(Un)making Annie: Black female subjectivity, the normative (white) suburban South African home and land repossession

In Jezile, Ngcobo offers a counter to the “nameless, shadowy, ‘woolly Kaffir maids’" of much of South African fiction that appeared before her novel. Ngcobo underscores that black women did not die, but lived rich and joyful lives, despite the erasure of personhood that they endured in the white spaces of apartheid’s nomos. Ngcobo’s novel is a harbinger of the unfinished business of the social, spatial and economic contracts and coercions that came with such a “formalisation” through colonialism, segregation and ultimately apartheid, particularly for black women. For Ngcobo, the negotiated settlement that brought about the end of apartheid did not address some of its residual effects.