Читать книгу Losing the Plot - Leon de Kock - Страница 9
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From the subject of evil to the evil subject
Cultural difference in postapartheid South African crime fiction
One of the more energetic debates about postapartheid South African literature revolves around the question of why genre fiction, and more particularly crime fiction, so heavily saturates the book market. This debate has often been conducted anecdotally or superficially in reviews and comments on literary websites, despite scattered journal articles and one or two special issues on the topic.1 Particularly contested has been my own suggestion that crime thrillers may have come to stand in for what used to be seen as political or engaged fiction, in response to which some academics have argued that the generic or formulaic nature of detective novels precludes them from a nuanced treatment of sociopolitical issues.2 A common strand has been the contention that it is far-fetched to assume that genre fiction can engage with political themes in the manner of Gordimer, Langa, Mda or Serote. A great deal of this commentary appears in the form of stabs of opinion in the comment threads of digital media, and as such does not penetrate much beyond provisional position-taking.
An exception to this trend is Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s essay ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, in which the authors argue that Nicol’s own turn from serious fiction (as exemplified by his 1998 novel The Ibis Tapestry) to the popular form of crime fiction (as in his 2008 novel Payback) represents an unfortunate withdrawal from more serious literary writing in which matters are, fittingly, in a state of unresolved tension. Instead of keeping faith with the open-form novel, Nicol gives way to the temptation of neat but ultimately superficial gestures of closure. Although Titlestad and Polatinsky do not say so explicitly, there is in their argument a strong sense of disappointment that an outstanding South African author, in the older, more serious vein of South African writing, should ‘sell out’ to the seductions of a popular market where trite ‘answers’ are laid out in accordance with the norms of the genre. For Titlestad and Polatinsky, the intense grappling of pre-2000 writing with the challenges of cultural difference – how to give people of all ethnic, gender and class variations their due – appears to have given way to ‘thriller’ computations of the social totality. Nicol’s neo-noir3 palette, for Titlestad and Polatinsky, amounts to premature closure, as if the new democracy is little more than a motley gangland version of the rainbow nation. Reading Titlestad and Polatinsky, one finds it difficult not to agree that, if it is indeed true that crime fiction mostly dishes out cheap closure, such totalisation would be premature, to say the least. The sense of disinvestment so brought about, a divestiture of multilayered texture and imponderable complexity for the sake of superficial resolution and easy entertainment, is helped along by some of Nicol’s own statements. These utterances (as disingenuous, perhaps, as Athol Fugard’s protestations that his writing is ‘not political’) make the case that Nicol has abandoned serious fiction to write ‘commercial fiction’ because he supposedly enjoys it more, and it sells better.4 So, in a sense, Titlestad and Polatinsky’s article reads as a kind of parable for a literature that has ‘lost the plot’, abandoning its moral compass and its sense of direction. This, indeed, is a common theme in discussions of postapartheid writing (see Frenkel and MacKenzie). One might argue that, being lost, this new writing has surrendered to the quick fix of genre fiction, though with a patina of political content in its preoccupation with social violence, or ‘crime’. Given the subtext of Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument, one is invited to read the story of a once-great literature, with redoubtable names like Breytenbach, Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer, Hope, Langa, Leroux, Matshoba, Mda, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Serote, Van Heerden, Van Niekerk and Vladislavić, against an alarming recent trend of ‘dumbing down’. The post-transitional genre writers are seen as copping out of the real deal, i.e. complexity and openness, for the sake of quick-sell entertainment. These supposedly cheap tricks, in addition, feed off a still-volatile society in a manner which, some might claim, borders on the unethical.
Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument is generally sound and well executed, though Christopher Warnes (‘Writing Crime’ 983) detects a ‘popular’ and ‘highbrow’ binary in their reasoning. Without going into the merits of an argument that compels one to choose between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, I would like to suggest that there may be a different way of looking at Nicol’s work, and that of other crime writers. This chapter, then, asks a different question of crime fiction, one which might be introduced as follows: what if one were to read the large (although by no means universal) shift from, let’s say, social-realist ‘complexity’ to crime-detective ‘genre’, as something else entirely? This would involve reading the genre as symptomatic of a bigger movement, of a seismic social shift. What if the upsurge in South African ‘crime writing’, in all its forms,5 rather than selling out on intricate ‘entanglement’ (see Nuttall, Entanglement), is in fact prising open the workings of a genuinely transformed social condition? This is a condition, moreover, that is no longer just national, just ‘South African’, but transnational in its dimensions, and global in its derivations.
The question, then, might be posed thus: why this obsession, in the new millennium, with law and (dis)order, and more particularly with the spectacle of ‘crime’, as presented in mediated forms such as fiction and nonfiction writing? Articulated in this way, the question leads us away from the ultimately futile war of opinion about whether or not crime fiction is sufficiently ‘literary’, or adequately complex as an object of formal literary architecture. Instead, it concentrates attention on the questions: what is this fiction about? And what is it doing out there? This, indeed, is the issue to which Warnes also directs scholars of South African writing, suggesting that writers such as Meyer and Orford ‘keep faith with some of the core features of “serious” South African literature: its capacity to document social reality, to expose injustice, and to conscientise readers into different modes of thought and action’ (‘Writing Crime’ 983). I would add a further set of ‘core’ questions which the literary scholar might address: why the relatively sudden, and major, shift in circulation and reception from liberal-humanist and late-modern forms of fiction to genre-based novels? To what larger socio-historical complex might this be attributed, as a more general syndrome? This is a by no means uninteresting question, and one that Warnes seems not to probe sufficiently, merely resting his case on the argument that ‘the postapartheid crime thriller should be read as negotiating – in the ambivalent sense of the word – the threat and uncertainty that many feel to be part of South African life, creating fantasies of control, restoration and maintenance, and reflecting on the circumstances that gave rise to this unease’ (‘Writing Crime’ 991). But what of the greater complex of circumstances that underlie the ‘threat and uncertainty’ that Warnes identifies?
