Читать книгу Losing the Plot - Leon de Kock - Страница 8

1

Introduction

This is not a study of postapartheid South African literature. Rather, it is study in that vast field of writing. I do not believe a coherent a study of this dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus is possible, short of the encyclopaedic method (a curated series of topics written by many different writers, or alphabetical listings). Such a ‘companion’ approach remains the default option, and it is duly taken by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, along with their 41 fellow contributors to The Cambridge History of South African Literature, and by Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie in The Columbia Guide to South African Literature since 1945. And still, as these compilers might themselves acknowledge, there will be significant gaps. This book, in contrast to such works of general coverage, proposes a way of examining the distinctive features of South African literature after apartheid. Put differently, it delineates certain through-lines that characterise postapartheid writing.¹ Although these lines are, in my view, prominent and important, they remain a partial set of concerns. This relation of single study to corpus may be viewed via the analogy of a hologram. Take this angle of view, and the shape emerges thus; tilt the hologram surface, or change your own angle of looking, and the object under view suddenly looks quite different. All the shapes brought into view, in their provisional wholeness, have validity – call them alternative manifestations of the complexity of the entity under examination. Such an approach allows the making of bold conceptual propositions without resorting to the fixity, and the closure, of all-consuming metanarratives. It means that in advancing a theory about the corpus of work under scrutiny, or more accurately within that body of work as a whole, one’s conceptual model is acknowledged as partial (e.g. Shaun Viljoen, Richard Rive: A Partial Biography). Like Viljoen, one acknowledges, in addition, one’s own partiality too: this is my reading of things, or my reading. Other readings are possible, indeed necessary. Please join the party. Write your own study. But for a moment, consider this one. Perhaps it will influence your own perspective on the field we share, though from different angles of view. This book, then, in full awareness of the risks inherent in such an undertaking, proposes a set of related ideas as a way of conceptualising certain emphases, perhaps, in South African literature after apartheid.

In the course of this study, I mention, and discuss, many writers and, in selected instances, this book offers readings of particular works. These readings lie at the heart of Losing the Plot, as they both instantiate and elucidate major threads of argument. In all such cases, however, the particular work so discussed serves to illuminate the larger idea to which it is yoked, and the reading of the work concerned should be seen as suggestive of trends. There are many worthy writers who are not mentioned in the pages of this study, and a great number of instructive works that do not get the readings they deserve. However, to include everything, and to discuss all works of importance, is both impossible and undesirable. Such an undertaking would result in a shapeless monster, so vastly populated is the field of postapartheid writing, and so varied the directions in which the literature goes.

Still, one particular line does suggest itself quite emphatically, and this is the key notion, or moment, captured in the term ‘transition’ – that putatively transformative shift from one ‘state’ to another in which an entire nation found a form of secular redemption from purgatorial political conditions in the first half of the 1990s. Following this line, Losing the Plot proposes a way of looking at the field of South African writing in the 1990s, 2000s and the current decade that pivots around a continuingly problematised notion of transition. In the contextual, if not immediate, background of most postapartheid writing, as much as in the popular South African imagination, the transition or switch to a ‘new dispensation’ serves as a founding marker in the ‘new’ nation’s collective consciousness. The putative ‘transition’ – a word defined as a ‘movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another’ (Dictionary.com) – ushered in the resplendent idea of a ‘rainbow nation’, a catchphrase coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu,² who also chaired South Africa’s public (and symbolic) transitional gateway mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The promise of the rainbow nation rapidly became popular mythology, replete with multicultural adverts projecting racial bonhomie. It led also, and inevitably, to an energised counter-discourse which followed the epochal events of 1994, a dialectical, many-sided engagement typical of the combative South African civil sphere, gaining force as the new democracy gradually appeared to lose its lustre, especially after the Mandela presidency of 1994–1998.

This study, then, proceeds from the premise that an initial wave of optimism, evident in the early phase of upbeat transitional ferment,³ was followed by a gradual and deepening sense of ‘plot loss’⁴ among South African writers and intellectuals of all stripes. That much was conceded even by the man that now serves as the country’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who commented near the end of Thabo Mbeki’s reign as president that the democratic project was not a dream deferred but ‘a dream betrayed’.⁵ From the early 2000s, escalating service-delivery protests in poor communities across the country – led by the very people meant to be the primary beneficiaries of liberation – suggested that a wide-ranging sense of dismay had taken root.⁶ The middle classes – by no means exclusively white – gave fulsome expression to such disappointment, too. Whether this general public disillusionment proceeded from a left-wing point of view, a nonracial stance, an anti-corruption position, or a sense of insecurity as crime statistics rose, the signs were ominous. Neoliberal economic policies were perceived as blocking economic transformation and severely impeding the social-democratic revolution of the liberation struggle. A new racial exclusivism emblematised by Thabo Mbeki’s ‘Native Club’ ushered in a resurgence of what Xolela Mangcu in 2008 described as ‘racial nativism’.⁷ Alarming disclosures about crime and corruption in a wobbly criminal justice system all contributed to the belief that the longer-term transition was going off the rails.⁸ In Anthony O’Brien’s words, the post-1994 years saw a ‘normalization of the political economy’ which he typified, following Graham Pechey, as ‘the neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (3).⁹ Such looming disillusionment, if not disorientation, rooted in a social imaginary that continues to hold dear the founding tenets of the ‘new’ democracy, effectively sets the scene for postapartheid literary culture. It creates the conditions for a wide-ranging investigation into the causes of the perceived inversion, or perversion, of the country’s reimagined destiny, a derailing that has widely come to be regarded as criminal. Hence the remarkable efflorescence of crime writing in the post-liberation period, in both fictional detective stories and nonfiction works of ‘true crime’, not to mention critical analyses of this work.¹⁰ In various chapters in this study, I consider the manner in which crime authors Antony Altbeker, Angela Makholwa, Deon Meyer, Sifiso Mzobe, Mike Nicol, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Jonny Steinberg and Mandy Wiener seek to redefine the locus of public virtue in a context in which the boundaries between right and wrong have blurred. It is a context of social disorder, typical of the late-modern postcolony, in which the signs by which we read the social have, in Jean and John Comaroff’s description, become ‘occulted’,¹¹ i.e. obscured by contending regimes of information and legitimation. Unlike the situation during apartheid, when all good, or even half-good, writers knew who was right and who wrong, the postapartheid milieu is less easily legible.¹² As in other postcolonies in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and elsewhere, this is a context in which, as the Comaroffs write, ‘social order appears ever more impossible to apprehend, violence appears ever more endemic, excessive, and transgressive, and police come, in the public imagination, to embody a nervous state under pressure’ (‘Criminal Obsessions’ 803).¹³

Such wayward, hard-to-read social conditions require exacting and forensic examination, which is what crime writing sets out to do, holding up to the light South Africa’s reconstituted public sphere and finding it riddled with symptoms of criminal pathology. Crime writing’s generic inclinations come conveniently to hand, since the crime story typically sets out to pinpoint the culprit, or, in the tale’s implicitly wider terms, the sources of social and political perversity. I see such acts of writing as works of social detection; the underlying context that gives rise to them may be related to both immediate pressures on the ground and more extensive transnational conditions. The diagnostic works of crime writers refract a real but perverted transformation in which the postcolonies of the late-modern world are awash with criminality despite a heightened preoccupation with law and (dis)order.¹⁴ In particular, the ‘criminalisation of the state’ is hardly peculiar to South Africa but rather a common feature of postcolonial polities, of which the postapartheid state is but a belated example.¹⁵

While many postapartheid writers choose to write about anything they like, a large number of authors seem compelled to chronicle the grit of urban existence in South Africa. This may be an aspect of a transnational impulse to narrate the textures of disorder in the global south (not to mention the faltering north), charting African destinies more widely now that Azania had come about (except it was still called South Africa) and was no better or worse than other developing regions. Some academics began seeking broader connections in the global south, including the Antipodes, while nonfiction scribes like Steinberg found stories of displacement and reconnection both inside and outside the once ‘beloved country’, from Liberia to New York to Somalia and back to Johannesburg and Cape Town. A new wave of crime writers and speculative fiction innovators sought answers in a dystopian, entangled global scene where individual destinies traverse connected cities. The post-millennium hangover was not confined to any one place, and the exceptionalism (famously outed by Mahmood Mamdani¹⁶) that apartheid had once conferred on South Africa was now really gone for good. As South African writers and scholars, we found ourselves tainted by the more general rot of a neoliberal world order of hyper-capitalism.¹⁷ But we also found an almighty stink at home, where venality had taken root, not only in the place where political virtue had once seemed to reside, but everywhere else, too. The scramble for position, privilege and wealth was the new contagion, and writers were overwhelmed with an abundance of ready-to-hand plots.

