The writing of Bloom, Krog and Steinberg, though sharp and unsentimental, is, consequently, suffused with concern about the clear failure of postapartheid’s grand narrative. This, despite the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to set the story of the new South Africa on the right track. As Shane Graham comments in his book on the TRC and the South African literature that followed in its wake, the Commission ultimately succeeded in setting up a perceived ‘contrapuntal dialogue’ that enables a ‘reconceptualization of such fundamental spatio-temporal constructs as the dichotomies between public and private, past and present’ (South African Literature 33). Here, indeed, is a necessary form of ‘plot loss’, a corrective to the always-looming teleology inherent in the very signifier ‘post-’, whether this be understood as ‘post-transitional’ or ‘post-apartheid’. Periodicity in its more commonly understood sense, as in the named phases of time marked as ‘transitional’, ‘post-transitional’, and so on, thus runs into a mash-up of temporalities in which the time of before intrudes on the present.5 In using the term ‘mash-up’, I draw on both the literal meaning of a collision of forces implicit in the verb ‘mash’ and on the composite term’s use in music and video as ‘blend, bootleg and bastard pop/rock’ in a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs (Wikipedia). The ‘bastard’ blend of styles and versions, in this description, exhibits a violently reintegrated (mashed) character whose pulpiness defies pre-imagined, distinct shapes.
In Ways of Staying, Begging to be Black and Midlands, the felt torsion of oneself becoming implicated in such destabilising mash-ups, and of seeing others undergoing a similar grinding or crushing, is almost obsessively focused on a single, if contested, signifier – that ultimate South African scare word: ‘crime’. Not only is ‘crime’ an everyday matter, integral to the daily newsfeed – with which it is complicit in the constitution of a ‘wound culture’6 – but it also has the potential to wreck the progress, the socially and economically necessary teleology, of the ‘rainbow nation’. The spectre of ‘crime’ is, indeed, the joker in the pack for South Africa’s negotiated settlement, creating as it does uncomfortable connections with the apartheid past, both in everyday life and in the realm that more immediately concerns us here, namely the felt imaginaries discernible in ‘transitional’ or ‘post-transitional’ writing.
Given the extraordinary saturation of the signifier ‘crime’ in postapartheid South Africa, a brief examination of social discourse in relation to this resonant (though problematic) term is necessary. The bogey of ‘crime’ has possibly been one of the most prevalent facts of life in South Africa over the past twenty years or so, as scholars such as Steinberg, Altbeker, Gary Kynoch and others have shown. Any street survey in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town that asks what the country’s biggest ‘problems’ are will likely yield the answer ‘crime’, followed by that other ‘c’-word, ‘corruption’. This chimes with perceptions of criminal corruption elsewhere, as argued above in relation to conditions in which ‘felonious’ states are able to thrive in the world’s postcolonies, which now include postapartheid South Africa.
The images of a ‘spectre’ and a ‘bogey’ are used because, although a statistical consensus about the incidence of crime in postapartheid South Africa remains elusive, the fear of crime has escalated, particularly but by no means exclusively among white South Africans. As commentator Sisonke Msimang writes,
[i]t is only possible to be haunted by the death of a stranger when you are convinced that he could have been you or one of yours. Perhaps this is why South Africans are obsessed with crime. It looms large because although it disproportionately affects poor black people, it also affects enough middle-class people for it to have become a ‘national question’. (‘Caught’ n.p.)
Crime, with or without the scare quotes, has over the past two decades replaced ‘apartheid’ as one of the country’s most conspicuous, and contested, terms. Steinberg argues that white fears of crime as a form of retribution have been endemic but greatly exaggerated in the postapartheid period, although he nevertheless acknowledges the high incidence of criminal violence in the country as a whole (‘Crime’ 25–27). Altbeker similarly notes the exceptionally high rates of crime, but casts doubt on the popular myth that South Africa is the world’s ‘crime capital’ (‘Puzzling Statistics’ 8). Echoing Steinberg, Altbeker adds, however, that the country’s murder rates are ‘far higher than those of the industrialized world’ (8). Assessments such as these, which acknowledge an unusually high crime rate – ‘near the top of the world rankings’, Altbeker concedes (98) – nevertheless cast doubt on what one might call ‘urban legends’ about crime; as such, they are fairly typical.7 Research findings in this area understandably seek to distance themselves from what the Comaroffs describe as ‘mythostats’ (‘Figuring Crime’ 215).
Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ are certainly at issue in the many plot twists conjured up by disgruntled whites in the ‘new South Africa’ deal. The frequent invocation of crime statistics is perceived by many as a ‘white whine’, or an updated version of the persistent ‘black peril’ metanarrative in colonial and neocolonial South Africa.8 Reading this narrative of fearfulness sympathetically, Kynoch comments that ‘[t]he crime epidemic is the most visceral reminder for whites of their diminishing status and protestations against crime provide an outlet for articulating anxieties about the new order without openly resorting to racist attacks’ (2013, 439). Altbeker, in turn, argues that ‘fear of crime has sometimes become a conveniently “apolitical” vehicle through which a disenfranchised elite can mourn its loss of power without sounding nostalgic for an unjust past’ (Country at War 64). Kynoch concurs, though he points out that ‘[h]igh crime rates have been a feature of life in many black townships and informal settlements for the past hundred years or more’ (2012, 3). He notes that this is a history that has been charted in a significant number of scholarly works, in which an urban African population is victimised by police and criminals in what are often politicised conflicts (2012, 3).9 Steinberg also makes this point, arguing that the flip side of whites being let off so lightly post-1994 – ‘no expropriation, no nationalisation, not even a tax increase’ – was that ‘a criminal culture whose appetite for commodities and violence was legendary in the townships arrived in the [white] suburbs’ (‘Crime’ 26). Crime, according to Steinberg, began to haunt white South Africans such that around dinner tables
a very different story about South Africa’s transition began to circulate, and, while the finer details varied, the heart of the tale did not: it was about somebody who had been held up at gunpoint, another who had been shot, another who had been kidnapped in her own car. The anecdotes of guns and blood spread like an airborne disease, becoming something of a contagion. By the end of the millennium, much of white South Africa had died a thousand deaths in their own homes, around their own dinner tables ... Many whites believed that Mandela’s discourse of reconciliation was rendered irrelevant by a far deeper, congenital hostility to the presence of whites at the end of the continent, and that this hostility found expression in violent crime. (26)
Steinberg convincingly demonstrates that this ‘diagnosis of crime’ was ‘spectacularly wrong’ (27).10 Providing evidence, he argues that in fact white South Africans were far less likely to be killed in their own homes than their black counterparts, who continued to bear the brunt of crime in the postapartheid period (27). And yet even Steinberg’s finely balanced account makes the familiar gesture of offering a qualifier about crime being epidemic in South Africa, regardless of race:
Levels of middle-class victimisation, both black and white, are high enough for just about the entire middle class to have experienced violent crime at close quarters. It is no exaggeration to say that almost every South African, whether poor or rich, has either had a gun shoved in her face, or has witnessed the trauma of a loved one who has had a gun shoved in her face. (27–28)
One may draw two conclusions from this: first, whatever actual crime levels may be, and regardless of the distribution of this ‘epidemic’
