MPHUTHUMI NTABENI

If, as the late African philosopher, Valentin Yves Mudimbe argues, Africa has been “invented” through a colonial archive that structures the very conditions of knowledge, then the central problem for African writing is not simply representation, but epistemology. We must then ask this crucial question: What does it mean to write Africa from within a system that has already defined, delimited, and distorted what Africa can be said to be?

This problem finds a particularly charged expression in the work of J.M. Coetzee whose fiction and literary criticism repeatedly circle the limits of European representation in African contexts. His response, characteristically, is not confrontation but withdrawal, a turn towards silence, allegory, and indirection in place of direct historical inscription after diagnosing the problem..

Between Mudimbe’s archaeological critique and Coetzee’s aesthetic withdrawal, however, a third possibility emerges—one increasingly visible in contemporary African writing. It neither claims an impossible position outside the archive nor retreats into silence, but instead inhabits the archive’s contradictions. It is within this unstable but generative space that my latest work of historical fiction, Multitudes,^{[1]Multitudes by Mphuthumi Ntabeni will be published by Kwela Books in September 2026} situates itself. The book is meant to be a longue durée of the Eastern Cape during the twilight of Xhosa freedom and independence just before the arrival of the Europeans that began the Frontier Wars of land dispossession.

Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa remains foundational in understanding the epistemic violence of colonial discourse. His concept of the “colonial library” names the body of missionary, anthropological, and administrative texts through which Africa is rendered legible to the West. He says these texts do not merely describe; they constitute. They impose a grid of intelligibility that allows Africa to appear only within European categories of thought.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of the episteme, Mudimbe demonstrates that knowledge is never neutral. It is historically conditioned, structured by power, and governed by rules of inclusion and exclusion.

The colonial archive thus functions as a regime of truth, which determines not only what can be known about Africa, but how it can be known at all.

Crucially, Mudimbe resists any naïve call for epistemic recovery. Postcolonial thought cannot simply step outside the archive; even its gestures of reclamation often reproduce the very conceptual frameworks they seek to undo. The task, therefore, is not recovery but critique of what exists. To delve into a literary archaeological that exposes the conditions under which Africa has been made thinkable.

In White Writing, Coetzee undertakes a parallel inquiry into the discursive construction of South Africa within early settler literature. His focus is narrower than Mudimbe’s, but the alignment is striking. He shows how colonial writers faced a fundamental problem of how to inscribe themselves into a landscape that resisted symbolic domestication.

The South African veld could not easily be assimilated into European pastoral traditions. As a result, settler writing oscillates between appropriation and estrangement, producing a literature haunted by absence—where the land is named but not known, occupied but not ethically secured.

This absence is not merely literary; it is epistemic. It is precisely the effect of the colonial archive Mudimbe describes as a system that renders indigenous presence unintelligible even as it overwrites it.

While Coetzee diagnoses this absence with great acuity in his criticism, his fiction often reproduces it. In it, African historical presence is frequently displaced, abstracted, or rendered oblique. In this sense, his novels do not simply analyse the limits of representation—they perform them. This is the ultimate reason why his book, Disgrace, which won him the Booker Prize for the second time raised ire and made him a suspect in political circles for stereotyping Africans. I’ll come back to this later.

Coetzee’s fictional method can be described as an aesthetics of evasion. This is not evasion in the sense of superficial avoidance, but a disciplined refusal of direct representation. Faced with a compromised language of history—one already structured by the colonial archive—Coetzee turns to allegory, indeterminacy, and silence.

Read generously, this is a form of negative critique. If representation risks complicity, then withdrawal becomes a way of marking that risk. Silence, in this framework, signals the limit of available language. But this strategy does not resolve the problem; it displaces it.

For silence, while ethically suggestive, cannot perform the work of reconstruction. At a certain point, evasion begins to resemble the very erasure it seeks to resist. What begins as critique becomes complicity—not through assertion, but through omission.

It is precisely this limit that Multitudes seeks to interrogate. It does not claim an exterior position beyond the colonial archive; such a position would itself be illusory. Instead, it inhabits the archive’s fractures, staging a continuous process of interrogation, disruption, and reinvention.

The dialogue between my protagonists, Kyuri and Phila, about Coetzee’s Summertime, is central to this critique. Their exchange about Coetzee does not merely critique him from the outside; it reveals something more structurally complex, that Coetzee’s work anticipates, even preempts, its own critique. He writes in such a way that the charge of absence—of historical thinning, of African erasure—is already embedded within the form itself. The silence is not accidental; it is method. The abstraction is not failure but a preemptive defence.

In this sense, Coetzee produces a self-insulating text. Critique arrives only to find that it has already been anticipated, absorbed, and neutralised within the aesthetic structure of the work. His novel knows its own limits in advance.