Cultural difference in a postapartheid frame
My argument commences with an overview of the changing role of cultural difference before and after the political transition of the 1990s. For several decades now, postcolonial theory, not to mention grassroots cultural politics, has encouraged an emphasis on cultural difference as a modifier of political subjectivity and identitarian position-taking. More general studies of cultural difference in its many dimensions, such as those by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young,6 in addition to local ones by, inter alia, Attwell, Duncan Brown and Wylie,7 have tended to place the spotlight on the many ways in which cultural difference has been misrecognised, in the colonies and the Orient, within reductive epistemic frames of reference. The centuries-long discourse around the ‘wild man’,8 primitivism, exoticism and other categories, including the fixations of social-Darwinist thought and biological racism,9 found a rebuttal in postcolonial theory and revisionist cultural history, most emphatically perhaps in Said’s Orientalism, and stretching beyond literary and cultural criticism to empirically founded historical works of epistemic redress such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. JM Coetzee’s South African novels may be said to deal with the politics of cultural difference in one way or another. The same is true for Nadine Gordimer and legions of other novelists working in the pre-2000 period. A common strain is the sense that cultural difference has been mismanaged in both colonial and neocolonial contexts, not to mention neoliberal conditions; also, vigilance regarding all forms of difference – whether relating to race, gender, ethnicity, language or culture – remains an important ethical task. It is also fair to suggest that South Africa’s negotiated settlement put in place (at least via the justice system and the Constitution) a process of remediation. By 1994, racial discrimination and the mismanagement of difference came to be seen by all except the far right as a universal evil, as the very subject of evil. By this time, apartheid, solidly based on the segregationist foundation laid by more than three centuries of colonialism, had been declared a crime against humanity; now, after the advent of full democracy, even the insiders of apartheid, the privileged whites, were persuaded to accept that ‘rainbowism’ – a symbolic figuration of ‘good’ or equitable cultural difference peculiar to South Africa’s late ‘revolution’ – was a virtuous state of being.10 For a short while during President Nelson Mandela’s five years of rule, rainbowism was enthusiastically promoted, not least by its originator, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Mandela himself, who will be remembered for, among other things, magnanimously taking tea in the white ‘homeland’ of Orania with Betsy, widow of apartheid’s architect, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.
The cultural-difference rainbow, in its fresh phase, was fleeting. Starting around the ANC’s second term of office in 1999, and the ascension to the presidency of the remote, less conciliatory Thabo Mbeki, a pervasive current of disillusionment set in. This occurred amid widespread perceptions of, first, the consolidation of a neoliberal form of ‘class apartheid’ in a ‘choiceless democracy’ (Bond, ‘Mandela Years’ n.p.) and, second, an emerging political discourse which was race-inflected to a degree that many found uncomfortable. One example of the new focus on race – particularly the valorisation of ‘pure’ blackness – was the controversy over the Mbeki-supported ‘Native Club’,11 which was part of a bigger pattern that Finlay describes as typifying the Mbeki presidency up to 2008: ‘[A] polarity in public exchanges dealing with race that, for many, felt quite different from the spirit of the preceding period, where notions of nonracialism and inclusivity were the guiding ideology of state decision and the zeitgeist of public discussion’ (Finlay 36).
To the ire of many long-standing nonracialists, the Native Club, closely affiliated with President Mbeki’s office, was open to black intellectuals only. Such exclusionary discourse and practice was widely perceived to signal the emergence of an unwelcome racial essentialism. It was perceived as abrogating the very nonracialism for which the ANC had fought; the latter had grown out of the concept of equality, a key principle in the 1955 Freedom Charter. It was felt that here, once again, a particular race was being valorised. The spectre of a resuscitated variant of exclusionary preferment, and the hardening of this scab on the body of the ‘new’ South Africa, galled many ‘new’ South Africans. Not least among such perceived defacements of the ideal of freedom and equality were the neoliberal economic policies which, combined with state corruption, were making conditions ripe for what Bond refers to as the ‘crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime’ that South Africa today endures (Bond, ‘Mandela Years’ n.p.).
Bond’s version is, of course, one strand in a complex story about what has gone ‘wrong’ in South Africa’s transition to democracy. However, the fact that the widely held belief that democracy was ‘failing’ gained broad traction in the 2000s (see, for example, Xolela Mangcu’s To the Brink). A 2008 conference at the University of the Witwatersrand had as its theme ‘Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Public Sphere: Democracy at the Crossroads’. At this gathering, political analysts Ivor Chipkin and Mangcu, among others, sounded warnings about a disturbing narrative of ‘national identity’ that seemed to be increasingly normative, and exclusionary on a racial basis, in the ranks of the governing party. In his book, Mangcu critiques what he describes as the ‘racial nativism’ (To the Brink xiii ff.) of the Mbeki government, calling for a renewed acceptance of ‘irreducible plurality’ and a return to the traditions of nonracialism (To the Brink 119).12 Such Mbeki-era ‘racial nativism’ landed with a threatening thud among South African cultural and political analysts, many of whom were familiar with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cautionary remarks on the ‘topologies of nativism’ (Father’s House 47–72). Appiah and other postcolonial thinkers in Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration perceived essentialised versions of ‘national identity,’ especially racialised national identity, as running counter to trends that had prevailed in critical theory since the Paris upheavals of 1968. It could no longer be assumed that the ‘new’ South Africa was on board in the larger progressive project of dismantling hegemonic and/or foundational fixities of identity. This is not to mention the bad taste such a return to ethnic fixations left in the mouth of Fanonites who feared the emergence of corrupt ruling elites, a comprador class wont to lose the plot of its own self-made ‘revolution’. Yet far from being unique in this regard, postapartheid South Africa was merely a late entrant to a global club, from north to south and west to east, in which newly constituted democratic regimes have suffered routine ‘breakdown’ (see Linz and Stepan).
