At the end of 1992 Achmat left Kagiso Trust to take up a position at the City University of New York (CUNY) as writer-in-residence. Achmat’s wife and partner Audrey Elster recalled: “Achmat loved being a Writer in Residence actually, he really enjoyed the interaction with the students and I think in another life, like many writers, he would have had a more academic career, but this was a luxury for him at the time.” After spending several months in New York, the couple returned home and Achmat resumed his work in the field of development. It became even more intense and demanding. He devoted what spare time he had to writing and told Jansie Kotze and Ruth Harris that it was “very organic [and] I write because I love it and I have to.”  

Achmat started working on parts of Bitter Fruit and published extensively in this period. The decade started with Achmat receiving the “Book Award of the BBC Prize for African Poetry” in 1990 for poems later published in Private Voices. This was followed by The Z Town Trilogy, in 1990 and published by Ravan Press; Private Voices, published in 1992 by the Congress of South African Writers; Kafka’s Curse: A Novella & Three Other Short Stories, published in 1997 by Kwela Books; and Kafka’s Curse: A Novel, published internationally by Pantheon in 1999. Some of Achmat’s short stories were published in a variety of anthologies in these years including: “Places of Stone” in Brian Filling and Susan Stuart’s The End of a Regime – An Anthology: Scottish-South African Writing Against Apartheid published by the University of Aberdeen in 1991; “Private Voices – Birthdays and Transitions” published in Hettie Scholtz’s 40 is g’n Vloekwoord (40 is no swear word) published by Queillerie in 1999; a Swedish translation of Achmat’s “Lost” appears as “Verloeren” in Judith Uijterlinde’s anthology Crossing Border: Wereldliteratuur uit binnen- en buitenland published by Gennep van Novib in 1999 and in Andries Oliphant’s At the Rendezvous of Victory and Other Stories, published by Kwela Books in 1999, a short story titled “Bitter Fruit” appears and later is chapter one of Achmat’s acclaimed novel Bitter Fruit published in 2001 by Kwela Books. Achmat was also an advisory editor for Staffrider, co-authored a film script with Oliver Schmitz and wrote the introduction to Paul Weinberg and Marlene Winberg’s Back to Land.

Achmat’s second book, The Z-Town Trilogy, published by Ravan Press in 1990 was dedicated to: “my mother, Ouma Du Preez and Ralph who lived through some of this.” In the same year, Staffrider, Vol 9, No 2, 1990, carried an interview with Achmat conducted by Andries Oliphant. “Z-Town,” Achmat told Andries, “is an abbreviated reference to Riverlea”, which is where Achmat lived when parts of the book were written. He continued:

“some of the material, such as the housing issue, the rent boycotts, the State of Emergency and roadblocks, are drawn from real events, and in some cases real people, but reworked for fictional purposes. I have tried not to submerge the human dimension in this overtly political situation. While I have focused on the poverty of the people and the environment, I have tried to avoid romanticising it by exploring race and class issues…In writing about it I have tried to deal with its day to day struggles as well as infuse it with universal concepts such as love, hatred, jealousy, religion and the humanity of both supporters and opponents of the government.”

Achmat explained that the triple structure (named respectively: The Representative; Birds of Prey and Ordinary People) was “related to how the story evolved. Basically, the lack of time to write continuously played a role as well as the fact that I attempted to combine the self-contained form of the short story or novella with the overlapping and continuous themes and events associated with the longer novelistic narrative which has a beginning, middle and conclusion. Parts of the novel, except for the conclusion, have been published locally and abroad.”

Journalist and novelist Peter Wilhelm praised Achmat for his ability to transcend social “barriers”. He wrote: “Very occasionally, in our fragmented writing scene, an author breaks through parochial barriers of race, class and tradition … Achmat Dangor is such a writer.”

