Experiments with Truth: Narrative non-fiction and the coming of democracy in South Africa 9781847011886, 9781847011893

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EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH Narrative non-fiction and the coming of democracy in South Africa

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ISSN 2054–5673 s e r i e s e d i to r s

Stephanie Newell & Ranka Primorac e d i to r i a l a d v i s o r y b o a r d

David Attwell (University of York) Jane Bryce (University of the West Indies) James Ferguson (Stanford University) Simon Gikandi (Princeton University) Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University) Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand) Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz) Lydie Moudileno (University of Southern California) Mbugua wa Mungai (Kenyatta University) David Murphy (University of Stirling) Grace A. Musila (University of the Witwatersrand) Derek Peterson (University of Michigan) Caroline Rooney (University of Kent) Meg Samuelson (University of Adelaide) Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University) The series is open to submissions from the disciplines related to literature, cultural history, cultural studies, music and the arts. African Articulations showcases cutting-edge research into Africa’s cultural texts and practices, broadly understood to include written and oral literatures, visual arts, music, and public discourse and media of all kinds. Building on the idea of ‘articulation’ as a series of cultural connections, as a clearly voiced argument and as a dynamic social encounter, the series features monographs that open up innovative perspectives on the richness of African locations and networks. Refusing to concentrate solely on the internationally visible above the supposedly ephemeral local cultural spaces and networks, African Articulations provides indispensable resources for students and teachers of contemporary culture. Please contact the series editors with an outline, or download the proposal form www.jamescurrey.com. Only send a full manuscript if requested to do so. Stephanie Newell, Professor of English, Yale University [email protected] Ranka Primorac, Lecturer in English, University of Southampton [email protected]

Previously published volumes are listed at the back of this book

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EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH Narrative non-fiction and the coming of democracy in South Africa

Hedley Twidle

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Hedley Twidle 2019 First published 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review The right of Hedley Twidle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84701-188-6 (James Currey cloth) isbn 978-1-84701-189-3 (James Currey Africa-only paperback) The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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Contents

Preface

Encountering non-fiction vii

1 Introduction

Historical and theoretical approaches 1

2 Unusable pasts

The secret history of Demetrios Tsafendas: assassin, madman, messenger 21

3 Literatures of betrayal

Confession, collaboration and collapse in post-TRC narrative 47

4 In search of lost archives

Nostalgia, heterodoxy and the work of memory 71

5 A very strange relationship

Ambition, seduction and scandal in post-apartheid life writing 97

6 Some claim to intimacy

Political biography and the limits of the liberal imagination 123

7 In short, there are problems

Literary journalism in the postcolony 141

8 Unknowable communities

Necessary fictions and broken contracts in the heart of the country 159

9 A new more honest code

Memoirs of the ‘born frees’ and the futures of non-fiction 185

10 Afterword

The extracurriculum 213

Bibliography Index

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225 241

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Preface

Encountering non-fiction

At the beginning of Fine Lines from the Box, a 2007 collection of essays and journalism, Njabulo Ndebele describes discovering a crate of books in his father’s garage when he was a boy, at some point in the mid-1960s. It is disguised by unused floor tiles and garden tools; on top are old copies of Huisgenoot, Zonk and Drum magazines, then Ludo and Snakes and Ladders game boards. ‘But as I got closer to the bottom of the box, my heart leapt with disbelief ’: Here was Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele and Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson; and Blame Me on History by Bloke Modisane; and Naught for Your Comfort by Trevor Huddleston; and Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams; [...] Chocolates for My Wife, by Todd Matshikiza; South Africa: The Struggle for a Birthright by Mary Benson; The Ochre People by Noni Jabavu; Ghana: The Auto­biography of Kwame Nkrumah; Let My People Go by Albert Luthuli; Go Well Stay Well by Hannah Stanton, copies of Africa South magazine, and other lesser known books that I do not remember now. Banned books! (9)

Here was, in other words, a secret archive of non-fiction from southern Africa and beyond, one that marked, he writes, ‘a turning point in my life’ (9). Ndebele describes the thrill of devouring the autobiographies of Bloke Modisane and Es’kia Mphahlele as two very different approaches to the same overriding social and political reality: ‘It struck me then that oppressed people were far more complex than the collective suffering that sought to reduce them to a single state of pain’ (10). This was the beginning of ‘a reading and writing journey that has not ended’, a process of seeking to understand his native land, and to represent it in prose with an immediacy and directness that he calls ‘the art of the fine line’: ‘Writing is the one art that compels the writer to explore and express complex feelings and thoughts through an attempt at simplicity and concreteness that are yet able to preserve the complexity’ (10). Life writing in South Africa often returns to this scene of encounter. If one unpacks that half-hidden crate, similar moments can be found nested (like Russian dolls) within the books Ndebele mentions. In Tell Freedom (1954), Peter Abrahams recalls discovering W. E. B. du Bois in Johannesburg’s Bantu Men’s Social Centre in 1937, along with Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance: ‘I read every one of the books on the shelf marked: American Negro Literature’ (197). Mphahlele describes, in his more

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sardonic way, ‘the small one-room tin shack the municipality had the sense of humour to call a “reading room” in the western edge of Marabastad’ (Es’kia 278): It was stacked with dilapidated books and journals junked by bored ladies from the suburbs – anything from cookery books through boys’ and girls’ adventures to dream interpretations and astrology. Mostly useless, needless to say. Still, I went through the whole lot indiscriminately, like a termite, just elated with a sense of discovery and of recognition of the printed word mostly connected with the mere skill of reading. (278)

Examples can be multiplied: Mohandas Gandhi receiving John Ruskin’s Unto this Last in 1904 and being inspired to create his experiments in communal living near Durban and at Tolstoy Farm outside Johannesburg; Nadine Gordimer escaping from a mining town into nineteenth-century Russia via the library in Springs. In ‘Remembering Texas’, J. M. Coetzee describes coming across the colonial records of German South West Africa while pursuing doctoral research in Austin, a discovery that would eventually lead to a fictional debut, Dusklands, as a kind of hoax or parody non-fiction (Doubling the Point 52). Long Walk to Freedom is itself a discourse on reading: on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela immerses himself in the memoirs of Anglo-Boer War generals in order to understand the crucible of Afrikaner nationalism, and the historical process by which black South Africans had become the victims of the victims. Mine too is a series of books within books, of unexpected encounters with the archive. Henk van Woerden finds the 1966 governmental report into the death of Hendrik Verwoerd, and with it the remarkable life of his assassin Demetrios Tsafendas. As a boy, Jacob Dlamini comes across ‘The Strange Saga of Mr X1’, a notorious collaborator with apartheid’s death squads, and someone whose story unravels any simple binary of victim and perpetrator. At the Lenin Institute in Moscow, a young Thabo Mbeki reads Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a blueprint for revolution. Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the literary set-works, like Coetzee’s Disgrace, that showed up the fragile multi-racialism of her ‘born free’ schooldays in Limpopo. Sisonke Msimang and Lebogang Mashile work back through the canon of anti-apartheid non-fiction to explore the complexities of inter-racial friendship, and the awkward intimacies of domestic labour. In tracing encounters like these, I explore how unpredictable, uneasy or even ‘mostly useless’ literary inheritances are put to uses for which they were never intended. For in the colonial or apartheid context (and in a country where books are still taxed as luxury items) ‘the library’ has often been a scarce resource. Thinkers operating in such conditions needed to ‘squeeze blood from stones’: a phrase from Antonio Gramsci that Archie Dick quotes in excavating the reading practices of South African political prisoners

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(‘Censorship’ 8).1 His Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (2012) is a reminder of how the most important intellectual work in or about the country has often taken place outside formal institutions: in marginalised, covert or exile spaces. This kind of autodidactic, unaffiliated intellectual labour is a deep theme in my book. It seeks to understand how specific literary encounters and cultural texts are woven into the trajectory of individual lives; and how certain forms of reflective non-fiction (so powerfully in the case of Ndebele and Mphahlele) are able to rehearse the intimate and sometimes arbitrary ‘backstory’ of how one comes to know what one knows, and think what one thinks. These are written modes where the mediation of the personal voice is not effaced or denied but put to work, where the ‘I’ becomes a risky but vital intellectual tool. In a piece also collected in Fine Lines from the Box, ‘Thinking of Brenda’, Ndebele remarks that if his tribute has been a ‘personal, imaginative embrace’ of his subject (the musician and performer Brenda Fassie), then ‘I have also now made the personal, public’ (217). Having suggested elsewhere that the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a large-scale endeavour of making the private public – ‘a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative’ (‘Memory’ 27) – he goes on: I think that only if we attempt this pouring out of personal feeling into the public domain will a new public become possible. We cannot tell what kind of public it will be; but we do need to release more and more personal data into our public home to bring about a more real human environment: more real because it is more honest, more trusting, and more expressive. (Fine Lines 217)

Reading, researching and writing about South African non-fiction has in many ways been an attempt to redress an ignorance about my own situation, an ignorance that my upbringing and formal education (during the final days of apartheid and the early years of the 1990s transition) did little to dispel, and often worked to inculcate. While some secondary schools made the historical events of the 1990s central to their curricula (even building questions posed by the TRC into their history lessons), at my partly liberal, partly conservative and certainly Anglophile boarding school, such events were only gradually, 1 With help from Hugh Lewin’s prison memoir Bandiet (1974), Dick records the attempts of warders in Pretoria Central to be archivists and librarians: ‘An even stranger arrangement later was chief warder Du Preez’s catalogue of purchased books. Over time the books could not be traced because most were filed under “T” since so many titles started with “The”. There was little improvement by the 1970s. The library catalogue, for example, listed The Tempest as science fiction, and Romeo and Juliet appeared as “author anonymous”’ (‘Censorship’ 8).

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somewhat grudgingly admitted. As I remember it, the proceedings of the Commission were mediated as something peripheral and barely mentioned. There was little sense that we were living through historic times. When I left for university abroad, I was surprised to find the immense interest that the global academic community was taking in the South African story, particularly in the question of transitional justice, post-apartheid culture and how creative work might contribute to reimagining the new nation’s pasts and futures. Having never read a great deal of my native country’s literature before, I now began (a typical reflex of the homesick) in earnest. To encounter Lewis Nkosi’s agile and fearless essays on Johannesburg, jazz and exile (so different from the institutionalised ‘Theory’ being fed to me as a student) or Coetzee’s unflinching 1997 account of Boyhood; to surrender to the confessional outpourings of Modisane’s Blame Me on History, Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull; to watch the intellectual nerve with which Jonny Steinberg set about some of the most difficult and dissonant subjects of ‘the new South Africa’ – farm murders, prison violence, HIV/AIDS denialism – such encounters forced me to begin reimagining my native land in ways that are far from over. In pursuing a PhD on post-apartheid returns to the colonial archive (novelistic, non-fictional, poetic, curatorial) I was confronted with the kind of theoretical and methodological quandaries that persist in this work. How can one conceive of history as a set of narrative and discursive practices, yet also try to discern some limit or ‘check’ to the literary imagination, beyond which past existences become too malleable or too easily usable for the designs and desires of the present? How can the matter of non-fiction narrative be conceived of as both wrought and received at the same time: that is, as an aesthetic, linguistic effect but also (simultaneously) as something verifiable beyond the text – outside, prior to or independent of any mediation? And how to respond to such works in a medium (academic prose) that is itself a kind of literary non-fiction? During these years, I worked as a researcher on the Cambridge History of South African Literature (ed. Attridge and Attwell, 2012), a multi-author collection intended as a comprehensive reference work and guide to the field. Since publication, it has struck me that the absence of a chapter devoted specifically to the question of literary or creative non-fiction is a notable gap in the survey. Quite what such a chapter might have looked like, or what linkages might have been drawn between the heterogeneous texts that would have populated it: these are difficult questions that it remains for me to think about in the chapters to come. But on first encounter, what they seem to share is a sense of narrative and intellectual pressure, a communicative passion or compulsion to make sense of a fractured country. In his account of post-apartheid writing, Leon de Kock frames South Africa’s non-fiction from the 1990s onwards as ‘an unadulterated brand of scrupulous

