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