It is not my purpose here to test and probe such positions or their prior historical conditions, but rather to note the resurgence of alarm about new orthodoxies of national identity, and new forms of differential preferment, perceived as contradictory to the promise of the negotiated South African settlement. Mbeki’s promised African Renaissance has been followed by the era of Zuma: instead of rebirth and restoration, there is a new clamour demanding the fall of villains, from Rhodes to Zuma. It is common cause that the democratic ideal has been profoundly compromised, culminating in a system of patrimonialism with President Zuma at its apex.
In a 2013 commentary, Achille Mbembe remarks on the state of the country:
South Africa has entered a new period of its history: a post-Machiavellian moment when private accumulation no longer
happens through outright dispossession but through the capture and appropriation of public resources, the modulation of brutality and the instrumentalisation of disorder. (‘Our Lust for Lost Segregation’ n.p.)
For Mbembe, South Africa in 2013 is not immune from the ‘mixture of clientelism, nepotism and prebendalism’ common to African postcolonies, and he observes that an ‘armed society’ such as South Africa is ‘hardly a democracy’; it is, he writes, ‘mostly an assemblage of atomised individuals isolated before power, separated from each other by fear, prejudice, mistrust and suspicion, and prone to mobilise under the banner of either a mob, a clique or a militia rather than an idea and, even less so, a disciplined organization’.
‘Bad’ difference – a new evil?
My focus is the relationship between crime stories and a growing public disquiet about social disorder. The new wave of fiction works on the assumption that a fresh and perverse form of officially sanctioned ‘bad’ cultural difference has become a justification for civil mismanagement, perhaps even for what Mbembe refers to as the ‘instrumentalisation of disorder’. ‘Bad’ difference is coming to be perceived as a sinister recuperation of elitism, so that detection, as spun into detective stories by a new generation of writers, has become a matter of exposing ‘bad’ difference and its legitimating rationalisations, its postures and pretexts, marking it as the shadow side of legitimate cultural difference. Such socially ‘conscientising’ writing, in Warnes’s words (‘Writing Crime’ 983), seeks to demonstrate how ‘bad’ difference goes about its disingenuous work. If the ‘transition’ itself is opaque and barely credible, with so little apparent social change, in hard economic terms, especially for the poor,13 then such detection and exposure is – perhaps inevitably – the task of the writer. In such an understanding of the writer’s role, the author seeks to show what’s actually going on, or at least to suggest a theory, a revised version of the lost plot, where a calculated guess is made. The task for the writer (and the critic), then, is to make the transition – or the myth of transition – visible and tractable by plotting its characters, their sphere of operation, their motives and modus operandi, and, ultimately, their actions and their social meaning. Political operatives who were ‘good’ in the past, under conditions of disenfranchisement, now often become ‘bad’ holders of power. At least, this would often appear to be the hidden meaning of the transition. Power is perceived as a motor of corruption. The implicit question is: has South Africa, beset with resurgent violence and disorder, truly moved on from apartheid? The answer, it seems, is dubious, to say the least.
Racial and cultural difference, as affirmed by the South African Constitution, particularly in its clauses guaranteeing equality, suggests a symmetry whereby the component parts of a diverse society enjoy equal rights. This may be termed ‘good’ difference. On the other hand, however, conditions in South African society have, since 1994, produced what may be termed ‘bad’ or corrupt difference, which uses the legitimising politics of cultural difference (identity politics) to achieve asymmetrical gain, often at the expense of others. ‘Bad’ difference is, then, the abuse of political privilege in order to leverage preferment, often under the guise of egalitarian practice. One example of this is the South African arms deal, while another is President Jacob Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, which enables privileges such as the use of a military airfield for private purposes. ‘Bad’ cultural difference in such cases enables corrupt collaborative practices in state as well as private-sector dealings characteristic of comprador societies. Materialist critics like Bond see government’s role in this as a form of class betrayal, with the postapartheid order constituting ‘class apartheid’ (‘Mandela Years’ n.p.); in this system, advocates for the poor gain capital leverage based on an ‘empowerment for all’ ticket. This chimes with what the new generation of Black Consciousness proponents, such as Andile Mngxitama, claim.14
For crime writers, the existence of corrupted or ‘bad’ difference is detected in a range of public and private spaces: within government itself (more specifically, its corrupt officials and their cronies, as in Nicol’s works); among criminals, which often includes (degenerate, sold-out) members of the South African Police Service, formerly the South African Police Force (as in Roger Smith’s Mixed Blood); or in civil society, where ‘bad’ alliances between distinct subsets, often in cahoots with state functionaries, create distortions of ‘civil’ practice (as in Margie Orford’s Gallows Hill and Andrew Brown’s Refuge). For writers in the postapartheid period, the easier-to-define moral order of anti-apartheid or struggle literature has disappeared, and they are compelled to work out a new way of seeing things. Here, the boundaries of right and wrong, of good and bad, have shifted and need to be redefined. Disorder, rule-breaking and malfeasance have saturated the private and public spheres to such an extent that virtuous conduct and wrongdoing are frequently blurred. Addressing this is no easy task, and the postapartheid fictional terrain dramatises a reconfigured contest over law and order in which the borderlines of legitimate and illegitimate are frequently under erasure. So pervasive is crime that neither the state nor any civil grouping has a monopoly over violence or legitimacy. The terrain is one of moral ambiguity, where newly validated cultural ‘difference’ becomes complicit in a gory inversion of the rule of law.