The Z Town Trilogy was the last of Achmat’s books to be published by Ravan Press. The Press would only survive another six years. In 1996, Ravan’s personnel would be retrenched and Ravan would be integrated into the mainstream publisher Hodder. However, before that, from 1991 COSAW published Staffrider and Achmat was appointed as a member of the editorial collective. COSAW also published books. Cover designs and artwork were created by South African artists such as Matthew Krouse, Andrew Lord and Gerald Sekoto. Matthew Krouse, who joined COSAW at Nadine Gordimer’s suggestion in 1990, wrote on his website that “COSAW was formed to give voice to a new and previously banned range of authors and poets poised for prominence.”

Works published by COSAW included Mongane Serote’s On the Horizon (1990) and poetry from the COSAW Women’s Collective. Work by non-COSAW members was also published, such as Oliver Schmitz and Thomas Magotlane’s Mapantsula: Screenplay and Interview with a preface by Serote and foreword by Achmat (1991). COSAW published Achmat’s second collection of poetry Private Voices in 1992 , which, among other things, described the effects of racial segregation and forced removals.

From 1993, Staffrider appeared as the “National Journal of the Congress of South African Writers”. The editorial board now comprised regional editors in addition to the editorial advisors. Achmat was an editorial advisor with Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Serote, Kelwyn Sole, Paul Weinberg, Gary Rathbone, Chris van Wyk, Gcina Mhlophe, David Koloane, Nise Malange, and Luli Callinicos. COSAW was committed to supporting new writers and offered book awards, including the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award and the Alex la Guma / Bessie Head Fiction Award. COSAW also supported other book prizes such as the Maskew Miller Longman’s Young Africa Award.

After the publication of Private Voices, Achmat focused on writing and refining short stories some of which were to be republished in Kafka’s Curse: A Novella & Three Other Short Stories (1997). In 1992, Achmat and Audrey were in New York. They returned in 1993 and Achmat’s short story “Lost”, set in New York, was published in December 1993 by the American owned magazine Cosmopolitan (established in 1886).

After Staffrider’s Fifteenth Anniversary Edition released in 1993, there “was a long silence, followed by the very last issue edited by Chris Van Wyk in 1996, which saw its ultimate demise.” Several members of the editorial collective had been involved with the National Arts Initiative, established in 1989, and subsequently the National Arts Coalition formed in December 1993 with Andries Oliphant as chair. South Africa was moving towards becoming a democracy, which provoked  questions in progressive academic circles about what the role of the writer and culture would be in a society in which, supposedly racial divisions and limitations had been abolished. Writer and academic Kelwyn Sole, in an article titled, “The role of the writer in a time of transition”, expressed his view that the old ways of analysing society based on racial categories would become less relevant:

“In this period of transition, the analysis of South African cultural and literary forms is also changing. A situation exists where, to my mind, simple and dualistic notions of politics and culture — black vs white, oppressor vs. oppressed—are becoming less useful; and, once one-person-one-vote has been achieved, will have even less relevance in the present form they are conceived and expressed. It is to issues of class and gender oppression, regional and economic imbalances, and specific minority political questions and interests that political writers will have to turn their attention. It is these other concerns, surely, which must remain with writers of a more progressive inclination throughout this transitional period and into the future; and it is to such areas of concern that some writers at least will want to begin to focus their attention and artistry now.”

After the 1994 elections, Achmat experienced a period of “turmoil” about what to write. He relayed his concerns to his friend Ariel Dorfman when he visited South Africa in 1994, Dorfman had recently published Death and the Maiden. He recalled:

“We had an extraordinary luncheon meeting in Cape Town. I had written Death and the Maiden and he was very impressed and Achmat said ‘But what do we do now you know we have Mandela, he is our president- we are now going forwards to a liberated society [so] what is the role of the writer? There are things I would like to write but I don’t dare to’ he said. ‘I feel as if they are too dark. I’m going into a turmoil that maybe I shouldn’t do that.’ And I told him about an anecdote that I remembered from Cuba where I was with a Cuban writer and said to him if you don’t dare then you are in real trouble because nothing should be sacred for the writer and I said that to Achmat as well. I said ‘Achmat, you’ve got to write what’s in your soul, in your heart’. And we spoke about this a lot back and forth and I think out of that meeting was born at least I believe was the way in which he confronted the transition to democracy in South Africa … He realised that one can be committed to revolution and change and at the same time be critical, indeed that it was essential not to lie about the shortcomings and failures of any causes of liberation. He had to be true to the darkness inside him even as he was true to the lightness that he thought was happening in the society. You can’t dispel the great dream of liberation unless you get rid of its nightmares as well. He was combining again the personal and the political.”

