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Freedom on a frontier? The double bind of (white) postapartheid South African literature

Around the turn of the twentieth century the early phase of ‘transition’ morphed into a sociopolitical category variously described as ‘post-transition’ (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 1–2), ‘post-anti-apartheid’ (Kruger, ‘Black Atlantics’ 35) and ‘post-postapartheid’ (Chapman, ‘Conjectures’ 15). Kruger’s neologism ‘post-anti-apartheid’ signifies a period beyond apartheid, where the writing subject is, at last, delivered from the oppositional stance signified by ‘anti’ – no longer compelled to counter the material effects of the ideology of apartheid, whether by means of plotting, or overall sentiment, be this moral, ethical or political. This sense of remission from the prison house of the past is key to the way the term ‘postapartheid’ has broadly come to be understood: as a deliverance from the constraints – the shackles – of endlessly opposing legislated racism that relied on a succession of states of emergency and a culture of political assassination and torture. Eventually, such oppositional struggle writing had become so repetitive, and so dreary, that Albie Sachs made his call for a provisional ban on the notion of culture as a ‘weapon of the struggle’ in his 1991 ANC working paper, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’.

Indeed, if there is one common thread in published research on postapartheid South African writing, it is the sense that the country’s writing, resisting classification as a result of its ‘unresolved heterogeneity’,¹ has now become even more diverse, as befits its newfound liberty, its deliverance from what one might term the closure of apartheid logocentrism. In keeping with this new script about the literature of postapartheid, Frenkel and MacKenzie propose that ‘scores of writers [in the years 1999–2009] have produced works of extraordinary range and diversity’ (1). These writers have ‘heeded Albie Sachs’s call to free themselves from the ‘ghettos of the apartheid imagination’, with ‘new South African literature accordingly [reflecting] a wide range of concerns and styles’ (1). This literature is ‘unfettered to the past, but may still consider it in new ways’ or ‘ignore it altogether’ (2).

Without contradicting Frenkel and MacKenzie,² I wish to suggest a line of reasoning that departs from the theme of being ‘freed from the past’. In my view, a significant section of postapartheid literature finds itself less liberated from the past than engaged in the persistent re-emergence of this past. Frenkel offers the figure of the palimpsest to explain how post-transitional writing allows for ‘a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it’ (25). I argue for an even stronger emphasis, and contend that in the hands of Kevin Bloom, Antjie Krog and Jonny Steinberg, the three writers who form the main focus of this chapter, postapartheid literature is inescapably bound to the time of before. A compulsive reiteration of certain South African literary tropes is evident in their work, particularly those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I argue that much postapartheid literature written in detection mode is distinguished by strong rather than weak or merely vestigial continuity with the past. Such ateleologial (re)cycling – decidedly against the grain of a widely alleged rupture with the past – runs counter to theses that postapartheid literature is mostly novel, or substantially different from earlier South African writing. However, it is also true that the very reprocessing I hope to uncover gives rise to features of authorial voice that are characteristic of a postapartheid generation of writing, for reasons I elaborate below. The argument about continuity or discontinuity between apartheid and postapartheid in South African literature, I suggest, needs stronger conceptual treatment of how past and present are disjunctively conjoined;³ the time of now-and-going-forward and the time of history, or what-has-been, are, I propose, mixed in a way that suggests the conception of a split temporality – altering from a bad ‘before’ (apartheid) to a better ‘after’ (postapartheid) – is perhaps overworked. It might indeed be more accurate to describe what occurs ‘in’ postapartheid as a reconfigured temporality in which Hal Foster’s ‘future-anterior’, or the ‘will-have-been’, persistently surfaces. This is consistent, to a large extent, with Grant Farred’s sense of a doubled temporality (see Chapter 1), in which the supposed ‘epochal progress’ of postapartheid ‘quickly showed itself to be less a march toward an ideal political future – let alone present – than a new democracy living in a double temporality’ (‘Not-Yet Counterpartisan’ 592–593).⁴ Foster’s proposition is invoked by Ashraf Jamal in a critique of certain conceptions of South African literature. Jamal writes:

My reason for this emphasis [on the future-anterior] rests on the assumption that South African literature in English has elected to sanctify and memorialize its intent, producing a literature informed by a messianic, liberatory, or reactive drive, hence a struggle literature (which precedes liberation from apartheid) and a post-apartheid literature (which establishes a democratic state of play). These phases, however, are hallucinatory projections, or candid attempts to generate a cultural transparency: see where we have come from; see where we now are; see where we are going. The logic is overdetermined, teleological, and in effect diminishes our ability to grasp that which is impermanent, hybrid ... (‘Bullet through the Church’ 11)

Jamal identifies what he perceives to be a major fault in conceptions of South African writing: a fixation with going somewhere, of getting from a dead-heavy past to a re-envisioned future. Instead, Jamal proposes that the South African literary imaginary contains ‘a latent sensation that South Africa as a country suffers the unease of never having begun’ (16, Jamal’s emphasis). Following Raymond Williams, Jamal argues that if nineteenth-century realism stems from the presumption of a ‘knowable community, such a hermetic logic fails to apply to a heterogeneous outpost such as South Africa’ (17).

