The enduring popularity of the plaasroman genre and the unfulfilled promise of land reform in South Africa

Abstract

The struggle for land in South Africa is intrinsically linked to the dispute over countercolonial narratives that recognise multiple worlds and subjectivities, transcending the Eurocentric and proprietary perspective that still predominates in the global academic and literary canon. Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise goes against this desired path. This contemporary plaasroman (farm novel) thematises the decline of a white farming family and deliberately obliterates the subjectivity of the Black characters in its plot. The author’s choice received a Booker Prize and acclaim from a cosmopolitan audience who sees their liberal sensibilities and imperial aesthetics reflected in the novel. This study articulates literature and the author’s ethnography with the Landless Peoples Movement in KwaZulu-Natal to show how the farm in South Africa operates as a space to protect whiteness, privileging settlers’ nostalgia and anxiety to the detriment of the realities of those who still await the restitution of their ancestral land post-apartheid.