Historical Novels

Fred Khumalo author The Longest March

Pic: Alet Pretorius.

The Longest March the historical novel by Fred Khumalo, a South African writer, is a possible candidate for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, because to my knowledge, it is the first book where the author not only conducted the research, but re-lived the history as well. Research is varied. It can be visits:

1. to war museums

2. Apartheid museums

3. Holocaust museums

4. slave cabins in Georgia, south of the U.S.

5. prisons

6. library basements to extract information from newspapers that have turned yellow with age

7. cranking up old technology like reel-to-reel

8. or interviewing 80 year-old men and women whose parents lost their land so that the Queen of England could mine silver and gold

Historical novels are based on some history percentage: 2%, 20%, 30% max, never beyond that. I suppose publishers figure that more than 30% will make the book non-fiction.

https://bridgebooks.co.za/products/the-longest-march-by-fred-khumalo

I’m not in a position to assign a percentage for The Longest March, but Fred Khumalo, the author physically dusted history by walking from Johannesburg to Ladysmith.

Why? Because the novel is based on a physical act, that happened 120 years ago where goldminers were caught in the middle in the war between Britain and white settlers called Boers.

They wanted to live independently in South Africa, the new land and not be ruled by the Queen of England. When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers, says the African idiom. 

The Longest March is based on the goldminers' story, how they walked home for ten days from Johannesburg in the Transvaal Province to Ladysmith, in the Natal Province at the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War.

That war is taught in school. Ask anybody who grew up in South Africa, but this particular walk is not in the curriculum. The author’s decision to re-live history by walking for ten days in the year 2019 to illustrate what happened in 1899 raises the bar of the historical novel genre.

It might be argued that the Nobel Prize in Literature is for the end product, all printed pages, the book’s title page and back cover, and not for how the author conducted the research.

Point taken, but The Longest March is a living reality because of something that happened 120 years ago. The author did the initial research and sat down to write the novel. He then joined the two dots for the reader which are: goldminers walking from Johannesburg to Ladysmith and Fred Khumalo himself re-walking that walk in October 2019.

It is a historical and literary feat.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.