The shift towards social forensics was more than mere opportunism or clever marketing, and from the 2000s, the quest to uncover what’s going on in an obscured public sphere became a consuming obsession for many writers. Ventures into the heart of the country, exemplified by Steinberg’s Midlands, reveal rebarbative forms of social interaction, a disorienting return to the violence of the frontier. Public levels of distress rise (and fall) with predictable regularity as each new media exposé uncovers the latest instance of state corruption, cronyism or, worse still, criminal neglect of and violence against citizens. Lately, the hashtag wars (such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) have come into play as a means of social mobilisation via broad and instantaneous dissemination of information. Government’s counter-efforts in the information wars include the Secrecy Bill,¹⁸ as well as growing influence over the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the Independent newspaper group, and the New Age newspaper. Hence Meyer’s acute fictional analysis of warring information regimes in Heart of the Hunter, and Orford’s Gallows Hill, which may likewise be read as a form of fictionalised reconnaisance, a quest to uncover reliable, inside information.¹⁹

Postapartheid writing constitutes an investigation into, and a search for, the ‘true’ locus of civil virtue in decidedly disconcerting social conditions, in an overall context of transition.²⁰ I have chosen not to follow this line through Gordimer and Coetzee, the latter’s 1999 novel Disgrace rendering problematic any easy notion of transformative reconciliation in the South African body politic, as does Gordimer’s final opus, No Time Like the Present. In this novel, her main characters, ‘having worked so hard to install democracy ... see its fragile stability threatened by poverty, unemployment, AIDS, government scandal, tribal loyalties, contested elections and the influx of refugees from other African countries’.²¹ One could equally take a view of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat as twisted love stories, respectively on the cusp of, and beyond, transition. Likewise, one might read the novels of Mandla Langa – The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, in particular – as telling parables about the ambiguities of power in post-liberation conditions, along with similar novels by Zakes Mda, while the works of Zoë Wicomb reveal the enduring intractability of race and gender issues, despite constitutional freedom (David’s Story, Playing in the Light and October). And so one could go on, including Etienne van Heerden’s complex meditations on the slippage between past and present in works such as In Love’s Place, 30 Nights in Amsterdam and Klimtol; Breyten Breytenbach’s reflective lyricism in Dog Heart, with its focus on ambiguous transformations that give the lie to notions of communitarianism implicit in rainbowism; Ivan Vladislavić’s articulation, via Aubrey Tearle in The Restless Supermarket, of the persistence of the old despite the new; Achmat Dangor’s wry depiction of the torsions of power in Bitter Fruit, which sees a post-liberation state ‘bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither principle nor compromise’(154). More, too: Nadia Davids, Rayda Jacobs, Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Njabulo Ndebele, Eben Venter and still others, too numerous to mention let alone discuss equally within the confines of a single study. All of them, in one way or another, can be seen to be testing the limits, and the possible breaches, of a reconfigured sense of probity in a public sphere so bewilderingly remixed, and so seemingly in a state of ‘plot loss’, that almost nothing can be taken for granted.

Rather than conduct a Cook’s tour through postapartheid literary works on the basis of how they unsettle the founding myth of transition, this study seeks to trace some of their internal dynamics. It asks the question: what formal patterns emerge from postapartheid writing, in relation to a widespread sense that the transition has been derailed?²² While such writing includes diverse forms, including popular and nonfiction, the field is limited mainly to narrative. (In selected cases, I include Afrikaans works.) A more general bifurcation seems to have taken place on the formal level of plot and plotting in postapartheid narratives: one strain – particularly genre fiction and incident-heavy nonfiction – tends towards a playing up of plot, while another tends to downplay this aspect, as in much literary fiction. In underplotted work, writers seem to take the position that, given the refractoriness, and the unpredictability, of the unfolding postapartheid experiment, the writer acts as a kind of camera or projector, throwing images onto a screen – for example, the eye of Milla in Agaat, and the news clippings in Van Niekerk’s convulsive play Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W; the various photographers in Vladislavić’s Double Negative; the imprint of gender and race upon Zoë Wicomb’s characters; the autobiographical ‘I’ introjected into the subject of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears. In works such as these, plot plays a lesser role. For Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, the ‘ambitious hero ... stands in as a figure of the reader’s efforts to construct meanings in even larger wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present and future in a sentient shape’ (48). Such plotting, implying as it does an near-omniscient grasp that is capable of totalising experience in time, is eschewed by certain writers, often the more ‘literary’ ones. Of course, there is imaginative invention of events purely for the sake of entertainment, and there is plotting, as in putting together a frame or adding to a palimpsest for the recovery, or rendition, of that which is perceived to be the ground of the insistently ‘real’. Rita Barnard notes that significant postapartheid novels like Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney, Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Van Niekerk’s Agaat and Wicomb’s David’s Story ‘have multilayered plot lines’. Barnard argues: ‘Their forms, one might say, are palimpsestic: the narrative oscillates between contemporary events and parallel (or originary) events in the past’ (‘Rewriting the Nation’ 660). The layerings of plot, in Barnard’s argument, serve to inscribe the mark of the real (events) on the palimpsest of the aesthetic/cultural record.²³ Barnard reminds her readers, too, that the ‘most characteristic and pervasive tropes’ in postapartheid writing, unearthed by Shane Graham in his study South African Literature after the Truth Commission, are the archive, the palimpsest, and excavation, along with digging and holes (657).

At a deeper level, the impulse to under-invent can be read as a yielding to the real, in this case because the meaning of what’s going on out there, as well as the substance – increasingly the single most urgent issue in public life – is perceived to have been occulted. To a large extent, this precludes the need for, indeed possibility of, imaginative reconstruction. Conversely, genre practitioners, crime writers in particular, overplay plot, dealing with the experience of occultation by turning it into a process of search and discovery, and often exaggerating for effect. This ‘solving the crime’ approach acts as an analogy for detecting the source of public misgovernance or private malfeasance, or (as often occurs) both. These, of course, are very real problems. The thickly plotted crime novel, then, seeks to capture the perverse details of plot loss in its search for representational adequation²⁴ of actual, lived conditions. This is a feature not only of genre fiction but also of ‘true crime’ stories, a dynamic form of writing in postapartheid conditions.

The inclination to yield to the real, apart from its salience transnationally,²⁵ also picks up from the TRC’s emphasis on witnessing and (re)discovery, and from the perceived need to excavate and confront previously concealed or repressed forms of truth, as Graham suggests. Narrative forms, especially post-2000, continue the TRC ethos of investigating perversities by folding these into a past-present conjunction. This is done either in nonfiction writing that follows an ‘evidential paradigm’, implicitly following the example of Carlo Ginzburg in his work Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (see Chapter 3), or in generic fictions founded on decidedly real conditions: human trafficking in Andrew Brown and Diale Tlholwe (Refuge and Counting the Coffins, respectively); farm murders and their complex causes in Karin Brynard (Plaasmoord, translated as Weeping Waters); inter-gender violence and abuse in Angela Makholwa (Black Widow Society); abuse of women and children in Margie Orford’s novels; public corruption in Mike Nicol (the Revenge Trilogy); corrupt policemen exploiting civil violence in Roger Smith (Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood). In nonfiction, a slew of writers cut to the quick about law enforcement, among them Antony Altbeker and Kevin Bloom.

