![]() ![]() In contrast to the postapartheid disillusioned Bildungsroman, these narratives do not overtly break with the developmental logic of the genre, but use the journey motif to narrate their protagonists’ attainment of a more complete sense of self. This emphasis on continental connectivity manifests, for instance, in Mongane Wally Serote’s Rumours (2013) and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016), which feature characters whose Bildung is prompted by or accomplished through an encounter with African migrants and/or journeys to other African countries, resembling the “back to Africa” motif in African American literature. ![]() In this paper, I read the Bildungsroman genre in the context of what critics have termed the presence of a “new Africanity” in recent South African writing. Forestalled or arrested coming-of-age narratives equally abound in post-transitional South African fiction, attesting to the disillusionment with the democratic promise in a troubled postapartheid socio-political climate. Anti-apartheid novels and autobiographies frequently disrupted the teleological circularity of the conventional Bildungsroman in order to foreground the injustice and violence at the heart of the apartheid state that made impossible the harmonization between individual and society that usually structures the form. ![]()
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