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ethical communication after decades of official prevarication and private denial’, yet also as a body of work which must reckon with the double imperative or ambiguity that ‘strikes a bass note’ in the literature of the transition: ‘a quest for establishing the truth of “what really happened” – and what continues to happen – in relation to a past that is itself subject to continual revision’ (Losing the Plot 10). The new literature, he goes on, ‘serves as a measure of an unreadable present and an unplottable future, appraised in relation to an eternally unsettled past’ (11). It is this double imperative that I, like many readers of critically aware non-fiction, find so compelling: its balancing of a fierce will-to-truth with an awareness of the endless human capacity for revision, self-delusion and error. The autobiographical narrative of ignorance and belatedness that I have outlined above underwrites this project. It has in one sense been an attempt to educate myself ‘after the fact’ of the transition, at a time when the terms of intellectual engagement are shifting fast in contemporary South Africa and entirely new questions are being posed. This book emerges into a post-transitional, postTRC moment in which much of the narrative non-fiction of the past decades has already begun to look like a historical phenomenon. As I explore in the final chapters on memoirs of the ‘born frees’, textured social history has given way to expressionism, radicalism and new forms of identity politics that are less ready to accept the freedom of writers to transgress divides of race, class and language. The scarcity of the hidden library is now difficult to imagine in a digital world where information is super-abundant, and where the matter of what it means to know something is undergoing changes that are profound and hard to articulate via existing literary or aesthetic categories. In teaching university seminars over several years, I have noticed that many students consistently use the word ‘novel’ to mean not just fiction but any long work of prose in the format of a printed codex. After several years, I gave up on trying to correct them, sensing that this might be less an error than the instantiation of new normal. Perhaps the division that matters most is increasingly not between fiction and non-fiction, but rather between the protocols of the book and those of the screen; or else between long-form and short-form text, with the different patterns of consumption and expectation that these involve. Nonetheless, I believe that the archive of critical non-fiction in South Africa is an extraordinarily rich one. As a new generation questions or rejects the conceptual architecture of the 1990s model of transition and reconciliation (and turns largely to the digital to do so), I work from the premise that returning to non-fictions from across the twentieth century reveals how deeply thinkers before us have grappled with questions of representation, complicity and the slippery nature of autobiography itself. For when, after all, do you know that you have arrived at the truth about yourself? What value can one give the outpouring of confessing narratives from South Africans, especially white South Africans, over the last decades (of which

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my paragraphs above form a small part)? How can genuine self-knowledge take shape in the context of political expediency, or within the high velocity of the online world? What constitutes a sincere confession in a secular context; and what about the strange pleasures of staged contrition, or loudly flagging the limits of one’s own ‘subject position’? If an autobiographical essay narrates its own coming to understanding, how stable or trustworthy can that endpoint ever be – at least from the vantage of a discipline that is trained to find silences and self-deceptions, slippages and omissions? To bring such questions right up to date: what valence can be given to the kinds of personal testimony that are increasingly informing radical student politics in the country, narratives of hurt and personal pain that demand to be taken as non-negotiable truth telling? Here then are the more sceptical counter-voices to Ndebele’s call for a release of personal data into the public realm, and to the unashamedly humanist language that he uses. From another perspective, we are in a sense the least reliable sources of information about ourselves. And this opens up the complex intellectual terrain in which fundamentally doubting or de-centred conceptions of the self in language (whether psychoanalytic, poststructuralist or performative) enter into dialogue with the strong and sincere truth claims, the ‘autobiographical pacts’, of non-fiction narrative (Lejeune 3). Reading this encounter becomes far more than just a theoretical issue; it broaches questions of whether working narrations of social relations are believable, whether they are just, whether the fictions that we live by are conducive to psychic health and open to change. Finally, this account of non-fiction in South Africa hopes to remember and prolong the moment of encounter: the moment of not (yet) knowing, of embarking on ‘a reading and writing journey that has not ended’ (Ndebele, Fine Lines 20). It wants to preserve a sense of onset, even naiveté in the presence of other existences and the ‘strange guests’ that arrive from the past.2 As such, I try to think and theorise from within the forms, surfaces and textures of the works in question, rather than subscribe too quickly to the knowingness of much academic prose. My case studies read for form, not because of any narrow formalism, but because it is here where one might see how innovative literary texts evolve their techniques for social thinking. * An enormous number of people have helped me with this project over the last six or more years, and I can’t hope to thank them all. I would however like to acknowledge the contribution of my graduate classes at the University of Cape 2 The phrase is from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations: ‘Historical knowledge streams in unceasingly from inexhaustible wells… The strange and incoherent forces its way forward, memory opens all its gates and yet is not open wide enough, nature struggles to receive, arrange and honour these strange guests (73).

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Town, 2010 to the present, where many of these ideas and case studies were first broached. I owe much to Nick Mulgrew, whose thesis on ‘Authority in South African Non-fiction’ I supervised, and whose work on this topic has substantially shaped and often challenged my ideas in progress over several years. Alice Edy’s MA on concrete poetry and Willem Boshoff ’s ‘Verskanste Openbaring’ – a whole thesis about a single, illegible page of text – was a revelation, and one that helped me clarify ideas about conceptual writing and the paradox of anti-realist documentary. Rosa Lyster’s PhD on the apartheid censorship archive introduced me to a range of helpful material on what it means to think through the ‘paper regimes’ of authoritarian political cultures. My thanks also to Abdullah Dada, Lucy Gasser, Sa’eed Masoet, Siyabonga Njica and Alice Sholto-Douglas, who have played roles as research assistants during the course of the project. Several of the early chapters took shape in the writing workshops of the Archive and Public Culture research initiative, convened by Carolyn Hamilton at the University of Cape Town: a bracing inter-disciplinary space in which my thoughts on the literary uses and abuses of the past could be stress-tested among real historians. My thanks to all those participants and respondents. I would like to thank my teachers, David Attwell and Peter D. McDonald, for encouraging me to finish this monograph, and for being the true and always generous professionals that they are. Their thinking about the often impossible idea of ‘South African literature’, or what happens to the category ‘literature’ in a place such as this, has been invaluable over many years. Rita Barnard and Andrew van der Vlies played crucial roles as editors and interlocutors at different stages in this project, particularly in making an essay of mine the basis of a special issue of Safundi in 2012. Rob Nixon was a generous respondent at the time and has been ever since, over many discussions about the ‘infinitely varied, riddled, unsteady realities that non-fictional forms advance’ (‘Non-fiction’ 29). I am grateful also to the other editors who worked with me at journals where earlier versions of some chapters appeared: Research in African Literatures and Biography, where Anjoli Roy and John Zuern were required to field many emails from an aggrieved (but also, I think, secretly rather pleased) Ronald Suresh Roberts. I am very grateful to Robin Rhode for allowing me to use his work for the cover of this book. My thanks to Sean O’Toole for making available transcripts of his interviews with N. Chabani Manganyi. I have learned a great deal, and not always the easy way, from my colleagues and fellow academics, past and present: Peter Anderson, Derek Attridge, Elleke Boehmer, Barbara Boswell, Duncan Brown, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Carrol Clarkson, Carli Coetzee, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Nadia Davids, Leon de Kock, Martha Evans, Sean Field, Gail Fincham, Anthea Garman, Harry Garuba, Colette Gordon, Lucy Valerie Graham, Lesley Green, Mandisa Haarhoff, Daniel Herwitz, Derrick Higginbotham, John Higgins, Kate Highman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Jeanne-Marie Jackson,

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Megan Jones, Bodhi Kar, Billy Keniston, Charne Lavery, Julia Martin, Wamuwi Mbao, Isa Mkoka, Polo Moji, Christopher Ouma, Cóilín Parsons, Shihaam Peplouw, Natalie Pollard, Deborah Posel, Sam Raditlhalo, Graham Riach, Steven Robins, Daniel Roux, Meg Samuelson, Chris Saunders, Konstantin Sofianos, Kelwyn Sole, Simon van Schalkwyk, Chris Thurman, Hermann Wittenberg and ­Sandra Young. I am grateful to Esté Heydenrych and Isa Mkoka for help with translations. My thanks to Sean Christie for comments on the manuscript, and for bringing a practitioner’s eye to my claims about the craft of non-fiction. Many thanks to Stephanie Newell and Ranka Primorac, who have been the most encouraging, patient and respectful of editors, but also firm enough to coax a monograph out of someone who has never been entirely sure that he is a real academic. Steph and Ranka, your senses of humour have been so important in the course of writing such a serious book. My greatest debt is to Anna Hartford, who has helped me think more clearly, and truthfully, about difficult things, and whose presence is everywhere in the work to follow. September 2018

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Introduction

Historical and theoretical approaches

1

Non-fiction: where to start with such a vague, negatively defined concept? Saying non-fiction is like calling a whole wardrobe of clothes non-socks, or using the apartheid term ‘non-white’. It takes a minority identity as a reference point to categorise a majority, and so implies a hierarchy of values. Most pieces of writing in existence, from recipes to tax returns to Wikipedia pages, are broadly non-fictional: that is, their makers and readers assume the function of words referring to actually existing elements of the world in which such texts are embedded. And so, in order to narrow the focus of enquiry, an adjective is added: narrative non-fiction, creative non-fiction, literary non-fiction. Each of these multiplies the complications. Narrative non-fiction is non-specific; creative non-fiction sounds limited to the output of creative writing programmes. Literary non-fiction seems outdated and elitist, risking the discredited idea that literariness should be searched for as some privileged arena of discourse, or special added value. The object of enquiry in this book is one that I have found hard to bring into focus or keep still. But I hope that such unsettledness can be generative, and that it might speak to a difficult place at a difficult time. The place is South Africa, the time two decades and counting since the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. During this period of social and political transition, some of the most ambitious and compelling writing published within and about the country has emerged in non-fictive modes. The work of writers like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg, Ivan Vladislavić and many others forms a body of cultural production that is ambitious, textured, imaginative and self-aware; that is sometimes experimental, often risky and troubling, often divisive – and worthy of more critical attention than it has received. The work to follow is offered as the first book-length treatment of nonfictional form in modern South African literature. It reads a sequence of challenging documentary texts not simply as carriers of pre-existing information, but as ambitious and creative treatments of actuality. It considers a fuzzy set of narrative modes that are involved in orders of aesthetic selection and decision comparable to those that produce novels, short fiction, poetry and drama

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(genres that have traditionally been paid more attention by the discipline of literary studies). Building on the work of many other scholars, my case studies pay attention to prose surface, style and voice; to genre, metaphor and rhetorical tactics. They trace the strange and ethically complex process by which actual people, places and events are patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. For some readers and critics, a kind of ambitious and formally restless non-fiction has ‘become in a sense “the genre” of South African writing’ over the last decades, encompassing all those texts that make their meanings ‘at the unstable fault line of the literary and the journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial’ (Brown and Krog 57). So what lies behind this perceived nonfiction boom? What cultural or psychic function is it serving? How can it be theorised and historicised? Non-fiction is often discussed in terms of relevance and topicality: its ability to render the contemporary moment, the ‘now’. Its relatively high sales in South Africa (and globally) are linked to its perceived role of taking sociopolitical readings of a world in flux: dust jacket copy promises state-of-thenation reports more credible than those of politicians or the media; but my account attempts a longer historical perspective. The recent wave of ‘experiments with truth’ (to adapt the title of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s 1927 autobiography) is read in mind of precursors across the twentieth century. Landmark works of black life writing and political memoir; the essays, reportage and New Journalism avant la lettre of the 1950s Drum writers; the extensive subgenre of South African prison writing; the techniques of social and oral history ‘from below’ that migrate from academic to more public registers – all of these emerge as possible forerunners of more recent works. I explore how the demands of witness and testimony have shaped writing in this part of the world for generations, but also trace how the most compelling non-fictions might come to exceed and outlast their immediate topicality and relevance. Why, in other words, does some news stays news? And what insights might Struggle memoirs and anti-apartheid texts release when revisited ‘now happily relieved of any need for solidarity’?1 In reading across the twentieth century for the most influential works of narrative non-fiction from a part of the continent known blandly as ‘South Africa’, three books surely stand out: Solomon T. Plaatje’s account of the consequences of the 1913 Natives Land Act, Native Life in South Africa (1916); the articles and addresses by Steve Biko collected in I Write What I Like (1978); and then Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), originary text of the new nation and our most exemplary life. Beyond this, 1 The phrase is from Lewis Nkosi’s 1990 essay marking the reissue of Bloke Modisane’s 1963 autobiography, Blame Me On History (online).

