DECOLONIZING APARTHEID IDENTITIES: LEWIS NKOSI’S MATING BIRDS

This paper aims to analyze Lewis Nkosi’s famous novel Mating Birds as a text that deals with the question of how to decolonize the colonial identities constructed by the apartheid regime in South Africa in the twentieth century. In this respect, the paper demonstrates how otherness, difference, and identity are constructed in this postcolonial novel. Moreover, it also explores how writing is used as a postcolonial strategy in the novel to deconstruct the identities of both the colonized and the colonizer and to reconstruct them as authentic decolonized selves. On the surface, Mating Birds is the story of a strange love affair between a black boy and a white girl, which eventually leads to the conviction and tragic execution of the boy. On a deeper level, it is a narrative about South Africa, apartheid and anti-apartheid resistance. As a novel that deals with such themes as knowledge and power, the cul-de-sac of the colonized as a consequence of the horrifying physical and mental prison apartheid created in South Africa, the forced silence and lack of communication between cultures, and the irresistible desire to get rid of any restrictions placed against dialogue between people who differ only in skin color, Mating Birds embodies the desire to view all cultures and people as different in nature, but equal in value. Education and writing open people’s eyes and enable them to question, criticize, and dismantle oppressive authority. Apartheid considers the education of non-white peoples as something corruptive, which causes their deviation from being noble savages. The protagonist Sibiya, a university student, is the first-person narrator and writer of this tale, which he writes in prison in the form of an autobiography. As a defying response to apartheid, his writing enables him and his readers to decolonize both their minds and identities.