Hedley Twidle’s new book is an academic but highly readable reflection on modern SA that eschews jargon

Nonfiction sells. It’s a well-known fact. No wonder; the need to have our complex, shifting, and often absurd reality “puzzled out” is enormous. It’s impossible to remain unaffected. We also want to understand the past and where we are heading in these times of growing unpredictability. In SA, apart from being a sanity-preserving mechanism, nonfiction literature contributes to the nation-building project. Just think Khwezi by Redi Tlhabi or The President’s Keepers by Jacques Pauw. Texts like these are, says Hedley Twidle, linked by “a sense of narrative and intellectual pressure, a communicative passion or compulsion to make sense of a fractured country” …

Continue reading: Sunday Times

Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa

by Hedley Twidle

James Currey, 2019