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there are the various literary responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), for example, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night (2003) – and then the TRC archive itself: that vast release of narrative into the public domain. The triumvirate of Plaatje, Biko and Mandela can be taken as metonymic of three deep currents of non-fiction that recur in many of the more recent works considered here. Plaatje’s work is a complex mosaic of different styles and genres, but it is anchored in the practice of narrative journalism, reportage and testimony, particularly as these pertain to violations of human rights and human dignity. Biko, in drawing on the passionate anti-colonial forms (and psychological registers) of Frantz Fanon, refines the critical and political essay into a form of great concision, frankness and rhetorical power. Mandela attaches his famous name to a collective exercise in life writing that is also explicitly a national allegory: a utopian writing-into-being of a new, democratic South Africa, and one in which every aspect of his subjectivity is made to do political work. This is a ‘life’, in other words, which is both an actual, individual existence in time and also its writing up for global consumption as a textual product and commodity. The chapters to follow track how these three non-fictive impulses are drawn on, woven together and reimagined in more recent South African writing: 1) literary journalism, testimonial narrative and reportage; 2) the critical essay as a form of narrative thinking able to braid together personal and political histories; 3) life writing in its many forms and registers, from ‘definitive’ biographies of public figures to more private modes like memoir, diaries, personal narrative and autobiographical confession. Yet even as it names various tropes or genres within the field of non-fiction, my approach is ultimately more interested in those works that seem to be in flight from, or writing their way out of, recognisable templates and preestablished narrative modes. In Krog’s acclaimed but contentious account of covering the TRC as a radio journalist, the three non-fictive codes above are scrambled together, and all sorts of liberties taken in search of a greater emotional and explanatory force on the page: ‘I cut and paste the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told’ (Country of My Skull 170–71). The result is a hybrid work that is deeply suspicious of universalised truth, and always alert to the gendered assumptions that form around notions of ‘objective’ versus ‘personal’ forms of writing: ‘Your voice tightens up when you approach the word “truth”’, the technical assistant says, irritated. ‘Repeat it twenty times so that you become familiar with it. Truth is mos jou job!’ [‘Truth is your job, after all!’] I hesitate at the word, I am not used to using it. Even when I type it, it ends up as either turth or trth. I have never bedded that word in a poem. I prefer the

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word ‘lie’. The moment the lie raises its head, I smell blood. Because it is there… where the truth is closest. (36)

In Gobodo-Madikizela’s account of coming to know the imprisoned Eugene de Kock (once the commander of apartheid’s most notorious death squads), questions of expedient truths and revealing lies are still more charged. Published three years into the twenty-first century, A Human Being Died That Night is perhaps the first work of non-fiction in which a South African woman of colour writes extensively, and psychobiographically, about a white man (see Coullie et al., Selves in Question 19). It is a startling reminder that questions of narrative non-fiction can never be divorced from those of narrative power: who has the ability to write about whom; which stories are told across history; what comes to be heard or forgotten, and why. Hungry for sincerity and emotional honesty but suspicious of overbearing truths: both these globally travelled TRC books turn on ‘one of the striking ironies of the late twentieth century’: that a widespread ‘philosophical angst about the pursuit of truth has been accompanied by a new-found political confidence in exactly this project’, and a growing global enthusiasm for truth commissions (Posel and Simpson 1). Under its ‘Concepts and Principles’, South Africa’s TRC posited four different modalities of truth-telling: factual and forensic truth; personal and narrative truth; social or ‘dialogue’ truth; healing and restorative truth.2 In the work of the Commission from 1996 to 1998, these were generally conceived of as additive, aggregative, complementary and goaldirected; individual testimonies were shepherded by Chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Christian ethos in the direction of an end point, generally forgiveness, reconciliation or amnesty. But it was largely beyond the scope of the TRC to engage the question of when such differently conceived techniques or genealogies of truth might modify, contradict, unsettle or work against each other; when they might point towards the unknowable, the unreconciled, the unforgiven. It is these psychic and political registers that the ambitious non-fictions I read here enter into. If the first decade of post-apartheid South African literary production saw a range of works that responded with journalistic and impressionistic immediacy to the Truth Commission, the second decade of democracy has been marked by a wave of what might be called post-TRC texts: more distant and recessed forms of accounting for the unfinished business of the transition. My book is addressed largely to this moment, and these works. It is drawn to self-reflexive, sometimes speculative, sometimes uneven texts: powered by a will-to-truth but simultaneously aware of the expedient, limiting or even illusory nature of truths arrived at too soon, or too easily. My case studies 2 See Vol. 1, Chapter 5 of the TRC Report: ‘Concepts and Principles’: ‘Truth’, 110–114.

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investigate the inner workings of non-fictions that are (to match one negative definition with another) perhaps better thought of not as documents which seek to proclaim inalienable truths, but as attempts to reduce the number of lies – falsehoods, obscuring myths, received ideas, comforting social fictions – in the public domain. Uncertain, uneven, unpunctual, over-determined, excessive – these are some of the words I have found myself reaching for in responding to works that do not correspond to the simple narrative templates and timeframes of much public discourse. On the one hand, I attempt to understand the ‘surge of narrative energy’ surrounding non-fictional modes in a particular time and place (McGregor and Nuttall, At Risk 10). On the other, I hope to avoid an insular approach, as well as the narrative of exceptionalism in which many texts about South Africa’s political ‘miracle’ find themselves implicated. The post-transitional decades might be said to represent ‘a long walk to ordinariness’ (Cornwell, Klopper and Mackenzie, South African Literature), a shift from South Africa as a proxy for global hopes to just another ‘unredemptive, unengaging elsewhere’ (Nixon, ‘Non-fiction’ 32). And so the local materials are read in mind of a wider, global turn toward a bewildering array of non-fictional forms and formats: the many writers who work in the blurred territories between the fictive and the documentary, as well as a resurgent interest in the essay as a twentyfirst-century genre. In this sense, the non-fiction boom of the South African transition takes its place among a variety of global documentary traditions that refract moments of historical rupture or social reckoning.3 Any account of prose non-fiction today must also consider a broader turn towards what Rob Nixon calls the ‘cultural industrialisation of the real’ (‘Nonfiction’ 30). The last decades have seen an immense shift from analogue to digital worlds, from books to screens, and the emergence, across verbal, aural and visual platforms, of ‘a new normal that places a great creative and commercial premium on making a show of reality’ (30). In the overture to Reality Hunger (2010), a set of memos for the new millennium, David Shields attempts to sketch in a particular twenty-first-century cultural moment, or texture of 3 For some comparative perspectives, see for example: Bak and Reynolds, Literary Journalism and Calvi, ‘Latin America’s Own “New Journalism”’. The ‘factography’ of Soviet journalism which follows the Russian Revolution; grand reportage in war-torn western Europe and baogao wenxue in a modernising China; the New Journalism of 1960s counter-culture in the United States; literatura faktu in eastern Europe emerging from Communist rule; the long-standing genres of testimonio, crónicas and nuevo periodismo in Latin America and their engagements with the authoritarian state and endemic political violence; the Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire project (writing as a duty to memory) in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide – such varied traditions suggest that it has often been in the domain of innovative non-fiction where moments of profound socio-political change find literary expression.

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experience, as seen from Euro-America: an unconnected but interrelated set of cultural forms and artists who are ‘breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work’ (3). His list of examples ranges from literary to pop culture and across all kinds of media: DVDs of feature films that inevitably come with a ‘making of ’ documentary; behind-the-scenes interviews running parallel to the ‘real’ action on reality television shows; the remixing and recombination of all kinds of cultural data permitted by the digital environment (4).4 This massive increase in narrative possibility – in technologies for the scripting, screening and staging of real life – is perhaps one of the greatest shifts in communication and consciousness within human history. Its full consequences for ideas of truth and the self are still unfolding, and perhaps only dimly understood at this point. Yet in completing this book at a time when phrases like ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have become commonplace in public discussion, it seems there is a need for more powerful and creative tools to distinguish between the different orders of information folded into narrative non-fiction. The stubborn binary embedded within this negative definition remains – such is the case-by-case complexity of apprehending texts, and the sheer volume of stories that must be processed in a digital world – both inadequate and inevitable. * ‘Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’. The first sentence of Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916) is perhaps the most famous and often-quoted opening line in this country’s literature. Mothobi Mutloatse, Njabulo Ndebele, Kader Asmal – all begin their reflections on Plaatje’s account of the consequences of the 1913 Natives Land Act by reproducing it. In retrospect, it serves as preliminary not only to the book but also to the South African century. Reaching for a loan word, ‘pariah’, from the other major theatre of English-speaking colonialism in the global South, Plaatje evokes the fundamental denial of reality that underlay the creation of a new country in 1910: a reconciliation of Boer and Briton following the South African War, but one premised on the disavowal – social, political, cultural – of the lives of most inhabitants of the geographical space south of the Limpopo and Orange rivers. For Asmal, writing a Foreword to the 2007 Picador edition, it is ‘one of the most powerful and memorable first paragraphs in literature’ (xi). Except that it is not, strictly speaking, the first paragraph. Before chapter one comes a prologue, which opens as follows: 4 The ‘non-socks’ in my opening lines is lifted from Shields, who no doubt lifted it from somebody else in turn, given the argument his book makes against outdated intellectual property regimes and for the anarchic recirculation of cultural forms.

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We have often read books, written by well-known scholars, who disavow, on behalf of their works, any claim to literary perfection. How much more necessary, then, that a South African native workingman, who has never received any secondary training, should in attempting authorship disclaim on behalf of his work, any title to literary merit. Mine is but a sincere narrative of a melancholy situation, in which, with all its shortcomings, I have endeavoured to describe the difficulties of the South African natives under a very strange law, so as most readily to be understood by the sympathetic reader. (15)

With this very different kind of opening – self-conscious, rhetorical and recursive where the famous first lines are curt, confident and declarative – one senses the kind of torsions that Plaatje had to negotiate in presenting his passionate work of testimony and reportage to a distant public. In its stacked and carefully modulated clauses, the prologue enters the game by which a claim to literary merit is made in the very act of its being disavowed: a longstanding rhetorical device, the apologia, but one now inflected and contaminated by the colonial predicament. Who, after all, is the ‘we’ of the very first word? Embedded in this wishful, unrealised pronoun is a vortex of tensions concerning authority, audience and representation: tensions that will shape so much documentary writing from this part of the world, and will persist into another ‘new’ South Africa at the far end of the twentieth century. If the prologue starts, writes Bhekizizwe Peterson, by echoing colonial ideology and ‘reconfirming the absence of “the aesthetic” amongst Africans at the very moments when his texts demonstrated the contrary’ (81), then Plaatje’s humility and deference should be seen in part as a tactical move. Its sincerity is simultaneously a stratagem to petition the British public – a public that was, in the event, increasingly preoccupied by the First World War, and increasingly unconcerned with the lives of its imperial subjects who were not white. Intellectual, multi-linguist and interpreter for the British at the siege of Mafeking; novelist, diarist and translator of Shakespeare into Setswana; Secretary of the South African Native National Congress and member of its 1914 deputation to London: Plaatje was, when he began writing Native Life on board a ship travelling north, a member of a black elite ‘educated by and committed to the values of a white world that ultimately scorned them’ (Peterson 81). The knowledge and scope of this betrayal across the twentieth century – the global failure of a supposedly liberal humanism that prompted such sincerely ‘literary’ appeals but was ultimately deaf to them; an English articulacy corrupted and demeaned by subsequent history – such knowledge makes the prologue in some ways a beginning just as painful as the more famous opening lines. There is another, methodological lesson that can be drawn here. In considering Plaatje’s attempt to negotiate the thresholds of interpreting ‘native life’ to a distant audience – with its dynamics of insider and outsider, its fractured

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sense of audience, its ‘subtle elaborations of African inscriptions into modernities’ (82) – Peterson pays attention to the matter of the textual threshold itself. Prologues, forewords and afterwords; endnotes, authors’ notes, notes to subsequent editions; dedications, glossaries, acknowledgements: these disparate kinds of writing, in lying beyond the boundaries of the main text in a printed book, can often be overlooked as supplementary or secondary. Yet, particularly within ambitious non-fiction narrative, a great deal of intellectual labour can be read out of these paratexts. An authorial prologue and petition like Plaatje’s is then ‘a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and strategy’ (Genette 2). And as we will see, some of the most compelling reflections on narrative non-fiction in South Africa can be found within these textual thresholds: a kind of in-built, selftheorising archive of documentary practice. As the complex rhetorical stance of Native Life in South Africa suggests, the matter of non-fiction turns continually on questions of representation, in all the literary and political senses of that word: on access to narrative, authorship, discursive authority and how these relate to histories of dispossession, inequality, racist segregation and resistance across the twentieth century. In traversing this difficult terrain I have three guiding arguments, or methodological axioms, drawn from the intellectual formations that underlie my approach, respectively: literary and cultural studies; questions of historiography and the archive; critical and postcolonial theory. For the rest of this chapter I explore more carefully how the question of non-fiction takes shape from each of these different disciplinary vantages. * First, and from the perspective of literary studies, I pay attention to form and argue for a method of cross-reading which ranges across the fiction/non-fiction boundary, placing works from different genres and even different mediums in dialogue. Literary history too often reads like with like – novels alongside novels, memoir against memoir, poems with poems – rather than setting different kinds of writing in counterpoint, and moving across classifications that are often little more than a publisher’s shorthand. The challenge, however, is to do this without dissolving or disavowing the specific truth claims of various modes – each with different techniques for smuggling world onto page; each working out different contracts about accuracy and candour with an implied reader. How, in other words, can one recognise that the experience of reading fiction and non-fiction are different, but also acknowledge the fictive lineaments within even the most truth-directed forms? Writing in the wake of the critical and postmodern theory that shows up the tacit fictiveness and narrativity inherent in all kinds of discourse, there is of course the temptation to dissolve and blur the fiction/non-fiction divide in

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all kinds of ways, or even to regard it as hopelessly obsolete. And certainly, a starting premise here is that any approach seeking to account for the full scope of literary production in southern Africa must in some ways move beyond this leaden binary. Yet on the other hand, any approach that entirely dispenses with the different kind of truth-claim (or factual status) assumed by (or attached to), for example, a novel and a work of social history, will remain somehow unsatisfying. Despite their resemblance in structure or technique, ‘literary non-fiction and fiction are fundamentally different’ writes Eric Heyne, and ‘this difference must be recognised by any theory that hopes to do justice to powerful non-fiction narratives’ (480).5 This may seem too absolute a binary for theoretically minded literary scholars. Yet in my experience of teaching graduate classes on, say, Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (a memoir of living and writing in Johannesburg, classed as NON-FICTION on the back cover of the international edition), even those students most ready to dissolve any distinction between fictional and nonfictional status into a postmodern play of signification are likely to find themselves mildly aggrieved on learning, after the fact, that Ivan Vladislavić does not really have a brother, that the cranky brother-character Branko in Portrait – often a mouthpiece for reactionary or crypto-racist sentiments in the work, and a foil to the more liberal, well-meaning narrator – is a fiction. It is a small but telling example of something that Daniel Lehman draws attention to in Matters of Fact: that those texts which blur genres and play in the borderlands between fiction and non-fiction do not so much deconstruct these categories as bring sharply into focus what is at stake in them: ‘The confession that, finally, it is impossible to delineate an exact boundary between fiction and non-fiction does not mean that the boundary does not matter’ (5). I would echo Lehman in saying that I don’t wish to reconstruct an absolute division in my bookshelf between fiction and non-fiction, but I do want to look at the range of narratives on that shelf – from Peter Abrahams to Virginia Woolf – ‘and describe how my very desire and difficulty in building such a division affects me as a reader’ (6). As a transaction between reader, writer and subject that can have material consequences for actual people, the non-fictional text is, Lehman goes on, implicated in a world beyond the written artefact. It is a term that carries the 5 Factual status, he writes in the course of making a useful basic distinction, is a category marker that has much to do with how the narrative is presented and received as its actual verbal content; factual adequacy is a value-judgment considering whether the work in question represents good or bad fact: ‘Status is either/or, a binary matter determined by contexts of reception and “the illocutionary intentions of the author”, whereas adequacy is a relative matter open to debate between readers’ (480–81). In other words, the question of engaging a text as non-fiction is always a process that involves both ‘external’ (top-down) categorisation and ‘internal’ (reader-directed) judgement.

