Paperless, Buntu Siwisa (2023) | A Review by Beverley Jane Cornelius
When I first picked up Paperless by Buntu Siwisa (2023), I expected a story about paperless technology. But the word ‘paperless’ in the title refers to this novel’s focus on the plight of African migrants in Oxford, United Kingdom, in the early 2000s. To explore the migrant’s ambiguous sense of identity and need for community belonging, the novel presents both ‘paperless’ and ‘documented’ characters. Following the stories of Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa, the novel foregrounds the day-to-day difficulties of people who are far from home as they attempt to improve their lot in life.
Luzuko Goba, the protagonist of Siwisa’s novel, is a young, African student of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. He is writing his doctoral thesis but is unsatisfied and unfulfilled in his work, aspiring also to publish a novel. This ambivalence about his work extends to and from other areas of his life: he does not have a defined sense of identity, and he yearns for a sense of belonging in a place where he can feel ‘at home’. This sense of longing is compounded by the recent deaths of both the grandmother who raised him and the father he never knew, a freedom fighter who was in exile, always absent from Luzuko’s life.
Luzuko half-heartedly attempts to assimilate into Oxford society, while paradoxically clinging to his Africanness. Adopting local lingo, for example, he talks of ‘heading out for a jar’ and at the pub ordering ‘pints’, ‘crisps’, and ‘pork scratchings’; and he is at pains to map out the area through which he moves, naming streets, buildings, and shops with an air of familiarity and intimacy; while associating almost exclusively with other African students at the university. This is not a cohesive group in which he can forge a sense of belonging, though: the African students in his orbit are each driven by their own personal ambitions and with them he finds little comfort or like-mindedness. Luzuko finds that “so many African students did not want to return to Africa” (Siwisa, 2023:137), a sentiment that sickens him as a choice he cannot understand. By way of explanation, the novel presents other perspectives. In juxtaposition to Luzuko’s experiences as a legal alien, the novel offers, also, those of ‘paperless’ characters. Alternative and alternating storylines introduce two characters, Bongani and Nomusa, who are both living and working in England illegally.
Bongani has arrived in the UK with a bundle of papers that is immediately rejected at Heathrow airport (whether the documents are authentic or not, is unclear). As he is being escorted to a holding area to await a deportation flight home, he takes advantage of an official’s carelessness and, left momentarily unattended, Bongani simply walks out of the airport to begin life in England as an illegal alien.
Nomusa lives a similarly precarious life having overstayed her visa. With the added responsibility of motherhood (she has a baby whose father is in prison) she hustles for cleaning and nursing jobs. Further complications ensue when Nomusa’s mother arrives to take the child home to South Africa but chooses, instead, to stay.
When Nomusa becomes embroiled in a friend’s problems, the migrant community’s tentative loyalties are reflected. Nomzamo (Bongani’s flatmate) is on the run, having escaped through a window during a police raid. Nomzamo blames Bongani’s carelessness for alerting the police, while Nomusa, in turn, distances herself from Namzamo. When Nomzamo asks Nomusa “what are we going to do now” (50), Nomusa tells her, “there is no we” (51). The cohesion of a group that Luzuko imagines will provide a sense of belonging is an entanglement that makes Nomusa vulnerable. She must carefully distance herself from her friends because, loneliness aside, she would “rather play this cat-and-mouse game for the next five years than leave this job” (51).
The three characters – Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa – cross paths at a house called ‘Sodom’ where a mutual friend hosts informal parties. By juxtaposing these three characters, Siwisa foregrounds themes of belonging and longing, the plight of the migrant, and the legacy of colonialism for Africans across the continent. With a vast cast of secondary characters – at least 14 African countries are represented: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan, Togo, Zambia, Lesotho, Tanzania, Namibia, Benin, Uganda, Congo, Burundi, and Liberia among them – Siwisa makes clear that, indeed, Africa is not a country, it is a continent; and that each country’s population suffers its unique historical repercussions. When Luzuko is introduced to the transient community at ‘Sodom’ he feels an immediate sense of relief and recognition: “The cab slowed down at the unfenced yard of a modest, yellow-painted house. What seemed like a freshly started fire glowed from the front porch, lighting up a slightly unkempt yard. […] This was Sodom. A fading Mafikizolo song yielded to the throbbing beats of Glen Lewis. Soon a hail of Zulu and Xhosa voices erupted I smiled. I knew that I was home. At last” (164). He has found “another, illegal Oxford” (174) where he feels a deluded sense of belonging. But his new friends, including Bongani, do not understand why he wants to be with them. They point out that they have come to England to work for money and that they work hard for that money, while Luzuko sits “on [his] arse and receive[s] money for reading books. Just for reading books” (209). From their point of view, it is an easy life when “you don’t even have to struggle for papers. They organise papers for you” (209). Interrogating their varying backgrounds, they become aware that some have come from poverty and working-class backgrounds, some from the middle-class/bourgeoisie, foreshadowing a later conversation between Luzuko and Bongani. Months later, Bongani confesses that their discussions in Oxford have been the catalyst for his interest in history. He seeks understanding about the historical and socio-economic differences that have given each of them (Luzuko and Bongani) a more-privileged or less-privileged start to life. Siwisa thus shows that the African migrant is as varied and as multi-faceted as humanity.
