Nature writing that keeps discomfort on the page
Sipho Mnguni's three linked essays move through a stretch of fynbos above the Cape Flats across one winter and one dry summer. He writes about the veld as a place people work in, not a view to admire from a car window. The 2024 local paperback runs to 168 pages and includes a hand-drawn map of the ridge, which helps if you have walked any part of it and want to place the burnt slope he returns to in the second essay.
What holds the collection together is a refusal to let beauty settle into comfort. Mnguni describes the smell after rain and then, a few paragraphs later, the dead protea he does not clear away. He notes the baboon troop that raids the bins at the top of the road without turning them into a lesson. The prose is quiet, but it is not passive, and it earns that quietness by staying with the awkward parts of the place rather than skipping to the view.
Mnguni assumes you have stood on this kind of slope and noticed how quickly the wind changes. If you have not, the map and the season markers carry you, but the book reads differently from Cape Town than it would from the ridge itself.
The second essay describes a controlled burn and the animals caught in it, and the third returns to a dog's death without softening it. Readers who prefer to know in advance should treat those passages as the ones to approach slowly.
The 2024 paperback is held at several library branches around the Western Cape, including the city centre and the southern suburbs. Independent bookshops in the province can order it if it is not on the shelf.