There was a time — 10 or 15 years ago — when I could confidently claim that I knew what was happening on the South African literary scene.
I was researching new and recent local fiction, reviewing, teaching, judging book prizes and going to launches and festivals. That is no longer the case, so any pronouncements I make about “SA lit” should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nevertheless, after reading Conrad Kemp’s novel Out of the Dead Lands, I am going to stick my neck out and say that it may just be the most important book published in South Africa in 2025.
There are a few assertions behind this claim. One is that I expect there is a lot more to come from Kemp, and that before long he will be an author with a significant body of fiction to his name. Though this is his first novel, he has worked far and wide in other modes: the writer behind celebrated sports documentaries Chasing the Sun and Two Sides, Kemp is better known for his work as an actor on stage and screen.
Another reason is that this book speaks powerfully to, and of, the present, addressing global (one hesitates to say “universal”) existential concerns but inextricable from the city of Johannesburg. While Kemp wrote some of the material in the book as early as 2013, the setting feels very much like Johannesburg today: post-Covid-19, leaderless, a city cracked at the core and fraying at its many edges, its denizens adrift or fending for themselves as best they can.
Yet Out of the Dead Lands is not exactly a story of the here and now. It is, rather, a set of stories that Kemp weaves together in the novel’s culminating scenes. They are stories of fractured families, of individuals grieving a loss or mourning their own displacement; yet, in the midst of this disorientation and alienation, there is evidence of human tenderness and kindness, of minor comfort and partial resolution.
Navigating past and future
More broadly, the book leaves the reader questioning whether there are such things as a coherent “here” or a knowable “now”. To live in the present is, we are reminded again and again, to live with the past.
Justice Jwarha is one of innumerable invisible people living rough on Johannesburg’s streets — but he is more than that. He was once a child, fatherless, and with his friend Unathi he explored the blurred boundaries of gender and sexual orientation. He was once a man who made ends meet through piece work, including for the Botes family, who also become central to the novel. Helen Botes is haunted by a past in service of the apartheid state. Her son, Daniel, has a mind that plays tricks on him, blanking out, violating others. Her husband, Magnus, trapped by dementia, seems oblivious to both past and present.
Steven Moyo, too, lives amid memories of what is lost: the home in Malawi he had to leave after years of drought, the homes of the indigent he has cleared out as a reluctant Red Ant. But Steven is also tasked with remembering the future. This is where the novel asks its readers to bend their minds around the tricky subject of time. Because the other key characters in the novel, the ambiguously named January and V, come from a disappearing future — or, at least, from a point on the temporal horizon that is at risk of receding forever into the unseen.
Sustainability through speculative fiction
Out of the Dead Lands is published by South African outfit Mirari Press, which specialises in speculative fiction. Unsurprisingly, it is in this domain that many writers have found themselves best able to tackle the implications for our species of climate crisis and ecosystemic collapse. But the Mirari brand is explicitly focused not on doomsday scenarios but on sustainability and green solutions, in publishing and beyond.
This is an apt home for the novel. Kemp brings the philosophical potential of spec fic to bear on material realities — from the darkly colourful underbelly of Jozi today to a grey, bleached, unspecified tomorrow — and gently insists that people from this present and that future must somehow be made, as he puts it, “seeable”.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.