My argument is structured around the following set of concepts: Chapter 2, crime fiction; Chapter 3, nonfiction; Chapter 4 focuses on the influence of, and ferment among, literary-cultural analysts, from the ‘spring is rebellious’ phase in the early 1990s and the critical reception of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying to the dialogue between Ashraf Jamal and JM Coetzee concerning South Africa as a ‘pathological’ space. Chapter 5 traces the accelerating sense of derailment and its effect upon the ailing body of the no-longer-new South Africa, with a focus on the noir-like detachment of Roger Smith, and Makholwa’s ‘chick-lit’ neo-noir frame in a tale of revenge against patriarchal abuse. The next part of this chapter follows nonfictional investigations into crises of policing and corrupt dealings in the criminal justice system, taken up by Steinberg, Altbeker and Mandy Wiener. Chapter 6 traces the powerful influence of the new media on reading as well as writing. Here, I examine recent nonfiction by Mark Gevisser and Mzilikazi wa Afrika as well as the journalism of Greg Marinovich. Chapter 7 dwells on fiction’s implicit response to this onrush of the real, examining Ivan Vladislavić’s 2010 novel Double Negative, and then looking at a series of recent fictional works that have reported on states of public pathology, as relayed through the perceptual registers of fictional subjects.

In summary, current South African writing is characterised by the rise of both genre fiction and creative nonfiction as ways of responding to a widely perceived sickness in the body politic, where the plot, metaphorically speaking, is thought to have been lost, and there is a premium on uncovering actual conditions. The real issue, for writers, is to find the right story, or to get the story right.

Conceptualising the ‘transition’: Ambiguity and temporality

This study proposes that the concept of transition – its uptake, problematisation and forensic-diagnostic investigation – serves as a pivot in postapartheid literary culture. In view of this emphasis, the term itself needs to be unpacked. Whether it references a sceptical ‘transition’ to democracy or an optimistic ‘democratic miracle’, this moment indubitably signals a shift in post-1994 South African literature from the centrality of apartheid.²⁶ The process most commonly described as the ‘transition to democracy’ has been well documented across several disciplines.²⁷ It is common cause that the year 1994, when South Africa finally became a fully inclusive political entity, serves as a decisive marker in the country’s history, similar to the shorthand of 1910 and 1961, when the country became a Union and a Republic, respectively, or 1948, when the National Party rose to power and proceeded to consolidate colonial segregation into the notorious ideology of apartheid.

The historic elections in 1994 ushered in a remarkable series of changes, bringing reforms in social welfare, housing, electrification, and the like, although terms such as ‘silent revolution’²⁸ and tags like ‘Mandela’s miracle’²⁹ suggest a bloodless turnaround, a ‘quiet coup’. The changeover of power was there for all to see in the structures and make-up of government, along with the superstructure of the new Constitution, though it was far less discernible on the ground, where there was little evidence of the elimination of severe economic disparities. The transition was of course manifestly, and symbolically, dramatised in the public domain by means of the TRC, from which flowed a quintessential postapartheid work, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull. This work is key because it inaugurates major trends, both in its content and its forms of address. It brings into stark relief what Mark Sanders calls the ‘ambiguities of witnessing’ as a through-line in postapartheid discourse, including the ‘new’ South Africa’s reinvented literary culture. At once testimony and witnessing that might enable national healing, the TRC also set a precedent for writing up the real, disclosing and uncovering, as an urgent priority. For Sanders, testimony is neither ‘fiction’ nor ‘truth’ but both: fundamentally unverifiable, it ‘[facilitates] both a narrative and a counternarrative’ (8). Essentially productive, this ambiguity strikes a bass note in postapartheid writing, and in considerations about the nature of the transition. It is as if the TRC inaugurated a quest for establishing the truth of ‘what really happened’ – and what continues to happen – in relation to a past that is itself subject to continual revision. In their introduction to Beyond the Threshold, Hein Viljoen and Chris van der Merwe write about the ‘dilemma of being stuck between past and present’ (2), and ‘the impasse of being caught on the threshold between past and present’ (3). Similarly, Meg Samuelson suggests that the concept of transition in South African literary culture can be seen to enable ‘thinking about being-at-home that is at the same time inherently liminal ... entering the house that locates one on a perpetual threshold’ (‘Walking’ 134). In a sense, the new literature serves as a measure of an unreadable present and an unplottable future, appraised in relation to an eternally unsettled past.³⁰ All in all, this is a mission of (re)discovery which, nevertheless, plays havoc with the teleological thrust implicit in the notion of a transition to democracy. So, for example, Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia speaks to this imperative of rediscovery, and to the ambiguities of witnessing, in its blending of memoir and essayistic journeying into finer calibrations of conceiving both current and past lived experiences in relation to established narratives. Dlamini’s work retrospectively confirms a line of similar postapartheid works in which reflective, literary nonfiction emerges as a reverberant form of expression about who and where ‘we’ are, now, and how we have come to be in this place. This is a line of writing that, in keeping with global trends,³¹ begins to surge under postapartheid conditions. Inaugurated, in a sense, by Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and, earlier, Charles van Onselen’s epic oral history The Seed is Mine, postapartheid nonfiction comprises powerful writing³² that in one way or another addresses the problematic nexus of past and present, as concentrated in the notion of transition.

Despite the efflorescence of postapartheid writing, its apparent release from the straitjacket of political themes,³³ it is also true that much of the new writing consists of narratives and counter-narratives that set up a dialectic around the very notion of a fresh start. That is to say, the idea of transition itself, in its denotation as a process or period of change from one state to another, a linear path that somehow yields the telos, or end point, of postapartheid – Desmond Tutu’s multicultural rainbow nation, the ‘democratic miracle’ of popular discourse – is questioned, problematised, cast in doubt or rendered ironic.³⁴ While scholars such as Graham Pechey rightly warn that the term postapartheid ‘defines a condition that has contradictorily always existed and yet is impossible of full realisation’ (153), writers remain aware of the persistence of founding myths, the bedrock mythography of ‘new’ South Africans. The foundational event was instantly memorialised in SA, 27 April 1994: An Author’s Diary / ’n Skrywersdagboek, edited by André Brink, and it continues to infuse political commentary, invoking the promise – and disillusion – of the rainbow nation as a standard trope.³⁵ Indeed, it remains a serviceable trope for all manner of writers.

One of the most generative areas of such troubling has come, as suggested above, in delineations of temporality after apartheid. Introducing a special issue of English Studies in Africa on post-transitional literature, Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie note the caveat issued by Michael Chapman on the ‘convenience’ and provisional nature of ‘phases of chronology’ such as ‘post-transitional’ and his own coinage, ‘post-postapartheid’ (3–4). In his essay ‘Conjectures on South African Literature’, Chapman writes as follows:

If post-apartheid usually means after the unbannings of 1990, or after the first democratic elections of 1994, or in/after the transition, then beyond 2000 begins to mark a quantitative and qualitative shift from the immediate ‘post’ years of the 1990s to another ‘phase’. (1–2)

The various descriptions used to typify this second phase, the time beyond the immediate transition of the 1990s, include Chapman’s ‘post-postapartheid’, Frenkel and MacKenzie’s ‘post-transitional’, and Loren Kruger’s ‘post-anti-apartheid’. For Kruger, writing in 2002, the solidarity of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa has waned because its chief antagonist, white supremacism, no longer enjoys official sanction. This ushers in ‘post-anti-apartheid – post-anti-apartheid because the moral conviction of and commitment to anti-apartheid solidarity have waned, while in their place has come postcolonial uneven development rather than radical social transformation’ (‘Black Atlantics’ 35). Kruger’s refinement of familiar terms usefully covers both a temporal and a conceptual shift: if the immediate years of transition were post-apartheid, with a strong emphasis on reckoning with the past, the 2000s roughly mark a period (‘post-transitional’, perhaps) in which many writers begin to conceive of themselves beyond the immediate aftermath of apartheid, and certainly free of the need to reckon with it.

