Towards a "New Africanity": Southern Connectivities and Lusofonia in Imraan Coovadia's Alternate History in The Institute for Taxi Poetry

One of the central developments in post-transitional South African literature has been a seeming shift towards an increasing transnational connectivity, as well as an incipient dialogue with other parts of the African continent. This article reads Imraan Coovadia's 2012 novel, The Institute for Taxi Poetry, as part of a larger body of works that demonstrates a rethinking of the country's "Africanity" (Smith 2012 Smith, Tymon. 2012. "The Fiction Prize." Timeslive.co.za. The Times, 13 May. Available at|http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/books/2012/05/13/the-fiction-prize|. [Accessed 14 May 2012].|). South African authors, particularly since 2000, have explored the country's post-apartheid opening up to the African continent, but also highlighted ongoing closures and ruptures. Coovadia's alternate history stands out from these works in its radical rethinking of South Africa's relations with other parts of Africa by envisaging the country's past, present and future through a Lusophone lens. Rather than focusing primarily on western Lusophone elsewhere, references to the Lusophone South, including Lusophone Africa, as well as other African countries, are central to the novel's alternative imaginary. With this reshuffling of conventional centre-periphery relations, Coovadia, I argue, writes into being a new form of Southern connectivity. The alternate history genre allows the author to question the traditional classificatory grids that have dominated South African scholarship in the past and ask for new critical vocabularies that transcend accounts of the country's journey on merely "black and white [ ... ] roads" (Serote cited in Coovadia 2012). Yet the relationship between Coovadia's counterfactual world and the reader's extra-textual reality is of a palimpsestic rather than oppositional nature. Contrary to more conventional counterhistories, in which the counterfactual narrative and the historical foil are frequently opposed to each other, we find continuous overlayings and overlappings of the two in Coovadia's text. The constant reminders of the historical foil from which the novel deviates become a dominating textual strategy that both invokes and critiques the decentring of other African countries in post-apartheid South Africa.