N. Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and A. Krog's criticism

Antjie Krog, b. 1952. Afrikaner. Poet, academic, critic, journalist. Body of poetry confessional). (political Hybrid prose production. AND New Alphabet (2006, translated by Peter Sacks) If you say A you have to say B A is always against apartheid B is color blind I want to write to you brother but you re further than the past century than a land of origin than a poem or a document If you say A you have to say B A is always against apartheid B is color blind So many guides who leave me in the lurch So many sides from which I try approaching You to get nearer – the more clothes I throw off The colder it gets the further you seem If you say A you have to say B A is always against apartheid B is color blind My eyes can t get enough of drowsing thorntrees Between red-grass and thin-shinned plovers My garden strewn with loads of roses – only for my children do I lay down my life Here I am learning to write – I can t do otherwise sonnet of the hot flushes (2006) something staples your marrow somewhere you feel a newly floated fire spreading angst from a kernel and how your veins run with fire how your flesh flames your heart keeps her fireproof balance your bones bake besides themselves your face singes your cheeks simmer in dismay and time and again you break out in sizzling encasings of sweat you smell your skin sparking off a blaze but one day you shift in your chair – and feel this enormous crucible destroying your last sap God knows, this is enough: burning like a warrior you rise – a figurehead of fire – you grab this death like a runt and plough its nose right through your fleeted and drybaked cunt 1998: Country of my Skull Collection of TRC hearings + TRC philosophy + autobiographical tale – personal experiences variously related to the TRC. 2003: A Change of Tongue New language needed for the new SA – see the 2005/7 essay. 2009: There was this Goat TRC and translation. 2010: Begging to be Black Historical testimony blended into autobiography. I, me, me, mine! Autobiographical Fiction and the I (2005) / Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of I (2007) Exploring one s own inspiration – unknown sources. “ place underwater (2005), “ place underground (2007 – Dostoevskian allusion?) → Coetzee. Writers have to have clarity about whether they are busy writing fiction or non-fiction . Necessity? Moral responsibility? …? Was I now into this unhelpful hybrid word faction , or are we onto something yet to be named? Why would J. M. Coetzee want Boyhood first published as nonfiction, later to be published as fiction, after Youth came out as fiction? Why would Njabulo Ndebele write a philosophical assessment on the real life of Winnie Mandela and call it a novel? Freeman/Brockmeier quote: contemporary reality cannot be emplotted in traditional genres. → The very attempt to move away from the self may in fact lead toward it. How, in the face of such multiplicitous array of possible selves, is one to find direction about how best to live? And how, in the face of so voluminous a library of possible selves, is one to determine how best to tell one s story? At times the path inward (as in autobiographical writing) may appear to be the only one to take. Best#1: functionally? Socially? Morally? Best#2: truthfully? Aesthetically? Coherently? …? CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION (1) In SA, however, this blurring of the borders [between fact and fiction] might have a somewhat more complex undercurrent . → Coetzee: history/the novel; truth/art. “t times I wonder whether we would not have loved to write facts […], but we have been living apart in such a particular Western or African framework that we often do not know what the truth is about ourselves and others. […] Although we would like to present what we know, we simply do not have the confidence to call it facts . → Ndebele: living in the realm of representation; no connection to facts; need for a rediscovery of the ordinary . CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION (2) The moment something is transferred into language it has already become condensed, formalized, and subjective manifestation of the truth. Isn t everything actually fiction? Or isn t everybody s fiction their own truths? Insufficiency of language HISTORY INVADING FICTION(→ Coetzee), FICTION INVADING REALITY (→ Ndebele); TRUTH IN FICTION The novel enabled us to get a grasp on the world. But now the world was so much with us that we no longer know what that tiny dot down there in the garden presented. Since we have begun to fly planes, everything seems to have become fiction. So where we initially used facts to enable our fiction to arrive at the truth, we now use fiction – or more accurately, fictional elements – to enable our facts to arrive at the truth . THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF WRITING When I was young, I simply turned my back and continued, confident that what I had to say was more important than any of these writhings . The moment something was a text it created its own context that rendered