Hill of Fools: notes towards a publishing history

Abstract

Written in English in the early 70s, Hill of Fools was projected into the market for world literature among distinguished company in the Heinemann African Writers Series (HAWS), at a time when expectations for African writing in English reflected a certain orthodoxy; when the book’s origins in apartheid South Africa pressed certain ‘buttons’ in world readerships, and when the country’s increasing cultural isolation meant that even relatively well-versed literary Africanists were less than familiar with the milieu from which the story springs. The result has been that the novel acquired a rather odd penumbra of interpretation, ranging from the naïve to the dismissive or reductive.