the democracy: if Mpayipheli does turn out to be a Robin Hood, then why is the state so intent on crushing him, and others like him? Can the new government be trusted? If Mpayipheli is essentially an upstanding citizen, then what is being hidden from sight, and why? What is on the hard drive he is carrying with him? And how important are the consequences of such hiding?
These questions were especially important in the first decade of the transition period, when South Africa still loomed large in the global imaginary as a singular case of constitutional, democratic success among developing nations, a political ‘miracle’. As German scholar Jörn Rüsen pleaded at a Witwatersrand University colloquium in 1998 called ‘Living Difference’, ‘[i]t is imperative for us that you [the democratic transition] succeed!’24 He was reminding sceptical South African delegates how much was at stake, not only for South Africa, but also for the very possibility of constitutional democracy in the postcolonies of the world. Among the colloquium discussants at that event was Nancy Fraser, who is wont to question the relevance of Habermas’s theory of public-sphere deliberation, framed as it is within Westphalian-state or ‘national’ contexts, as well as Benedict Anderson’s notion of nationally constituted ‘imagined communities’. Fraser argues that these notions are no longer valid in a globalising, post-and transnational context (11–13). South Africa, one might argue, was caught amidships in this period, between the stern of an inchoate national identity and the bow of globalisation, the point at which the country was navigating the swells of oceanic global interconnectedness.
On the one hand, the very existence of broad media contestation in South Africa might have suggested to Meyer’s readers that a democratic public sphere is – or was, at that time – on a sound footing; the novel is set in the early 2000s, several years before the looming threat of the Protection of State Information Bill, or ‘Secrecy Bill’. Such public-sphere contestation might suggest that Fraser’s sense of a sequestered national public sphere is premature in the case of South Africa. Meyer is one of the few crime writers who, at least in his earlier novels, of which Heart of the Hunter is a good example, evinces optimism about the new democracy and its prospects for robust health – though he is correspondingly hard on the old white renegades who continue to crawl out of the woodwork in new-era knavery. At the same time, however, the underlying forces in Meyer’s story, the very factors precipitating ‘plot loss’ among the state’s functionaries – namely the CIA and transnational agents at work in the novel’s ‘sting’, alongside a covert intelligence scam inside the South African security establishment – are mostly beyond the nation-state’s control and even awareness. This suggests that Fraser’s theory of nation-states losing the luxury of an efficacious, bounded public sphere might be half-right after all. In Meyer’s novel, as in many demonstrable real-world incidents in postapartheid South Africa, the state itself is too often in the dark about what exactly is going on for comfort; this is especially so in strategic instances, both with regard to external undercurrents and internally, where its own operatives are often indisputably at war with one other, as each week’s news stories tend to suggest. The state, like its citizens, seems to have lost the plot, and to save face it has to present a unified front. In the name of ‘national security’, it has no choice in this novel but to back the most politic option in the short term: hunt down Mpayipheli to eliminate the risk that the intelligence he is carrying will compromise the state’s security, not to mention its increasingly precarious dignity. In order to do this, however, it must fight a war of public opinion, and in the process betray Mpayipheli, one of its former MK soldier-heroes, painting him as a psychopathic, out-of-control renegade.
The question of what exactly constitutes a virtuous South African citizen – and, by implication, how to discern ‘bad’ difference – is therefore a matter of supreme importance, both in the world of the novel and also in the real world, involving an exploration of contending values. ‘Virtue’ here would include the typical diagnostic preoccupation in postcolonies with the idea of what makes a good or legitimate legal subject, a preoccupation which, according to the Comaroffs, is ‘growing in counterpoint to, and deeply entailed in, the rise of the felonious state, private indirect government, and endemic cultures of illegality’ (Law and Disorder 20). This has ‘come to feature prominently in popular discourses almost everywhere’ (20), including, I suggest, crime fiction. Furthermore, as governance ‘disperses itself and monopolies over coercion fragment, crime and policing provide a rich repertoire of idioms and allegories with which to address, imaginatively, the nature of sovereignty, justice, and social order’ (20). In the process, the kind of ambiguity about right and wrong, noted earlier as typical of various postcolonies and developing nations, grows ever larger. As if to demonstrate this very point, Meyer’s character Janina Mentz, head of an elite intelligence unit among several other warring intelligence structures in the postapartheid government, tells her protégé Tiger Mazibuko that ‘the world ha[s] become an evil place, residents and countries not knowing who [is] friend or foe, wars that [can] no longer be fought with armies but at the front of secret rooms, the mini-activities of abduction and occupation, suicide attacks and pipe bombs’ (Heart of the Hunter 104).
‘Intelligence’ in a reconstituted public sphere
Taking this theme a step further, Heart of the Hunter’s focus on wars of intelligence (both strategic state information/espionage and ‘sense-making’ in an age of information overload) captures a crisis of old and new methods of warfare. The old methods included MK foot soldiers such as Mpayipheli conducting guerilla warfare, but such subjects now find themselves caught up in an information-age meta-war. In this newer kind of mêlée the old tricks of information and disinformation are elevated into a knowledge economy face-off, a data war of contending power-plays which claim human lives as collateral damage. By the end of Meyer’s novel, one has come to understand that lives can plausibly be lost in a war of attrition around ownership and/or control of information in and of itself, despite the fact that the data at the centre of the conflict might be quite worthless – or even false, as it turns out to be in Heart of the Hunter. And yet, at stake is the power to define what is ‘right’, what is legitimate (including what is legally right) in the name of the body politic. Therein lies the key to the knowledge/power equation. Everything, in a sense, depends on ‘intelligence’, a conflict which drives Meyer’s novel relentlessly towards its bloody conclusion.
In the plot of Heart of the Hunter, government agents issue communiqués describing Mpayipheli as a deranged madman, based on the evidence of a high-ranking former MK ‘hero’ who makes this claim to escape a sexual harassment charge. Meanwhile, reporter Allison Healy portrays a very different version of Mpayipheli to her fictive (and Meyer’s actual) readers: he was an old MK hero of great distinction, and he has repeatedly tried to avoid hurting people in the hunt-and-resistance story of the novel. Healy’s version of Mpayipheli is, moreover, based on the testimony of a former comrade. In addition, the words of ordinary people, such as Mpayipheli’s common-law wife, Miriam, and a streetwise shoeshine-man, suggest to Allison and her readers that Mpayipheli is indeed a man of the people rather than the villain the state wishes to make him appear in the eyes of the masses. Healy’s ‘Will the real Thobela Mpayipheli please stand up’ (192) echoes the bigger question that forms the subtext of the novel. While virtue is strongly suggested in the character of Koos Kok, a ‘Griqua troubadour’ who helps Mpayipheli escape pursuit by police helicopters, the general public remains in doubt. The motorcycle chase and its reported progress serve to emphasise that the line between law and (dis)order cannot be decisively demarcated. In addition, it reveals a political cartography that is both politically occulted and dangerously labile.
In the end, the novelistic ‘resolution’ is polyvalent and disorienting. Though Mpayipheli’s common-law wife is killed as a result of a blunder by a state agent, he manages to save her son, Pakamile, whom he plans to take home to his ancestral plot of land in Xhosaland. This is his consolation after very nearly losing his own life at the hands of his former comrades. Public opinion about Mpayipheli’s status as a heroic or a debased citizen remains ambiguous, however, as the ‘new’ South Africa dissolves into perversions of justice perpetrated especially against those who should be the heirs of
