Africa is a Country

‘In 2002, J. M. Coetzee moved from South Africa to Australia, exchanging one white colony for another, leaving behind the fractious, brutal, and failed project of apartheid for citizenship in a democratic state far more successful at dispossessing its indigenous people. Coetzee has lived in places other than South Africa before, notably England and the United States, but the latest break with his home country seems permanent. There is something irrevocable in the act of changing citizenship; in this case, the transfer of allegiance was carried out by a writer whose fiction had been molded in the workshop of South African politics.’

Read the rest in the December/January 2008 issue of Bookforum here