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sense of being ‘deeply involved, complicit, even incriminated in both history and text’, and one that ‘complicates more traditional or tidy literary notions of “ideal” or “implied” authors and readers’ (4). The full power and problems of such documentary forms, he goes on, ‘cannot be understood until the discursive relationships among author, subject and reader that undergird nonfiction are read as closely as the words and images that make up the narrative itself ’ (2). It is an insight that comes into relief in my central chapters, which read a range of ambitious and contentious post-apartheid life writing – Mark Gevisser’s Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2007), Ronald Suresh Roberts’s biography of Nadine Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen (2005), Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), The Number (2004) and Three-Letter Plague (2008) – in terms of racially inflected misprision and lopsided author/subject relations. Particularly in the case of Steinberg, whose books make their meanings within unreconciled gulfs of race and class while also probing criminal underworlds, the question of being implicated by narrative non-fiction takes on a very literal charge. If a tendency to entirely dissolve or disavow the non-fiction binary is one problem that I have repeatedly come up against, then the other side of the coin is the problem of rivalry. In Western literary theory from Aristotle onwards, one often sees the construction of a competitive, antagonistic relation in which the creative imagination – ‘fiction’, ‘the novel’ – is set against a more truthdirected adversary, whether ‘history’, ‘the New Journalism’, or the texture of the real itself. ‘The novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow’s newspaper’, wrote Philip Roth in 1961: ‘The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist’ (224). Variations on this theme – that unmediated or merely notated truth is stranger, and stronger, than fiction – permeate South African cultural criticism, stretching from Rian Malan’s bestseller My Traitor’s Heart (1990) back via the essays of T. T. Moyana to the Drum journalism of 1950s Johannesburg.6 Exploring apartheid as ‘A Daily Exercise in the Absurd’, Lewis Nkosi remarked: ‘At best an account of what a black man goes through in his daily life sounds like an exaggerated Kafka novel’ (Home and Exile 35). But, as he went on to argue in a well-known polemic, few novelists had properly risen to this challenge. 6 See Cowling, ‘Echoes of an African Drum’, for an exploration of how Drum journalists like Todd Matshikiza, Nat Nakasa, Henry Nxumalo and Can Themba employ and anticipate the literary and often improvisational strategies that Tom Wolfe would later see as characterising the New Journalism: scene-by-scene construction; natural dialogue; third-person point-of-view; the use of ‘status-life details’, as well as a writerly voice that was ‘often lively, inventive, and colloquial, a marked departure from the reporterly style of serious journalism’ (21).

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Instead, he found only ‘the journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature’ (Home and Exile 126): a succession of ‘ready-made plots’ and untransformed ‘social facts’ that make it ‘difficult to see why we should give up the daily newspaper in favour of creative fiction, for the newspapers would tell us just as much about life’ (127). In a later decade, Njabulo Ndebele set about refining and complicating this cliché of rivalry between the creative and the documentary, suggesting that Nkosi ‘did not go far enough in his analysis of the problem’ (Rediscovery 16). Writing in Staffrider magazine in 1984, he theorised a tension that is not locked into the question of fiction versus non-fiction, but instead plays across all kinds of narrative modes: the relation between ‘the journalistic, informational ambience on the one hand, and the storytelling, narrative ambience on the other’ (Rediscovery 24, his emphasis). It is this space of dynamic tension that ambitious and aesthetically crafted non-fictions must navigate – the ‘conflict between the aim of storytelling and that of imparting social information’ (16) – while also embedding their own intra-textual reflections on what Ndebele calls ‘the phenomenon of information’ itself (16). Writing in mind of the 1970s Information Scandal (in which the apartheid government secretly founded, funded and bribed media outlets in an effort to change South Africa’s global image), he points to the nature of information in a capitalist society not as raw material but as an ideological commodity and manufactured product, its nature hinging ‘on such issues as who produces the information, who interprets it, and who disseminates it’ (16). In articulating what one might frame as a tension between knowledge and information, Ndebele’s diagnosis of apartheid as a deliberate and cynical exercise in denying reality still resonates in the twenty-first century. The Trump/Putin era has seen the apogee of a project in which media conglomerates, even in the ‘free world’, blatantly arrange and disseminate information in ways that correspond to predetermined ideological positions, positions that may well be ludicrous or cynical, but which serve the market and an elite with vested interests nonetheless. In a world of politically engineered social media feeds and well-funded digital misinformation, the result is a widespread sense of a damaged or debased real, and a cultural predicament that the traditional tools of critical and postmodern theory seem ill-equipped to address. Another often-cited example of a supposed rivalry between imaginative and documentary modes in South African literature is J. M. Coetzee’s 1987 address ‘The Novel Today’. Speaking at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, the author and academic argued strongly against his chosen form being seen as a lesser form of discourse to be checked against the ‘answer script’ of history as if by a censorious schoolmistress: the novel as mere ‘supplement’ or handmaiden to the master discourse of historical materialism (2). Yet the problem with invoking ‘The Novel Today’ is that it tends to reinforce precisely

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the binary that is seen as so limiting at the outset. As Rita Barnard comments, it has often been taken up as ‘a kind of holy writ, a parable about the supremacy of fiction and storytelling’ (‘Beyond Rivalry’ 1). Because its metaphors are so extreme (the novelist feeling ‘colonised’ by the master narrative of Marxian and liberationist historiography) we are left with an after-image of this antagonistic opposition – ‘the novel’ versus ‘history’ – that overshadows the wider import of the address. That is: when History has been demythologised and revealed as a text among other texts, there exists a whole spectrum of different narratives and writings competing for legitimacy and primacy, making their different claims on the real. With all this in mind, my account begins from the premise that any simple notion of rivalry (or indivisibility) between fictive and non-fictive writing is inadequate. It cannot account for the flowering of both the novelistic nonfiction, and the historically textured novel-writing, that has characterised South African writing since the 1990s. Strains of fiction and non-fiction here have for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and constitutive dialogue with each other, and any attempt to engage South African writing in its fullest sense needs to find ways of addressing this complex and crossstitched relationship. ‘Is it fair to weave fictions out of the lives of real people?’ asks Vladislavić in The Loss Library: ‘How else are fictions to be made? All fiction is the factual refracted’ (30). As such, my challenge here is to read an array of different modes in critical counterpoint – literary journalism, fiction, life writing, drama, social history, poetry, documentary film, political biography, narrative essays, online posts, even conceptual art installations – with a sensitivity to how specific narrative techniques and rhetorical tactics are drawn on, refashioned and blurred into each other in the event of writing and reading. This method of cross-reading attempts to play across different genres and modes of address rather than remaining trapped within those protocols of symbolic exchange that thrive on an endless series of tired oppositions: fact and fiction; the novel versus history; the aesthetic versus raw experience; committed versus formalist; liberal versus radical. In the event of writing, it is perhaps more helpful to exchange such over-worked dichotomies for a space of dynamic tension between the found and the imagined, the informational and the narrative, the received and the wrought.7 And to concede that all the 7 The phrases ‘the received’ and ‘the wrought’ are from Janet Malcolm, who is (as we will see in chapter six) a major influence on the work of Jonny Steinberg. She uses them when discussing Virginia Woolf ’s life writing (Woolf ’s coinage), suggesting how the ‘hyper-reality’ of certain scenes ‘derives from a common artistic tradition and from certain technologies of storytelling, by which the wrought is made to appear as if it were the received. We call the tradition realism; the technologies are unnameable’ (Forty-One False Starts 73).

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works considered here, non-fictional or not, are composed of these different elements, in various ratios and combinations, and with different consequences. * Second, I am interested in how certain strains of non-fiction narrate an encounter with the past unlike that produced by dominant (and often reductive) forms of public, post-apartheid or nationalist historiography. A ‘usable past’ is a familiar phrase, coined by the American literary critic and biographer Van Wyck Brooks. Writing in 1918, he opposed the conservative reflex by which scholars invoked the past to disparage the present, asking instead for a more dynamic approach in which history is better imagined as ‘an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens itself at the touch of desire, it yields up, now this treasure, now that’ (331). ‘If we need another past so badly’, he went on, ‘is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?’ (339) The invention of a usable past is of course an important project in newly liberated, transitional or decolonising societies where various political and cultural actors are trying to recover silenced histories: a moment (like South Africa in the 1990s) when textbooks must be rewritten and the basic contours of a new national narrative imagined into being. But what lies beyond that culturally sanctioned, politically appropriate moment of retrieval, reconstruction and remembering? What about an inappropriate, unpredictable or unusable past? In her far-reaching reflections on slave memory in the post-apartheid moment, What is Slavery to Me? (2010), Pumla Gqola reminds the reader that processes of public remembering and forgetting always exist side by side, and that imaginative renderings of history must themselves be historicised in order to understand ‘the relationships of entanglement between the forms of memory found and the timing of their public rehearsal’ (7). In tracing how the slave past ‘moves from the obscured to the well recognised’ (5), she nonetheless stresses the more discordant and difficult elements of this process: how a historical consciousness of slavery and its violence might have been masked by subsequent generations as a matter of survival; how archival traces of the disremembered reside in ‘modes that do not easily give up the stories’ (4). ‘The relationship of historiography to memory’, she writes, ‘is one of containment’ (7). At a still greater distance from South Africa’s first democratic elections, I would suggest that the idea of a too easily usable past carries a more dubious charge (one not dissimilar to the sceptical, Marxist notion of an invented tradition). It is a moment when the decolonial impulse to retrieve previously unvoiced histories can be co-opted by new forms of distorting nationalism; and when even the most self-confidently progressive engagements with the archive might risk ‘using’ – by which I mean instrumentalising, or conscripting – past existences that should properly retain more resistance to the designs

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of the present. In circling around the phrase ‘unusable pasts’ (my alternate title for this book), I am concerned with all those awkward, ill-fitting, untimely histories that cannot be made to perform a simple or immediately recognisable political gesture. In telling the lives of defectors from the liberation struggle, or narrating the collapse of the ill-fated African Resistance Movement, writers like Jacob Dlamini and Hugh Lewin assemble complex meditations on betrayal, complicity and collaboration. In his memoir ‘I Gave the Names’, Adrian Leftwich reflects on a lifetime of infamy that followed from his turning state witness against his comrades in the 1960s. South African history is often produced as a series of heroic biographies, but these non-fictions turn to ideologically opaque or ‘useless lives’. The phrase is from the trial of Demetrios Tsafendas, the man who stabbed to death apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd on 6 September 1966, in full view of South Africa’s parliament. Tsafendas (the presiding judge declared) was a ‘meaningless creature’ who had led a ‘useless life’. The father of apartheid struck down at the height of his power by a ‘mad Greek’, a schizophrenic drifter who believed his body to be parasitised and was (so the story goes) acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside his gut – it is one of the strangest facts in South African history. It is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one which first spurred me into thinking seriously about the literary treatment of actual lives. Tsafendas is quickly written out of Long Walk to Freedom as an ‘obscure white parliamentary messenger’ (512). Yet in fact he was not ‘White’, but rather someone who found himself multiply misread by apartheid’s bureaucratic machine. He is a figure often passed over in standard histories, disavowed by both Afrikaner and African nationalism. But his extraordinary, wandering life has been refracted into an array of texts and artworks that are often speculative, deconstructed and non-linear. So what does it mean to read history through such ‘creative’ forms, and how might they conceive of a past that in some measure refuses the desires and projections of the present? ‘Non-political’ prisoners, con men, collaborators, askaris, HIV/AIDS denialists, betrayers, ‘ordinary’ lives in extraordinary times – these are persons and predicaments that do not yield any easy political capital, but which for that very reason may be all the more powerful in understanding what it has meant for South Africans to make sense of their lives in, through, and despite politics. * The third intellectual problem threaded through the book unfolds from the following thought experiment: can the category non-fiction be theorised, can it even be imagined, without reference to colonialism and its aftermaths? After all, it sounds odd to speak of the myriad different kinds of knowledge encoded in southern African societies in forms other than the written document as

