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Self-reflexive, retrospective narratives of London in J.M. Coetzee’s Youth and Justin Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet
Africans – other than an off-stage Mandela or a near-neighbour in Swazi-born Anthony – from the novel, could be viewed as a problematic blind spot, reflecting a desire to shake ‘the dust of the country from his feet’, in Coetzee's words ( 1992 : 393). Using a different metaphor of relinquishment, Cartwright describes, in Oxford Revisited ( 2009 ), how, after moving to Oxford and being exposed to Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism, he found himself ‘happily free from the heavy burden of being a white South African’ ( 2009a : 39). Alternatively, his