Buried Under A Pile
Where Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani’s Buried In The Chest, gets buried…
We meet Unati with her grandmother, in the afternoon heat of the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Two important facts that stay with you as you make your way through this slim novel. The person and the place. Buried In The Chest follows Unati’s journey to find her unknown father, her missing mother and maybe even herself. Might sound strange to some but an entirely normal story for many South Africans.
Mbunyuza-Memani’s writing in the early part of the book is crisp as an autumn morning in the coastal Eastern Cape. And her sense of place is palpable as the summer afternoon humidity of the entire eastern seaboard of the country. The novel unwinds the narrative gently, flowing thick and smooth like one of the many rivers that course through the rural parts of this place. We follow Unathi and Bongeka’s journeys of self-discovery written with sweet tenderness. The book is hard to put down. The story unfurling with a self-assuredness of a writer, writing not just a story but almost themselves onto the page.
The middle section, as Unati reaches her early adulthood, feels a little less indulgently written. There’s an urgency in places especially with Gerald that’s somehow tempered by Mr Buso’s presence. A presence that stays with the reader throughout the novel and lives gently beside Unati herself. Moving ahead to Unati’s departure from Moya to teacher training college, the novel picks up pace and while this is good for keeping the reader engaged, some of the magical, flowing quality of Mbunyuza-Memani’s in the earlier half of the book recedes.
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This was the trickiest past of the book to read. And I was left feeling like the author herself was still processing much of the changes in the political landscape of South Africa in that period of the late 90s through the mid 2000s. And the unresolved tensions of the past atrocities committed under the political banner of Apartheid. My reading slowed. The book remained unopened for nights on end. But vodka-sipping Madam and the reappearance of Ms Mvezo in a new role drew me back in. Suddenly, Gerald was a minor player again and Unati seemed more alive like she was in the earlier part of the story.
Still, there’s a rushed quality to the closing third of the book. And my initial assessment after finishing the book was maybe not so complimentary to Mbunyuza-Memani’s writing. And so the book (and this review) sat quietly on the bedside table. For days and eventually what become months. It had taken me months to get to read the book and here I was now feeling unable to write a review.
I didn’t have much to say beyond the first third of the book feeling like a wondrous new voice was telling our stories. But that’s just a third of a review and hardly helpful to potential readers. Buried In The Chest got buried under the small stack on the bedside table. The Highveld Winter settled in and I remain unsettled by Buried In The Chest.
It took weeks before the genius in what Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani has done with the difficult, messy, violent and unlikeable parts of our history (and present) became apparent. Yes, the writing in the last third of the book stutters in places, it lags here and there, it feels rushed at the very end, it feels unresolved, despite a flowing narrative arc. In stark comparison to the first third of the book. And that is exactly Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani’s genius with Buried In The Chest. South Africa’s difficult, messy, violent history (and present) is written as it exists for many (if not all) South Africans. It is not neatly resolved. It is not a polished trophy on a shelf and Mbunyuza-Memani doesn’t give us a Hollywood-trope laden view of Unati facing demons others made for her, unasked. The writing grapples as much with these histories as we do each day in our interactions. There is no ease but an enduring tension that fires both our propensity to viral ‘racial incidents’ and the hardly ever viral, slow and real connections that emerge from our sustained engagement with each other as naturally troubled and normal people.
Buried In The Chest offers something altogether too rare in our writing. A naturalness that reflects our history and present with a pathos that bleeds out of the page. The back-cover of the book offers that, “A stunning new voice has entered the South African literary scene” and rarely has such an assertion been more true.
Buried In The Chest by Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani (Jacana Media, 2025)
© Jesh Baker, for OppiStoep, 2026