But this preemption, while intellectually sophisticated, produces a new problem by foreclosing the possibility of transformation. If critique is already internalised, then what remains outside the text to compel change?

This is where Multitudes diverges. Where Coetzee abstracts, Multitudes re-embeds. Where he withholds, it goes for articulation. Not naïvely—there is no claim to an unmediated African essence—but insistently. Memory in Multitudes is not nostalgic recovery but a contested terrain. The domestic, historical, and metaphysical are braided together, producing a layered account of African experience as it persists within and against archival constraint.

Knowledge, transmitted through father–child dialogue, is always mediated, always provisional, always open to revision.

Formally, the novel adopts a poetics of fragmentation: voices interrupt, temporalities extend to the supernatural, and the ordinary is charged with ancestral residue. This is not clunky disorder, as liberal arts might be tempted to say, but a method for the enactment of Mudimbe’s archaeology in narrative form.

Importantly, Multitudes expands the archive by foregrounding embodied knowledge of oral memory also, which affects by registering historically information that is excluded from the colonial library. This leads to a reconfiguration of what already exists within the colonial archive, and a redefinition of what counts as knowledge.

I hope by now the contrasts are clear. Mudimbe offers archaeology—a critique of the archive’s epistemic foundations. Coetzee offers evasion—a registration of its limits through silence and indirection. Multitudes proposes inhabitation—a practice of working within the archive’s constraints to produce new forms of articulation.

This third mode is the most precarious because it risks complicity and failure. But it is also the most generative. It refuses both the illusion of epistemic purity and the retreat into silence, opening instead a space for what might be called critical invention.

Nowhere is the tension in Coetzee’s method more visible than in his post-apartheid work, particularly Disgrace. There, the strategy of abstraction persists beyond the conditions of coding and non explicit political exposure that may once have necessitated it under apartheid. In it South Africa is recognisable yet curiously unnamed in historical specificity. Violence appears, but is often stripped of its structural vocabulary. The result is a disciplined minimalism in which history is transposed into ethical allegory.

It is precisely this that drew criticism from the African National Congress, including figures such the then President, Thabo Mbeki. The objection was not simply political defensiveness, as it is sometimes caricatured, but a deeper concern about representation.

Disgrace was read by some within the ANC as reproducing a racialised imaginary in which post-apartheid Black life appears primarily through the lens of violence and moral opacity. In the absence of historical grounding—land dispossession, structural inequality, the longue durée of apartheid—the narrative presented violence as cultural rather than historical. This is the fatal danger of abstraction. When history is thinned into atmosphere, its causes can be misread as nonessential.

From within Coetzee’s aesthetic logic, this may be an unintended consequence of a broader philosophical project. But from a postcolonial standpoint, it reveals the limits of evasion as method. What is omitted is not neutral but quintessential to the shaping interpretation.

At the level of literary form, this returns us to the question of style and substance.

In Coetzee’s work, style assumes the weight of ethical authority. The prose is austere, controlled, exacting—qualities long canonised as markers of literary excellence, especially by voices within the liberal arts. His defenders have long argued that this distance is a source of his genius, that his refusal of an explicit political vocabulary resists the instrumentalisation of literature; that his spare, exacting prose strips experience to its ethical core, exposing structures of authority, complicity, and domination at their most elemental. In this view, abstraction is not evasion but method—a way of reaching beneath the noise of politics to its underlying grammar.

Yet this very elevation of style produces a subtle inversion where substance recedes to the forefront of self-justifying style. What is called “good taste” begins to function as a regulatory ideal, privileging distance over immersion, abstraction over specificity, restraint over historical density. Inevitably this encodes, under the guise of universality, a set of aesthetic values rooted in European literary traditions. Hence Coetzee’s appeal to an occidental trained literary palate. 

The consequence is a literature that appears morally rigorous while remaining insulated from the full demands of global historical accountability. To critique this is not to reject style, but a warning towards a need to reorder it. Language must also be accountable to the worlds it represents. Precision cannot substitute for substance; elegance must not absolve preordered omissions.

Coetzee’s importance, then, in African literary contexts, lies not only in what his work achieves, but in what it compels others to confront. He sharpens the question of the African writer’s responsibility, especially within worlds still suffering from injustices of the past, about whether the writer’s task is to abstract—to seek the universal beneath the historical? Or to name—to insist on the irreducible specificity of lived experience?

Coetzee chose the former. Many African writers, by necessity rather than ideology, choose the latter. Because for them, history is not material to be shaped at an aesthetic distance. It is lived, inherited, and inscribed. In Multitudes, this tension is given its most concise formulation in Phila’s reflection:

“Even silence must account for itself here.”