Postcolonial law and (dis)order
Rita Barnard draws attention to the manner in which the postapartheid state has brought with it ‘new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, new meanings of citizenship, and new dimensions of sovereignty and power’ (Barnard, ‘Tsotsis’ 561–562; see also Steinberg, ‘Crime’). One aspect of this newer set-up, according to Barnard, is that ‘minimal government, under pressure from a frightened citizenry (redefined as consumers and victims), can readily turn into its authoritarian opposite’ (‘Tsotsis’ 565). For Jean and John Comaroff, the former colonial state evinces a particular preoccupation with the law, amounting at times to a fetishisation of legality. The preoccupation with law and legality, write the Comaroffs, runs deeper than ‘purely a concern with crime’ (Law and Disorder 32). This is an important consideration, since ‘crime’ in South African discourse is a problematic signifier, capturing very incompletely a more generalised scene of social instability. It has to do, the Comaroffs argue, ‘with the very constitution of the postcolonial polity’, since the ‘modernist nation-state appears to be undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of an imagined community founded on the fiction, often violently sustained, of cultural homogeneity, toward a nervous, xenophobically tainted sense of heterogeneity and heterodoxy’ (32). The rise of neoliberalism, the authors continue, ‘has heightened all this, with its impact on population movements, on the migration of work and workers, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on the return of the colonial oppressed to haunt the cosmopoles that once ruled them and wrote their histories’ (33). Such effects ‘are felt especially in former colonies, which were erected from the first on difference’ (33).
Now, difference strikes back at the former colonies: ‘[P]ostcolonials are citizens for whom polymorphous, labile identities coexist in uneasy ensembles of political subjectivity’; such citizens tend not to attach their sense of destiny to the nation, but rather to ‘an ethnic, cultural, language, religious, or some other group’, despite the fact that subjects such as these do not necessarily reject their national identity (33). What are often labelled as communal loyalties (Abahlali baseMjondolo15 for example, or migrants from other parts of Africa who have been the subject of xenophobic attacks) ‘are frequently blamed for the kinds of violence, nepotism, and corruption said to saturate these societies, as if cultures of heterodoxy bear within them the seeds of criminality, difference, disorder’ (33).
It is worth backtracking to give a more complete account of how the Comaroffs reach the rather startling conclusion that cultures of heterodoxy produce criminality and disorder as correlates of difference. How has it come about that the role of cultural difference, such a critical factor in the history of many postcolonies, could have shifted so drastically from a perceived virtue to something resembling a matrix for criminality?
The first step is to sketch the context in which such a keen preoccupation with the law, legality and its abrogation in the postcolony might be found – most recently, postapartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of case studies and ethnographic scholarship, the Comaroffs find that ‘law and disorder’ are constitutive of a social base in which legality and criminality depend on and feed off each other in an enhanced, or accentuated, manner. ‘Vastly lucrative returns ... inhere in actively sustaining zones of ambiguity between the presence and absence of the law’; in this way, value is amassed ‘by exploiting the new aporias of jurisdiction opened up by neoliberal conditions’ (Law and Disorder 5). In this environment, one might add, law enforcement officers feel at liberty to collaborate with underworld agents, helping to sustain sex-slavery rings in Cape Town amid a chaotic and often dysfunctional criminal justice system, as Noseweek’s 2009 report indicates (‘Trapped in Pollsmoor’ n.p.).
Central to the Comaroffs’ discussion about the consequences of neoliberalism in the postcolony is not only what one might call prevailing conditions of ‘lawlessness’, but also the widespread media representation of such conditions as ‘bad’. Media versions of a venal, predatory approach to the ‘free market’ take their lead from an older, more equitable liberal rationality. Egalitarian political theory in South Africa, as expressed in a progressive liberal-democratic Constitution, exists in a state of disjuncture with socio-economic practice. The conjunction of ‘neo’ and ‘liberal’ creates a paradoxical nexus in which it is possible both to be part of a (benignly) liberal dispensation in the more traditional sense of this term, and to be part of its subversion – whether in the form of a corrupt police commissioner, or as an entrapped subject, caught in what is an essentially inequitable order of things. The crime writer often takes up the position of the galled citizenry, observing dirty doings in a newly created ‘democratic’ order that seems to belie, in its (reported) behaviour, every tenet of its underlying (liberal-democratic) ethos. Further, in the more reflexive writers’ work, there is an awareness that the citizen so entrapped in witnessing widespread neoliberal quashing of what might be termed classical liberalism16 is, willy-nilly, part of – i.e. caught within – the same system.17 This kind of tension between an idealised notion of fairness and actual justice is consistently invoked in public discourse, such that it is almost a leitmotif. The persistent cancellation of the ideal of justice by practices that are essentially unfair typifies the postcolonial law/disorder condition in a similar way to that in neoliberal environments – though the edge is perhaps a little sharper, and the grain rougher, in the postcolony.
Ironically, in such conditions the law is fetishised, ‘even as, in most postcolonies, higher and higher walls are built to protect the propertied from lawlessness, even as the language of legality insinuates itself deeper and deeper into the realm of the illicit’ (Law and Disorder 22). Law and lawlessness, assert the Comaroffs, ‘are conditions of each other’s possibility’ (21). And so, too, are these two leitmotifs of the postcolony inextricably linked in fictive imaginaries: citing Rosalind Morris, they write, ‘[m]ass mediation gives law and disorder a “communicative force” that permits it to “traverse the social field”’ (21). These arguments appear to support Margie Orford’s opinion18 that crime fiction allows ordinary citizens imaginatively to traverse zones of law, and of the erasure of such laws; these are zones that are not generally open to anyone other than policemen and journalists. The ‘crime’ story is thus a ‘communicative force’ in which bolted-in, apprehensive citizens of the neoliberal postcolony can ‘get out’ and ‘see’ what might actually be going on in the dark of night, and in the clear light of day, too, in the frequently bewildering, unreadable postapartheid topography (see also, in this regard, my discussion of a ‘wound culture’ in Chapter 6).
