– in the media, in commentary and in the powerful, popular genre of crime fiction. Together, these forms gesture towards a reconfigured sense of evil, one which coincides to some extent with a more general postcolonial condition in the wake of neoliberal hegemony across the globe. Whereas the denial of cultural difference (in colonial and neocolonial contexts) mobilised activism such as the struggle against apartheid for its revalidation and the restoration of putatively more symmetrical power relations, a widespread emergence of ‘bad’ difference has since become evident. The use of violence, too, has become morally ambiguous, as dramatised in the case of Mpayipheli in Meyer’s Heart of the Hunter (and its sequel, Devil’s Peak), as well as in works such as Orford’s Gallows Hill and Mzobe’s Young Blood. In Devil’s Peak, Mpayipheli finds himself resorting to rough justice for paedophiles, using his assegai as a weapon, after he realises that the South African criminal justice system – and therefore the state – is incapable of protecting its most vulnerable citizens from abuse. And yet this form of kangaroo-style justice is shown to be an ultimately unsatisfactory measure, especially when Mpayipheli misidentifies two of the perpetrators and thereby becomes a murderer himself, rather than a virtuous avenger. Such are the moral intricacies of the new order. If the state does not have ‘a monopoly on the legitimate use of force’, then there is an urgent need for intensive investigation. The turn to crime fiction in South Africa should therefore be regarded not so much as an escapist, formulaic lapse in taste than as a form of social hermeneutics: in an ethically muddled topography, acts of detection identify, describe and explore the phenomenon of ‘bad’ difference. Alternatively, such detection investigates the management of difference, that is, the disingenuousness and deceit surrounding such management as the locus where the new order either coheres or falls apart. In the process, the basis of ‘virtuous’ citizenship within the postapartheid context is being extensively rewritten.
3
Freedom on a frontier? The double bind of (white) postapartheid South African literature
Around the turn of the twentieth century the early phase of ‘transition’ morphed into a sociopolitical category variously described as ‘post-transition’ (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 1–2), ‘post-anti-apartheid’ (Kruger, ‘Black Atlantics’ 35) and ‘post-postapartheid’ (Chapman, ‘Conjectures’ 15). Kruger’s neologism ‘post-anti-apartheid’ signifies a period beyond apartheid, where the writing subject is, at last, delivered from the oppositional stance signified by ‘anti’ – no longer compelled to counter the material effects of the ideology of apartheid, whether by means of plotting, or overall sentiment, be this moral, ethical or political. This sense of remission from the prison house of the past is key to the way the term ‘postapartheid’ has broadly come to be understood: as a deliverance from the constraints – the shackles – of endlessly opposing legislated racism that relied on a succession of states of emergency and a culture of political assassination and torture. Eventually, such oppositional struggle writing had become so repetitive, and so dreary, that Albie Sachs made his call for a provisional ban on the notion of culture as a ‘weapon of the struggle’ in his 1991 ANC working paper, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’.
Indeed, if there is one common thread in published research on postapartheid South African writing, it is the sense that the country’s writing, resisting classification as a result of its ‘unresolved heterogeneity’,1 has now become even more diverse, as befits its newfound liberty, its deliverance from what one might term the closure of apartheid logocentrism. In keeping with this new script about the literature of postapartheid, Frenkel and MacKenzie propose that ‘scores of writers [in the years 1999–2009] have produced works of extraordinary range and diversity’ (1). These writers have ‘heeded Albie Sachs’s call to free themselves from the ‘ghettos of the apartheid imagination’, with ‘new South African literature accordingly [reflecting] a wide range of concerns and styles’ (1). This literature is ‘unfettered to the past, but may still consider it in new ways’ or ‘ignore it altogether’ (2).
Without contradicting Frenkel and MacKenzie,2 I wish to suggest a line of reasoning that departs from the theme of being ‘freed from the past’. In my view, a significant section of postapartheid literature finds itself less liberated from the past than engaged in the persistent re-emergence of this past. Frenkel offers the figure of the palimpsest to explain how post-transitional writing allows for ‘a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it’ (25). I argue for an even stronger emphasis, and contend that in the hands of Kevin Bloom, Antjie Krog and Jonny Steinberg, the three writers who form the main focus of this chapter, postapartheid literature is inescapably bound to the time of before. A compulsive reiteration of certain South African literary tropes is evident in their work, particularly those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I argue that much postapartheid literature written in detection mode is distinguished by strong rather than weak or merely vestigial continuity with the past. Such ateleologial (re)cycling – decidedly against the grain of a widely alleged rupture with the past – runs counter to theses that postapartheid literature is mostly novel, or substantially different from earlier South African writing. However, it is also true that the very reprocessing I hope to uncover gives rise to features of authorial voice that are characteristic of a postapartheid generation of writing, for reasons I elaborate below. The argument about continuity or discontinuity between apartheid and postapartheid in South African literature, I suggest, needs stronger conceptual treatment of how past and present are disjunctively conjoined;3 the time of now-and-going-forward and the time of history, or what-has-been, are, I propose, mixed in a way that suggests the conception of a split temporality – altering from a bad ‘before’ (apartheid) to a better ‘after’ (postapartheid) – is perhaps overworked. It might indeed be more accurate to describe what occurs ‘in’ postapartheid as a reconfigured temporality in which Hal Foster’s ‘future-anterior’, or the ‘will-have-been’, persistently surfaces. This is consistent, to a large extent, with Grant Farred’s sense of a doubled temporality (see Chapter 1), in which the supposed ‘epochal progress’ of postapartheid ‘quickly showed itself to be less a march toward an ideal political future – let alone present – than a new democracy living in a double temporality’ (‘Not-Yet Counterpartisan’ 592–593).4 Foster’s proposition is invoked by Ashraf Jamal in a critique of certain conceptions of South African literature. Jamal writes:
My reason for this emphasis [on the future-anterior] rests on the assumption that South African literature in English has elected to sanctify and memorialize its intent, producing a literature informed by a messianic, liberatory, or reactive drive, hence a struggle literature (which precedes liberation from apartheid) and a post-apartheid literature (which establishes a democratic state of play). These phases, however, are hallucinatory projections, or candid attempts to generate a cultural transparency: see where we have come from; see where we now are; see where we are going. The logic is overdetermined, teleological, and in effect diminishes our ability to grasp that which is impermanent, hybrid ... (‘Bullet through the Church’ 11)
Jamal identifies what he perceives to be a major fault in conceptions of South African writing: a fixation with going somewhere, of getting from a dead-heavy past to a re-envisioned future. Instead, Jamal proposes that the South African literary imaginary contains ‘a latent sensation that South Africa as a country suffers the unease of never having begun’ (16, Jamal’s emphasis). Following Raymond Williams, Jamal argues that if nineteenth-century realism stems from the presumption of a ‘knowable community, such a hermetic logic fails to apply to a heterogeneous outpost such as South Africa’ (17).
It is with a similar sense of unknowability amid a scene of unresolved heterogeneity in South African culture at large that the texts I examine in this chapter, Bloom’s Ways of Staying, Krog’s Begging to be Black and Steinberg’s Midlands, take on their burden of (re)discovery, as if nothing can be taken as known, again, and as always. Indeed a felt anxiety, again and renewed, about ‘never
