Still Enough Wrongs To Write

If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then the horrors of apartheid gave South African writers a focus and an intensity unique in 20th century literature. Not many countries can boast two still-scribbling Nobel prizewinners, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, as well as a mob of socially conscious contenders like Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Zakes Mda and dramatist Athol Fugard. Yet since the fall of the race-based regime and the triumph of democracy more than a decade ago, some South African writers and readers have worried that the thrill is gone, the edge lost, the fire...