Morris comments on the phenomenon of mediated ‘crime’ in South Africa: ‘Transmitted along a myriad vectors, in televisual serials, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, and music lyrics, crime is the phantom that haunts the new nation’s imaginary’ (61). Crime is both an event in the real world and a mediated condition feeding other fears and insecurities: ‘Macabre tales of heavily armed robbers and single-minded carjackers, of remorseless murderers, and – most remarked of all – pedophilic rapists feed a national press that is insatiable for news of personalized catastrophe with which to signify or prophesy political failure’ (61). Similarly, Gary Kynoch (‘Fear and Alienation’) argues for a deep preoccupation with narratives of lawlessness amid mounting political threat among whites in postapartheid South Africa.
‘Crime’ as an allegory for the sociopolitical
Understanding, interpreting, describing and responding to ‘crime’ in the ‘new’ South Africa therefore appears to be an everyday allegory for the sociopolitical terrain in a broad sense, speaking urgently to anxieties about very real conditions of social disorder.19 ‘[T]he causes of crime’s transformation are ... usually construed in political terms,’ argues Morris. ‘Crime marks the boundary of the polis as much as any other wilderness,’ she adds (61). Within such a sociopolitical milieu, regardless of finer points of form, genre or the writer’s intention, writers ineluctably go to the heart of the political with every new narrative in which detection is imagined as a set of explorations across the social terrain, and the cause of a crime is sought within a chain of events in a dysfunctional polity.
Of course, many shades of the palette will be evident as writers seek to depict an emerging order through the lens of what a community deems to be ‘criminal’, in line with Emile Durkheim’s credo that society learns to know itself by coming to understand the nature of its own criminal shadow. For Durkheim, crime – and more to the point, how people respond to its occurrence – provides a basis for the emergence of a normative consensus. ‘Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them,’ Durkheim wrote (103), and this continues to hold true more than a century later. The problem for South African writers on the cusp of the millennium, however, has often been the very equivocality – and contestation – of the line between legality and criminality, both in the civil and in the public sphere. The condition of ‘plot loss’ for such writers is acute: not only has the sociopolitical dispensation changed fundamentally, making what in the very recent past was illegal and unethical suddenly legal and right – and vice versa – but world politics, too, has undergone a disorienting transformation. In the 1990s, leading into the new millennium and beyond, two formerly discrete zones (‘home’ and the ‘outside’ world) began to play into each other, such that new levels of uncertainty bedevilled the general relief at having achieving a democratic consensus. In the wake of globalisation and its dramatic 1990s upsurge, the rules were rewritten across the transformed face of the world, especially for nations that had long defined themselves in relation to the antagonisms of the cold war. In addition, as Misha Glenny argues in McMafia, crime rapidly became a global network, creating new transnational alliances facilitated by globalisation.
Deon Meyer takes precisely the disambiguation of the post-1990 condition as his implicit task, his subtext, in his novel Heart of the Hunter. Meyer’s hero in this tale, the muscled modern warrior, Thobela ‘Tiny’ Mpayipheli, embodies the intricate complexity of the postapartheid dispensation in several ways. Not only was Mpayipheli schooled in cold war conditions as an MK soldier trained in Eastern Europe under communist conditions; not only was he, too, ‘forgotten’ by the ruling party upon his return from exile; he was also ‘shopped’ by his political masters in the South African political underground to the eastern Europeans as a crack assassin, in return for political favours. Then, to make matters worse, this Xhosa ‘hunter-warrior’ – associated explicitly in the text with a long line of precolonial champions, including Phalo, Maqoma and Ngqika – is abandoned by the eastern Europeans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They had been using him as an unusually sharp cold-war assassin. Importantly, Meyer’s multi-layered ‘plot’ in this novel is built precisely upon the ruins of earlier socio-historical plots: (i) the ANC’s alliance with the USSR and the communist world, all of which imploded on the eve of liberation in South Africa; (ii) the promised economic ‘new deal’ in South Africa in the wake of what was supposed to be socialism’s moral victory on the world stage – a deal that failed to materialise; the committed foot soldier of the revolution comes home to nothing, neither glory nor compensation; (iii) the setting up of a working-class leadership in a socialist republic – yet another conspicuous failure of intention. All of these building blocks for what was long projected as a ‘good’ and ideologically virtuous new South Africa had been swept away. The ability to function like a sovereign state, or a relatively independent entity, at least, was being critically undermined by the late-capitalist world order, with its lack of respect for borders, in terms of money flows particularly. (Unsurprisingly, it was during this period that the ‘market-friendly’ macro-economic strategy Growth, Employment and Redistribution [GEAR], which emphasised tighter fiscal policy and the loosening of foreign exchange controls, was formulated.) Michael Allen’s searching political-economic enquiry, Globalization, Negotiation, and the Future of Transformation in South Africa, concludes (181–192) that the South African postapartheid state found itself between a rock and a very hard place indeed as global economic pressures increasingly set the agenda, especially for countries in the developing or ‘emerging’ world seeking to achieve economic growth.
