Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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was widely perceived to signal the emergence of an unwelcome racial essentialism. It was perceived as abrogating the very nonracialism for which the ANC had fought; the latter had grown out of the concept of equality, a key principle in the 1955 Freedom Charter. It was felt that here, once again, a particular race was being valorised. The spectre of a resuscitated variant of exclusionary preferment, and the hardening of this scab on the body of the ‘new’ South Africa, galled many ‘new’ South Africans. Not least among such perceived defacements of the ideal of freedom and equality were the neoliberal economic policies which, combined with state corruption, were making conditions ripe for what Bond refers to as the ‘crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime’ that South Africa today endures (Bond, ‘Mandela Years’ n.p.).
Bond’s version is, of course, one strand in a complex story about what has gone ‘wrong’ in South Africa’s transition to democracy. However, the fact that the widely held belief that democracy was ‘failing’ gained broad traction in the 2000s (see, for example, Xolela Mangcu’s To the Brink). A 2008 conference at the University of the Witwatersrand had as its theme ‘Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Public Sphere: Democracy at the Crossroads’. At this gathering, political analysts Ivor Chipkin and Mangcu, among others, sounded warnings about a disturbing narrative of ‘national identity’ that seemed to be increasingly normative, and exclusionary on a racial basis, in the ranks of the governing party. In his book, Mangcu critiques what he describes as the ‘racial nativism’ (To the Brink xiii ff.) of the Mbeki government, calling for a renewed acceptance of ‘irreducible plurality’ and a return to the traditions of nonracialism (To the Brink 119).12 Such Mbeki-era ‘racial nativism’ landed with a threatening thud among South African cultural and political analysts, many of whom were familiar with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cautionary remarks on the ‘topologies of nativism’ (Father’s House 47–72). Appiah and other postcolonial thinkers in Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration perceived essentialised versions of ‘national identity,’ especially racialised national identity, as running counter to trends that had prevailed in critical theory since the Paris upheavals of 1968. It could no longer be assumed that the ‘new’ South Africa was on board in the larger progressive project of dismantling hegemonic and/or foundational fixities of identity. This is not to mention the bad taste such a return to ethnic fixations left in the mouth of Fanonites who feared the emergence of corrupt ruling elites, a comprador class wont to lose the plot of its own self-made ‘revolution’. Yet far from being unique in this regard, postapartheid South Africa was merely a late entrant to a global club, from north to south and west to east, in which newly constituted democratic regimes have suffered routine ‘breakdown’ (see Linz and Stepan).
It is not my purpose here to test and probe such positions or their prior historical conditions, but rather to note the resurgence of alarm about new orthodoxies of national identity, and new forms of differential preferment, perceived as contradictory to the promise of the negotiated South African settlement. Mbeki’s promised African Renaissance has been followed by the era of Zuma: instead of rebirth and restoration, there is a new clamour demanding the fall of villains, from Rhodes to Zuma. It is common cause that the democratic ideal has been profoundly compromised, culminating in a system of patrimonialism with President Zuma at its apex.
In a 2013 commentary, Achille Mbembe remarks on the state of the country:
South Africa has entered a new period of its history: a post-Machiavellian moment when private accumulation no longer
happens through outright dispossession but through the capture and appropriation of public resources, the modulation of brutality and the instrumentalisation of disorder. (‘Our Lust for Lost Segregation’ n.p.)
For Mbembe, South Africa in 2013 is not immune from the ‘mixture of clientelism, nepotism and prebendalism’ common to African postcolonies, and he observes that an ‘armed society’ such as South Africa is ‘hardly a democracy’; it is, he writes, ‘mostly an assemblage of atomised individuals isolated before power, separated from each other by fear, prejudice, mistrust and suspicion, and prone to mobilise under the banner of either a mob, a clique or a militia rather than an idea and, even less so, a disciplined organization’.
‘Bad’ difference – a new evil?
My focus is the relationship between crime stories and a growing public disquiet about social disorder. The new wave of fiction works on the assumption that a fresh and perverse form of officially sanctioned ‘bad’ cultural difference has become a justification for civil mismanagement, perhaps even for what Mbembe refers to as the ‘instrumentalisation of disorder’. ‘Bad’ difference is coming to be perceived as a sinister recuperation of elitism, so that detection, as spun into detective stories by a new generation of writers, has become a matter of exposing ‘bad’ difference and its legitimating rationalisations, its postures and pretexts, marking it as the shadow side of legitimate cultural difference. Such socially ‘conscientising’ writing, in Warnes’s words (‘Writing Crime’ 983), seeks to demonstrate how ‘bad’ difference goes about its disingenuous work. If the ‘transition’ itself is opaque and barely credible, with so little apparent social change, in hard economic terms, especially for the poor,13 then such detection and exposure is – perhaps inevitably – the task of the writer. In such an understanding of the writer’s role, the author seeks to show what’s actually going on, or at least to suggest a theory, a revised version of the lost plot, where a calculated guess is made. The task for the writer (and the critic), then, is to make the transition – or the myth of transition – visible and tractable by plotting its characters, their sphere of operation, their motives and modus operandi, and, ultimately, their actions and their social meaning. Political operatives who were ‘good’ in the past, under conditions of disenfranchisement, now often become ‘bad’ holders of power. At least, this would often appear to be the hidden meaning of the transition. Power is perceived as a motor of corruption. The implicit question is: has South Africa, beset with resurgent violence and disorder, truly moved on from apartheid? The answer, it seems, is dubious, to say the least.
Racial and cultural difference, as affirmed by the South African Constitution, particularly in its clauses guaranteeing equality, suggests a symmetry whereby the component parts of a diverse society enjoy equal rights. This may be termed ‘good’ difference. On the other hand, however, conditions in South African society have, since 1994, produced what may be termed ‘bad’ or corrupt difference, which uses the legitimising politics of cultural difference (identity politics) to achieve asymmetrical gain, often at the expense of others. ‘Bad’ difference is, then, the abuse of political privilege in order to leverage preferment, often under the guise of egalitarian practice. One example of this is the South African arms deal, while another is President Jacob Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, which enables privileges such as the use of a military airfield for private purposes. ‘Bad’ cultural difference in such cases enables corrupt collaborative practices in state as well as private-sector dealings characteristic of comprador societies. Materialist critics like Bond see government’s role in this as a form of class betrayal, with the postapartheid order constituting ‘class apartheid’ (‘Mandela Years’ n.p.); in this system, advocates for the poor gain capital leverage based on an ‘empowerment for all’ ticket. This chimes with what the new generation of Black Consciousness proponents, such as Andile Mngxitama, claim.14
For crime writers, the existence of corrupted or ‘bad’ difference is detected in a range of public and private spaces: within government itself (more specifically, its corrupt officials and their cronies, as in Nicol’s works); among criminals, which often includes (degenerate, sold-out) members of the South African Police Service, formerly the South African Police Force (as in Roger Smith’s Mixed Blood); or in civil society, where ‘bad’ alliances between distinct subsets, often in cahoots with state functionaries, create distortions of ‘civil’ practice (as in Margie Orford’s Gallows Hill and Andrew Brown’s Refuge). For writers in the postapartheid period, the easier-to-define moral order of anti-apartheid or struggle literature has disappeared, and they are compelled to work out a new way of seeing things. Here, the boundaries of right and wrong, of good and bad, have shifted and need to be redefined.