Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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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’ among the sectors of South African society, discourse about crime – especially emanating from whites – accelerated significantly in the transition period, thereby justifying the use of terms such as ‘mythostats’. Second, taking into account this tendency to amplification, it remains clear that social violence in South Africa in the transition period (as in previous periods), manifested in the form of criminal behaviour, was in fact ‘epidemic’ by comparison with most other emerging economies.11 Paradoxically, then, this also means that although, from a critical or scholarly point of view, one should not give undue credence to the exaggerations of white discourse about crime, this discourse nevertheless provides evidence of a state of being that is itself noteworthy. Steinberg, who goes so far as to call this a ‘white phenomenology of crime’(28), continues:
For a milieu in which the idea of mortality has always been hitched exclusively to the elderly and the frail, the constant threat of lethal violence is akin to an earthquake. The profundity of the fear of crime is deep enough to go all the way down, to the existential itself, to the cornerstones of one’s relation to the world ... ‘Crime’ has nestled inside the most exquisitely intimate and private domains of white experience. It has taken its place among the categories through which people experience the fundamentals of their existence. (28)
If one adds to this amped-up sense of existential fragility the fact that white South Africans in general inhabit the country on the ‘shakiest of pretexts’ (Steinberg citing JM Coetzee in Youth), then one gets a sense of the abysmal dislocation that is integral to the experience of such South Africans. Coetzee’s young Cape Town protagonist in Youth implicitly knows that he ‘must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagines he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger’ (Youth 17).
In the discussion that follows, I deal with three nonfiction narratives of postapartheid conditions by white writers (Bloom, Krog and Steinberg) as a way of investigating changing modes of address in the broad category of ‘postapartheid’ writing. In making claims on this basis, I look at one of several seams – white creative nonfiction in what I call detection mode – in the greater patchwork of postapartheid literary culture. While one is loath to reintroduce categorisation in terms of race, the latter remains a stubbornly persistent feature, both implicit and explicit, in postapartheid modes of expression. The critic should be aware, however, that, as with literary culture during apartheid, totalising claims on the basis of a limited number of writers – especially in terms of race – are sure to founder. At best, the critic details diverse and divergent acts of writing under a nominal but ultimately (and necessarily) obscure totality in which particular renderings are both distinctive as parts, and also definitive in their own right. In this case, I am particularly interested in Steinberg’s notion of a ‘white phenomenology of crime’, and how white writers of the generation after Gordimer and Coetzee may be said to express this. It is a state of affairs that has loomed large since 1994, and it seems appropriate to ask whether and how it reconnects with or disconnects from the longue durée of the colonial, neocolonial-segregationist, and apartheid past. Naturally, a view of black writing in which crime and corruption emerge as major themes12 inevitably results in a differently inflected version of postapartheid writing that disrupts any coherent sense of literary totality. Part and whole – and indeed the relationship between the two – remain as vexed a conjunction as ever in South African writing.
Ways of Staying
It is precisely the white ‘soft spot’ in the postapartheid imaginary described above – an accelerating sense of personal threat over and above