zulu become an Inkosi? It is done in such a clean and uplifting way that one is tempted to write an answer to make its characters live beyond the traditional leadership succession dilemma facing their father.
Sibiya’s writing flows naturally, it is not artificial or driven by technique, giving us beautiful, lyrical and multi-layered writing. If you thought you were in trouble, wait until you meet the Sibiya characters and their unique but identifiable life difficulties. A successful woman falls in love with a Ben 10, maybe it’s her long-lost son? A woman plays hard to delay saying the magic words, “I love you too” until it is too late. Maybe. A suspicious woman loses her husband to unproven rumors of infidelity. A father who faces ruin as a result of xenophobia lives to tell the proverbial story, but with a twist. Twitter brings together lovers lost in extraordinary circumstances; they rekindle their love story, get married and live happily ever after. But not until someone close to them decides to take the blame for a murder that didn’t commit everything in the name of friendship. Welcome to the world of Sibiya, you can eat and drink with the cute entrepreneurs, some with troubled consciences, but all with excesses of undeserved riches on display, and then this, the ubiquitous bellies.
He has given us a banquet. On the menu, there is a delicious, succulent and tender steak, served medium raw, as Sibiya displays her vast vocabulary and manages, without much trouble, to incorporate proverbs and idiophones from IsiZulu. All in one day’s writing. Sibiya not only paints the landscape with her words, but provides us with a GPS insight into the KwaZulu-Natal province, from Gcotsheni, her birthplace near Eshowe, to Mandeni, and finally to her Pietermaritzburg workplace.
