Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbingride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow-microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everythingis there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people's lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow-living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

Author: Phaswane Mpe
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 02/24/2011
Pages: 150
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.00w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9780821419625
ISBN10: 0821419625
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | African
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | African Studies

About the Author

Phaswane Mpe taught African literature and publishing studies at the Universityof Witwatersrand. Welcome to Our Hillbrow was his only published novel. He died in 2004.