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‘non-fiction’. In their wide-ranging introduction to Selves in Question (a 2006 volume of interviews on southern African auto/biography) the editors reject labels like ‘life narrative’ and ‘life writing’. They remark, quite rightly, that such concepts do not take account of the wide range of symbolic expressions in which lives can take shape; that they are ‘biased against non-narrative, oral or non-verbal accounts’ (Coullie et al. 8). But it is precisely the problem of writing that one is forced to consider in theorising prose non-fiction: writing up the lives of other people; writing down their words. Writing up in the sense of filing a report, an article or even a PhD: forms premised on closure, judgement – the production of usable information, often for a distant audience. Writing down in the sense of transcribing, notating, translating and re-ordering the words spoken by somebody else. The shift from the spoken to the written, Stephen Gray remarked in 1985, persists as our major literary event: across all kinds of southern African texts, the narrator is continually positioned as ‘amanuensis of the spoken word’ (10). Works like Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (1997) and Steinberg’s The Number (2004) are exercises in cultural translation on a massive scale: enormous projects of transcribing, sifting and arranging the words of non-elite (and sometimes non-literate) narrators. From this point of departure (one not always considered by influential Euro-American approaches to literary journalism), the whole question of nonfiction is inseparably bound up with power, racialised difference and the particular forms of knowledge production that took shape in the colonial contact zone: logbooks of maritime exploration; trading company reports; projects of terrestrial surveying, prospecting and cataloguing; the archives of natural history, ethnography and colonial administration. That vast and oppressive collection, in other words, of ‘Narratives’, ‘Accounts’, ‘Travels’, and ‘Descriptions’ that make up what V. Y. Mudimbe has called ‘the colonial library’ (213). This genealogy of the documentary carries with it the knowledge techniques and technologies of colonial modernity: the invention of orthography and comparative philology; the global circulation of information via imperial networks intent on producing comparable sets of data; the reduction of African languages and life-worlds to print; the biopolitics of anthropometric photography, identity documents, census taking and pass books. In this context, ‘nonfiction’ comes to signify less a universalised debate about the nature of truth and falsehood than a particular set of textual practices and print cultures that make landfall from the fifteenth century onwards, and then undergo manifold transformations and contestations.8 As with many other postcolonies, South 8 To give a very literal example of a colonial documentary form making landfall: in an outline of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) writing system, Adrien Delmas shows how the daghregister (diary) of Jan van Riebeeck was first and fundamentally a nautical

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Africa’s is ‘a literature that has developed from exogenous sources and has ever since been through innumerable processes of adaptation and indigenisation’ (Attwell, Rewriting Modernity 19). It is from one of the most famous examples of this process that I borrow my title. Writing from his ashram at Sabarmati, Gujarat, on 26 November 1925, the 56-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi – once a London-trained barrister in a suit, now a khadi-wearing Mahatma – begins his autobiography with a note of scepticism toward the whole idea of a written life. Some of his nearest coworkers (we are told) had prevailed on him to embark on the project; but ‘a God-fearing friend has his doubts’: ‘What has set you on this adventure?’ he asked. ‘Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who come under Western influence. And what will you write? Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled?’ (14)

This argument, Gandhi writes, ‘had some effect on me. But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography’: I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. (14)

This ‘Author’s Introduction’ was the first of a series of articles published between 1925 and 1929 in Gandhi’s own newspaper Navajivan (Young India), the successor to Indian Opinion, which he had established in 1903 at the Phoenix settlement outside Durban. And so what the English-speaking reader today encounters as An Autobiography first appeared in Gujarati as a long-running serialization under the title ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’. At Sabarmati, Gandhi had already completed the political history of his South African years, Satyagraha in South Africa (1928). It is a work that, not unlike Plaatje’s Native Life, tells the story of a frustrated appeal to the ideal of a form, requiring a daily log of conditions for navigation and dead reckoning at sea. At the southern tip of Africa, the seventeenth-century daghregister, ‘begun with the casting-off from Texel, would not […] be stopped, and would continue its narrative for the next one hundred and fifty years of the VOC’s presence at the Cape of Good Hope’ (106). Once on land, the Company directives about logging daily events were equally insistent: ‘Of all that occurs in your neighbourhood, you will keep accurate notes and a diary’, instructed Amsterdam on the eve of Van Riebeeck’s departure, ‘and shall not fail in this point’ (cited in Moodie 8). Such records have since formed the archival grain for several historical, postcolonial, post-apartheid novels set in the early Cape Colony.

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global imperial subject; this is then abandoned for the different political strategy of satyagraha: often translated as ‘passive resistance’ but literally ‘truthforce’, ‘truth insistence’ or ‘firmness in truth’. In his characteristically mercurial style as editor, writer and leader, Gandhi hybridises and adapts supposedly ‘Western’ forms of print culture and autobiography for his own purposes, blurring the traditional liberal distinction of individual and political, and writing even the most intimate details of his bodily functions – his diet, his bowels, his sexual urges – into his autobiographical experiments.9 Along with Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Gandhi’s life must rank as the one of the most widely read autobiographies in the world (the contemporary Navajivan Trust edition, which retails for Rs.30, just over R6 or around half a US dollar, records almost 16 million copies printed, and this in English translation alone). Mandela’s Long Walk is strenuously allegorical, secular and collective: the ‘autobiography’ of a movement in which every detail has the feel of having been comprehensively reverse-engineered to serve the political parable. Partly the product of a team of ghostwriters at an American publisher, Mandela’s ‘I’ is less the trace of a confiding, historical subject than a strategy to write a new nation into being.10 Gandhi’s Experiments are more personal and piecemeal, imbued with the gnomic, otherworldly or unknowable truths of religious thought. ‘The instruments for the quest of truth are as simple as they are difficult’, he writes towards the end of the Introduction: ‘The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him’ (16). Yet saints, as George Orwell remarked in his 1949 ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent (Collected Essays 9 See the discussion in Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Life-Writing, in which he remarks that ‘from the outset, An Autobiography conjoins “reform” of Gandhi’s individual body with the struggle against foreign domination. Indeed, his desire for mastery of bodily appetites provides a template for developing the self-control and self-discipline necessary not just to attain self-rule in the political sphere, but to remain worthy of it’ (38). Moore-Gilbert introduces his book by showing how slave narratives like that of Olaudah Equiano (‘a precursor form of postcolonial life writing’) begin to circulate from as early as 1770: ‘This is roughly the same moment as Rousseau’s Confessions, widely regarded as the inaugural instance of western autobiography in a recognisably modern form’ (xi). As such, the question of empire is present at the founding moment of modern autobiography, if one widens the angle of vision (and so too the dual helix of confessional and testimonial impulses that wind through the varied life writings that I consider in this book). 10 For an account of how Mandela’s ‘extraordinarily reticent, even colourless’ narrative of imprisonment might have displaced or substituted for a very different kind of prison book written during his incarceration, see Schalkwyk, ‘Mandela’s “Missing” Manuscript’ (207) and Roux, ‘Mandela Writing / Writing Mandela’.

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451); and the idea of experimenting with truth takes on a more dubious connotation in the larger Gandhian story. Arundhati Roy’s 2014 polemic,  ‘The Doctor and the Saint’, decries the unseemly loyalty demonstrated by the young Gandhi to the British Empire, particularly during the brutal suppression of the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906. With the help of other dissenting scholars, she traces how his autobiography elides the segregationist and anti-black sentiments of his South African years. The fact that his vision of satyagraha was not extended to black South Africans during his Durban and Johannesburg years has led to a diametrically revisionist idea of Gandhi in some circles. This cultural shift from him being claimed by the ANC as one of the fathers of the liberation struggle to being written off as racist makes him another example of an awkward or ambivalent figure from history: someone who has changed from being a usable icon to a more unpredictable, unstable element of the South African past. Nonetheless, both Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and Gandhi’s Autobiography remain global emblems of how it is in testimonial non-fictional forms that one finds the counter-voice that has always accompanied colonial conquest and political injustice: the humanitarian objection, mediated via texts that rely on documentary techniques even as they contest the uses to which these have previously been put. In this sense, the colonial library in southern Africa also holds works by writers like François Le Vaillant, John Philip, Thomas Pringle, Tiyo Soga, Olive Schreiner, Emily Hobhouse, John Tengo Jabavu, William Wellington Gqoba, John Langalibalele Dube, H. I. E. Dhlomo – producers of critical, corrective or anti-colonial non-fiction in a globalising imperial world, and precursors of the kinds of reportage and literary journalism that underwrite the twentieth-century liberation struggle. Prolific writers and editors of the New African Movement like Dhlomo were, Ntongela Masilela has argued, the crucial figures in ‘constructing the theoretical, political and epistemological instrumentarium’ for understanding and shaping a black South African modernity on its own terms (Cultural Modernity 5). It is in early black newspapers and periodicals – Dube’s Ilange lase Natal (The Natal Sun), Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion), Plaatje’s Tsala ea Batho (The People’s Friend), to name just a few – that one can look for a longer genealogy of literary non-fiction in southern Africa. ‘What initially looked like a newspaper’, writes Isabel Hofmeyr of Gandhi’s Indian Opinion, ‘starts to resemble an ethical anthology’ on closer inspection (5), one that initially appeared in four languages (English, Gujarati, Tamil and Hindi) and four scripts. In such print cultures one sees the creation of a multilingual, sometimes anonymous and generically various counter-archive, one that contests the distortions and denialism of a white-supremacist press and its compulsive and phantasmic framing of ‘the native problem’. ‘A situation such as that existing in southern Africa’, wrote Mothobi Mutloatse in the introduction to the 1980

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anthology Forced Landing, ‘compels the black artist to use all avenues available to him in expressing the black experience, and whether it be autobiographically, sociologically, dramatically, poetically or otherwise, is not so important’ (1). Its companion volume, Reconstruction (1981), affords the categories ‘Journalism’ and ‘Essays’ an equal footing with ‘Poetry’ and ‘Prose’ in reading across 90 years of black historical literature. ‘It seems to me’, he goes on, that the black artist ‘is expected to be a jack of all trades – and a master of all! He has to be a tradesman, docker, psychologist, nurse, miner, matshigilane, tshotsha, teacher, athlete, toddler, mother, musician, father, visionary, imbongi and – above all – oral historian. That’s Forced Landing…’ (1). With all this in mind, the bringing together of ‘non-fiction’ and ‘non-white’ in my opening lines was no accident. When viewed from southern Africa, the claims to objectivity and documentary truth involved in writing up the lives of others are implicated in a long and painful history of producing (in the sense of producing knowledge about) the ‘non-white’: a history in which whiteness is the fiction that passes as normative fact. Objectivity, as Frantz Fanon remarked in The Wretched of the Earth, is always wielded against the native (‘Pour le colonisé, l’objectivité est toujours dirigée contre lui’ 75). The long shadow of that colonial ethnography, and what poet Gabeba Baderoon calls ‘the hurt of the Non’ (The History of Intimacy 58), must surely be held in mind when considering how the non-fiction text creates a reality it claims only to describe. And as Fanon, Biko and Edward Said have all shown in different ways, the discourse of the powerful is not simply a matter of silencing, effacing and ignoring other life-worlds. It is also a productive endeavour: an encyclopaedic, proliferating corpus of information techniques that are used to ‘know’ and to govern the subject (who becomes an object) of enquiry. ‘One of the most difficult things to do these days is to talk with authority on anything to do with African culture’; so runs the opening line of a 1971 address by Biko, who goes on to critique the unreality and hypocrisy of a certain strain of white-dominated intellectual production that, even in its most liberal variants, professed an opposition to racial inequality while nonetheless assuming an undue epistemic command over the lives of others: Somehow Africans are not expected to have any deep understanding of their own culture or even themselves. Other people have become authorities on all aspects of African life or to be more accurate on BANTU life. Thus we have the thickest volumes on some of the strangest subjects – even the ‘feeding habits of the ­Urban Africans’, a publication by a fairly ‘liberal’ group, Institute of Race Relations. (I Write What I Like 44).

Any theorisation of non-fiction from the postcolony can hardly forget this history, and this challenge: the need for a ‘truth-force’ that will counter a demeaning objectivity; for frank talk that will contest a racialised knowingness; for

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Introduction

vernacular knowledge that will resist official or authoritarian informationgathering. Written into a context of material inequality and unresolved difference, narrative non-fiction in contemporary South Africa must (if it is equal to its situation) grapple in particularly charged ways with the power imbalances and risks involved in writing up the lives of others, even as it does evolve ways of telling that do make a strong claim on the real, and on real bodies. Self-reflexivity and an explicit foregrounding of subject position and the authorial presence, the narrating ‘I’, is one method of doing so; but it is not, I will argue, the only method, nor necessarily the most sincere, ‘honest’ or convincing. Experiments with Truth tries to widen and make more open-ended this discussion about epistemic authority and narrative method. It tracks the different ways in which compelling non-fictive texts mark out (and are marked by) long-running debates about historiography, knowledge production and the ethics of representation – even as they do attempt new ways of representing southern African history. With democratic South Africa now entering a moment of profound disillusion, disappointment and impatience – a moment signalled by renewed youth activism under the mantra of decolonisation – the practice of writing and reading narrative non-fiction is shot through with deep questions about the creation of knowledge: how it is produced, by whom and for whom. For if, as Ndebele has written, the death of apartheid must be seen not as an event but as a social process (Fine Lines 93), then the non-fiction of South Africa’s transition suggests how long, uneven and psychically complex this process will be.

