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,