Regardless of how one conceives of the chronology of postapartheid, its temporality remains contradictory and complex, as Grant Farred argues in his introduction to a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled ‘After the Thrill is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa’. For Farred, temporality in postapartheid is necessarily doubled, rendering all ‘post’ descriptions internally ironic, encoding both the idea of a (virtuous, desired) teleology and its persistent rupture. Farred argues that

[t]he propensity for the teleological, to think post-apartheid South Africa as the disarticulation (and possibly even evacuation of) and triumph over its apartheid predecessor, the narrative of ‘progress’ from a racist past to a nonracial present (and future), is a critical modality that has significant purchase in the post-1994 society. (‘The Not-Yet Counterpartisan’ 592)

For Farred, the event of the nation’s first democratic elections ‘signals the “end” of one era and the beginning of a new, democratic one that aligns South Africa – almost half a century later – with a global post-1945 nomos’, although with the provisos ‘that past economic inequities, cultural differences, and racial tensions, to mention but three, would have a (powerful) residual life in the new, post-apartheid nomos’ (592). Farred continues:

[T]he old illegitimacy has been replaced by a new, substanceless legitimacy, a formal equality that simply displaces social hierarchy from race into economics; the white/black distinction is transfigured into rich/poor, or ‘creditor/debtor’. There is already a tension inherent within the new legitimacy: the marking of epochal progress, from apartheid to post-apartheid, 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. (592–593)

Farred’s insights are on point, especially with regard to fractured or doubled temporalities and economic stasis. Other contributors to the South Atlantic Quarterly issue³⁶ are similarly coruscating about the notion that the transition has seen a transformation in material conditions after ten years of democracy. In particular, the new government’s adoption of neoliberal macro-economic policies that effectively maintain or worsen oppressive economic conditions, creating a present and a future that looks and feels like the apartheid past, is held up to scrutiny. For Farred, South Africa after 1994

is a nation living with a dual orientation: it looks, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes discretely, to its past and its present; it has a historical vision that is alternately bifurcated and cyclopean – split in its visual outlook or too trained on a single moment. The new nomos of the South African earth is haunted by the old nomos; the old nomos is inveterately part of the new one, a source of concern, regret, and anger to some, a source merely of chagrin and inevitability to others. (594)

Another way of describing such a double temporality is to adopt Hal Foster’s notion of a ‘future-anterior’.³⁷ In the ‘future-anterior’, a ‘will-have-been’ mode of seeing and feeling makes a mess of linear temporalities or easy assumptions about periods that are ‘post’ anything.

Terms such as ‘postapartheid’ and, occasionally, ‘post-liberation’ and ‘post-transitional’ are used to cover the nominal understanding of literature that has succeeded South African writing during the time of apartheid, with the necessary conceptual caveats about the paradoxes of both ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’. One might argue that postapartheid pertains to the 1990s, and post-transition (or post-anti-apartheid) more accurately describes the 2000s, while post-postapartheid emerges around and after 2010. Although these designations may have merit, the internal dynamics of the literature, in my view, remain similar regardless. The foundational social significance of the transition, and its sceptical treatment in writing, remain on track throughout, although the entire period also yields up works that refuse any relation to transition and postapartheid, or to any ‘politics’ at all. That, too, should be seen as part of the new literature’s anti-exceptionalism, its newfound normality, allowing it to be anything it wants, if it so desires. Nevertheless, in its weightier instances it all too often returns to the moral fate of the country and its subjects after apartheid, as Coovadia does in his 2014 novel Tales of the Metric System.

Transition, the putative mid-point of postapartheid culture, is frequently shown to be a paradoxical cross-temporal knot, an ateleological threshold replete with ambiguity. Michael Titlestad’s phrase ‘mezzanine ontology’³⁸ (‘Afterword’ 189) captures this sense as the incomplete transition leaves the country’s citizens ‘caught up in a world of contradictions and ironies’. For Titlestad, the mezzanine is the post-1994 version of Gramsci’s interregnum, or the ‘the historical moment when apartheid was dying-but-not-dead’ (as described by Thurman 181). Titlestad calls into question the ‘teleological rumbling forward’ he espies in the idea that authors should ‘put their shoulders to the wheel of history’; the lives of authors, as much as the subjects they write about, are ‘caught in-between’ the old and the new as they themselves face the ‘uncertainties of the future’ (188). In similar vein, Samuelson (‘Scripting Connections’ 116) argues that post-transition literature is ‘characterized more by its rearrangement than its abandonment of the chronotopes of South African literature and its expanding field of enquiry’.

Postapartheid as a phase of events, an identifiable period, is, as Titlestad suggests, marked by routine indeterminacy, in which a ready-to-hand telos gets twisted out of shape and doubles back on itself. Dialectically, the conceptual nexus suggested by the term ‘transition’, including its wayward temporality and deep ambiguity, has proved useful in critiquing popular rainbow discourse. It has broadly served as a kind of grammar for contextualising contentious events, culminating in the corrupt crony-capitalist administration of Jacob Zuma, and the concomitant economic empowerment of party loyalists. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the country swings between extremes of optimism and disappointment. The events of 1994 were nothing less than epochal. Uniquely, more than 350 years of bloody contestation over land and resources, over power and ideology, seemed to be settled in a way that was acceptable to everyone, both inside and outside the country. A violent revolution was forestalled, disaster averted. There could be no doubting the historic shift, the switch to democracy. South African Air Force jets performing a fly-past at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as head of state in Pretoria on 10 May 1994 signalled the birth of a new South Africa, and people all over the world bore witness to an event that many had long believed impossible. The seeming loss of such a wondrous breakthrough, its gradual dismantling, and the subsequent critique and lamentations constitute a churn in which postapartheid and its subjects remain entrapped.

The reclamation of narrative

If the ‘forward march’ version of transition has been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place, then one of the unambiguous success stories emerging from the transition is the restorative value of story itself, or, more broadly speaking, narrative. In postapartheid writing, a great diversity of form and content emerges, constituting a body of work that is itself significantly transformed, despite its subject matter often being about the failures of transformation. This is a key point. For, regardless of the perceived loss of plot in political and social terms, the space of postapartheid is one in which a great many voices have found their pitch in public discourse, in more conventional as well as new media forms. Such speaking out, self-validation and identity reclamation, not to mention public position-taking (or posturing), is surely one of the most notable achievements of postapartheid writing, and of the ‘silent revolution’ in general.

Njabulo Ndebele’s essay ‘Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative’ underlines the regenerative power of story, and the link between testimony, memory and narrative. ‘Time has given the recall of memory the power of reflection associated with narrative’ (‘Memory’ 20), Ndebele argues. This reflective capacity, ‘experienced as a shared social consciousness’, is posited as the ‘lasting legacy of the stories of the TRC’ (20) – one that gives ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’ (20), and functions as an ‘additional confirmation of the movement of our society from repression to expression’ (20). Whereas the state attempted, in the apartheid era, ‘to compel the oppressed to deny the testimony of their own experience, today that experience is one of the essential conditions for the emergence of a new national consciousness’, Ndebele writes, adding that ‘[t]hese stories may very well be some of the first steps in the rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (20).

Ndebele here captures one of the core impulses of transitional and post-transitional narrative in general: the restoration of ‘legitimacy and authority’ to previously silenced voices, and the emergence of a ‘new national consciousness’. In concluding his essay, he argues that a ‘major spin-off’ resulting from the ‘stories of the TRC’ is the ‘restoration of narrative’. He sees this event as a rare opportunity to take narrative beyond testimony, towards imaginatively creating what he calls ‘new thoughts and new worlds’ (28). Writing in the year 2000, Ndebele sets a challenging agenda for postapartheid writing as a whole. The criterion, as he sees it, is that the narratives resulting from ‘a search for meanings’ (20) in the wake of apartheid ‘may have less and less to do with the facts themselves and with their recall than with the revelation of meaning through the imaginative combination of those facts’ (21, emphasis added); for, at that point, Ndebele writes, ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21).

