Not So Stories

Abstract

Three short autobiographical stories introduce a host of characters (human and beyond), places, and objects that bridge worlds – worlds of fact and fiction, past and present, Africa and Europe. The three autobiographical reflections, How the Outside Got In, Of Migrants and Music, and New Transvaal Stories, serve as points of departure for diffractive engagements with relational ontologies, histories, and cultures. The title refers to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories: fictive children’s allegories and origin stories that offer a decidedly Western idea of “Africa.” The stories from Africa presented in this essay are true, but exploratory narrative fragments that break from conventional (and problematic) European representations of Africa. This essay constitutes an experiment with the personal memoir as a mode of embodied and affective thinking that seeks to trouble complacently accepted distinctions: inside/outside; culture/nature; self/other. When placed in the context of South Africa these distinctions take on different meanings, resulting in different (embodied) relations to nature, people, and things. Memories serve as embodied evidence of a world that escapes simple categorisation; these are presented alongside scholarly works, poetry, and literary fiction to enable a contingent reading of the worlds that constitute Africa and thereby challenge prescribed distinctions of critical theory.