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