the original links illegible : Autonomy of artistic creation or representation detaching itself from reality and becoming dangerously selfreferential? SOUTH AFRICA: TOO MUCH TRUTH FOR ART TO HOLD ? I feel that coming from a divided,exclusive past, the imagination – or at least mine – is at a disadvantage. […] As I experience the new South Africa I find that my knowledge, my upbringing, and my imagination are unable to bring me to an understanding of why things seem to be experienced in a particular way. A SOLUTION: A REDISCOVERY OF CONCRETENESS? The most clarifying source for me in every situation has been the black voice. I think that since 1994 all my work has been not only a response to the black voice […] but also a conversation with the black voice. Country of my Skull in 1998 was a specific response to the specific black voices of the TRC . Things in the new SA have changed and language testifies for it: Fuck the kaffirs had changed into these fucking kaffirs . (object → subject). YET what suppressed thinking imagination was happening in SA on a day-to-day basis my imagination. What black people were […] was beyond my understanding and . What is the solution for representation? How do I do justice to the other kinds of changes that are taking place on personal levels? […] How do I signify hidden transformations? I do not know he , or she , or they well enough to tell their story convincingly. As the whole point of writing is to interact with the you , I am left with I . [axiom? deduction?] REASONS FOR USING THE I IN FICTION: 1) Honesty – not a spokesperson. 2) The complete control the I allows opens up a multiplicity of selves, narratives, and interpretation (Bakhtin). 3) It calls for a you , for a response; it allows access to the other. 4) It is less ostentatious than a disguised I . (Coetzee?). 5) If the author were absent, it would be a problem – uncritical towards him/herself. (Coetzee#2?). 6) To facilitate the reader (writer as a mediator between the story and the reader – as opposed to Coetzee, writer as a medium). 7) To facilitate the writer getting through the book. 8) [twist] I means I can lie ; I as a character, a mask. Poetic voice as a tool to find the you . [back to point 3]: the end has the I reaching out and embracing you – acknowledging the impossibility, the impoverishment, of being simply and only I , recognizing how it is imperative that we imagine ourselves as the other . SYMPATHY! THE FUNCTIONS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY: generality (making a coherent story of our lives) and exeptionality – and the source of exeptionality is not fiction but real life. In postmodernity, blurred lines. Krog s choice of writing fiction bordering fact marketed as nonfiction. I USE MY IMAGINATION NOT TO INVENT THE STORY BUT TO INVENT THE WAY IN WHICH TO TELL THE REAL STORY. MY IMAGINATION IS ACTIVE IN THE NARRATIVE DISCOURSE AND NOT IN INVENTING REALITY. I LET MYSELF BE LED BY THE LIFE AROUND ME AND USE MY IMAGINATION ON HOW TO PHOTOGR“PH THIS INTO LANGUAGE. Representation is detached from reality, but experimental forms of representation can represent it (photograph). A question: Isn t something I would call autobiographical fiction the new genre she is talking about? Isn t the splitting of the self into many selves precisely what makes it possible to permeate the borders of genres with authenticity […]? Isn t the concentrated linking of the self to as many genres and as many cultural, social, linguistic, political communities as possible underlining the embeddedness of the self in others? Also, in the 2005 version, aesthetics and ethics: For me the haunting and trumatizing moments during the writing process are not about what I choose to depict, but what I leave out. […] I guess it ties in with one s aesthetic and ethical drive. Some things fall out because aesthetically they don t belong, others fall out because ethically they don t belong. It is through this very personal sieve that one sifts reality and then calls it non-fiction . Then: the role of the intellectual as the one who preserves the outsider within the self. The answer: Might one say that in an era of over-individualization and self-estrangement, it is crucial to allow the self to reintegrate so that the self is no longer the stranger. To integrate, then, is to allow the self to imaginatively disregard the borders between fact and fiction and to write life as a narrative within a narrative that is filled with the liberation of imagination and truth. (In the 2005 version: emphasis on the cult of the individual as one of the most enduring modern Western myths . Njabulo Ndebele, b. 1948 Writer and critic; academic. Involved policy. in SA educational Mainly prose fiction and critical essay. As a student, involved in the Black Consciousness movement. Member of the COSAW (Congress of SA writers). AESTHETICS (notes from the Cambridge Anthology of SA literature) Critique of the dominant forms of SA writing in times of political urgency. Criticized for intrinsic formal conservatorism (!) and uninspected humanism. Countering the dominant forms of Western realism; oral