Shortly after this conversation, Achmat published two short stories both of which would later form part of Kafka’s Curse, which Dorfman would describe as a “mesmerising, mythical work which proved that South Africa was very different from what was in the headlines”. First came “Mama & Kid Freedom” in Index on Censorship, Volume 24, Number 3 in 1995, followed by “Moving to the Suburbs” published under the title “Kafka’s Curse” in World Literature Today, Volume 70, Number 1, Winter 1996 published by the University of Oklahoma.

Finding a South African literary magazine to publish short stories was a challenge, despite changes introduced in the arts and culture landscape which were supposed to create more publishing opportunities. The implementation of new developments for publishing was uneven. Academic and journalist Alan Finlay noted, in his MA thesis, that Andries Oliphant had described the commercial publishing sector as having ‘regressed’ “in terms of diversity in ownership, as well as in the variety of its output.’” Finlay maintains that publishing collectives such as Timbila, which was critical of government policies such as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy, were sanctioned by the state. With limited options, the search for a publishing house for “Kafka’s Curse” began.

Achmat’s journey with Kwela Books, founded in 1994 “to give a new generation of authors a voice and to document untold, uniquely South African stories”, started in 1997. In a 2004 article, “Celebrating Kwela”, Achmat wrote:

“My journey with Kwela Press began in 1997 when I received a letter from this publisher with the strange but resonant name ‘Kwela’ asking permission to publish one of my stories. I vividly remembered the word ‘kwela’ as an exhortation used by township ‘clevahs’ to give each other courage as they raced alongside moving trains in order to catch a ride, moments before they came to equally vivid ends. I thought it was yet another retro-activist, post-Apartheid fad in search of relevance, trying to reclaim the dead Staffrider spirit.

Curious, but not expecting much, I asked to meet the publisher, who turned out to be this friendly, articulate and unassuming Afrikaans-speaking woman who knew exactly where to get a quick but good meal in Cape Town’s city centre. Within minutes I was offering her the manuscript for my novel ‘Kafka’s Curse’ which I had withheld from my traditional ‘radical’ publishing house that had just sold out to a multinational company. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Annari van der Merwe, Achmat’s publisher, who played a key role in establishing Kwela, recalled their meeting:

“Achmat came down to the offices and I was quite nervous to meet somebody like Achmat that had a name and you know, he was also a political figure. Achmat had never heard of Kwela before and he came to see me and we decided to publish ‘Kafka’s Curse’ and that’s how it started. He was working at the IDT at that time. His office was in Bree Street and he was well-known at that time. I tried to sort of create a little community of writers, Kwela writers, he would be there and he would be so sympathetic and he would be so part of everything. We had these little ‘get togethers’ always very humble affairs.”

Kwela appointed Ivan Vladislavić as the editor of Kafka’s Curse & Three Other Stories. The book comprises four stories and includes a glossary of Afrikaans words and South African slang. The stories are: “Kafka’s Curse”; “The Devil”; “Mamma & Kid Freedom”; and “Lost”. The short story “Kafka’s Curse”, in turn has five parts: Moving into the Suburbs; Majnoen; Malik-ul-Mout; Their Story and Nothing to Confess. “While writing the novel Kafka’s Curse”, Achmat recalled in a 2017 interview, “in which one of the main characters turns into a Magnolia tree branch, I climbed into such a tree in our front yard, perched there for hours, imagining what it was like to be part of a tree. This really amused our neighbours.”

