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