mode of storytelling. H. Marcuse: Interiority in N. s production is linked to a dialectical form of liberation from the dominant enforcements of the real; it is a process in the text that involves the reader in making meanings and that trascends predermined moral allegories. He reverses the relationship between the aesthetic and the political: the challenge is to free the entire social imagination of the oppressed from the laws of perception that have characterized apartheid society . Interiority; alteration of the surface of SA reality and its characteristic forms of political representation. ROLE IN THE ALBIE SACHS DEBATE Sachs 1990: SA art governed by its oppressors, by the political (in contrast with the ANC hardline approach to culture). N. agrees with Sach s attack upon the lack of originality in committed literature. According to many, though, Sach s formulation was poor in terms of aesthetic and theoretical content, as opposed to that of Ndebele s. His opinion on protest literature: struggle poetry, a poetry of fighting people, no longer a poetry of being asked what the problem is . ESSENTIALISM and IDENTITY Tendency to essentialize form in relation to social/historical circumstances. This is challenged, though, by his fluid and contingent conception of racial/gender identity formation. Although the racial codification of identity is a tempting place from which to subvert classifications, one can also be a victim of them (binary thinking). 1991: Ndebele warns the SA literary community that the essentialized black identity of the 1970s and 80s liberationist writing should not replicate the reductive binaries of white hegemony. RELATIONSHIP TO COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE TRC Late 90s: optimism about previously silenced voices whose experience has become part of an emerging national consciousness. Less controversial than others historical retrievers . TRC: a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative . Necessity of the narrative potential. EXPERIMENTALISM Experimenting with Joycean internal monologue in isiZulu while a student. Attwell on the experimental turn : Fools as an example of experimentalism and aesthetic self-consciousness in black writing. Implicit experimental dimension in Fools. Relism s rasources re-deployed in an experimental intervention. Ndebele makes of realism an experimental mode that recovers, in the context of the SA of the 80s, some of the epistemological freshness that once adhered to realism itself. FOOLS (1983) Not a collection but a cycle . Threaded motifs, gaps and continuity → readerly involvement. First-person narrative, character as a process. Readers negotiate sympathy and disgust. Translingual writing . Readers are expected to imagine multilingual conversations taking place. Text as an act of translation. Possibilities of experimentalism in black writing in English, translating the idioms of writing in English from a black point of view. No anonymity for white characters. Interiority. THE REDISCOVERY OF THE ORDINARY (1991, collection) Burst of intellectual and creative energy. Key terms for considering the history, trajectory and imperatives of SA literature. First perspective for considering the history of SA literature on formal grounds – not categories from standard literary history, but formal terms from what informed SA writing – its interiority. Implicit challenge that has not been taken up in writing SA history. // History of the representation of spectacle. Protest literature as predermined and overdetermined moral images which shaped the sourface of SA reality without questioning it – does not allow identity to shift or change. Paradoxical: Ndebele does not call for the end of such a literature because reality is just as spectacular . He calls for black SA literature to rediscover the ordinary : alternative narratives of the mundane (A. Van der Flies). THE CRY OF WINNIE MANDELA (2003) TRC marginal and yet activating presence, impetus for the characters for revealing the past.It does not necessarily subscribe to the TRC idea that making dark secrets public is therapeutic. Radically hybrid – fiction, essay, biography merge within overtly metafictional structures; varieties of voices overtly narrated by the narrator-as-author. (M. Green). Woven around journeys through an evocatively rendered SA landscape. Symposium. Formally disjointed but thematically unified colloquy. Speakers meet in a purely fictional/conjectural space. Distorted sexual/familiar policies of the regime. Spatial regime.Space excluded from epic events. The book ends with a new form of voluntary collectivity, in motion: open-ness to the future. