The postcolonial afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, xenophobia, and the community of healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segregation and apartheid. The post-apartheid, “postcolonial afterlife,” rather than auguring for a new world of social justice and equality, has painfully witnessed, among other persistent “colonial” problems, the crisis of AIDS epidemic. In this chapter, I will show through scholarly engagement that there is nothing South African or African about this epidemic. Epidemics, in the last centuries, had a social and cultural history of travel often from European countries to the colonial world, which, via discourses of European civilization and “western” science, were rendered into problems of the colonies that European colonizers had to study and eradicate. In South Africa, colonial epidemics were understood to have been borne by poor back and Asian migrant workers in the mines which were used for the racist urban segregation laws that have crystallized into postcolonial xenophobia in contemporary globalized cultures. I will engage with these concerns through a close reading of content, style and form of Phaswane Mpe’s short novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001). I will further argue that Mpe’s novel envisions an overcoming of the “contagious community” by a “community of healing” through storytelling, talking, fellow feeling and empathy-based solidarity.