Of Oceanic Crossings and Discordant Cultural Adaptations in Post-apartheid Neo-slave Narration

Abstract

This paper adopts the sea as a productive metaphor to interrogate colonial and apartheid constructions that silence African Indian Ocean cultures. It analyses Therese Benadé’s debut novel, Kites of Good Fortune (2004) to show that whereas the novel depicts the Cape Peninsula as an oceanic crossroads, it rejects the cultural hybridity of the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans. Here, I look towards the sea to examine ‘oceanic crossings’ as a precursor of servitude, and as defining as well as complicating slave freedom in its ensuing construction of cultural hegemonies. I employ the black Atlantic models of the sea’s function as Middle Passage; Door of No Return to examine the (im)possibility of natal restoration in the novel, and determine that the oceanic crossings of two different slaves narrated in the novel translate into two different meanings of freedom. My analysis shows that these two meanings of freedom present the silencing of the African Indian Ocean cultures amid slavery and slave freedom. The study of these two meanings of slavery at the Cape enables a reading of the past and present together, pointing to continuities of enslavement, colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid that silence African identities and cultures.