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) Ayebia Clarke Publishing Edition STRUCTURE Dedication Note to the reader PART ONE Penelope s Descendants (third p.; pov?) The First Descendant (third p.) The Second Descendant (thrid p.) The Third Descendant (first p.!) The Fourth Descendant (third p.) PART TWO Ibandla Labafazi (third person; back to the first narrator-as-author) Delisiwe Dulcie S khosana (Second Descendant) (first person, sometimes essay-like). Mamello Molete, aka Patience Mamello Letlala (Third Descendant) (first person; a letter). Marara Joyce Baloyi (Fourth Descendant) (fist person) Mannete Mofolo (First Descendant) (first person) Winnie Nomzamo Mandela (first person; she addresses the other women, then herself – her own public image). A Stranger (third person; narrator-as-author) Glossary Acknowledgements DEDICATION: Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus . Overexposition, Western arrogant eye, visual dimension of exteriority; a body becomes a form of representation. NOTE TO THE READER: This is a work of fiction . INCIPIT: Let s begin with the blurb of an imaginary book about a South African woman (p. 1). See Elizabeth Costello, incipit. Ndebele → the actual book we have in our hands claims to be the description of a not-(yet?)written book. Coetzee → the book is built upon some construct of the imagination that we do not know. The source of creativity remains unknown. PENELOPE S DESCENDANTS P. 2: Faith, the one device that makes infinity endurable . Whose point of view? P. 2: Penelope – see Costello s Molly Bloom. Penelope as the ultimate symbol . PP. 3, 4: let s ponder further ; we have to admit … Axiomatic tone. P. 6: “lthough these were voyages of rediscovery promped by impersonal forces of world history, they assumed a personal dimension as each of the travelers developed their own story to tell. History vs. histories P. 7: Let s consider the imaginary life of four of Penelope s millions of descendants. They are women… P. 7: gender perspective. Pp. 7-8, WAITING AND MEANING: Space of waiting – time and space merging into one another – see, later on, the comments on SA landscape. This love increasingly without object → signifier! When endurance becomes its own end ; a memory that no longer evokes passion ; passion […] is evoked by guilt ; the inescapable condition of living in the zone of absence without duration (time/space again). P. 8: once again, inner life as landscape. P. 9: Our imaginary book carries the stories of Penelope s South African descendants. Let s see how they waited . THE FIRST DESCENDANT P. 10: men and landscape. Axiomatic tone. Once again, whose point of view? P. 12: time of reality and time of memory. The erosion of moral and ethical steadfastness occurs like the unnoticeable eating away of a mountain by sun, rain and wind. P. 15: She has to decide whether to accept his permanent physical absence, or to assume his moral presence through the bond of marriage. What happens to her from now on is one of the great South African stories. P. 16: time, space, memory. THE SECOND DESCENDANT P. 17: ”etween them, she lives in a tense endlessness, where something is always about to happen; and then it does not happen. It is in that space without dimension that she undertakes many of life s daily projects. They begin and end without a definitive future. She comes and goes, in limbo. Waiting. Not waiting. But waiting. P. 18: (failing to) make history. // P. 21: being overtaken by history. Who is he, now? P. 22: THE BODY AS A LINK TO REALITY. FEMININITY. “ woman can never escape the messages of her body. In the end, her hoped-for departure became the departure of her hope ever to depart. But why did the reality of her situation only come to her once her stomach began to swell with a child who was not her husband s? “ man into a moral situation so complex she began to lose confidence in any claim to really know him . THE THIRD DESCENDANT P. 23: Patience! P. 24: “lways something to look forward to . P. 27: I ve always been good at philosophical justifications for coping with my misfortunes. I m really lying to myself. This was not just another woman. Forgive me, I m a loyal party member, trying to be non-racial. But surely this attempt is an escape into an illusionary world. She was not just another woman. She was a white woman. Shifts in pov – first/third person. P. 28-29: He ll get tired of speaking English all the time ; Life for him will be the constant strain of living out an objective. Non-racialism. P. 29: “t the end of the interview, the camera lingered on father, mother and child. Then it zoomed out and faded them out. He was gone. There was something in that ending that ste him definitively beyond my reach. But I still couldn t let go. Pp. 30-31: the Coloured, ontologically. So definitive . P. 32: Did he choose to ignore me like the Coloureds of his theory who are driven by certain notions of community to ignore some vital parts of themselves, censoring it out of their existence? Didn t this make him a Coloured of sorts? Note, ignoring or censoring does not imply forgetfulness. His inability to suppress what he suppresses, like his Coloureds, consigns him to a perpetual state of anguish. At which point in the future will he come to a knowledge of himself? I ask him and his theoretical Coloured. Would it mean that my impression of a loving relationship was nothing more than that? An impression? Was it an illusion? . BARRENNESS. P. 33: Insanity. Now I know what it is. It is not the absence of inhibition caused by mental breakdown. No. It is the intensity of