In search of the ‘virtuous’ postapartheid citizen
Meanwhile, inside the ‘fragile, infant democracy’ (Heart of the Hunter 234) that Meyer’s novel maps, matters are correspondingly complicated. Gone is the old struggle order of good revolutionaries pitted against bad (mostly white) politicians, or commendable communists going up against exploitative Western capitalists. Now, in many instances, the government is at war with itself as certain alliance partners push to the left of an unstable centre and others, formerly rock-solid alliance partners, lurch to the right. Indeed, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ become increasingly unstable as ‘left’ easily becomes associated with a form of national socialism or fascism, evident in the case of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).20 At the same time, as enacted in Heart of the Hunter, separately constituted intelligence agencies (combining the information regimes of the former liberation armies with those of the former South African Defence Force and South African Police) find themselves crossing swords. The collateral damage that results from such intergovernmental feuds includes ‘good’ people like the struggle hero Mpayipheli and Miriam, his new love.21 The ‘good’, as in ‘good people’, and how to define this in the ‘new South Africa’, ideologically speaking, was fast becoming a paradoxical category. And it is this blind spot about what exactly constitutes a ‘good citizen’, or a ‘reasonable person’ in legal parlance, to which crime writers, nonfiction authors and political analysts have repeatedly turned.22
Imaginative writers at work in this period23 seem especially keen to probe the problem of the ‘virtuous’ individual – and the limits or pressures brought to bear in defining such virtue – as a litmus test for the health of the body politic at large. Where does one draw the line between legitimate cultural difference – a polymorphous ‘good’ – and less virtuous strains of difference? In a fragile ensemble of citizens aiming at a new democratic consensus, ‘bad’ difference seems to introduce a form of perversity. JM Coetzee probed the limit conditions of democratic consensus in his character David Lurie in Disgrace, and Gordimer in her examination of the trigger-finger character, Duncan Lingard, in The House Gun. Damon Galgut, in The Good Doctor, describes two doctors trying to do the ‘right thing’ in a rural hospital, against all political odds, asking the reader to weigh up their efforts (see Titlestad, ‘Allegories’). Mandla Langa, in The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, takes the delicate question of where to draw the line in political behaviour into a fictional African state, thereby broadening the postapartheid canvas to postcoloniality. Orford’s investigator, Clare Hart, persistently attempts to expose a criminality that is hidden behind a variety of faux-virtuous insulations. In Gallows Hill, Hart says at one stage that ‘[t]he collision of history and politics is complicated in Cape Town’ (60; but this is true also of Mpumalanga – where the action shifts later in the story – not to mention the rest of the country). ‘History’, in this novel, delivers the bones of long-dead slaves discovered in a mass grave; near the place where they are found, the site of a new commercial development on Cape Town’s ‘Gallows Hill’ (a public hanging site in the colonial era), lie the bones of a murdered Cape Town anti-apartheid activist from the 1980s. As the earth unveils unholy, improperly buried skeletons, pointing to the politically sanctioned evils of earlier layers of history (colonial rule, then apartheid), so the action of the novel in the postapartheid period reveals a new stratum of political crooks: wheelers and dealers who would rather throw cement over the bones of the indecently buried, and take a paycheck, than heed conscience. Orford’s novel takes one to the ‘scene of the crime’ in both a historical as well as a contemporaneous sense, and puts together an ensemble of citizens who contest, via their various vested interests, the question of value, of material enrichment and political advancement, on the one hand, and the remit of legal and ethical reckoning, on the other. Mzobe’s Young Blood, to offer another example, offers a reverse-angle view, from behind the scenes of what is taken to be ‘crime’, showing the precarious fate of a ‘good’ young man in Umlazi, Durban. This is a space where, as critic Wamuwi Mbao puts it, ‘the criminal and the respectable jostle at close quarters’ (‘Report Card’ n.p.). Mzobe’s hero, Sipho, is an essentially upstanding character whose blameless aspirations lead him into a ‘bad’ world, a zone in which loyalty, astuteness and similarly excellent qualities are moulded into ‘crime’ by a culture of disadvantage and acute need.
How to define a ‘good’ person in the ‘new South Africa’ is, likewise, urgently at issue in Meyer’s novel. By creating a single primary focus of public attention – a riveting road chase – Meyer succeeds in focusing the attention of three sets of readership (his South African readers, his sizeable international audience, and the imagined general-public consumers of media in the world that the novel represents) upon a critical question: is Tiny Mpayipheli a bad guy or a good guy, a hero or a villain? Is he virtuous or villainous within the redefined terms of the new dispensation? How far do we allow for ‘difference’ in the parameters of the new constitutional democracy? A ‘good citizen’ is a category that is under erasure, as Chipkin demonstrates (100); so it is, too, in the ‘infant democracy’ depicted in Meyer’s novel. It is a question on which the fate of the country hangs, because if postapartheid South Africa gets this definition wrong, or badly skewed towards renewed injustice and ‘bad’ difference, then the newborn dispensation might just emerge from transition as a beastly adult. The stakes are high.
The political importance of this moral fixing of the notion ‘good citizen’ cannot be overestimated. Such ‘fixing’ – in the sense of stabilising as well as correcting – implies a discursive re-territorialising of the new South Africa, underpinned by consensus. It is therefore no surprise that Meyer addresses the difficulties of ethical compass-setting. He achieves a high degree of narrative concentration by launching his protagonist Mpayipheli on a movie-style motorcycle chase from Cape Town to northern Botswana. By using a plot-heavy thriller model, Meyer succeeds in achieving what very often eludes more discursive fictional modes in South African writing: he revivifies the drama – in the form of a big-screen sense of plot and colourful characters – as he narrates the story of postapartheid political change.
A Frankenstein or a Robin Hood?
Meyer’s Mpayipheli, figured perhaps a little romantically as being in touch with ‘the voices of his ancestors – Phalo and Rharhabe, Ngqika and Maqoma, the great Xhosa chiefs, his bloodline, source, and refuge’ (Heart of the Hunter 3) – reluctantly agrees to help a former struggle comrade, Johnny Kleintjes, who is being held hostage by unknown parties in Lusaka following an intelligence sting. Mpayipheli is tasked with delivering a mobile hard drive supposedly containing sensitive information to Lusaka, where a group of obscure transnational kidnappers are based; his aim is to secure a compatriot’s freedom. Mpayipheli is reluctant to undertake the assignment – he has bought a plot of land in his ancestral Xhosaland (Eastern Cape), to which he hopes to return with his beloved Miriam and her son. He feels compelled to nurture and re-educate the boy as a man of the people. Mpayipheli is keen to close down the bad parts of his history, to live pure and straight, but the past hauls him in for one (seemingly) last settling of scores. He ‘owes’ his comrade Kleintjes an unspecified ‘struggle’ debt, and Mpayipheli is nothing if not a man of his word. He books a flight from Cape Town to the Zambian capital, thinking he will sort out the business quickly. Unknown to him, though, various warring South African intelligence agencies are trailing him – they also don’t quite know what’s going on, and they want the information that Mpayipheli is carrying so they can find out. When agents try to apprehend him at Cape Town International Airport, he reveals his extraordinary physical prowess by staging an unlikely escape, exiting the airport and eventually ‘borrowing’ a BMW 1200GS motorcycle from his place of work, a Motorrad dealership in the Cape Town CBD.
