Literature as an Agent for Social Change: The Case of Caitlin Davies’s Place of Reeds and The Return of El Negro

Abstract

This article considers two of Caitlin Davies’s novels on Botswana, Place of Reeds and The Return of El Negro, as exemplifying the ways in which literature addresses issues of justice within the postcolonial context. A narrative which see-saws between history, journalism and anecdotal reporting, Place of Reeds exposes the underbelly of Botswana society, particularly with regard to the country’s mistreatment and marginalisation of its minorities and women. Paradoxically, El Negro is a story about an unidentified Southern African man whose body was clandestinely taken to Europe by natural scientists who put it on display, subjected it to scrutiny, and used it as a specimen for scientific research. In the years leading up to the end of the twentieth century, the body was brought back and buried in Botswana’s capital of Gaborone. What Caitlin Davies’s second text does is to lay bare the violence of colonialism. Using Homi Bhabha’s concept of a vernacular cosmopolitanism, a notion which he uses to suggest that global progress should be determined from the perspective of those people who have suffered all manner of injustices in the past, this article argues for and shows the extent to which Davies’s fiction bears witness to the role that literature plays in addressing issues of social justice in society.