An Author's Agenda: Re-visioning Past and Present for a Future South Africa

This paper takes as premise Stanley Frielick's generally accepted point that much publishing in South Africa today is 'part of the process of historical rediscovery and re-visioning that informs contemporary South African studies', so that 'through exploring the dynamic connections between past and present, we can gain a clearer picture of the forces that are shaping our future'.1 I would add to this one of the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys's throwaway lines: The future is known in South Africa; only the past is unpredictable? The position of that elusive specimen - the South African writer- is perhaps best summarised in part by Nadine Gordimer in 1982 in her paper, 'Living in the Interregnum',3 first delivered to the New York Institute of the Humanities