Ivan recalled receiving the manuscript at the beginning of 1997 and praised the dynamic structure of Kafka’s Curse as a brilliant vehicle for the book’s themes and the evolution of its characters. Ivan saw in Kafka’s Curse the hallmarks of a “really skilful writer”. He said:

“When I was editing Kafka’s Curse – a book I should reread actually – I was struck by how the stories fold out of one another. The form of the book mirrors its preoccupations perfectly: you have a chapter devoted to one character, who’s in the process of transforming; then the next chapter shifts focus to a new character and their story, while also showing us the first character and continuing their trajectory of change. And so, it goes on, with one story folding out of another. Only a really skilful writer can find the form that suits the themes and ideas and philosophical groundings of the text so perfectly and I think Achmat does so in this book.”

Achmat dedicated the book to Audrey, his partner and soon to be wife. The couple married in 1998. Nadine Gordimer warmly commended Kafka’s Curse: “Dangor’s prose is that rare achievement: an equivalent in lyrical energy and freshness to its subject. This is a South Africa you haven’t encountered in fiction before. Immensely enjoyable.”

The book marked a turning point in Achmat’s writing. Ivan explained:

“If you look across his whole body of work, the early books like Waiting for Leila or The Z Town Trilogy are more direct and the style is less developed, and they feel like the more directly social or political fictions of the time. But by the time you get to Kafka’s Curse there’s a really different literary sensibility at work. Partly it’s the fantastical elements in the fiction, and partly that the writing has become quite intricate and very adept.”

In 2013, Achmat told literary scholar Aghogho Akpome that he was striving to represent greater complexity in Kafka’s Curse:

“I think what I perhaps tried to do in Kafka’s Curse is to explore rather than demonstrate the fact that human beings are far more layered than you see; are far more complex. Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi is a book I always keep by my side because it reminds me about that complexity… Our history is far more complex than simply black-white, victim-non-victim…”

After Kafka’s Curse A Novella & Three Other Short Stories was published locally, Annari explored ways for it to be published internationally and for that you needed an agent. Annari explained:

“The whole idea of literary agents was unknown in South Africa. In the UK, in particular, unless a submission comes through an agent, the publisher would not even look at it. It won’t get off the slush pile. So, you needed an agent to present it, to mediate between the writer and the original publisher and that’s a very specialised field.”

Annari turned to Isobel Dixon who, Annari said, “was working as a literary agent in London and I knew her of course and Isobel was just starting out as literary agent with Blake Friedman and very enthusiastic and very pleasant and so that was somebody that I could approach.” In a 2021 article about Bitter Fruit, Isobel recalled that Achmat’s writing “came to me in the early days of my publishing life as a rich, mysterious gift. I was fortunate to be asked … to sell international rights to Kafka’s Curse.” It was bought, she wrote, “by a discerning young editor, Dawn Davis, at Pantheon in the United States, hailed as a New York Times Notable Book on publication in 1999, and translated into six languages. The Baltimore Sun wrote: ‘It is entirely wonderful: delicious, moving, mysterious, wise, and profoundly provocative. Read it.’

This marked Achmat’s international literary debut. In praise of Kwela, Achmat wrote:

“Kwela has not crashed into the many barriers, literary and financial, that so many other staffriding ventures have. It is flourishing because it is honest, places quality above fashion, and yet is willing to take on “risky” writers, both established and new. In my case, Kwela helped open international doors that have, in the last seven years, allowed my work to be published in many languages, from Dutch to Hebrew and Russian. Viva Kwela, viva !”

Achmat had also embarked on collaborative work. In the early 1990s he worked with his friend and filmmaker Oliver Schmitz on a film script called “Soft Targets”. Oliver recalled that he had been working on a new project after his film, Mapantsula had been shown to great “critical acclaim” at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. Oliver was struggling with this new project. It was, he said:

“not easy to formulate and to articulate. The project was about Robert McBride (leader of the uMkhonto we Sizwe cell responsible for bombing Magoo’s Bar in Durban in June 1986, killing three civilians) and I had gone to death row about thirty-five times to visit him and done all this ground work and written a script. It was a very lonely space and I looked for a collaborator on this. I spoke to Achmat and he was intrigued and interested and knew some of the background to this story as well and that’s how we really got to know each other better, to work on this script.”