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Unusable pasts

The secret history of Demetrios Tsafendas: assassin, madman, messenger

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In 2012, Human Rights Day in South Africa was officially commemorated not in Sharpeville, where the massacre that it marks took place on 21 March 1960, but in Soweto’s Kliptown, site of the signing of the Freedom Charter in 1955. President Jacob Zuma’s decision to distance the proceedings – physically and politically – from a march originally organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) provoked protest both on the streets of present-day Sharpeville and in the pages of the left-liberal press.1 Yet this state-led attempt to arrogate the meanings of Sharpeville was derailed entirely by the events of 16 August 2012 at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, when over one hundred striking workers were shot by policemen, and thirty-four killed. As the single most lethal use of force by the state against civilians since 1960, the Marikana massacre was soon dubbed the Sharpeville of post-apartheid South Africa. As the country has moved through other anniversaries and historical landmarks – the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act, the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013, the celebration of two decades since the first democratic elections in 1994 – such historical shorthands have become more common in the public sphere. Schoolchildren under Hendrik Verwoerd’s ‘Bantu education’ system may have received better instruction than the ‘gutter education’ of learners in some South African provinces today – a claim made by Mamphela Ramphele (‘Education System’, online). Campaigners against the Protection of Information Act (dubbed the ‘Secrecy Bill’) have repeatedly deemed it a step back toward apartheid-era censorship. Student confrontations with riot police during the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015 onwards have been refracted through the iconography of the Soweto Uprising, with placards reading: ‘1976 Reloaded’.2 1 The decision showed ‘an extraordinary failure of political and historical attention’ on Zuma’s part, wrote the editor of the Mail & Guardian Nic Dawes; in a year marking the centenary of the African National Congress, the ‘bombast of ANC historiography’ had effectively ‘decocted the content of the Sharpeville story and filled up the vessel of Human Rights Day with the narrative of the charter and the governing party’ (‘Why Zuma Can’t Bury Sharpeville’ 7). 2 See Booysen ed. Fees Must Fall for examples of and reflections on this comparison.

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What is at stake in such linkings of past and present? And to what extent should they be indulged or resisted? They seem at once inevitable and unsatisfying. Inevitable given that the conduct of the ruling party has borne out the thesis of an 1881 essay by Ernst Renan (one anthologised by Homi Bhabha in the influential 1990 collection Nation and Narration) which suggests that the modern nation-state constitutes itself through acts of both selective commemoration and deliberate forgetting – ‘I would even go so far as to say historical error’ (11). Nationalist agendas tend to resemble each other across the postcolonial divide, Edward Said remarks, particularly ‘in such malleable activities as reconstructing the past and inventing tradition’ (Freud and the Non-European 49).3 But such analogies and easy invocations of the past are also unsatisfying, even dangerous. Not only do they flatten out historical specificities, they also risk overlapping with a reactionary reflex that collapses the difference between (in this case) Afrikaner and African nationalist projects altogether: a strain of public discourse that works to excuse past injustice or to dismiss present transformation out of hand. As with those debates that turn obsessively on the question of whether to ‘blame’ apartheid or colonialism for current ills, the way in which history is put to work seems to show the often limited repertoire of conceptual shapes available to public culture as it debates the relation between past and present (and also reveals the difficulty of disaggregating progressive from reactionary critique of an ANC-led South Africa). ‘The flippant dismissal of the weight of the past on our collective present is just as unhelpful as its opposite’, writes poet (and once Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party) Jeremy Cronin: ‘a simplistic evocation of that past as an alibi for our own weaknesses’ (‘How History Haunts Us’, online). More generally, what one is often left with is South African history and apartheid as a stock of all-too-familiar and overused signs. It is at this juncture that I hope to explore how certain forms of non-fiction might suggest models for estranging the past and for escaping the overly familiar rhetorical moves of much public debate. If ‘Sharpeville’ or ‘Bantu Education’, ‘censorship’ or ‘1976’ emerge as immediately recognisable (and usable) signs of apartheid’s human rights violations, then what might an unusable past consist of? What of an unrecognisable or even unpredictable past?

3 A substantial body of post-apartheid literary and historical scholarship has considered how the South African past has been treated in ways that range from the innovative and liberatory to the politically expedient and patriarchal. See for example Baderoon, Regarding Muslims; Coetzee and Nuttall eds. Negotiating the Past; Gqola, What is Slavery to Me?; Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony; Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa; Samuelson, Remembering Nation; and Witz et al., Unsettled History.

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The secret history of Demetrios Tsafendas

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The following chapters track a cluster of figures and events that have remained recalcitrant to now familiar narratives of struggle, liberation, truth, and reconciliation. They are concerned with histories that do not fit such linear, end-stopped plots. Demetrios Tsafendas, the ‘mad Greek’ who stabbed to death the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, at the height of his power on 6 September 1966; the demise of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) following the psychological collapse of one of its leaders who turned state witness and betrayed his closest friends; the trial and execution of member John Harris, who placed a suitcase of petrol and explosives under a bench in Johannesburg’s Park Station during rush hour on 24 July 1964: each of these figures, and the events surrounding them, seem at once both present in the artistic imaginary but curiously absent from the way that South African history has come to be formalised. Often entangled and conflated by literature, these events from the mid-1960s provide a very literal example of how (to return to Coetzee’s metaphor) there exists no ‘answer script’ of history against which the literary text can be checked, as if by a censorious schoolmistress (‘The Novel Today’ 2). Instead, what one finds in each case are gaps in official historiography, around which are ranged a wide variety of creative treatments – texts that are by turns speculative, explicitly personal, or formally experimental. The histories of Tsafendas, Harris and the ARM represent sites of disassociation and disavowal, of humiliation, mental collapse, misplaced heroism and regret. The spectre of meaninglessness haunts them. Summing up ‘The State versus Demetrio Tsafendas’ on 20 October 20 1966, Judge J. P. Beyers talked of ’n niksbeduidende skepsel and sy nuttelose lewe – a meaningless creature who had led a useless life. In the decade following Sharpeville, such incoherent or incompetent ‘plots’ could not easily be absorbed into a politics of resistance – if, that is, the political was to be envisioned only as the domain of organised, collective and rational action. The historical impulse here seeks simply to thicken a sense of the South African past and to assess what valence one can give to speculative or formally experimental engagements with the apartheid archive. A more literary approach seeks to probe the matter of genre and literary form, imagined here as itself a kind of archive: a repertoire of narrative gestures and rhetorical figures that are simultaneously drawn on and refashioned in the writing event. As a deep narrative ‘grammar’, in other words, that determines the coming-intobeing of statements: that (to adapt Michel Foucault) describes ‘the law of what can be said’ in any given mode (The Archaeology of Knowledge 145). Why have these events compelled such generically varied and experimental approaches? What are their possibilities and limits; what is it that each chosen form can or cannot say?

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In this chapter, I concentrate on the Tsafendas story, one that has intrigued me for a number of years.4 The opening section sketches the archive of official documents, myth and personal remembrance that surrounds and produces (or effaces) this man in the national imaginary. The later sections track more carefully how Tsafendas appears in a range of cultural forms, many of them experimental and playing at the borders of the fictive and the documentary. I pay close attention to the 1966 government report on the Verwoerd assassination, a fascinatingly conflicted document, yet one that many later creative treatments must rely on for its fine-grained archival texture. I then move on to Henk van Woerden’s speculative biography A Mouthful of Glass (originally published in Dutch as Een mond vol glas in 1998, translated and edited by Dan Jacobson in 2000) and close with an analysis of Penny Siopis’s short film Obscure White Messenger (2010), two artworks that represent, I believe, the most compelling responses to the question of Tsafendas and his ‘useless life’.

‘A man without a country’ The many meanings of a meaningless life

‘When Tsafendas reached Dr. Verwoerd’s bench, he drew the dagger, leaning over Dr. Verwoerd as though he wanted to say something to him, and then gave Dr. Verwoerd the first stab in his chest on the left side.’ So reads the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Circumstances of the Death of the Late Dr. the Honourable Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd as it renders the climactic deed at 14:10 in the House of Assembly, September 6, 1966: ‘Dr. Verwoerd raised his hands as if to ward him off, and Tsafendas dealt him three more stabs before several Members of Parliament rushed to Dr. Verwoerd’s aid and overpowered Tsafendas’ (14). The tragicomic mixture of deference and violence here is suggestive of the larger problem that the enquiry had to address. How had so obscure and questionable a man as Tsafendas managed to come into such deadly proximity to the embodiment of high apartheid power? And what exactly was the nature of his ‘message’? The death of Verwoerd marked an indelible date in the lives of many South Africans (as did the assassination John F. Kennedy for Americans) and it provides a trigger for personal reminiscence among those of a certain generation: an entry into what one historian has called the ‘psychic archive’ of apartheid

4 See also Twidle, ‘Visions of Tsafendas’, revised and extended for a 2017 collection of essays and creative non-fiction, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World. These pieces reflect on the difficulties of approaching a life like that of Tsafendas within the disciplinary norms of academic research, and contain all the oddities and ‘outtakes’ that could not be accommodated in this chapter.

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(Adams ‘Race, Madness and the Archive’ 2).5 The assassin’s name passed into urban and prison slang – to ‘tsafenda’ someone was to knife them – while the tapeworm within his body that he ostensibly acted on instructions from still resides in the cultural imagination: a ‘freakish footnote in the liberation story’ and a piece of South African apocrypha that has embedded itself in all kinds of places (Robins 29).6 Yet for all its complex presence in artworks, anecdote and private memory, Tsafendas’s story is notably absent from official historiography, and from public forms of memorialisation. ‘Pauper’s Grave Likely for Man Who “Acted on Orders from Tape Worm”’ read the headline in the The Citizen following his death on 7 October 1999. After the intervention of welfare workers, the funeral two days later was in fact conducted by the Greek Orthodox Church in Pretoria; but as Van Woerden tells it in the epilogue to his work, only a handful of mourners arrived at St Andrew’s Church in Krugersdorp. The grave, in a cemetery next to Sterkfontein Hospital, is described as unmarked: ‘No sign identifies the spot. It has simply disappeared among the mounds, rubble and tangled grass in the immediate vicinity’ (Van Woerden 156). Such disappearance extends also to historical scholarship. In the two-volume Cambridge History of South Africa (2009, 2011) there is no index entry for Tsafendas. Scanning through other standard works, one finds the matter dealt with in short order, via stock phrases and the passive voice. Verwoerd was ‘struck down by an assassin’ (Wilson and Thompson 414), or ‘a deranged attendant’ (Thompson 184) who remains unnamed. As with the earlier attempt on Verwoerd’s life by David Pratt on 9 April 1960, ‘the man was declared insane’ (Davenport and Saunders 424). This ‘white parliamentary messenger’ was ‘later found by a court to be deranged’ (Giliomee and Mbenga 345); but there is no pause to ask what might have been involved in such findings and declarations.

5 In a seminar at the University of Cape Town on 10 May 2012, Zuleiga Adams remarked how her mentioning of the name Tsafendas would inevitably call forth a range of personal and anecdotal narratives from South Africans of a certain generation. How, she asked, could the event be so deeply etched in the ‘psychic archive’ and yet so absent from historical scholarship? And considering the ‘glut’ of post-apartheid projects of monument and memorialisation, why is there so little public visibility accorded to Verwoerd’s death, or his assassin? 6 In a key essay of 1984 which tries to widen the concept of political ‘relevance’ beyond something prescriptive and doctrinaire, Njabulo Ndebele discusses the ‘masterpieces of entertainment and instruction’ that he has heard from storytellers on buses and trains carrying black South Africans to work: ‘they have woven satires about the assassination of Verwoerd by Tsafendas (if you threatened to stab someone those days you could say, “I will tsafenda you”)’ (Rediscovery 25).

