a.magazine’s African Interview Series

Niq Mhlongo, a South African writer who focuses his work on social and economic issues – such as the threat of AIDS, poverty and unemployment – was born to a poor family in South Africa. His first novel, Dog Eat Dog, was published in 2004 and has been called “semi-autobiographical.” In the novel, Niq deals with race relations in Africa and talks about how a young man growing up there deals with being the first in his family to attend college. In 2006, the New York Times called him: “one of the most high-spirited and irreverent new voices of South Africa’s post-apartheid literary scene.”

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You dropped out of law school in your 3rd year to write your first novel Dog Eat Dog. Why was writing so important to you and how did you know that was the time to focus on your book?

You are right…I did law for four years both at Wits University (one year) and University of Cape Town-UCT (three years). That was after I had graduated at Wits with BA (African Literature and Political Studies). Cape Town was a lonely and strange place for me, as I came from a more cosmopolitan city of Jo’burg. Some people who had been in Cape Town might agree with me that although the city is fondly called ‘The mother city’, it is not ‘motherly’ at all. For a Jo’burger like me, it was like I was outside South Africa where people behaved in a strange cultured way. It was difficult to adapt. Strangely, I missed the barking of the dogs at home during the night. I missed the drunken people from the seven shebeens along our street. I missed the township lingo/tsostitaal, I missed the kids playing diketo in the middle of the street, and so on. To escape from this loneliness and strangeness I decided to write, although informally. That does not mean that I was consciously trying to be a writer. Off course I wanted to be a lawyer, but I got bored memorizing all those Acts and Cases for the exams. At the end I failed some of the courses, and I was forced to stay another year in that boring city. I decided not to. So, I asked myself one question: what else can I do besides being a lawyer? That’s exactly writing came into my mind. It was in fact my second choice from being a lawyer, although I had done literature in my first degree at Wits. I don’t know whether I should say that writing chose me at the right time when it was difficult for me to separate criminal law cases and civil law cases at the law school. Call my first novel Dog Eat Dog ‘a crazy experimentation that had fortunately gone well’ if you like.

Where do you find inspiration for your characters and stories?

I find my inspiration almost everywhere, but mostly in the township. The fastest way to develop the loathing, loving and the knowledge about South Africa’s rich sub-culture, especially from the black perspective, is to go to a nearest taxi rank during peak hours, with your pen and paper (no laptops because you might get robbed). Whilst there, stand in the queue for a taxi ride to the township (any township). In that way you can write a great introductory chapter about South Africans. In the township you could go to the nearest ‘shisanyama’ (barbecue place) or car wash, or funeral where you’ll see the lifestyle and popular music being played from the giant speakers inside the flashy cars. That could be the body of your book. In the shebeen an old woman would be opening her beer with her old decaying tooth while talking about the present problems of power shedding with her equally drunk daughter. In the shisanyana an old man with gout would be wrestling with half-barbecued meat while talking about how he hates the Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Nigerians because he thinks they are the reason he is unemployed. At the car wash seven youth could be sharing one piece of cigarette and a quart of beer while discussing how they do their hijacking. It will be up to you how you interpret these stories-and all these are some of my inspirations.

You once said “Our contributions to literature today should be to write about issues that are directly facing the youth” and when on to talk about issues such as HIV and Aids, poverty and homophobia. Which issue do you think is most important to youth in South Africa today?

All the issues are important and they are linked in someway or the other. But if I am forced to rank them I would probably mention HIV/Aids as the most important to youth in South Africa today. The youth are definitely dying young today, mostly due to this non-racial virus, and we seem to be ignorant as the youth. I hope that our contributions could help bring the awareness.

Your parents sent you to Limpopo province for your education to keep you safe from the violence of the Soweto schools. Still, in your matriculations year, the schools were disrupted by turmoil when Mandela was released from jail. How did that experience help to form your eventual topics as a writer?

Yes, there is a lot of reference to ‘South Africa in transition’ in my writing, especially in Dog Eat Dog. The title itself tries to capture ‘the mood’ of that transition into a democratic process, e.g. the first democratic elections of 1994, the influx of black students into what was formally ‘whites only’ schools and universities, and so forth. Of course I was part of these experiences and changes, and because of that I think I was in a better position to interpret the situation than anybody that was not there. That is perhaps the reason some analysts of my work have wrongly insisted that my work is believable and auto/semibiographical. I guess it is because I wrote about things that were/are happening right in front of my eyes, and it is difficult to ignore them. But where they are actually wrong is where they ignore a huge element of fiction in my work.

Of course I’m not aiming to win a Pulitzer or Commonwealth Prize, because I will not achieve that. Although I would not mind prizes, I want my writing to provide my readers with everything they need to imagine the world around them. I want to keep motivating their desires and ambitions, and help them to dream about things that are missing in their lives. I want my characters in my novels to find many friends in many places around the planet, and give them the survival skills while facing challenges in this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-creed and multi-lingual society of ours.

Dog Eat Dog has been described as a semi-autobiographical sketch of yourself. How do you evaluate your own life to find scenes that tell the bigger narrative you are trying to feel?

The problem with writing in first person narrative is that most of your readers tend to think that you are talking about yourself, and it is very difficult to convince them to think otherwise. That has been a problem to me ever since I wrote my two novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007) and I have called by the names of my main characters. Before people read After Tears I was called Dingz behind my back and now people have started calling me Advo. Let me use this opportunity to, first, to say that Dingz and Advo are just fictional characters, secondly: Niq Mhlongo is different from these two characters. However, Dingz and Advo in both novels are my own creation that was informed by my own observation of my own world. That observation was also influenced by my own interpretation of the situation; hearsays; dreams; thinking and everything that involves creative thinking and writing. I hope people understand the fact that although both settings of these two novels are in the places that I had been before (i.e. Township and University) does not necessarily make my work semi/autobiographical. However, what happened or happens (not necessarily to me) in everyday life in these places informed and continues to inform my writing.

If you could meet any African writer, artist, author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer or designer, who would it be? Why?

This is a difficult question because I grew up admiring all the writers that were published by the African Writers Series, from Achebe, Ngugi, Armah, Mwangi, Emecheta, Ekwensi, Mphahlele etc. But right now I have two writers in mind, one is still alive and the other one has unfortunately passed away. I’m talking about Ben Okri (The Famished Road) and Dambudzo Marechera (House of Hunger). With Okri I would probably ask him to share with me the secret herb that he had smoked the day he decided to write that wonderful book, The Famished Road. I would love to write a book like that in the future as well. With Marechera, I would ask whether by House of Hunger he was actually referring to his country, Zimbabwe. If so, how were his predictions so perfect?