It is striking that Ndebele’s sense of the imagination follows an arc that traverses fiction and nonfiction, testimony and invention, fact and fable. Accordingly, postapartheid’s many sources of (formerly muted) self-expression and storytelling condense into metaphor, into an imaginative amalgam, whether the writing is autobiography or poetry, whether it bears witness to or fictionalises a lived reality; the pressing need is an imaginative reconstruction of experience via memory, which has regenerative ‘moral import’. This proves a testing criterion as many works engage in a ‘search for new meanings’.

In particular, the capacity for newfound self-affirmation, the recuperation of formerly repressed and often still-marginalised voices, positions and identities, has been one of the more emphatic, and unambiguously affirmative, yields of postapartheid literary culture. A culture of authentic self-expression in response to centuries of patriarchy and racism has emerged, as evidenced by a work such as Samuelson’s Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Andrew van der Vlies argues that ‘Samuelson’s project ... is informed by a desire to “restore” to these historical women [Krotoa-Eva, Nongqawuse and Sarah Baartman] some of their strangeness and challenging heterogeneity, that which does not necessarily serve the purposes of normative, naturalising national discourses’ (954). Similarly, Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is Slavery to Me? seeks to problematise appropriations of slave heritage in order to reconfigure group identity, just as Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims tracks South African cultural expressions of Muslim identity. The reclamation or recuperation of formerly repressed identities and subject positions, coincident with the transition and its aftermath, also involves the politics of appropriation and the dangers of being subsumed into larger, newly repressive, or normalising, narratives. In an important sense, the post-transitional literary-cultural sphere is a locus of contending scripts, characterised by keen vigilance about who speaks for, and about, whom, and under what authority.

If there is a golden, affirmative thread in postapartheid writing, one might find it in narrative reclamations of identity, the excavation of buried or repressed selves, in unfolding self-expression. Such speaking out satisfies, in spirit at least, Ndebele’s vision of narrative as giving ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’, confirming the ‘rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (‘Memory’ 20). Further, as Ndebele notes, it is the revelation of meaning through the ‘imaginative combination of ... facts’ (21) so that ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21) that is important. Hence the prevalence of memoir-type or confessional/autobiographical writing by a wide range of South African subjects, whether from township streets or prisons – or universities. Indeed, academics are more likely nowadays to write their own variants of memoiristic witnessing or reflection than pen ‘appreciations’ of ‘great writers’, as earlier generations were inclined to do. Notable recent examples of this trend include Stephen Clingman’s Birthmark, Mamphela Ramphele’s A Life, Steven Robins’s Letters of Stone and Leslie Swartz’s Able-Bodied. Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael argue that the ‘flourishing of the autobiographical voice has emerged alongside the powerful informing context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it is also a symptom of the decompression, relaxation, and cacophony of the post-apartheid moment in general’ (298). They contend that the ‘autobiographical act’ is ‘more than a literary convention’; it ‘has become a cultural activity’. In a multiplicity of forms, including ‘memoir, reminiscence, confession, testament, case history and personal journalism’, such ‘biographical acts or cultural occasions’ see narrators take up ‘models of identity that have become widely available’; these have ‘pervaded the culture of the 1990s and have spread into the new century’ (298). Nuttall and Michael continue:

Particularly since the political transition of 1994, personal disclosure has become a part of a revisionary impulse, part of the pluralizing project of democracy itself. The individual, in this context, emerges as a key, newly legitimized concept. South Africa becomes a ‘recited’ community ... [t]alking about their own lives, confessing, and constructing personal narratives – on the body, on the air, in music, in print – South Africans translate their selves, and their communities, into story. (298)

These points are well made. However, it is not just that, in the wake of the TRC, everyone has a story to tell, and should tell it, reclaiming selfhood, dignity and difference, or providing still more diverse and variable perspectives on past and present. It is also that the transitional zone – where lines became blurred by different reckonings of value, different invocations of legitimacy – has become a space of contest between individuals and groups via the valence of storytelling. In that sense, the post-liberation era has seen an acceleration in the politics of stories and storytelling, where significant stories generally bear a strong relation to the ‘real’, narrating people’s lived experience. This current of connection to the detail of the actual is not quite the ‘stenographic bent’ that Louise Bethlehem (‘A Primary Need’ 365) identified in pre-1994 literature, with its ‘rhetoric of urgency’. It reveals, rather, an insistence on both the real and the right way of viewing this, as people insistently express their own versions of themselves. Stories of survival, a thriving line of oral rendition, as Jonny Steinberg’s The Number amply illustrates, encode identity in highly particularised ways, contributing to self-and group-validation as perhaps the single biggest symbolic reward of democracy. (The controversies over Steinberg’s own appropriations of his subjects’ stories ironically confirm how keen the contention over stories, their nature and their ownership, continues to be.) Particularised and contentious gambits, however, implicitly question the idea of a universal measure of reclaimed identity; they reopen ‘grounds of contest’³⁹ in ways that render precarious any cosy metanarratives or settled identity politics on the basis of victimhood in the world of postapartheid. To conclude this introduction, I offer, below, an extended reading of The Number as an instantiation of the stakes involved in contending lines of storytelling in post-transitional culture.

The politics of (true) stories

Steinberg’s The Number is indubitably one of the most suggestive works of postapartheid South African writing. The narrative itself is a dense, analytical weave of stories told, scrutinised, picked apart, reconsidered and retold. When all else fails, The Number suggests, narrative accounts – stories – are what South Africans cling to. Here, the double entendre in the term ‘accounts’ is apposite, for there is the all-important matter of accounting for oneself, and laying accounts at the door of history, if not other people. Steinberg is acutely sensitive to the charge and importance, in postapartheid society, of stories. His mission is to excavate layers of narrative as a means of understanding various postapartheid ‘others’ in a country where, as Steinberg has commented, writing continues to be a business of ‘coordination between deaf people’.⁴⁰ Not only does Steinberg retell stories told to him, and read by him, in the course of the book, but he also retells the story of how the stories told to him, and read by him, have been shaped by earlier histories. Somewhere in this entanglement of storylines, data originally perceived to be true ‘transmogrifies’ (a word often used by Steinberg) into myth, or philosophy, or law, either written or unwritten. And these articles of belief, resting on the foundation of perceived truth, with origins in real events, are decisive for the people about whom Steinberg writes, because they live by such lore. In Steinberg’s work, and in the wider domain of postapartheid writing, stories therefore gain a secular prominence of critical proportions.

Steinberg’s telling example of this, in The Number, is gang mythology in South Africa’s prisons. The ‘Number’ bands derive their sense of origins from the densely worked and reworked story of Nongoloza Mathebula, a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century bandit figure who straddled the boundary between law and its abrogation amid oppressive social conditions. Mathebula’s tale was first recounted in book form by Charles van Onselen in The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867–1948, published in 1984. At one stage in The Number, Steinberg turns Van Onselen into a character in his book by relating the venerated historian’s version of Nongoloza to his interlocutor-subject, Magadien Wentzel. One must remember here that, academic accounts aside, rival versions of the Nongoloza story, in the country’s prisons, can have life-or-death consequences because they are allied to what Steinberg’ calls ‘competing doctrinal positions’; moreover, competition of any kind between the Number gangs often leads to killings. Whether or not, for example, sex with men is validated by the Nongoloza story depends on a doctrinal difference between different Number factions, a difference that might well have deadly consequences.⁴¹ So, when Steinberg brings Van Onselen’s account of the Nongoloza story into confrontation with the understanding of it held by long-term prisoner Wentzel, this Numbers gang leader is not impressed:

‘There is the black man’s story and the white man’s story. Go to any prison in this country, you will hear the black man’s story – exactly the same in every prison. You go there with Van Onselen’s story, they will kill you. Serious. How can you say Nongoloza spoke to a white man?’ (The Number 236)

Steinberg tries to explain how Van Onselen came into legitimate possession of the story he tells, but Wentzel interrupts him:

‘Van Onselen is fucking with something very fucking important. You look at Shaka’s history, you look at Piet Retief, at Jan van Riebeeck. This is history people believe. It is like a power. People are prepared to die for their stories.’ (238)