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Perhaps for such works of historical synthesis, concerned as they must be with the larger structural patterns and socioeconomic drivers of the southern African past, there is little time to dwell on such an individual. Here, though, is where many works of literary non-fiction make their meanings. They seek out more creative ways to model the relations between biography and social history; they attempt to escape narrowly emblematic or allegorical modes of life-narrative for more unsettled and unpredictable accounts of the relation between societal structure and individual agency. For in fact, the life of Tsafendas – in its singularity, its radical mobility and finally its inconceivability – allows a powerful insight into the world of high apartheid: a programme of modernist ‘rationalism’ and social engineering revealed via its slippages, paradoxes and misrecognitions; a system of legal and bureaucratic contortions that in Ivan Vladislavić’s words, ‘often resembled a grotesque conceptual game’ (Willem Boshoff 44). In tracing Tsafendas’s transnational biography and the complex racial positioning that he negotiated within it, one is left with the sense that the act for which he is most famous, the killing of Verwoerd, is by no means the most meaningful aspect of his story. * It was of course in the interests of the National Party and its security apparatus to deem Tsafendas’s actions those of an irrational and delusional individual. ‘I can as little try a man who has not in the least the makings of a rational mind as I could try a dog or an inert implement’, Judge Beyers remarked, a turn of phrase that is quoted in almost everything written about the assassin (Report 11). Once the absence of any coherent political ‘plot’ had been established, this ‘State President’s prisoner’ was shut away from public view, placed first on Robben Island, then in solitary confinement in Pretoria Central’s death row for twenty-three years – the treatment of a mentally unstable patient as a regularly abused inmate in the innermost recesses of the ‘hanging jail’ that marks one of the regime’s lesser-known but more vindictive human rights violations. Yet the figure of Tsafendas is also largely absent from dominant narratives of the anti-apartheid struggle. Even Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994) – normally so ready to find a place for all at the ‘Rendezvous of Victory’ – quickly passes over him as an ‘obscure white parliamentary messenger’ (512). But Tsafendas was in fact of mixed racial origin, born January 1918 in Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) to Amelia Williams (a household servant, the child of a Swazi woman and German man in Portuguese East Africa, today Mozambique) and Michael Tsafandakis (a marine engineer of Cretan extraction whose family had settled in Egypt). And if he was obscure, then he was, like J. M. Coetzee’s Michael K, ‘so obscure as to be a prodigy’ (The Life and Times of Michael K 142).

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A Mouthful of Glass leads us into a life of wandering and displacement, the extent and complexity of which, as Van Woerden remarks, ‘stun the imagination’ (72). Sent to live with his grandmother in Alexandria until the age of six (a way for the family to avoid embarrassment), Tsafendas was returned to Mozambique in 1925. He was first placed in a Portuguese mission school, then despatched as a boarder to Middelburg in the Transvaal, where classmates taunted him for his dark complexion. The family, with his father now married to a different woman, had moved to Pretoria to find work during the Depression. The young Tsafendas crossed into the Union of South Africa illegally to follow them, having received the first of many refusals from South African immigration services. He began a succession of odd jobs: in Hillbrow tea rooms, where he distributed the odd Communist pamphlet; in the seafront kiosks and bars of Lourenço Marques; as a chauffeur for Imperial Airlines in Quelimane; and back to Johannesburg as a welder and lathe operator, as the war effort swelled the South African economy, fitting parts to armoured ­vehicles. Yet by 1942, the official dossiers on Tsafendas had amassed too many troublesome phrases for him to be left alone: this ‘half-caste’ with ‘communistic leanings’ prone to ‘irregular attendance and loafing’ was placed under increased scrutiny by the security services, who now waited for any excuse to deport him for good (Report 2, 3). He left for Cape Town, signed on with a Greek ship bound for Canada, and so began a twenty-year period of statelessness and almost constant movement. As the Commission of Enquiry discovered when it began its investigations, the movements of the man known variously as Tsafendas, Tsafendis, Tsafandis, Tsafendos, Tsafandakis, Tsafantakis, Tsafendikas, Stifanos, and Chipendis could be tracked via ‘a litany of deportation orders and psychiatric reports’ stretching across twenty-five countries, thirteen ships, twelve hospitals, and leaving traces in secret police files ranging from Salazar’s PIDE to Israel’s Mossad (Key). In Liza Key’s 1997 submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on behalf of Tsafendas (a text that also provides the voice-over for her 1999 documentary A Question of Madness) she writes of Tsafendas’s journeying: At one stage he walked across the frozen St Croix river from Canada into the United States. He presented himself at the Mandelbaum gate demanding entry into Israel from Jordan. He was detained on New York’s Ellis Island, put into military detention in Portugal, certified insane in England, baptised on a beach in Greece, given shock treatment in a German asylum and passed through

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France as a refugee under the auspices of the Red Cross. In 1964, fluent in eight languages, he returned to South Africa.7

Condensing the years 1942 to 1963 in this way produces almost a parable, or picaresque, of the wanderer. But the clipped, numbered paragraphs of the report (assembled from a major international enquiry and a mass of state documents following the assassination) serve as a reminder that these wanderjahre were anything but those enjoyed by the conventional literary traveller: that free narrative agent who proceeds toward self-knowledge and psychic integration through a series of disparate but meaningful experiences. By contrast, Tsafendas was ‘a man who found all of many venues in the planet’s racial/spatial order inhospitable’ and his wanderings were marked with repeated instances of psychological collapse (Shapiro 250). Following the war, the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’ joins the labels ‘half-caste’ and ‘Communist’ in government documents; he is deported from New York’s Ellis Island to Greece for no more reason, it seems, than his name. ‘It is not a small mistake’, he wrote to U.S. authorities from Greece in 1948, ‘the difference is between the North Pole and the South Pole’ (Report 4). This animus toward America persisted, a country whose wartime convoys he had helped to service as a crew member on the ‘Liberty Ships’: vessels built in record time to keep pace with the Allied war effort and to replace those sunk by German U-boats. Tsafendas would write letters to President Roosevelt and even try to sue his government – a signal of how his life and times soon began to exceed the frame of any narrowly, or nationally, conceived history of South Africa. In fact it was only through bureaucratic error that Tsafendas did re-enter the country and its history at all. Between 1938 and 1960, he constantly applied for permanent residency in South Africa and was constantly refused. In a letter on 12 April 1949 to the Department of the Interior, he makes his case once again, writing of having ‘risked my life in submarine infested seas’: ‘I made the mistake of not taking out my citizenship papers before I went to serve, due to my young age then & inexperience, thinking that I was automatically an African citizen’ (Report 5). The letter is revealing in its mixture of rhetorical sophistication and political innocence, or utopianism: the phrase ‘African citizen’ was surely the wrong one to use on the South African officials at the time, almost the utopian inverse of the surreal apartheid coinage ‘foreign native.’ It goes on: Will you please consider the above & let me return to my home, & to the girl I was brought up with, to whom I want to marry, as we have so much in com 7 This is the text as adapted by Beresford in his newspaper article ‘The Madness of Demetrio Tsafendas.’ The original submission by Key to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was made for a hearing into the apartheid judiciary on 27 October 1997.

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mon. I am here a man with-out a country. Living in strange lands, with people who have different ways of living & customs, and languages. I have a lot more to mention but cannot put it into writing. Remain Yours James Demetrios Tsafandakis P.N. Will you kindly send a note to my family when answering [...]

Tsafendas would continue writing to state authorities his whole life, even during his incarceration in Pretoria.8 Combined with psychiatric interviews and medical reports, the result is a large collection of archival material, a textual corpus that bears the violence of apartheid usage at every turn, but also preserves Tsafendas’s own words and writerly persona to a remarkable extent. These form a complex blend of intelligence and petulance, lucidity and delusion, political insight and personal trauma. In a discussion of autobiography by political prisoners in South Africa, Paul Gready draws on Foucault’s insight that power can in one sense be understood as a form of state writing that is exhaustive and overpowering. He then goes on to make an important remark about the intensely fictive qualities even at the heart of such supposedly official language: ‘The written fictions of apartheid, though often patently ridiculous, had a devastating operational truth of their own’ (492). Yet in the case of Tsafendas, who was prepared to enter into correspondence with the state again and again – to write back when so many others would surely have given up, to match the political fictions of apartheid with increasingly baroque inventions of his own – the results were complex and contradictory. On the one hand, he was flagged as a troublemaker and placed on the ‘black list’ by the Department of the Interior in September 1959, intended to prevent him from ever re-entering South Africa. But at the same time, the Portuguese authorities had granted him a kind of amnesty and a new passport. In South Africa, the files on him began to multiply and diverge from each other: indeed much of the latter half of the Report is a kind of ‘object biography’ given over to tracing how dossiers G.8226 (‘the Tsafendakis file’) and B.7771 (‘the Tsafandakis file’) existed in parallel for decades and were never adequately crossreferenced. His shape-shifting name also seemed to have something to do with how this life managed to slip between the cracks of the racialised, rationalised grid. On 2 November 2 1963, the passport control officer responsible for letting Tsafendas back into South Africa ‘looked up the name under the index letter “S,” as a result of the sound association in the pronunciation of his surname’: Stafendas (Report 19). 8 For a close analysis of these letters by the historian who found them in the Pretoria archives, see Adams, ‘Race, Madness and the Archive’ .

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This was by no means the last bureaucratic irony associated with the Tsafendas case. In September 1965, having reached Cape Town to explore the possibility of marriage to a woman named Helen Daniels (with whom he had corresponded), he applied to the Department of the Interior for reclassification as ‘Coloured.’ The bureaucratic mechanisms were overwhelmed by applications in the other direction and, while awaiting the outcome, Tsafendas took up the fateful post as parliamentary messenger, a job reserved for ‘Whites’ according to apartheid legislation. How could such a man have been accepted into the inner sanctums of government, the Commission demanded? Precisely because, as the Chief Messenger Mr Burger explained, of the job reservation policy and the difficulty of filling a post that carried a racial stigma: ‘I have to scour the streets, because nobody wants to do the humble work, under the humble name of messenger’ (Report 25). In the meantime, the reclassification request had prompted the Department of the Interior to connect files G.8226 and B.7771 and issue a deportation order. It lay dormant on an official’s desk on the day that Tsafendas stabbed Verwoerd. It is worth pausing to note the layer upon layer of ironies compacted into this moment: how it shows the multiple absurdities of the Verwoerdian machine, which tried to parse the racial spectrum of southern Africa into different group identities, economies and social functions – entrenching one version of difference by collapsing all others. What form of writing, one wonders, could possibly comprehend such a life? In her submission to the TRC, Key resorts again to the litany, a list that she also placed on Tsafendas’s coffin in 1999: ‘Displaced person, sailor, Christian, communist, liberation fighter, political prisoner, hero. Remembered by your friends.’ It is clearly a product of its moment, part of a much larger project of historical recuperation underway in South Africa’s 1990s transition: the invention of a past that might be recognisable and usable for the purposes of strengthening a new democracy. Today, at a greater historical distance, one might want to add to this a range of less overtly political (or usable) roles: waiter, chauffeur, welder, messenger, possible schizophrenic, hawker of postcards on the Tagus in Lisbon, frequenter of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, tractor mechanic in Germany, self-styled teacher and ‘Professor of English’ in Turkey, and translator at the ‘immorality trials’ of Greek and Portuguese seamen when back in Cape Town. Indeed, the rhetorical technique of the list is hard to resist when faced with such a life: a temptation simply to multiply details and examples. In the remainder of this chapter I explore artistic responses to the Tsafendas story more carefully, asking what kinds of shape have been given to his life by various literary and filmic texts. What narrative logics are operating within each and what are their consequences? What cultural forms might be adequate for a life story that is, in one sense, ‘useless’ but at the same time intensely significant, overdetermined, excessive; where there is always (to use

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Tsafendas’s own words) ‘a lot more to mention’ that one ‘cannot put... into writing?’ (Report 5).

Archival fictions and the plotting of real lives ‘Tsafendas’s Diary’, Triomf and the 1966 Government Report

‘They killed the Prime Minister during the winter’ (9): so runs the opening line of Ivan Vladislavić’s first work, Missing Persons (1989), a short story collection that returns compulsively to the death of this unnamed figure and the identity of his assassin. In the darkly comic, deconstructed fairy tale ‘Tsafendas’s Diary’, this imaginary document becomes a kind of South African urtext, the object of an obsessive quest through the unconscious of a damaged society: ‘Granny smiles. “You must fetch it for us,” she says. “Tsafendas’s Diary is the key to all mysteries. The mysteries of meat and the imagination”’ (86). The compulsive knitting of this grandmother figure (reminiscent of the Fates or Dickens’s sinister Madame Defarge), and the long, fanged black ribbon that results, is read by one critic as a possible reference to a larger social fabrication of the tapeworm alibi: ‘a misrepresentation of the assassin as simply deluded – an oversimplification, perhaps a lie – created by the apartheid government and widely accepted by the population’ (Thurman 61).9 At the same time, the imperative to find the talismanic ‘diary of a madman’ evokes the conspiracy theories surrounding Tsafendas (instrument of the Broederbond, or brainwashed Communist catspaw?) that could never be quite dispelled: he was a semi-mythical figure who had, Thurman writes, ‘breached parliament, killing the minotaur in the heart of the maze’ (59). In Vladislavić’s hands, the form of the short story cycle both invites and resists larger theories of coherence, tempting readers to make possible links between parts while never providing enough internal evidence of whether such inferences can be justified: by the end we have entered into arcane webs of signification surrounding the assassination, but with no possibility of explication or diagnosis. Its cryptic transect of a violent society has something in common with the ‘condensed novels’ that make up J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) or even the fictionalised reconstructions of Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988). Both works are haunted by the 1963 Kennedy assassination; both

9 See Thurman for a detailed treatment of the way that the Verwoerd assassination and the state pageantry surrounding the declaration of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 is refracted by Vladislavić’s short-story cycle. Thurman also traces references to Tsafendas and the ‘polysemic symbol’ of the tapeworm in the writing of Denis Hirson, John Matshikiza, Chris van Wyk, and Zoë Wicomb (46).

