The adult world crucially encompasses children, but research in South African literature has mainly focused on adult worlds, whether white or black. The child, however, is a prominent figure in the poetry and fiction that has tried to capture South African experience in the past, present, and, importantly, implicit projections of the future, through the ways in which children often embody hope for the future. In South Africa, the child is caught up in the politics of the nation through the politics of love and past shame. While it is expected that the child will be loved unconditionally and unfailingly, narratives of love for the child demonstrate the shameful failures of love. Njabulo Ndebele, in Fools and Other Stories, attempts to rewrite the fate of the nation as struggles over black independence emerge, but as Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples shows, loving the child is irrevocably caught within national shame. K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents illustrates the influence of past failures to adequately love the black child, while Rayda Jacobs, in The Slave Book, imagines the girl child as integral to successfully restoring the proud multiracial character of South Africa as a nation. Sindiwe Magona considers the impact of masculinity in loving the child in Chasing the Tails of my Father’s Cattle, and presents loving the (girl) child as crucial to restoring the essence of black masculinity, which was visibly affected by the nation’s history. Finally, Kopano Matlwa considers both the girl and boy child as integral to the family as nation, and replaces national pride with pluriversalism in loving the child in Spilt Milk. It is only through loving wholly and without shame that the child may be adequately loved, and the symbolic national family be restored.
Keywords: South African literature, the child, the family, the nation, love, education, restoring the soul of the nation,