Achmat and Oliver spent “well over a year, maybe two years working on this script.” Although it never got filmed, Oliver enjoyed working with Achmat saying: “I found him an incredibly insightful, gentle human being, who I felt very comfortable with … I spent five years working on a project that didn’t happen, which is not easy for a filmmaker and this relationship I had with him over this time, meant a lot to me.”

In 1996, Achmat wrote the introduction to Paul Weinberg and Marlene Winberg’s book Back to the Land. Paul explained the context and what Achmat brought to a “very important story of South Africa” that “flow(ed) into the present”:

“I started photographing removals and people living on the land, struggling on the land, during the time that the fires were kind of just going throughout South Africa. There was massive activism in an urban sense, but I was also just very interested in the background of the South African story and particularly dispossession. In post-1994, when Derek Hanekom came into his position as Minister of Land and Agriculture, he asked me and …(author and narrative specialist) Marlene Winburg, if we would put together a book around the return to the land and we visited various communities and Achmat was the person we hired to write the introduction around the land story in South Africa and it was great working with Achmat and he did a brilliant job actually, in telling this very important story of South Africa, that as you know, flows into the present.”

By 1999, Achmat was refining chapters of what would become Bitter Fruit and, in the same year Andries Oliphant included one of Achmat’s short stories named “Bitter Fruit” in his edited collection At the Rendezvous of Victory and Other Stories published by Kwela Books in 1999. The title borrowed from Nadine Gordimer’s short story of the same title. According to literary scholar Siphiwo Mahala, the story “had a clear objective of reflecting on the momentous occasion of the triumph of the liberation movement over apartheid”. In the introduction, Oliphant writes: “this anthology of stories attempts to provide a perspective on narrative responses to recent changes in South Africa.”

Ivan Vladislavić described the post-1994 period as an “exciting” time for writers:

“That was an exciting period for writers, with opportunities for travel. It was a few years after the first democratic elections and many institutions in other countries organised events focused on South Africa, gathering writers, artists, musicians who represented the new country. Often the aim was a sort of cultural stocktaking, trying to get a sense of where South African culture had been and where it was now, and also a sense of future directions. What had been accomplished in our literature and what did it want to become. Everyone in the cultural world was talking about these things. The TRC was happening and there was a real ferment around thinking through the past and thinking about the future.”

Achmat was one of those writers who was thinking about the TRC in relation to South Africa’s past and future. He was deeply concerned that by encouraging reconciliation, a “banket amnesia” was being imposed. In his article “Apartheid and the Death of South African Cities”, published in 1999 Achmat warned against “losing one’s past”:

“It is quite unfashionable these days to use apartheid as a reference point when trying to find the roots of South Africa’s economic and political problems. In the name of reconciliation, a blanket amnesia is being imposed on South Africans: what you forget you forgive, and what you forgive you reconcile yourself to. The only problem with this rather generous approach to history is that there are lessons to be learned from the past. This somewhat utilitarian fact aside, there is something distinctly sad about losing one’s past, however bitter one might feel about some of it.”

As in previous decades, Achmat wrestled with what the role of the writer should be. He felt that one of the major challenges writers faced was a fear of taking on “contemporary issues”:

“The biggest challenge I think is psychological, not just for me but for many other writers. Mercifully many of us have been able to make the crossing, as it were, from one side to the other. Let me put it this way: I can’t see how history can be compartmentalised — as if there were something called pre-apartheid South Africa and then a wall came down and wiped the past out and now we suddenly have a post-apartheid or ‘new’ South Africa. There is a greater continuity in our history than we want to recognise and the challenge is to find the continuity and not to get hung up or stuck on genres that are so overused. Nadine Gordimer and I attended a writers’ seminar at the University of Natal today and she made a comment about the number of people who are writing about their childhoods under apartheid — black, white or Indian — as if that’s the only experience we’ve had. People shy away from contemporary issues because they are difficult to deal with: they are complex and they test your loyalties — or your prejudices. As a writer, if you can’t overcome those things, you’ve really got a problem.”