Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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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 the fruits of revolution.
Cultural difference is thus conceptualised as the locus for a redefined morality in the postapartheid imaginary – 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,