Here, we witness a turn in the politics of knowledge production. In this instance, intellectual jousting in the cloistered halls of the university is rendered relative by contention over stories in another hothouse of competing narratives, another enclosure in which understanding is forged via the giving and taking of accounts: the South African prison, with its marked cultures of institutionalised violence. Van Onselen, himself widely known for his gloves-off style of argument (in his years at the University of the Witwatersrand, especially), would be at something of a disadvantage in this debate with Wentzel, who seems capable of giving the term ‘visceral engagement’ a wholly new twist. The democratic space of postapartheid writing, via story-aggregator Steinberg, opens up a dialogic zone in which such unlikely bedfellows are allowed to share the privilege of open, public dialogue, even if it is reconstructed after the event. This is what one might call a Bakhtinian moment, a dialogic zone never available in quite the same measure before 1994. Steinberg, and writers like him, stitch together stories from irreconcilably polarised realms because real communication and real listening remain an urgent need despite – or because of – the gains of postapartheid. Recall Steinberg’s statement that writing in and about South Africa ‘is a question of coordination between deaf people’. Steinberg’s raison d’être as a writer seems to be to act as a collector of accounts, and to scrutinise them with an unsparingly sharp eye, while also embedding himself inside his interlocutor’s felt world, his felt life. Anyone who has read Steinberg, whether it is The Number, Three Letter Plague, A Man of Good Hope or any of his other books, is likely to agree that his ability both to listen to, and to elicit from, his subjects what one might call ‘heartfelt’ stories is quite extraordinary. These subjects open up to him, entering into a bond in which the right, or best possible, telling of the story becomes an objective of the utmost importance because, always, the stories matter deeply; on these accounts hang someone’s sense of self, or at least their own understanding of it.

Clearly, then, this is serious business, involving the most intimate textures, or layers, of people’s lives, their self-making and identity construction, their aversions and resentments, and their most prized memories. There is little place in such a highly sensitive process for ‘fiction’, or for fictionalising life stories, and yet there is much fictionality in these accounts; here, one might talk about the fictions that underlie – in some cases make up – much of what is taken to be the real. This kind of ‘fictional’ content almost always enters into Steinberg’s stories at a secondary level, as he disentangles truth from half-truth, perspective from fact. Despite such blending of nonfiction and fiction, however, the emphasis remains squarely on the primacy of an impeccable standard of accuracy, and of reported actuality. Steinberg frequently refers to himself as a ‘journalist’, despite the fact that his books are a hybrid of investigative journalism and scholarly research, achieving a quality of social history that is, in South African studies, unique, though he does acknowledge, in The Number, a great debt to Van Onselen. In this regard, Steinberg, like Dlamini, is unique to postapartheid writing, and his mission as a discoverer of deep stories, excavated with due regard for both their surface feel and their below-the-radar complexity, gives his work an edge over writing that is merely imagined or made up. Perhaps this is what Krog means when she says, ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’, and Van Niekerk, too, when she opines that a reading of the best South African nonfiction (in this case, Antony Altbelker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree) ‘almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-Fiction’ 5).⁴²

It is as if the analytical edge of nonfiction, in its commitment to establishing a baseline account and its dedication to getting the story right, is necessary precisely because the ‘right story’ can only be achieved, or nearly achieved, in a continuous weighing up of the value of the stories people tell themselves, which are likely to have varying degrees of usefulness. That is to say, Steinberg deploys a mode of nonfictional investigation, akin to journalism in the best sense of that term, to discriminate between orders of information folded into stories. Steinberg is alert to the fact, always, that subjects use stories strategically and pragmatically, so he cannot take them at face value. Much of the information gleaned in the course of a Steinberg-type book, although based on fact, often verges on a kind of fictionality in its arrangement of elements. For example, Steinberg writes, at one stage, that

[Wentzel’s] identification with Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love is almost certainly a retrospective memory. It is the product of a conciliation he has made with the world during the last three years. It is also the symptom of a peace he has made with himself. (The Number 138)

Explaining this, the author suggests that

[watching To Sir with Love] wasn’t his first experience of black and white. Away from the screen, in his real life, he was watching his mother give her maternal love to two white children. And the feelings this spectacle invoked had made him a virulent racist. He hated the Sampsons in particular, the entire white population in general. Even the ‘pseudo-whites’, the coloured middle class, with their domestic workers and their family cars, he hated with a vengeance. (138)

On the basis of this evaluation of what Steinberg has deduced about Wentzel’s sense of things, over the longer term and in view of the stories he typically tells himself, the author is able to identify his subject’s current storyline as a ‘retrospective memory’, a reconstruction (or fiction, of a sort), in the present, of a memory that, Steinberg concludes, must have had a different charge in the past: ‘Back in the mid-seventies, he must have watched To Sir with Love with ambivalence at best: a toxic mix of longing and envy’ (138).

Such meta-reflexive recalibrating in the face of a superfluity of oral and researched data represents the real work of Steinberg’s (and Dlamini’s) brand of nonfiction. In The Number, as elsewhere in his corpus, the importance of such work is evident in the consequences attendant upon narratives of self-understanding, or delusion. The very destiny of Steinberg’s interlocutors is intricately bound with their stories of origination and validation. This can be seen on both an individual and a collective level. Socially, the prisons become a site in which the political narrative of transition after 1994 gains a sharpened focus. The early years of Mandela’s presidency saw riotous conditions inside gaols like Pollsmoor in the Cape after unrealistic expectations of mass amnesty and ‘freedom’ on an exaggerated scale were not met (The Number 271–276). However, white bosses in the command structure gave way to people of colour fairly quickly, and the new prison directors had their own ideas about running institutions of incarceration. One new manager in particular, Johnny Jansen, decided to turn the prison around, from an authoritarian, violent and mistrustful institution to a place where the governors and inmates might forge a common language. As a man of colour himself, Jansen had experienced the humiliation of racial discrimination at the hands of his former white bosses, ‘[s]o he believed that he knew why the men in his charge had murdered and raped; their psyches had been mangled by the collective humiliation of apartheid’ (319). ‘I don’t think the solution to crime is so complicated,’ Jansen says to Steinberg in the course of The Number. ‘Human beings are supposed to be simple. They didn’t become what they are by choice, but by their circumstances. If you expose them to different ways of doing things, it is like giving a child a new toy’ (319). Steinberg continues:

It was all charmingly romantic. Human beings are naturally good: apartheid had deformed their souls. Jansen himself had almost succumbed to the cancer of racial humiliation; he had wanted to kill. But he was better now, a fully-fledged human being, and he was going to shepherd his flock back to goodness: one victim of apartheid taking the rest by the hand. (319)

Romantic it may well have been, but at this point, Jansen as a senior prison boss is engaged in something quite astonishing in any prison environment, let alone one inextricably linked with apartheid – he is structuring a management revolution in a discourse associated with redemption. It is surely not accidental that healing discourse of this kind was also being used, at the same time, by the TRC, which was in fact sitting in the period that Jansen launched his initiative (1997–1998). The redemptive version of the transition story so key to postapartheid mythography, then, is played out inside Pollsmoor, one of South Africa’s biggest prisons. And, given the confined space of prison, its urgent pressures, Pollsmoor witnesses a dramatic, larger-than-life version of the promise, and outcome, of the transition narrative. Is it fiction or reality? Can it be made to work? What is more, Steinberg’s interlocutor, Wentzel, comes to internalise this redemptive promise (for reasons that are skilfully narrated in The Number), and so his story – and The Number – gain an enhanced significance as postapartheid documents: alongside the TRC, they bear witness to momentous currents of change, and the power of narrative to reconstitute the self.

