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Author: Olivier Moreillon, Research Associate, University of Johannesburg
Original article: https://theconversation.com/k-sello-duiker-a-rock-star-of-south-african-literature-died-20-years-ago-how-his-work-lives-on-247778
K. Sello Duiker was regarded as a “rock star” of South African literature. He was one of a group of budding black South African novelists of the late 1990s and early 2000s who emerged with democracy in 1994. They stirred up the country’s literary scene with their irreverent take on post-apartheid socio-economic and cultural realities.
On 19 January 2005, Duiker committed suicide at the age of 30. He had suffered from bipolar affective disorder. Olivier Moreillon is a scholar of post-apartheid South African literature who has researched Duiker. We asked him about the author’s legacy on the 20th anniversary of his passing.
Who was K. Sello Duiker?
Kabelo Sello Duiker was born in 1974 as the eldest of three sons to the Duiker family, who lived in Soweto in Johannesburg at the time. Duiker had a deep love for reading as a child, a passion he shared with his mother. The two would exchange book recommendations and share their favourite passages from the ones they were reading.
He finished high school at a prestigious private institution in Johannesburg, and went on to study journalism and art history at the university currently known as Rhodes. After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree, he relocated to Cape Town to pursue studies in copywriting, but was expelled due to poor attendance.
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While in Cape Town, Duiker spent three weeks with a group of street children in search of one of their friends. The events of those three weeks would become his celebrated first novel, Thirteen Cents. He also wrote an article for Rhodes Journalism Review about the adventure.
The award-winning Thirteen Cents, published in 2000, would establish Duiker on the literary scene. He would live in Johannesburg and write two more novels before his passing, also working in television as a script writer and later a commissioning editor at the country’s public broadcaster.
What are his novels about?
Thirteen Cents, which is mostly set in Cape Town’s urban suburbs during the late 1990s, centres on Azure. He’s a homeless child who turns to sex work, sleeping with older men to survive on the streets. He’s also forced to obey the arbitrary rules of several local gangsters and suffers their cruel abuse.
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After falling out of favour with Gerald, the thugs’ merciless leader, Azure climbs Table Mountain. There, in a surreal and apocalyptic finale, he witnesses and embraces the destruction of Cape Town. The novel won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book: Africa Region.
The Quiet Violence of Dreams was published just a year after Thirteen Cents, in 2001. It’s again set in the vibrant urban centres of Cape Town. The story follows a student called Tshepo, who is admitted to a mental institution after suffering from “cannabis-induced psychosis”. Tshepo escapes but is soon returned to the facility and completes his rehabilitation.
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On his release, he decides to abandon his studies and takes a job as a waiter. He shares a flat with a recently released prisoner. When the two men’s relationship deteriorates and Tshepo loses his job, he struggles to make ends meet. He finds work at a male massage parlour under the name Angelo. Duiker’s second novel was awarded the 2002 Herman Charles Bosman Prize.
The Hidden Star was published in 2006, after his death. It tells the story of 11-year-old Nolitye who finds a magical stone in the streets of her neighbourhood in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. Nolitye embarks on an adventure with her two friends Bheki and Four Eyes.
As the story unfolds, she discovers her own unique abilities – she can, for example, communicate with animals. She finds out the magical stone is one of four others needed to correct the wrongs that began the day her father died in a mining accident when she was five.
What impact did his writing have?
Around 2000, South Africa experienced a boost in both the quality and quantity of fiction being published.
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J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999), for example, is regarded as a landmark novel marking that shift within the South African literary scene.
As my co-author and I have argued elsewhere, Duiker’s novels – together with Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) – are additional landmarks, heralding a new phase in the country’s English-language literature.
After the trauma of apartheid (white minority rule that divided the country along racial lines), the country’s writers began to turn inward. They scrutinised South Africa’s socio-economic and socio-cultural issues in the wake of a racist past.
Duiker’s scrupulous, uncompromising depiction of mental illness, sex work, same-sex relationships, crime and violence, to list but a few recurring themes in his work, laid the ground for others. Duiker’s and Mpe’s influence on younger black authors is undeniable. Writers such as Niq Mhlongo and Kgebetli Moele, who started publishing in the mid-2000s, or Perfect Hlongwane and Songeziwe Mahlangu, come to mind.
Duiker rapidly gained readership, especially among young black South Africans who could relate to the challenges his characters faced and were drawn to his fresh, taboo-breaking writing.
Why is it important we remember him?
The importance of Duiker’s legacy is reflected in the establishment of the Sello Duiker Memorial Award after his death. Part of the South African Literary Awards, it honours novels and novellas by authors under 40.
The scholarly interest in his work is unabated, even 20 years after his untimely death.
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His novels have been translated into several languages and are still being bought. The Hidden Star was translated into South Africa’s Xhosa language in 2023. It remains largely under-researched compared to the first two novels.
When Duiker’s first two novels were published, they struck a powerful chord. They offer a poetic yet unrelenting portrayal of life in post-apartheid South Africa and uncover the darker realities of South Africa’s society that contradict Cape Town’s global postcard image.
They continue to hold significance 20 years after Duiker’s death. Unfortunately, the issues and unfulfilled aspirations addressed in them still hold true for many South Africans as too little has changed for too many since the demise of apartheid.