consciousness of one s own mental and emotional anguish. It goes with an equally intense knowledge of one s incapacity to do anything about it. It is living in a never-ending cycle of questions without answers. It is living with the knowledge of one s own confusion and one s own inability to escape from it. It is living without a future and with the overpowering sense that all your past has been no past at all, but an instant moment of profound regret, followed by nothing. […] Insanity is knowing that looking back at the past is looking for the impossible, and that you cannot escape from that impossibility, an impossibility that has been happening and building up all along, until it becomes a way of life . P. 35, INDIVIDUALITY vs. HISTORICAL CLASSIFICATIONS: I m the woman of history […]? This view of woman renders my deepest feelings suspect. I want to reclaim my right to be wounded without my pain having to turn me into an example of woman as victim . THE FOURTH DESCENDANT P. 36: What does a wounded woman do? She proverbially wounds another woman, her rival, hurling boiling water at her . ! P. 37: Sleeping with a man is not like drinking a glass of Coca Cola to kill thirst. Or maybe it is, if the thirst is overpowering. When you need something in you, and you find someone to put it in. Animals. Meaning? Men as bodies containing a mixture of chemicals. […] Before thought and conscience disappear into habit, they are your hurdles, your redemption. When you loose them, that s when you may become a mere thing to have another thing put into you . Pp. 37-38: burial and customs. P. 38: Proof of infidelity is the aim of society s interest in the life of a woman who waits for an absent husband. If they cannot find the proof, they ll invent it. IBANDLA LABAFAZI P. 39: Yes, there s something generic about them. […]You must surely know something definite about them now. Each is an illustration of thought. Yet, they all seem to be struggling to wriggle out of the cocoon of thought, seeking to emerge as fullyfledged beings. Seemingly that s what happens when thought, under the pressure of memory and narrative, steadily gives way to desire . P. 40: They strain at the writer s leash, wanting to assume individuality of character. But the writer must hold on to the leash, and hope it won t choke them; that they will learn to enjoy the movement between the end of the leash and the hand that holds it. Pp. 41-2: tea-making ceremony. Etiquette. 43: confirmation of your status as a [woman] server . P. 43: For now, talking about style, maybe we could add more style to our conversations. Let s play a game . Characters enjoying whichever freedom the leash allows them? P. 44-5: Winnie Mandela, names, public dimension, waiting. Winnie as public figure that cannot escape being seen: an ongoing public conversation, perhaps too public to be understood . Is an intimate conversation about/with Winnie possible? She likes playing the intricate grammar of inter-personal distance . DELISIWE DULCIE S KHOS“N“ (second descendant) P. 48: waiting/dying/mourning. P. 48-9: Winnie as a possible life for other women. Winnie s life as pure drama . I was never fooled by your brazen display of courage. Yet you became that look . Pp. 49-50: Winnie Mandela s true letter to Dali Mpofu, her younger lover. P. 51: DESIRE and public life. Desperate sentences , loss of control , the desire to hold on to self-esteem and respectability while losing them in the very act of trying to hold on to them . Disgrace: I rest my case on the rights of desire – André Brink, The Rights of Desire. They took their chances, prompting you to take your chances, until you transformed the game of chance into an attribute of power. […] To limit the risks, you had to amass enormous political power, sufficient to put you beyond criticism. Fear of you would substitute for moral judgement. WM creates her own signifier. P. 52-53: FUCKING a purely physical sexual act , a one night stand , a quickie , a rape , a trivialised act of rampant procreation carried out without ritual , expel sperm and release a desire outside of constraint . He always leaves behind someone feeling abandoned, someone longing for the legitimising, […] a prostrate, used object [THE BODY]. It is at that moment that rape is transformed into a lasting violation . “ random and violent exercise in sex without the burden of consequence. It is sex breaking out of all social constraint . “ term of abuse, an insult. […] May someone pump into you with violence and disgust, deliver his sperm and walk away. I used the fantasies of being in love to justify the real desire for a fuck . P. 54, THE MORALITY (ETHICS?) OF REPRESENTATION Freedom of speech: brutality given the respectability of philosophy ; freedom to abuse . The product of a culture of self-indulgent excess, celebrating expressiveness without discipline. Bearing all, the culture of excess kills the beauty of love. Love → restraint, costraint, boundaries, limits. Why canonise brutality, abrasiveness and obscenity as freedom? Why is freedom to expose anything praised so much? Dominance concealed as freedom. White man s