Research Catalog

Title

Bird-Monk Seding / Lesego Rampolokeng.

Author

Rampolokeng, Lesego

Publication

• Grahamstown, South Africa : Deep South, [2017]
• [Natal, South Africa] : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

192 pages; 20 cm

Summary

Rampolokeng's third novel Bird-Monk Seding is a stark picture of life in a rural township two decades into South Africa's democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, narrator Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers. This place is called SEDING, short for Leseding, place of light. Quite ironic given the darkness throbbing at its core and spilling out bubbling in the blackest rage when least expected. Surrounded by farmland in all directions, it is a settlement of about 700 households crammed in tiny structures. Average 7 souls per hovel. It used to be made up of ramshackle corrugated iron shacks that seemed tossed down regardless of aesthetics. Then the new administration's housing programme kicked in. Man in the bush in quest of Bosman's ghost. Finding AWB rabidity. Tranquillity so deep it kills. Hate-hounds. Beneath the surface quiet, such racist rotten-heartedness. & children dying. Starvation abounds. Raw sewage in the water supply. Crap in the taps. Skin matters. Ancient white beards sexing black teens for tins, food exchange. The soul's impoverishment. The starved get their humanity halved. And weekends of sex-tourism. Alcoholic stares everywhere. Deep fear too.

Subjects

• South Africa
• Novels
• Fiction
• 1900-2099
• Apartheid in literature
• Blacks > Social conditions
• Race relations
• South African fiction > 21st century
• South Africa > Race relations > Fiction
• Black people > South Africa > Social conditions > 20th century > Fiction

Genre/Form

• Fiction.
• Novels.

ISBN

• 9780994710406
• 0994710402

LCCN

• 2017478472
• 99989731553

OCLC

• ocn995328172
• 995328172
• SCSB-8946337

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries