Beloved Countries: Labour, Landscape and the Politics of Conservation in Three Novels from KwaZulu-Natal

Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1990) chronicles the lives of a group of rural South African women as they struggle against both the black and white patriarchies in which they are enmeshed and the dire environmental conditions in which they live. However, critics have tended to focus substantially more on Ngcobo’s interest in women than on the novel’s rural setting, the environmental problems that define it, or the longer literary history of which the novel is a part. This article re-examines And They Didn’t Die in order to show, in one vein, how the struggles that Ngcobo narrates are oriented towards environmental as well as gendered forms of justice. But the article also puts And They Didn’t Die in dialogue with both Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), two texts set in the same part of KwaZulu-Natal, in order to examine a problem important to ecocriticism both in South Africa and beyond: namely, the relationship between environmental history and literary form. As I show, while And They Didn’t Die both draws on and re-imagines the conventions that guide Paton’s novel in order to construct its account of black rural life, the novel also opens up a series of conflicts that reverberate long after the time in which it is set.