Mpayipheli, accustomed to riding a 200cc Honda Benly, finds himself having to adapt to the brutish power of the BMW, almost wiping himself out as he makes his way onto the N1, the road that leads north, to Botswana and Zimbabwe, and beyond that, Lusaka. He knows that the combined forces of the SA Police Service, the SA National Defence Force, various arms of the postapartheid intelligence services as well as an elite reaction unit will soon be hunting him down. They do this with helicopters, satellite surveillance, roadblocks, and an arsenal of arms fit to kill a battalion of soldiers, let alone a solo fugitive on a motorbike. When Cape Times reporter Allison Healy gets wind of the story, the stage is set for a media spectacle that concentrates the attention of significant portions of the new nation on a dramatic chase, and what it represents.
In line with the idea that reporters and detectives traverse social shadow-zones on behalf of the citizenry, and send back dispatches on ‘what’s going on out there’, Healy’s reporting, along with other media reports, pitted against statements by the state, signals a fierce public-sphere contestation over how best to understand and interpret the events on the ground regarding Mpayipheli. The big question is how to ‘read’ him and his actions – is he a Frankenstein of the struggle, as the government media communiqués suggest, or a Robin Hood, as many civil subjects begin to think during the course of the story? Before long, reporter Healy is not only updating her reports on a daily basis in the Cape Times as she forges ahead in her work of detection, she is also being interviewed on national TV about her discoveries. The Mpayipheli affair becomes a media fanfare, and a test case to boot: who is more truthful, and more ‘good’, in this sapling democracy – the government’s agents or the individual that these agents are hunting down? The resolution of this question carries an enormous burden of meaning for the health and longevity of the democracy: if Mpayipheli does turn out to be a Robin Hood, then why is the state so intent on crushing him, and others like him? Can the new government be trusted? If Mpayipheli is essentially an upstanding citizen, then what is being hidden from sight, and why? What is on the hard drive he is carrying with him? And how important are the consequences of such hiding?
These questions were especially important in the first decade of the transition period, when South Africa still loomed large in the global imaginary as a singular case of constitutional, democratic success among developing nations, a political ‘miracle’. As German scholar Jörn Rüsen pleaded at a Witwatersrand University colloquium in 1998 called ‘Living Difference’, ‘[i]t is imperative for us that you [the democratic transition] succeed!’24 He was reminding sceptical South African delegates how much was at stake, not only for South Africa, but also for the very possibility of constitutional democracy in the postcolonies of the world. Among the colloquium discussants at that event was Nancy Fraser, who is wont to question the relevance of Habermas’s theory of public-sphere deliberation, framed as it is within Westphalian-state or ‘national’ contexts, as well as Benedict Anderson’s notion of nationally constituted ‘imagined communities’. Fraser argues that these notions are no longer valid in a globalising, post-and transnational context (11–13). South Africa, one might argue, was caught amidships in this period, between the stern of an inchoate national identity and the bow of globalisation, the point at which the country was navigating the swells of oceanic global interconnectedness.
On the one hand, the very existence of broad media contestation in South Africa might have suggested to Meyer’s readers that a democratic public sphere is – or was, at that time – on a sound footing; the novel is set in the early 2000s, several years before the looming threat of the Protection of State Information Bill, or ‘Secrecy Bill’. Such public-sphere contestation might suggest that Fraser’s sense of a sequestered national public sphere is premature in the case of South Africa. Meyer is one of the few crime writers who, at least in his earlier novels, of which Heart of the Hunter is a good example, evinces optimism about the new democracy and its prospects for robust health – though he is correspondingly hard on the old white renegades who continue to crawl out of the woodwork in new-era knavery. At the same time, however, the underlying forces in Meyer’s story, the very factors precipitating ‘plot loss’ among the state’s functionaries – namely the CIA and transnational agents at work in the novel’s ‘sting’, alongside a covert intelligence scam inside the South African security establishment – are mostly beyond the nation-state’s control and even awareness. This suggests that Fraser’s theory of nation-states losing the luxury of an efficacious, bounded public sphere might be half-right after all. In Meyer’s novel, as in many demonstrable real-world incidents in postapartheid South Africa, the state itself is too often in the dark about what exactly is going on for comfort; this is especially so in strategic instances, both with regard to external undercurrents and internally, where its own operatives are often indisputably at war with one other, as each week’s news stories tend to suggest. The state, like its citizens, seems to have lost the plot, and to save face it has to present a unified front. In the name of ‘national security’, it has no choice in this novel but to back the most politic option in the short term: hunt down Mpayipheli to eliminate the risk that the intelligence he is carrying will compromise the state’s security, not to mention its increasingly precarious dignity. In order to do this, however, it must fight a war of public opinion, and in the process betray Mpayipheli, one of its former MK soldier-heroes, painting him as a psychopathic, out-of-control renegade.