The novel is also a commentary on various forms of writing. Luzuko is a doctoral candidate writing a thesis, while also producing political pamphlets and speeches for his Togolese mentor and, at the same time, struggling to write a novel. In the final paragraphs of Paperless, Luzuko decides to start his novel afresh. He wants to start his story “from the beginning” (304); and the words he recites as his starting point for the novel (of which he is the author), are also the opening lines of the novel, Paperless, (in which he features as a character): “I was on my way to see Ian Smith. For twenty pounds, I was going to see the last white prime minister of Zimbabwe” (1, 304).
This metafiction underscores the autobiographical elements of the novel. While Paperless proclaims itself a novel on the title page, it could be deemed auto-fiction inspired by the author’s own experiences. Like his character, Luzuko, Siwisa completed a D.Phil. in Politics and International Relations at Oxford University and, while there, befriended South Africans who were in England to work and who, paperless, constantly worried about deportation. There were stark differences between the friends because although they “shared the same culture and language” what separated them was “the difference between [their] destinies” (Eeley 2004 n.p.). In keeping with the autobiographical elements of the novel, Luzuko’s storyline is narrated in the first-person and is therefore relatively subjective, while Bongani’s and Nomusa’s respective stories are told in third-person narration, giving a more objective account of their experiences.
The metafictional elements in Paperless extend to literary critique. Dela gives his opinion about why Luzuko’s fiction is failing: “You write to yourself, for yourself, and you’re far too expository. You want to explain everything” (101). Luzuko then becomes self-critical seeing that his work is “often unnecessarily expository [that] chunks of dialogue digressed, [becoming] long winded [and that] themes shouted over loudhailers, hanging over the storylines” (136). This commentary mirrors Siwisa’s own writing challenges: an earlier manuscript, he acknowledges, “went on and on about a whole lot of things” and he was advised to “instead focus on a core theme” (vi). Paperless does focus on the core theme of the African migrant in England, yet some of Siwisa’s own criticism applies. The novel is at times burdened with the sheer number of characters. Though they serve the necessary function of depicting diversity and variety of experience, the multitudes at times deflect attention – and empathy – away from the more important characters.
Thematically, Paperless pays homage not only to the struggling migrant, but also to literature and the power of narrative. At least twenty-nine authors are mentioned in the novel’s pages including, for example: Dambudzo Marechera, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, Ali Mazrui, Salman Rushdie, Jack Kerouac, Lewis Nkosi, Masize Kunene, and Robert Frost. Stressing the importance of literary creation, Luzuko’s mentor says that the writer is inspired because “you write to communicate to the people, to the reader. In any medium, in any form that suits your message best, you write” (100).
And it is through reading and writing that Luzuko again encounters Bongani towards the end of the novel. Having been finally deported, Bongani is subsequently put in prison in South Africa (for a crime he denies, a point not clarified) and, prompted by earlier conversations with Luzuko, is now immersed in South African history books. His reading exposes to him how inequalities result from historical events and, therefore, how someone like Luzuko, for example, is destined to have more opportunity than someone like himself, Bongani. The different paths their ancestors chose, affected their lives in the narrative present. In clandestine and hurried phone conversations, Bongani discusses with Luzuko the pros and cons of “changing faces through migrations” (281).
This discussion lies at the heart of Paperless. The way Bongani sees it, if you ‘change faces’, you can start afresh but, as Luzuko has experienced it, this is also where the longing for identity, belonging, and home begins. And while they are having their long-distance intellectual, abstract discussions, their friend, Nomusa, is yet again enacting a ‘change of face’. To elude Social Services and the police, she is moving on to a new place, this time disguised in a burka: a cab arrives for her in the half-light of dawn and “carrying [the baby] in her car seat, Nomusa head[s] stealthily down the stairs, covered from head to toe in black” (264).
Focusing on Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa, Paperless examines the realities of what it is to live and strive restricted or freed by the necessity of documentation. The novel foregrounds the starkly different experiences of the ‘paperless’ and the ‘documented’, raising questions about the (un)fairness of boundaries that dictate on which side of structured borders individuals must remain or through which they may move. If identity is “shifty, fluid, [and] flexible” (124), the novel raises the questions: what would a paperless humanity look like; what could a paperless humanity achieve?
Though the novel deals with serious matters and there are intellectually challenging conversations among the characters, the tone of the narrative remains energetic, light, and humorous. This may be because of the energy of the young (and young-at-heart) characters, who all retain the will to push forward with their aspirations. Amidst the chaos and turmoil of their lives there is beauty: “[t]he beauty was in the mess. It had always been in the clutter and jumble of it all” (300). There is a hopefulness in their optimism despite the sometimes-dire circumstances, which makes this book a worthwhile read.
Buntu Siwisa (2023) Paperless | Jacana | ISBN 978-1-4314-3401-5
Beverley Jane Cornelius is a lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa.
References
Eeley, Stephen. 2004. “Buntu Siwisa: In Conversation with Stephen Eeley”. https://www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=node/94 [Accessed 4 January 2025].
Siwisa, Buntu. 2023. Paperless. Auckland Park: Jacana Media.
University of Johannesburg. Website. Staff Members. https://www.uj.ac.za/members/buntu-siwisa/ [Accessed 4 January 2025].
This book review was published in Africa Book Link, Spring 2025