history . vs. constraint as the sacred ground of feelings , life, beauty, imagination. Pp. 56-7: sex and power. Pp. 58-59: women/country/lanscape. Women as motherland . Women: common-sense, earth-bound knowledge vs. men: abstraction. Gender perspective. Deeply heterosexual? In Lesotho the vagina is fondly known as lesotho . Rape is the invasion of the primal country. It is the first form of violence and brutality. All other forms of violence are derived from it, for rape is an onslaught on the territory of one s origins. I found [mellowness] in my recovery from the pillaging of my inner country which I allowed. […] It is a quality of acceptance. Of moving on without having to respond to blame or any need for self-justification. It must be this feeling of freedom that gives women that distant yet allknowing look. […] The look of the gazing sphinx. The look that tells of timelessness, not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a permanent quality of experiencing life among others. […] The look of the humbling of human beings by experience. Winnie, sana, can you hear me? Are you able to build a bridge between the public clamour in your life and the intimate secrets deep inside of you? What we know, right now, about you is the hint of secrets without the sign of a bridge. What kind of bridge will yours be, that special salvation that so many other women have had? (p. 60) MAMELLO MOLETE P. 62: public and private dimensions: letter writing as an intimate form of expression and a personal record of experiences; paradox of the public figure you take your place in my mind with the familiarity of a neighbour . P. 63-4: Western cultural arrogance. Every interaction with white people begins with the imposition of rules, their rules; of norms, their norms. ; the culture of instant gratification ; genealogy in Africa and in the USA; fundamentally disruptive, military view of the world . P. 66: QUESALID THE SHAMAN. Gifted at what he knew to be fraudulent, Q. nonetheless acquired a reputation as a healer and became socially indespensable. Unable to trascend his own contradictions, he came to believe in them, or at least to rearrange his disbelief. P. 69: Can you talk about [your first meeting with NM] beyond the mythical? P. 71: building a grammar of the public image. “nd everything became the manifestation of destiny. The elements of your rethoric took shape . P. 72: Swanepoel. Secret autonomy of the torture chamber. Winnie and Quesalid: your speech became transformed into pronouncement . Even memory has been overcome by the posture of commitment . P. 73: It is not the voice I should doubt, but that more significantly the voice expresses a state of understanding in which reality is encapsulated in a particular way. It is a universe of seeing that you entered which, instead of making you exeptional, rather typifies you . P. 74-5: the TRC. you may have lost all sense of distinction between perception and reality ; a minor concession to the moral authority of the man of God who stood before you ; Quesalid won. It was the victory of image and posture, which had become fused into a compelling reality of their own. ; technical proficiency only established technical victories and technical innocence ; the TRC strived to bridge a gap between technical innocence and moral responsibility . P. 77-8: again, Western cultural arrogance. “ black face cannot turn red from blushing even if it wanted to. Find another language to describe me. In the name of freedom . MARARA JOYCE BALOYI 80: home, a meaning of myself ; 82: exile, space and travelling in SA. Annihilated landscape, claustrophobia of the self 85: contraddiction as a structure of thinking 86: TRC. M“NNETE MOFOLO 95: We ve all been profiled in the book that created us. WINNIE NOMZAMO MANDELA 104: failing language. in between space . 106: being civilised into an order. Structuralism? 110-111: WM s testimony; Winnie becoming a character in her own story and addressing herself. 119: visiting the torture chamber with one s imagination. 120-1: representation of evil. When Major Thenius Swanepoel was finally tired of being cruel, and let us leave his citadel of torture, I carried inside of me like a pregnancy – see Costello s egg! 130: narrating through two degrees of distance. 132: language trascendence. of theatrical gestures / 134-5: TRC. To truth oneself out of Responsibility. Disjunction language/reality. language of something. Antjie Krog, What the Hell is Penelope Doing in Winnie s Story? I was interested in the kind of form that a writer/philosopher like Ndebele would use with which to look ethically at Winnie . Chorality vs. individuality. “t heart an ethical story ? Ndebele indicates that the classic narrative of the hero or main character is not the appropriate form in which to tell the ethical story of his community . What is an ethical story? Penelope as a counte-intuition. Instead of Africa being dictated to by a Western framework, Ndebele smartly uses Winnie to create an alternative route and African framework for Penelope . Sara Baartman → Identity as both a construction and the result of connections to others.