The question of what exactly constitutes a virtuous South African citizen – and, by implication, how to discern ‘bad’ difference – is therefore a matter of supreme importance, both in the world of the novel and also in the real world, involving an exploration of contending values. ‘Virtue’ here would include the typical diagnostic preoccupation in postcolonies with the idea of what makes a good or legitimate legal subject, a preoccupation which, according to the Comaroffs, is ‘growing in counterpoint to, and deeply entailed in, the rise of the felonious state, private indirect government, and endemic cultures of illegality’ (Law and Disorder 20). This has ‘come to feature prominently in popular discourses almost everywhere’ (20), including, I suggest, crime fiction. Furthermore, as governance ‘disperses itself and monopolies over coercion fragment, crime and policing provide a rich repertoire of idioms and allegories with which to address, imaginatively, the nature of sovereignty, justice, and social order’ (20). In the process, the kind of ambiguity about right and wrong, noted earlier as typical of various postcolonies and developing nations, grows ever larger. As if to demonstrate this very point, Meyer’s character Janina Mentz, head of an elite intelligence unit among several other warring intelligence structures in the postapartheid government, tells her protégé Tiger Mazibuko that ‘the world ha[s] become an evil place, residents and countries not knowing who [is] friend or foe, wars that [can] no longer be fought with armies but at the front of secret rooms, the mini-activities of abduction and occupation, suicide attacks and pipe bombs’ (Heart of the Hunter 104).
‘Intelligence’ in a reconstituted public sphere
Taking this theme a step further, Heart of the Hunter’s focus on wars of intelligence (both strategic state information/espionage and ‘sense-making’ in an age of information overload) captures a crisis of old and new methods of warfare. The old methods included MK foot soldiers such as Mpayipheli conducting guerilla warfare, but such subjects now find themselves caught up in an information-age meta-war. In this newer kind of mêlée the old tricks of information and disinformation are elevated into a knowledge economy face-off, a data war of contending power-plays which claim human lives as collateral damage. By the end of Meyer’s novel, one has come to understand that lives can plausibly be lost in a war of attrition around ownership and/or control of information in and of itself, despite the fact that the data at the centre of the conflict might be quite worthless – or even false, as it turns out to be in Heart of the Hunter. And yet, at stake is the power to define what is ‘right’, what is legitimate (including what is legally right) in the name of the body politic. Therein lies the key to the knowledge/power equation. Everything, in a sense, depends on ‘intelligence’, a conflict which drives Meyer’s novel relentlessly towards its bloody conclusion.
In the plot of Heart of the Hunter, government agents issue communiqués describing Mpayipheli as a deranged madman, based on the evidence of a high-ranking former MK ‘hero’ who makes this claim to escape a sexual harassment charge. Meanwhile, reporter Allison Healy portrays a very different version of Mpayipheli to her fictive (and Meyer’s actual) readers: he was an old MK hero of great distinction, and he has repeatedly tried to avoid hurting people in the hunt-and-resistance story of the novel. Healy’s version of Mpayipheli is, moreover, based on the testimony of a former comrade. In addition, the words of ordinary people, such as Mpayipheli’s common-law wife, Miriam, and a streetwise shoeshine-man, suggest to Allison and her readers that Mpayipheli is indeed a man of the people rather than the villain the state wishes to make him appear in the eyes of the masses. Healy’s ‘Will the real Thobela Mpayipheli please stand up’ (192) echoes the bigger question that forms the subtext of the novel. While virtue is strongly suggested in the character of Koos Kok, a ‘Griqua troubadour’ who helps Mpayipheli escape pursuit by police helicopters, the general public remains in doubt. The motorcycle chase and its reported progress serve to emphasise that the line between law and (dis)order cannot be decisively demarcated. In addition, it reveals a political cartography that is both politically occulted and dangerously labile.
In the end, the novelistic ‘resolution’ is polyvalent and disorienting. Though Mpayipheli’s common-law wife is killed as a result of a blunder by a state agent, he manages to save her son, Pakamile, whom he plans to take home to his ancestral plot of land in Xhosaland. This is his consolation after very nearly losing his own life at the hands of his former comrades. Public opinion about Mpayipheli’s status as a heroic or a debased citizen remains ambiguous, however, as the ‘new’ South Africa dissolves into perversions of justice perpetrated especially against those who should be the heirs of the fruits of revolution.
Cultural difference is thus conceptualised as the locus for a redefined morality in the postapartheid imaginary – in the media, in commentary and in the powerful, popular genre of crime fiction. Together, these forms gesture towards a reconfigured sense of evil, one which coincides to some extent with a more general postcolonial condition in the wake of neoliberal hegemony across the globe. Whereas the denial of cultural difference (in colonial and neocolonial contexts) mobilised activism such as the struggle against apartheid for its revalidation and the restoration of putatively more symmetrical power relations, a widespread emergence of ‘bad’ difference has since become evident. The use of violence, too, has become morally ambiguous, as dramatised in the case of Mpayipheli in Meyer’s Heart of the Hunter (and its sequel, Devil’s Peak), as well as in works such as Orford’s Gallows Hill and Mzobe’s Young Blood. In Devil’s Peak, Mpayipheli finds himself resorting to rough justice for paedophiles, using his assegai as a weapon, after he realises that the South African criminal justice system – and therefore the state – is incapable of protecting its most vulnerable citizens from abuse. And yet this form of kangaroo-style justice is shown to be an ultimately unsatisfactory measure, especially when Mpayipheli misidentifies two of the perpetrators and thereby becomes a murderer himself, rather than a virtuous avenger. Such are the moral intricacies of the new order. If the state does not have ‘a monopoly on the legitimate use of force’, then there is an urgent need for intensive investigation. The turn to crime fiction in South Africa should therefore be regarded not so much as an escapist, formulaic lapse in taste than as a form of social hermeneutics: in an ethically muddled topography, acts of detection identify, describe and explore the phenomenon of ‘bad’ difference. Alternatively, such detection investigates the management of difference, that is, the disingenuousness and deceit surrounding such management as the locus where the new order either coheres or falls apart. In the process, the basis of ‘virtuous’ citizenship within the postapartheid context is being extensively rewritten.
