Empathy, enemies and present participles: A review of Justify the enemy: Becoming human in South Africa

摘要

Justify the enemy (2017) is a compilation of the non-fiction writing of Zakes Mda – public lectures, articles, interviews and other compositions – disseminated from 1997 to date. They communicate Mda's concern with narrating all manner of social issues – South African and beyond. These include, amongst others: the role of the past in the present and the way in which it determines the future; environmental stewardship; social development; the dynamic relationship between readers and writers, writers and discourse, and art and politics; landscape as the keeper of memory; the blurred nature of binaries like rural and/or urban, real and/or magic, traditional and/or modern and fact and/or fiction that result in transitive or hybrid identities; and the interrogation of race and culture in post-apartheid South Africa.