In the present article I seek to discuss, following a diachronic approach, the close-knit relationship that can be found between journalistic discourse and the genre of the short story in Anglophone South African literature over a time span of fifty years, between the late Twenties and the Eighties. In particular, I intend to explore this genre negotiation by close reading selected short stories and/or newspaper articles by four non-white South African writers: R. R. R. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Miriam Tlali. The intersections between the two different genres and discourses in these hybrid texts can be identified at the level of both content and form. A close reading of selected short stories and/or articles may call for a revaluation of this “South African New Journalism” as a creative experimentation that challenges conventional generic categorisations.

This article discusses the presence of a covert but substantial Joycean intertext in Zoë Wicomb’s short story “Nothing Like the Wind”, namely “Eveline” in Dubliners. The two texts tackle similarly the felt experience of their female protagonists, Elsie and Eveline, two colonial or colonized subjects suffering equally because of their physical location, gender, and social class. Apart from the parallels at the level of both content and form, the short stories perform a dialogue centred around the staple thematic concerns of patriarchal family, home, and emigration — over which the paralytic legacy of colonialism hovers. Wicomb’s engagement with these issues finds a ready counterpart in Joyce’s own treatment of British policies in Ireland. This intertextual connection sheds new light on the possibilities of interpretation, both of “Nothing Like the Wind” and of “Eveline”.

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.