In the course of Jansen’s ambitious programme, he recruits the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) to come to Pollsmoor. Jansen wants the CCR to conduct conflict resolution workshops for warders and inmates. ‘These were heady days at Pollsmoor,’ Steinberg comments. ‘Its young coloured managers wanted to reinvent the prison; they were searching hungrily for ideas’ (323). The CCR people succeeded in changing the prison ‘profoundly’, Steinberg writes, ‘at least for a while’ (323). During their first 18 months at Pollsmoor, the CCR consultants established a workshop involving inmates and warders ‘in an endeavour to unstitch the coarse and violent practices apartheid had bequeathed to the prison’ (323). The 18 inmates in the workshop consisted mostly of Number gang leaders and members of the inmate committee. The workshop was based on psychological research around ‘human dynamics’. A second course involved ‘creative and constructive approaches to conflict’, while another on trauma debriefing was conducted by clinical psychologist Stephen van Houten (326). ‘It was the first time ever for some prisoners,’ Van Houten reported, ‘that they were able to verbalise their traumatic childhoods and/or their crimes.’ Steinberg sees in this a transformative moment:

That, indeed, is much of what the workshops were about for Magadien. At the age of 39 he learned a foreign language, a language of self. It opened the door to an entirely new universe. The idea that one can make of one’s life a project, an internal and inward-gazing project, that one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning – this was radically foreign, and a revelation. (326)

There is a clear similarity between Ndebele’s ‘restoration of narrative’ and Steinberg’s ‘narrative of meaning’, both of which enable affirmative reclamation of previously distorted and mangled senses of self. In addition, the correspondences between this ‘foreign’ notion of trauma debriefing and self-shaping in Pollsmoor, on the one hand, and similar processes going on in the TRC, on the other, cannot go unremarked. During the optimistic, early phase of transition, public discourse about the project of democracy seized the language of healing and reparation, of making good, all of it involving what one might call projects of reoriented selfhood. The late justice minister Dullah Omar regarded the Commission as ‘a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation’.⁴³ For Omar, healing the ‘wounds of the past’ (a common phrase in public discourse at the time) and avoiding further conflict meant building ‘a human rights culture’, for which ‘disclosure of the truth and its acknowledgement are essential’. Omar went further, declaring ‘truth’ the fulcrum of the public healing process: ‘The fundamental issue for all South Africans is therefore to come to terms with our past on the only moral basis possible, namely that the truth be told, and that the truth be acknowledged.’⁴⁴ This publicly enshrined, redemptive understanding of ‘truth’ struck home forcefully as the TRC hearings and their media reverberations echoed in the public imagination. This was the secular redemption⁴⁵ of postapartheid at work, and it paralleled the remarkable literary event of Krog’s Country of My Skull, published in 1998. As suggested earlier, Krog’s amalgam of reporting and lyrical writing, drawing on testimony and, to a lesser extent, memoir – some of it fabricated for effect – established ‘creative nonfiction’ as an ascendant form of literary intermediation in postapartheid writing. ‘Truth’ – the real thing, wheat that had been sifted and gleaned from the chaff of lies and ‘fictions’ – became a discursive imperative in both the more general public sphere and in the delimited literary realm. It ushered in a widespread public emphasis on embracing an unadulterated brand of scrupulous, ethical communication after decades of official prevarication and private denial. Such utterance of bare truth, such painful unearthing of repressed psychic material, is clearly of a different category to the notion of a reified ‘real’ – a category that literary scholars correctly dismiss as simplistic or banal, citing the interpenetration of fictional and real elements in both fictional and nonfictional utterances. Certainly, even TRC testimony is likely to contain storytelling elements that are constructed after the fact, ingredients that might be seen as ‘fictive’, but the categorical insistence on the primacy of a discourse of truth and truth-telling – in contradistinction to lying and repressing, withholding and twisting – should be seen for what it was in the late 1990s, going into the 2000s, in postapartheid time and space: an urgently revelatory, cleansing process.⁴⁶ At least, that was the aim, if not always the outcome. Fiction, until the mid-1990s the pre-eminent form for intermediating higher ‘truth’ in South African culture, now had to take a back seat, finding its place in the internal registers of a discourse of ‘healing’, a revelatory brand of truth containing the much-needed ‘real’ content of what had happened, and what was still going on, out there.⁴⁷ This was a discourse that borrowed from the conventions of storytelling, but which saw its main business as excavating repressed registers of selfhood and community.

Postapartheid, then, becomes a voluminous, many-tiered space of stories, a house with many rooms, one might say. At the TRC, the stories came in the form of testimony and witnessing, often in broken registers of language that seemed inadequate to the task of expressing the trauma at hand. In the process, what Krog would later come to call the country’s new common language of ‘bad English’ came into prominence.⁴⁸ In the prisons, the ‘foreign language’ that Steinberg talks about, what he calls ‘a language of self’, opening the door to ‘an entirely new universe’ in which ‘one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning’, coincided also with the adoption of English. ‘It was foreign,’ Steinberg continues, ‘not only in the sense that the language of self is largely a bourgeois language, a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself. It was quite literally spoken in a different language: the workshops were largely conducted in English.’ So, Wentzel, a mother-tongue Afrikaans-speaker, comes to use English as ‘a significant part of his internal dialogue; many of his most intimate thoughts he could only think in English’ (326).

Exactly the same thing was happening in the public sphere at large, and it is exemplified in the way in which Krog, a formerly Afrikaans poet, was partly transformed into an English writer of creative nonfiction. In ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society’, Anthea Garman has written suggestively about how overlapping public ‘fields’ such as the media field, the literary field and the political field exerted pressure on Krog to produce Country of My Skull.⁴⁹ First, in her capacity as a radio reporter on the TRC hearings, Krog was invited to write long-form pieces for the Mail & Guardian by that weekly’s then editor Anton Harber. These harrowing pieces had a strong political impact, and Krog was approached by Random House. She supplemented the pieces, and Country of My Skull has come to rival even Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in its global reach. Just as Paton’s book stood as a masterpiece that captured the pain of racial conflict for all the world to see and feel, so Country of My Skull spoke to the world of the new drama in postapartheid South Africa – its reckoning with Truth. In the wake of significant international uptake, both works eventually became Hollywood movies. Both, in a sense, inaugurated a certain tradition of writing: Paton set the tone for the liberal novel (and realism in general) as a leading form for relaying apartheid conditions, while Krog’s work stood as a major example of how a new form of nonfiction might mediate postapartheid conditions;⁵⁰ as life-writing, it is a lyrical blend of the real and its retelling, making free use of fictive devices. Such writing conjoined the perceived need to unveil truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, to reconstruct a viable ‘language of the self’ for traumatised South Africans – a by no means simple task.

The ‘language of the self’ under the spotlight here, conducted mostly in English, amounted to what Steinberg calls the working and shaping of memories into a ‘narrative of meaning’ in the wake of democracy. This specifically narrative capacity was perceived as a revelatory opening, a rupture of enormous significance. Despite the ‘language of self’ being bourgeois, ‘a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself’, it took hold in literate public discourse. Moreover, it stuck, not only in Steinberg’s own remarkable series of memory-shaping true stories – books that came to be seen as the cutting edge of postapartheid writing, winning a slew of prizes – but also in a run of ‘truth’ books displaying the diversity of forms characteristic of postapartheid literature.⁵¹

