SOURCE: Brink, André. “Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A Personal Testimony).” World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (winter 1996): 17-23.

In the following essay, Brink discusses how fiction plays a vital part in describing and interpreting the past in post-apartheid South Africa.

1.

“Our continent has just invented another,” wrote Montaigne about the discovery of the New World. At the time, of course, to invent was a synonym for to discover; yet both readings of the word are relevant to a procedure which may well become, increasingly, a preoccupation of the literature produced in postapartheid South Africa. The need to revisit history has both accompanied and characterised the literature of most of the great “thresholds of change,” as Kenneth Harrow has called them—those periods in which, as Santayana had it, “mankind starts dreaming in a different key.” This need speaks as much from...