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Liberation in South Africa, gender equality and affirmative action have introduced black women to management positions. But that is also stained by tokenism and inequalities for most women and blacks.
Shameless shows up these anomalies through two childhood friends, Zonke and Thandiwe. Zonke pursues a ‘conventional’ working life while Thandiwe takes the wild route of sex work. Sassy Thandiwe believes that as a sex worker, she doesn’t prostitute herself worse than black/white corporate women and black men.
For instance, Kwena – a filmmaker who documents Thandiwe’s life – sees a psychologist due to stress from work, thanks to the overbearing white mentor. That is as good as the white sex client who shot at Thandiwe because he was a pathetic male disaster.
Shameless exposes the thin line between what is progressive and backward in the lives and status of blacks in post-apartheid SA. It calls us to re-examine where the new dispensation has placed us: are gilded positions respectable, disgraceful or an excuse for survival?
– Papa Saint Molakeng, Real Magazine
A South African story to be lauded
Book review by Margaret von Klemperer
The Witness April 9, 2008
Futhi Ntshingila introduces her central character, Thandiwe, in the first sentence of her novel with the words: “Thandiwe has been shot”. And then we learn that Thandiwe is a prostitute, working the mean streets of Yeoville. Her life has been hard after her brief carefree childhood in rural Mpumuza came to an abrupt end with the death of her mother in an accident. And things would only get worse – abuse, poverty and then the destruction of her community by the violence of the late 1980s in KZN.
But Ntshingila has not written a gloomfest here. Her characters – Thandiwe, Zonke who is her childhood friend and narrator, and Kwena, the young documentary film maker who wants to tell Thandiwe’s story – are feisty, determined young women, making their own choices in life and living with, even relishing, the consequences of those choices. Kwena, talking to Thandiwe, says her aim is to tell the stories of South Africa with dignity, and that seems to be Ntshingila’s motivation as well.
The characters are appealing, strong young women. Their lives have been tough, but not without humour, and even if the routes they choose are roundabout, you are left feeling that they will get where they want to go, and reach their undoubted potential.
In places the writing is a little uneven, and the changes in time between present and past are sometimes abrupt, but these are minor faults in what is a novel to be lauded, telling a South African story in an assured, concise voice. Let’s hope we will be hearing a lot more from Futhi Ntshingila in the future.
Gripping novel lays our nation bare
Fred Khumalo
Sunday Times, May 31, 2008
”Who doesn’t want to see a would-be rapist being given his just deserts?”
Important novels that deal with social issues used to be hard work to read. Not this one - it’s a real page-turner.
When her uncle tries to rape her, Thandiwe stabs him to death. Zonke, who witnesses the murder, is immediately sworn to secrecy by the unwitting murderer, and the two girls decide to leave the uncle’s corpse in his room.
Relatives and neighbours spend weeks scouring the village, looking for the missing man whose body, unbeknownst to them, is rotting away in his room.
When the body is finally discovered, decomposed and crawling with maggots, the two girls act equally surprised.
Their abrupt loss of innocence is palpable, and their blood pact becomes the percussively throbbing heart of the short novel Shameless by Futhi Ntshingila, a former journalist on the Sunday Times.
I read and finished the book in one sitting, the same day I bought it. And this had nothing to do with the fact that I was trying to give moral support to a former colleague - this had everything to do with the narrative, which grabs you from the first line and strangles you into submission.
But what was even more fascinating for me was that I was reading the book from my point of view as a novelist myself.
We are sometimes over-critical about colleagues: we hold a microscope to the text as we painstakingly try to discern the author’s hand - which shouldn’t be discernible in a piece of good writing.
The Ntshingila that I encountered in the book was not the Ntshingila I thought I knew. The Ntshingila that I know or thought I knew is a lady so fragile you feel as if you are torturing her by engaging her in conversation. Her voice is so soft - yebo, bhut’Fred, uttered in a whisper that’s almost inaudible - you get the feeling that she is about to break down in tears and cry. That’s how shy the Ntshingila of the Sunday Times was.
But the assuredness of the text successfully disguised the authorial hand.
As I sat reading into the early hours of the morning, I was in the presence of the characters whose brutality of intent took me right into the underbelly of the Yeoville streets that I have perambulated for the past decade, ever since I moved to Johannesburg. The next time I drive down Rockey Street, I will slow down and look at it with a different eye.
Yes, having lived in that neighbourhood myself some years ago, I have seen ladies of the night plying their trade from the pavement. But I have never paused to think what happens to them once they get swallowed up by a customer’s car. I have never pondered the brutal possibilities that characterise each of these encounters with the customers.
Ntshingila thrust all these possibilities right into my face. And I recoiled in horror, but continued reading, willingly subjecting myself to the horror of it - like a moth to a flame. Having killed her uncle, and lost her mother in an accident, Thandiwe is adopted by a religious couple from Kenya who soon leave KwaZulu-Natal for the bright lights of Johannesburg where the young girl is to live with them.
But her stay with them is to be short-lived when the patriarch, in keeping with a Kenyan custom - a Masai custom to be exact - wants Thandiwe circumcised, which would entail her clitoris being chopped off so she cannot experience sexual pleasure.
Her flight from the house marks the beginning of a tough odyssey that sees her becoming a creative artist at an ad agency at one stage, and then a fully-fledged, high- class prostitute. Unlike other prostitutes who are mostly insecure and will do anything a customer wants, Thandiwe thinks she is offering an important service to society, and is willing to dispense it on her terms. She thinks of herself as a healer: “I am their priestess; I hear their deepest, darkest confessions and I give them the absolution that no regular priest can.”
She is so powerful that her customers come to her but leave feeling used. But they keep coming back. She is an addiction.
But she is also powerful in another sense, as is evident in her statement to a black woman filmmaker she encounters: “My job is no different to yours. You do things to get money. You have to please people, be polite to them even when you think they are assholes because at the end of the day you need to get paid. You need that cheque as much as I do. In fact, when I think about it, being a whore is better. I don’t have to be subjected to the humiliation of being an affirmative action token. A joe willingly chooses me for his fantasies. He is not forced by any law to do it and he doesn’t have to resent me for choosing me.”
Ouch, affirmative action tokens!
This is the book of our times, speaking as it does about many of the social ills vexing our lovely nation.
There was a time in our history - during the height of apartheid - when content took precedence over form; where artists in general, and novelists in particular, thought of their art as a weapon of struggle against apartheid. Sometimes aesthetics were sacrificed at the altar of sociopolitical relevance.
It’s heartening, therefore, when one comes across a text such as this - which, while it is socially relevant, is also highly, highly entertaining. Some books are hard to read; you have to take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves as you embark upon the chore of reading them. I mean, who doesn’t want to see a would-be rapist being given his just deserts? Who doesn’t want to know what drives some women to prostitution?
Oh, what a pleasure it is to witness the squirming displeasure of an advertising agency boss being forced to employ black people - whom he resents entirely - to fill racial quotas, or risk losing clients.
At best, a good novel is a mirror in which society sees itself. Through Shameless, a thin book of only 108 pages, Ntshingila has achieved what other less able writers have failed to communicate in tomes that run into hundreds of pages.
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