Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)

This chapter looks closely at Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he gives a compelling and impassioned voice to five South African ‘descendants’ of Penelope, and to Penelope herself. It argues that the book puts into practice Ndebele’s belief that it was important for South African writing to resist the orthodoxy of spectacle, to rediscover the ordinary, to fashion a new narrative of intimacy and introspection, and thereby envisage a future of promise and complexity. It shows how Ndebele challenges the classical paradigm of the faithful waiting woman and, in so doing, urgently interrogates the notion of Home in the new South Africa.