It is with a similar sense of unknowability amid a scene of unresolved heterogeneity in South African culture at large that the texts I examine in this chapter, Bloom’s Ways of Staying, Krog’s Begging to be Black and Steinberg’s Midlands, take on their burden of (re)discovery, as if nothing can be taken as known, again, and as always. Indeed a felt anxiety, again and renewed, about ‘never [quite] having begun’ lies at the heart of the affective charge in such texts. Now, however, the notion of postapartheid, and the popular, widely shared social imperative of a desired teleology, a clean break from the past, raises the stakes considerably. The writing of Bloom, Krog and Steinberg, though sharp and unsentimental, is, consequently, suffused with concern about the clear failure of postapartheid’s grand narrative. This, despite the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to set the story of the new South Africa on the right track. As Shane Graham comments in his book on the TRC and the South African literature that followed in its wake, the Commission ultimately succeeded in setting up a perceived ‘contrapuntal dialogue’ that enables a ‘reconceptualization of such fundamental spatio-temporal constructs as the dichotomies between public and private, past and present’ (South African Literature 33). Here, indeed, is a necessary form of ‘plot loss’, a corrective to the always-looming teleology inherent in the very signifier ‘post-’, whether this be understood as ‘post-transitional’ or ‘post-apartheid’. Periodicity in its more commonly understood sense, as in the named phases of time marked as ‘transitional’, ‘post-transitional’, and so on, thus runs into a mash-up of temporalities in which the time of before intrudes on the present.⁵ In using the term ‘mash-up’, I draw on both the literal meaning of a collision of forces implicit in the verb ‘mash’ and on the composite term’s use in music and video as ‘blend, bootleg and bastard pop/rock’ in a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs (Wikipedia). The ‘bastard’ blend of styles and versions, in this description, exhibits a violently reintegrated (mashed) character whose pulpiness defies pre-imagined, distinct shapes.

In Ways of Staying, Begging to be Black and Midlands, the felt torsion of oneself becoming implicated in such destabilising mash-ups, and of seeing others undergoing a similar grinding or crushing, is almost obsessively focused on a single, if contested, signifier – that ultimate South African scare word: ‘crime’. Not only is ‘crime’ an everyday matter, integral to the daily newsfeed – with which it is complicit in the constitution of a ‘wound culture’⁶ – but it also has the potential to wreck the progress, the socially and economically necessary teleology, of the ‘rainbow nation’. The spectre of ‘crime’ is, indeed, the joker in the pack for South Africa’s negotiated settlement, creating as it does uncomfortable connections with the apartheid past, both in everyday life and in the realm that more immediately concerns us here, namely the felt imaginaries discernible in ‘transitional’ or ‘post-transitional’ writing.

Given the extraordinary saturation of the signifier ‘crime’ in postapartheid South Africa, a brief examination of social discourse in relation to this resonant (though problematic) term is necessary. The bogey of ‘crime’ has possibly been one of the most prevalent facts of life in South Africa over the past twenty years or so, as scholars such as Steinberg, Altbeker, Gary Kynoch and others have shown. Any street survey in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town that asks what the country’s biggest ‘problems’ are will likely yield the answer ‘crime’, followed by that other ‘c’-word, ‘corruption’. This chimes with perceptions of criminal corruption elsewhere, as argued above in relation to conditions in which ‘felonious’ states are able to thrive in the world’s postcolonies, which now include postapartheid South Africa.

The images of a ‘spectre’ and a ‘bogey’ are used because, although a statistical consensus about the incidence of crime in postapartheid South Africa remains elusive, the fear of crime has escalated, particularly but by no means exclusively among white South Africans. As commentator Sisonke Msimang writes,

[i]t is only possible to be haunted by the death of a stranger when you are convinced that he could have been you or one of yours. Perhaps this is why South Africans are obsessed with crime. It looms large because although it disproportionately affects poor black people, it also affects enough middle-class people for it to have become a ‘national question’. (‘Caught’ n.p.)