The ‘language of self’ that Steinberg captured in prison discourse was, moreover, also key to the rise of identity politics in public contestations, as witnessed in the heated exchanges about Pippa Skotnes’s Miscast exhibition, soon followed by similarly bruising arguments over Brett Murray’s satirical painting The Spear.⁵² In academic discourse, too, the politics of identity found strong expression in partisan critical readings of writers like Zoë Wicomb, Gabeba Baderoon and Yvette Christiansë, among others, whose work has been taken as affirming the agency of subject positions marginalised in the past on the basis of gender and race. In a broader sense, life-writing as a genre became a means to self-discovery, self-expression and self-affirmation on the basis of ethnicity/race, gender or sexual orientation. Creative writing programmes in the postapartheid years confirm this trend. ‘Everyone has a story to tell’ was a common refrain in the new culture of bearing witness, the opening up of self and past. Fiction often seemed irrelevant, even meretricious. There were too many stories waiting to be told, and a strong conviction that such stories needed to be given utterance, ‘voiced’ in a wave of speaking out and talking back to decades of power abuse and of silencing; all this for the sake of healing a traumatic and troubled past, of restoring agency to citizens. Who would wish to argue with such virtuous uses of culture, such powerful possibilities of restitution in the aesthetic forms of a scarred country? One only had to attend a poetry reading at Wits University or the Poetry Africa festival, or listen to the InZync poets of the Stellenbosch Literary Project (SLiP), to hear self-making in full flow, talking back sharply, and with verve, to earlier histories of denigration and dehumanisation.⁵³ The works of ‘spoken-word’ poets such as Lebo Mashile, Jitsvinger, Koleka Putuma, and the Botsotso Jesters energetically took up the language of self-making and celebration, bringing into being an assertive new lyricism: We are here; This is who we are; This is how we speak; We will not go away. For many, not forgetting the growing legions of spoken-word poets and their fans, this brand of self-assertive speaking out is the core, the real point, of postapartheid life, whether in ‘bad’ English, ‘Kaaps’, ‘Boland rap’ or any other ‘creolisation’.⁵⁴ This new performance culture has little to do with rarefied literary fiction. The spoken-word performances almost always conjoin individual experience with hip-hop and rap avowals of gender politics, self-discovery in challenging conditions, and the remaking of identity in the unstable conurbations of twenty-first-century metropolitan living. Whether one likes it or not – and many don’t – these challenging, defiant forms constitute a powerful and insistent force in the locales of cultural reception.

For Magadien Wentzel – alias ‘JR’, ‘William Steenkamp’, ‘Darryl’ – the TRC-style language of self, rooted in reckonings with the real rather than the denials and fabrications of apartheid and its aftermath, gave him something of inestimable value: the ability to consolidate his various, spurious identities. Here was an opportunity to story himself into a new being, for if Mandela’s revolution itself wasn’t able to open the prison gates, then individual subjects could take hold of their memories and experiences and reshape them into something of worth, a story with dignity and purpose. Wentzel switches from Afrikaans to English for this encounter. This is true also for Krog in Country of My Skull, as she embraces the redemption narrative of postapartheid in English, for her a second language. Steinberg writes of Wentzel: ‘And so everything about his new experience smacked of revelation, of a radical rupture, just as certain Christians describe the sudden presence of God in one’s life’ (326). In his conversations with Steinberg, the ‘jargon of psychology’ slips into Wentzel’s language, in his use of phrases such as ‘I need closure’ (327). Steinberg realises he is witnessing something remarkable:

Journeying with him back to his past, I felt we were two outsiders looking into the world of a stranger. The tools he used to think about his history were not available to him when he lived it. There is a sense in which he was re-inventing his past when he spoke to me, using his new knowledge to write a history of himself. (327)

The question, of course, is whether the rewritten history of self can hold up in the face of adverse material conditions once Wentzel is finally released from prison. In Wentzel’s case, the narrative of mostly secular redemption (he does align himself with religion from time to time) wears thin as actual circumstances make it difficult for him to maintain an adequate standard of living outside of crime. Wentzel does, however, succeed in resisting the invitations of various former crime partners to take the easy way out. Despite the tough conditions and relative poverty he faces once out of prison, he holds onto the riches of what one might call symbolic deliverance. At a Sunday religious service held in Pollsmoor in the early 2000s, Wentzel ‘got up and denounced the gangs in the name of Jesus’, something ‘he remembers ... as one of the bravest actions he has ever taken’ (327). Johnny Jansen’s prison reforms, even in the sceptical view of Steinberg, prove to be ‘astoundingly successful’ (328), and Wentzel himself becomes, before his release, a ‘minor celebrity at Pollsmoor’. He would be ‘wheeled out for all visitors’ because ‘Pollsmoor was doing well, beyond the wildest expectations, and the change managers wanted to show off their good work’, inviting all and sundry to the prison to come see for themselves (331). By late 2002, Steinberg writes, Wentzel ‘was being booked out of Pollsmoor to meet the world’ (331). The ‘relentlessly energetic’ Jansen co-founded a modest community-based organisation called Ukukhanya Kwemini Association (UKA) (331). Jansen felt he needed to take the message outside prison, to the communities from which the inmates came. And so, in October 2002, Jansen takes Wentzel with him on a car trip into the Klein Karoo to visit the town of Ladismith. They meet with members of the UKA board of directors and, that night, Magadien addresses a packed Ladismith community hall. The next day he speaks at the local school’s morning assembly.

The way he tells it, he was the town’s hero for a day. ‘I spoke straight to their hearts. To the kids I described the horrors of prison. I told them prison does not make you a man, it fucks you up and rapes you and then throws you out. I said that no human being who cares for himself will want to go to prison. To the parents, I said how I had fucked up the task of bringing up my own kids. I said that in some homes, you have three generations sitting around smoking drugs together. I said we had to rebuild some sanity in our communities.

‘They all crowded round me after my speech in the town hall. A woman came up to me and hugged me and burst into tears. She explained that her son was in prison.

‘It was one of the greatest moments of my life. The Uka delegation all had dinner in a restaurant that night. I was served by a waiter for the first time in my life. I ordered chicken livers for starters. It was my first taste of food outside the prison since 1998. I savoured every mouthful. I felt I could learn to eat properly again.

‘I looked round the restaurant, and looked at myself eating in the restaurant. I thought to myself: “I am somebody now. I am a decent human being, someone a waiter takes an order from.”

‘I laughed at myself. I thought: “I have dignity now ...”.’ (332)

This is a significant moment, on several levels. The restitution of dignity via the power of narrative is a high point for Wentzel personally, and it provides an example of postapartheid discourse delivering the tangible, felt benefit of self-reclamation. This is a yield that might come in various ways: in the form of self-storying (richly evident in the passage above); in the repossession of dignity via identity solidarity (for example, as a victim of male abuse; a Xhosa poet; a Rastafarian; an urban, hip-hop spoken-word artist from the townships); or in any of the other positions that were becoming available, both in the public space of liberated political discourse and in the spaces opening up on the internet and in the new media. Anyone could set up a website, start blogging, publish their own writing, post on Facebook and start aggregating an audience. The forms of public expression available to formerly silenced people seemed similar to TRC-style reckonings, potentially freeing the body politic of its psychic horrors, and helping to reconstitute people as full citizens rather than mere ‘subjects’ (see Mamdani).

Wentzel holds out, against the odds, in the story narrated in The Number – and it is important that this is indeed a true story. However, the story outside of Steinberg’s narrative, the story of self-recovery, wears thin as Wentzel’s ‘minor celebrity’ status slowly evaporates after his release from prison and his work with UKA runs aground. Still, Wentzel clings to his story as he gets poorer and more desperate, begrudgingly accepting charity from his hard-up in-laws, in whose backyard ‘Wendy house’ he lives in Manenberg, estranged from his wife, Faranaaz, and increasingly at odds with her family. He manages to hold out, right to the end, when he phones Steinberg to declare that he has found the love he has spent his life searching for (416). Whether this love will hold out or not is less the issue than the fact that the story of it – a redemptive narrative – at one point nourished Wentzel’s sense of self.

Wentzel’s story, folded into a larger discourse of truth reclamation, is individually empowering, speaking to the power of narrative as a means for constructing a truth about oneself, a story that one can live with. Such narrative also functions as a potent social force, as Jane Taylor – who collaborated with William Kentridge in the production of Ubu and the Truth Commission – suggests:

What has engaged me as I have followed the Commission, is the way in which individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative. The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa’s recent past. History and autobiography merge. This marks a significant shift, because in the past decades of popular resistance, personal suffering was eclipsed – subordinated to a larger project of mass liberation. Now, however, we hear in individual testimony the very private patterns of language and thought that structure memory and mourning. Ubu and the Truth Commission uses these circumstances as a starting point. (ii)

Echoing Ndebele and Steinberg, Taylor contends that the merging of ‘history and autobiography’ in the making of ‘the larger national narrative’ speaks directly to a discourse of self. The latter is a means to achieve a level of truth that is potentially redemptive, a means of deliverance from the past. The terms ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ in this book’s subtitle gesture to the strong urge, identified here by Taylor, towards merging stories of self-making and ‘history’, and they also point to the productive tensions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ with their multiple meanings.