'My country is falling apart, we find ourselves in a crisis in every aspect,' says writer Marlene van Niekerk about South Africa. It was not an optimistic conversation I had with the famous author on one of the first days of the year. Van Niekerk is in the Netherlands. She holds the new Africa Chair at the University of Utrecht, where she delivered her inaugural lecture last week. She will work on the position of the novel and the novelist in post-apartheid South Africa. In our interview she states: 'I am waiting for an enlightened young black writer who dares to denounce the failure of South African politics. Someone to describe how the post-apartheid regime might have given a different shine to society, but how it did not change anything for most people.' According to Van Niekerk the poor have remained poor and find themselves in the same hopeless social economic situation, while the rich are getting richer. The only difference is that some of those rich people now are black.
