Harare Review of Books

152 pp. Published February 1, 2025 by Granite Cloud. Historical fiction.

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Mbaqanga Nights is neither truly plot- nor character-driven; it’s rather a nostalgic trip into the past, via a jazz club called the Coltrane. Laurence is reminiscing about how he and a group of friends set up the Coltrane in Joburg in the closing years of Apartheid, inspired by their love for the uniqueness of the sound out of Joburg’s townships (Sophiatown in particular), the jazz scene in Durban, and how music drew people across Apartheid’s divide. Laurence is white, descended from a Ukrainian Jewish great-grandfather, Bene, who migrated because of the oppression he was experiencing there. The novel switches between Laurence’s memories of his years in South Africa, and the story of Bene’s journey to a new life.

It’s a sensitive and lyrical portrayal of the complexity of migration and a liberal white experience of South Africa’s race laws. However, it (necessarily, perhaps) doesn’t grapple much with the brutality of Apartheid. Laurence’s experience of his compulsory drafting into the army is as a kind of paid holiday, moving from camp to camp to do their books. He never has to confront the true face of Apartheid in the townships as he moves away before he’s forced to do so. His experience of it, therefore, is only glancing, at the very edge of the conflict, where the jazz bars of his beloved musical scene exist. It’s perhaps not meant to be a deep novel in that sense.

Mbaqanga Nights reads as an ode to South Africa’s phenomenal jazz scene (with lots of name-dropping), an acknowledgment that it grew out of and despite Apartheid, but going no further. It’s excellent when it imagines Laurence’s great-grandfather’s flight from Ukraine, and here and there, it does hint at the irony of the privileged life of his descendants due to the race laws in South Africa; but, again, while Laurence ponders this, his engagement with it is fairly shallow.

So, a pleasant read, but don’t expect it to challenge any beliefs—presumably because it never sets out to do that. It is beautiful as an ode to music, creating vivid and evocative scenes of what it must have been like in those jazz clubs at that time. And it’s wonderful as a record of Ukrainian Jewish migration to the melting point that South Africa is. Read on that level, Mbaqanga Nights is an enjoyable and memorable novel.

Thanks to Cameron Publicity and Marketing Ltd and NetGalley for access to a DRC.

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