Imagining the Real: Apartheid in Beverley Naidoo’s Journey to Jo’Burg

Abstract

My thesis focuses on the novel Journey to Jo’Burg by Beverley Naidoo, a children’s book about a thirteen-year-old girl called Naledi and her brother who travel to Johannesburg by foot to find their mother. I will argue that Beverley Naidoo uses Journey to Jo’Burg to explain apartheid and make the topic accessible for a younger audience. First the socio-political context will be discussed and applied to the case of Journey to Jo’Burg, while mainly focusing on three elements of the apartheid regime: the role of the police, the “pass” laws and the Soweto student uprising of 1976. After placing the novel in its appropriate context, I will also consider its place in the larger canon of postcolonial (children’s) literature and South-African (children’s) literature in particular by briefly looking at other South-African children’s books written at roughly the same time and using postcolonial and intersectional theory to analyse in what way Journey to Jo’Burg can be considered a postcolonial novel.