Abstract
Written during the riotous fall of South African Apartheid, Wilma Stockenström’s stream-of-consciousness novella Die kremetartekspedisie, translated into English by J.M. Coetzee as The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, is recognized as the first full-length Afrikaans text written from the perspective of a black African woman. It has been hailed as demonstrating new liberality of the Afrikaner consciousness but also assailed as usurpation of the Shona cultural voice. Analysis of textual symbolism with regard to Herbert Aschwanden’s Shona Heritage books and of the text’s verisimilar qualities with reference to Julia Kristeva’sRevolution in Poetic Language together reveal textual parallels between the post-Apartheid Shona woman and the newly feminist Afrikaner woman, suggesting that traditional feminine paradigms of both cultures limit women’s possibilities and that a new hybrid, powerful vision of woman is needed.