Crime, with or without the scare quotes, has over the past two decades replaced ‘apartheid’ as one of the country’s most conspicuous, and contested, terms. Steinberg argues that white fears of crime as a form of retribution have been endemic but greatly exaggerated in the postapartheid period, although he nevertheless acknowledges the high incidence of criminal violence in the country as a whole (‘Crime’ 25–27). Altbeker similarly notes the exceptionally high rates of crime, but casts doubt on the popular myth that South Africa is the world’s ‘crime capital’ (‘Puzzling Statistics’ 8). Echoing Steinberg, Altbeker adds, however, that the country’s murder rates are ‘far higher than those of the industrialized world’ (8). Assessments such as these, which acknowledge an unusually high crime rate – ‘near the top of the world rankings’, Altbeker concedes (98) – nevertheless cast doubt on what one might call ‘urban legends’ about crime; as such, they are fairly typical.⁷ Research findings in this area understandably seek to distance themselves from what the Comaroffs describe as ‘mythostats’ (‘Figuring Crime’ 215).

Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ are certainly at issue in the many plot twists conjured up by disgruntled whites in the ‘new South Africa’ deal. The frequent invocation of crime statistics is perceived by many as a ‘white whine’, or an updated version of the persistent ‘black peril’ metanarrative in colonial and neocolonial South Africa.⁸ Reading this narrative of fearfulness sympathetically, Kynoch comments that ‘[t]he crime epidemic is the most visceral reminder for whites of their diminishing status and protestations against crime provide an outlet for articulating anxieties about the new order without openly resorting to racist attacks’ (2013, 439). Altbeker, in turn, argues that ‘fear of crime has sometimes become a conveniently “apolitical” vehicle through which a disenfranchised elite can mourn its loss of power without sounding nostalgic for an unjust past’ (Country at War 64). Kynoch concurs, though he points out that ‘[h]igh crime rates have been a feature of life in many black townships and informal settlements for the past hundred years or more’ (2012, 3). He notes that this is a history that has been charted in a significant number of scholarly works, in which an urban African population is victimised by police and criminals in what are often politicised conflicts (2012, 3).⁹ Steinberg also makes this point, arguing that the flip side of whites being let off so lightly post-1994 – ‘no expropriation, no nationalisation, not even a tax increase’ – was that ‘a criminal culture whose appetite for commodities and violence was legendary in the townships arrived in the [white] suburbs’ (‘Crime’ 26). Crime, according to Steinberg, began to haunt white South Africans such that around dinner tables

a very different story about South Africa’s transition began to circulate, and, while the finer details varied, the heart of the tale did not: it was about somebody who had been held up at gunpoint, another who had been shot, another who had been kidnapped in her own car. The anecdotes of guns and blood spread like an airborne disease, becoming something of a contagion. By the end of the millennium, much of white South Africa had died a thousand deaths in their own homes, around their own dinner tables ... Many whites believed that Mandela’s discourse of reconciliation was rendered irrelevant by a far deeper, congenital hostility to the presence of whites at the end of the continent, and that this hostility found expression in violent crime. (26)

Steinberg convincingly demonstrates that this ‘diagnosis of crime’ was ‘spectacularly wrong’ (27).¹⁰ Providing evidence, he argues that in fact white South Africans were far less likely to be killed in their own homes than their black counterparts, who continued to bear the brunt of crime in the postapartheid period (27). And yet even Steinberg’s finely balanced account makes the familiar gesture of offering a qualifier about crime being epidemic in South Africa, regardless of race:

Levels of middle-class victimisation, both black and white, are high enough for just about the entire middle class to have experienced violent crime at close quarters. It is no exaggeration to say that almost every South African, whether poor or rich, has either had a gun shoved in her face, or has witnessed the trauma of a loved one who has had a gun shoved in her face. (27–28)

One may draw two conclusions from this: first, whatever actual crime levels may be, and regardless of the distribution of this ‘epidemic’ among the sectors of South African society, discourse about crime – especially emanating from whites – accelerated significantly in the transition period, thereby justifying the use of terms such as ‘mythostats’. Second, taking into account this tendency to amplification, it remains clear that social violence in South Africa in the transition period (as in previous periods), manifested in the form of criminal behaviour, was in fact ‘epidemic’ by comparison with most other emerging economies.¹¹ Paradoxically, then, this also means that although, from a critical or scholarly point of view, one should not give undue credence to the exaggerations of white discourse about crime, this discourse nevertheless provides evidence of a state of being that is itself noteworthy. Steinberg, who goes so far as to call this a ‘white phenomenology of crime’(28), continues:

For a milieu in which the idea of mortality has always been hitched exclusively to the elderly and the frail, the constant threat of lethal violence is akin to an earthquake. The profundity of the fear of crime is deep enough to go all the way down, to the existential itself, to the cornerstones of one’s relation to the world ... ‘Crime’ has nestled inside the most exquisitely intimate and private domains of white experience. It has taken its place among the categories through which people experience the fundamentals of their existence. (28)

If one adds to this amped-up sense of existential fragility the fact that white South Africans in general inhabit the country on the ‘shakiest of pretexts’ (Steinberg citing JM Coetzee in Youth), then one gets a sense of the abysmal dislocation that is integral to the experience of such South Africans. Coetzee’s young Cape Town protagonist in Youth implicitly knows that he ‘must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagines he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger’ (Youth 17).

In the discussion that follows, I deal with three nonfiction narratives of postapartheid conditions by white writers (Bloom, Krog and Steinberg) as a way of investigating changing modes of address in the broad category of ‘postapartheid’ writing. In making claims on this basis, I look at one of several seams – white creative nonfiction in what I call detection mode – in the greater patchwork of postapartheid literary culture. While one is loath to reintroduce categorisation in terms of race, the latter remains a stubbornly persistent feature, both implicit and explicit, in postapartheid modes of expression. The critic should be aware, however, that, as with literary culture during apartheid, totalising claims on the basis of a limited number of writers – especially in terms of race – are sure to founder. At best, the critic details diverse and divergent acts of writing under a nominal but ultimately (and necessarily) obscure totality in which particular renderings are both distinctive as parts, and also definitive in their own right. In this case, I am particularly interested in Steinberg’s notion of a ‘white phenomenology of crime’, and how white writers of the generation after Gordimer and Coetzee may be said to express this. It is a state of affairs that has loomed large since 1994, and it seems appropriate to ask whether and how it reconnects with or disconnects from the longue durée of the colonial, neocolonial-segregationist, and apartheid past. Naturally, a view of black writing in which crime and corruption emerge as major themes¹² inevitably results in a differently inflected version of postapartheid writing that disrupts any coherent sense of literary totality. Part and whole – and indeed the relationship between the two – remain as vexed a conjunction as ever in South African writing.

Ways of Staying

It is precisely the white ‘soft spot’ in the postapartheid imaginary described above – an accelerating sense of personal threat over and above an abiding sense of not belonging – that both Bloom’s and Steinberg’s texts deal with. It is a sore area that Bloom targets in his 2009 nonfiction work, Ways of Staying – the title being a play on Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel, Ways of Dying.¹³ Bloom’s book is noteworthy not only because it homes in on the condition of existential fragility identified by Coetzee and Steinberg, but also because it eludes the category of ‘white whinger’. The book grew out of an event that shook Bloom’s life to its core – the apparently senseless murder of his cousin, fashion designer Richard Bloom, aged twenty-seven, along with his partner Brett Goldin, who was twenty-eight at the time. According to the account by Antony Sher, who researched the incident for a documentary, Goldin and Bloom were carjacked as they approached their vehicles after a party on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard. The year was 2006, a good twelve years into democracy. Their abducters were a band of young men high on crystal meth (or ‘tik’, as it is known in the Cape) looking for a car to steal. Sher takes up the story:

The group held them up at gunpoint, stole one of their cars, stripped and bound them, and forced them into the boot. They then drove to a motorway a few miles away, and onto a traffic island. Perhaps they were intending to abandon Brett and Richard alive and make their getaway, but the car got stuck in sand. After a long, frenzied struggle to free it, during which their naked victims were forced to help, they shot them dead. Either the mixture of frustration and intoxication led to the murderous act, or – as the men later claimed in their confessions – their victims cried out and had to be silenced. (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.)

Sher’s subsequent comment distinguishes his sense of horror from the more routine kind of white discourse about crime. The story is chilling, Sher continues, ‘because it isn’t about racism or sex, or anything other than chance’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.). The timing of Goldin and Bloom’s departure from the party ‘just happened to coincide with the group driving past’. The targets could have been ‘[a]ny of the other guests ... someone in the next street, it could have been you or me’. The renowned Shakespearean-actor-turned-writer concludes that his ‘birthplace seemed changed in a way that I didn’t like. Nowhere felt safe anymore’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.).