Prison Literature and Postcolonial Carceral Consciousness: A Reading of D. M. Zwelonke’s "Robben Island"

Abstract

Due to the extreme display of brute racial suppression of indigenous South African blacks (and their few activist white sympathisers) by white settler colonialists, South African literature may be argued to have produced Africa’s most harrowing creative accounts of racist profiling of blacks and hegemonic erasure of the Other. This has eminently constructed a canon of writings critically distinguished for their representations of African racial “sub-humanity” in relation to the coloniser’s performance of impalpable power. Despite this, there is a gap in scholarship to account for and theorise the signification of South African prison literature as a postcolonial site of black carceral consciousness which projects unequal racial power relations in which the activist black individual stubbornly asserts their marginalised but revolutionary agency. Redressing this gap through a postcolonial reading of D. M. Zwelonke’s Robben Island, this paper proposes that South African prison literature not only reflects an intensity of black postcolonial carceral consciousness, especially during apartheid, but also signifies a unique activism in dealing with this. In this unfolding, the paper suggests that Zwelonke’s Robben Island, though barely known within African(ist) critical circles, is one of South African prison literature’s most resounding exemplar of the genre.