An enduring sense of deep historical time continues to anchor and guide writing by African novelists, no less so as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. One of the most powerful of such fictions lately is the debut novel by South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni, whose The Broken River Tent plays out as a psychic drama in which Maqoma, the nineteenth-century Xhosa chief who fought the British as they tried to settle the Cape Colony, is in dialogue with Phila, a young South African negotiating the disappointments of his country after the demise of apartheid. Ntabeni is in touch, imaginatively, with a long line of historical novelists which begins with such iconic figures as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, who in the early twentieth century revisited historical episodes of 100 years previously. While The Broken River Tent follows Chinua Achebe’s example in taking some reference points from European modernism, it does so without interpreting the colonial encounter through the paradigm of classical tragedy. Instead, following a recent revival of the militancy of South Africa’s Black Consciousness era, Ntabeni’s invocation of Maqoma implies a renewed emphasis on anti-(neo)colonial vigilance.