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