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combine the technical specificity and ‘flat prose’ of the official document with a terminally unresolved or ‘open’ structure.10 In Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994, trans. De Kock, 1999), widely regarded as one of the outstanding novels of the South African transition, the violent and inbred son of the Benade family, Lambert, works on a ‘never-ending painting’ in his den, a bricolage of detritus from the Afrikaner nationalist imaginary that the larger work explores with relentless irony. Amid this bizarre palimpsest of southern African history, the ‘lekker [lovely] pink’ paint used for the feather in the cap of Jan van Riebeeck is also used for Tsafendas’s Worm: He cut out the picture of Tsafendas from Huisgenoot. Still in jail over Verwoerd. Very old now, but he’s still got the worm. He hung his Republic Day medal on Tsafendas’s chest, onto a nail going right through his HEART. He’d drawn the heart onto the picture himself. Treppie came and asked if that was the Lord Jesus there with his bleeding heart. Then he asked Treppie if he was mad or something, Jesus didn’t have a worm. ‘Cause the worm starts in the heart and goes all the way to the guts, until you can’t make out anymore what’s guts and what’s worm.’ (van Niekerk 166)

The historical impasto here registers an array of possible meanings and anxieties surrounding Tsafendas in the Afrikaner nationalist imagination. There is the intrusion of a violent, unexpected outlier into the idealised domestic space of the Huisgenoot [House-Helper] magazine: a monster to be killed like a vampire, but one that might also be a messiah bearing an incomprehensible message. ‘Die Here maak nie ’n fout nie’, as Betsie Verwoerd famously remarked at her husband’s funeral, still adhering to the script of a larger providential design (with the Afrikaner nation as a chosen people) in the face of such radical historical contingency: God does not make a mistake. One could even suggest that the blurring of ‘guts’ and ‘worm’ here carries with it a complex metaphor of host and parasite within the social organisation of apartheid South Africa, terms that (as Coetzee’s comparably obscure prodigy Michael K reflects) are likely to switch places on closer inspection (Life and Times of Michael K 116). And just as the inbred Benade family are the final logic, or reductio ad absurdam, of a Verwoerdian insistence on cultural ‘purity’ (the reverse of the Republic Day medal, so to speak), so Tsafendas becomes as kind of obverse or doppelganger to Verwoerd. He is a figure both disavowed by nationalist historiography and endlessly summoned by it, assassin and victim welded together forever by the violent act. 10 The phrase ‘flat prose’ is from a 1993 interview with DeLillo, in which he describes the immense research project that underlay Libra: ‘There were times with Oswald, with his marine buddies and with his wife and mother, when I used a documentary approach. They speak the flat prose of The Warren Report’ (quoted in Begley, online).

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In these dense and self-aware works of fiction, ‘Tsafendas’ is able to move back and forth from historical individual to a referent in the service of some other narrative: whether as chronological marker, figure of folk memory or as a means of accessing larger psychic or social terrains. In this sense, interpretation is, in a sense, unfalsifiable and potentially endless as it enters such circuits of meaning. But how can one preserve a literary mode of analysis when turning toward the ostensibly non-fictional or documentary treatments that address themselves more squarely to the historical existence of the man? * Reading the 1966 Report from cover to cover is to be reminded once again how documentary forms can simultaneously be ideological fictions. Compiled from widely distributed questionnaires, extensive international enquiries, and over one hundred oral testimonies, the Report is on one hand the culmination of a massive research project dedicated to the facts of the matter, charged with covering all aspects ‘which the said Commission deems to be in the public interest.’ Even with this rider, and in counterpoint to a steadily entrenching police state under B. J. Vorster, it released a dense load of (often embarrassing) information into the public domain, and has served as the sourcebook for many subsequent reimaginings of Tsafendas’s life. Yet on the other hand, its many instabilities emphasise that there can never be a pretext or historical ‘answer script’ against which later versions can be checked; that even the most official and impersonal forms can be tendentious and highly wrought textual artefacts in which questions of form and genre have distinctly political consequences. In a close reading of the report, the sociologist and historian Deborah Posel reveals it as a profoundly bifurcated document. In one mode it portrays Tsafendas as an ineffectual and meaninglessness figure: a ‘lone gunman’ akin to Lee Harvey Oswald in The Warren Report. In this narrative, the assassin is ‘ideologically inchoate’ and figured as the pathetic nemesis of everything that Verwoerd stood for: ‘racial purity, community, national rootedness, resolute faith, ideological certitude, patriarchal manhood’ (Posel, ‘Assassination’ 340). Yet at the same time, there is a counter-narrative operating. In trying to offset the long chain of bureaucratic errors and ironies that allowed Tsafendas to come within stabbing distance of the Prime Minister, there is also a vexed attempt ‘to elevate the enemy into a worthy adversary’, to conjure an unpredictable maverick who acted with foresight and planning (Posel 336). One senses this lurch of gear between chapters two and three, as the Report moves from ‘The History of Demetrio Tsafendas’ to ‘Demetrio Tsafendas’s Motives.’ In the former, the text is only required to provide a chronologically arranged list of all verifiable (and some unverifiable) information about its subject along with extracts from other correspondence and reports, many of

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them medical. If the twenty-six-volume Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination is, in DeLillo’s words, ‘the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel’ (quoted in Begley, online), then in the South African document one also senses how the fine-grained period details and ‘found’ narratives collated in its staccato paragraphs might also be suggestive for a creative imagination. To select a fragment from the 1966 Report at random: ‘Tsafendas was always begging for a place to sleep and for meals. At Beira, for example, he slept at the fire-station for a time’ (8). Each numbered paragraph, each report within a report threatens to open a door into another unmanageable archive: a mise en abyme of story within story that multiplies contingency so that the more that is known of this life, the less that can be said about it. When the report switches to questions of motive, however, and must now generate logical connections between the paragraphs, something odd happens to the previously constrained language: ‘Whatever the causes were, there can be no doubt that he was a maladjusted, rejected, frustrated, feckless rollingstone. He is boastful, selfish, unscrupulous and crafty’ (16). Gathering momentum, it goes on: ‘In the clouded mind of this outcast, who was a complete failure, whose life meant practically nothing to him, was born a cunning plan to make use of his power to destroy the head of a Government that he hated’ (16). Trying to balance the mutually exclusive demands of meaninglessness and master-plot, the report begins to read like an over-written pulp novel. Tsafendas is both ‘feckless’ and ‘cunning’; robbed of agency but also granted ‘power’ within the course of a single sentence. The rhetoric dilates accordingly to paper over such non-sequiturs, and by the end of the section, the once flat prose is now sagging under the weight of adjectives and unidiomatic translation: ‘He concealed the knives carefully and had enough self-control to wait his chance [sic]. Unaided, without a false move, with cunning timing and with unerring purpose he executed his plan’ (16). The paradox registered so baldly here in the ‘plotting’ of Tsafendas, the simultaneous demand for and frustration of an immediately legible cultural meaning or narrative shape, is one that I want to trace in later responses to his life. And while this is a paradox particularly visible in the 1966 report, it is of course at play in any story told about the past. For narrative histories, as Mink remarks, ‘should be aggregative insofar as they are histories, but cannot be, insofar as they are narratives’ (217). That is to say, all historical narratives have a centrifugal impulse toward greater complexity and contingency, but one that inevitably rides in tension with the need to select, order and emplot such data into a legible narrative arc of some kind. The remaining sections here track how more ‘creative’ experiments in non-fiction apprehend such an excessive, elusive life. To what extent are they able to plot his story without collapsing it

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into a meaning that is expedient or premature, and what can this tell us about how literary culture engages the South African past?

‘The cinnamon-coloured suit’ Literary liberties and artistic ‘facts’ in Van Woerden’s A Mouthful of Glass

At only 150 or so pages, Van Woerden’s A Mouthful of Glass has the sense of being a deliberately minor work (at least in Jacobson’s edited translation). If this first book-length treatment of Tsafendas is indeed a biography, then it is hardly definitive, authorised, magisterial, or any other of the adjectives routinely attached to that word. Instead, its slimness might be read as deliberate: a formal riposte to the surfeit of state archiving that Tsafendas’s life produced. It also sets aside the chronology of the Report and begins in medias res, with a novelistic vignette from the mid-point of its subject’s wanderings: an episode in Hamburg’s General Hospital where one ‘Demitrios Tsafendon’ was admitted for agitation, exhaustion, and ‘delusional psychosis’ in February 1955. Following electroshock treatment and partial recovery, he left on June 6: ‘He wore a faded, cinnamon-coloured suit. A taxi took him to the centre of town’ (5). In the notes at the back of the book, Van Woerden reveals the combination of different sources that produce this passage. The first is a detailed set of medical records from Germany, sent on request to Dr I. Sakinofsky (head of psychiatry at Groote Schuur Hospital, who interviewed Tsafendas shortly after the assassination) and then subsequently rediscovered by Van Woerden among twelve large cartons of documents in the Pretoria State Archives. Yet having made this claim to archival fidelity, the authorial commentary then swerves in a different direction: ‘The faded brown suit in which I dress Demetrios on his discharge from hospital is derived from a line in the verse of Alexandrian poet, K. P. Kavafis, a fellow townsman of his between 1919 and 1925’ (161). How can one interpret such a flagrantly literary detail within a non-fictional work: a self-confessed departure from the actual? In ‘The Art of Biography’, Virginia Woolf wrote memorably of the variable kinds of fact in the writing process, remarking that if the biographer ‘invents facts as an artist invents them – facts that no one else can verify – and tries to combine them with the facts of the other sort, they destroy each other’ (123). But what if, as is the case here, a paratextual mechanism exists to register and reflect on this very process, and to signal the presence of artistic ‘facts’ within the work of nonfiction? A Mouthful of Glass, Van Woerden writes in his notes, is ‘a cautious attempt at anamnesis – a bringing back to memory of that which has been forgotten’: ‘by means of Demetrios’s story I would be able to render something of the South African trauma’ (159). Yet this representational burden, which seems to

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be tending toward some kind of national allegory, is then qualified: ‘To try to recall the prior history of someone’s illness is not the same thing as giving a diagnosis of it’ (159). Here, then, is the tension that bifurcates the government Report – between ‘prior history’ and ‘diagnosis’ – a tension that this very different exercise in life writing is for the most part able to acknowledge and keep in dynamic relation through a supple and self-reflexive narrative mechanism. The notes admit to a mixture of documentary rigour, novelistic scenepainting and intertextual influence – but also a more intangible quality of writerly ‘inference’ and ‘intuition’: an imaginative feeling for the material that was, the narrator claims, enhanced by his own meetings with Tsafendas in the 1990s. Yet equally, the rambling conversations with an elderly, hard-of-hearing Demetrios in Sterkfontein Hospital that occupy the latter sections of the book hardly provide an ex cathedra confirmation of what comes before. Instead, they allow us to see the subject of the work constantly reimagining and rescripting his life, a dynamic that is in turn refracted back into the biographical narrative proper. ‘Demetrios looked at his past as if through a kaleidoscope’, Van Woerden writes when analysing the testimony given in interviews at Groote Schuur Hospital in the days after the assassination: ‘depending on need or desire, he would give it a quarter-turn this way or that’ (46). The intuition afforded by the first-hand experience of meeting Tsafendas, in other words, works to unsettle the archival testimony on which much of the book has been based, a quality signalled by the series of verbal cues and metaphors as we read. As such, the modal verbs and non-insistent syntax of Jacobson’s translation carry with them a hedged or semi-fictive quality, while the images (in the modernist sense) that the work evolves for understanding its own procedures – the ‘cinnamon-coloured suit’, the kaleidoscope – offer provocative redefinitions of what the archive underlying such a project of life writing might be. They show up the artifice and imaginative liberties involved in oral testimony, memory work, and the writing up of ‘real’ lives – but they do so without annulling the truth claims of the larger project. The kaleidoscope holds in mind the projections and tricks of memory; the poetic borrowing acknowledges that texts are built from other texts and tempts the reader to enter Cavafy’s meditations on place and exile, clearly signalled as a body of work that underwrites Van Woerden’s own. The suit comes from a poem titled ‘Days of 1908’, but one can turn to Cavafy’s most famous work, ‘The City’, for a poetics through which to read Van Woerden’s complex relation to his subject, and to the country that he is writing about. When the speaker of the poem states, ‘I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, / find another city better than this one’, the counter-voice replies, ‘You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you’:

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You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. (28)

This vexed sense of place and displacement, of mobility and entrapment, is surely resonant in the transnational odyssey of Tsafendas’s life story; but it also provides an underlying key signature for the strong autobiographical element in A Mouthful of Glass. Indeed, the idea that ‘the city will always pursue you’ is an apt summary of the way Van Woerden evokes his relationship to Cape Town, where he arrived at age nine following his family’s move from the Netherlands in 1956. The first chapter, ‘The Emigrants’, traces his adolescence in the southern suburbs of the city: his fascination for Cape Town’s Muslim cultures and his friendships with mixed-race (‘Coloured’) classmates at a time when apartheid’s forced removals were gathering momentum.11 In Van Woerden’s reading of the migrant – ‘an uncertain and incomplete man’ who ‘lives in an inveterate state of unease’ (10) – it is no accident that Verwoerd (who became Prime Minister in 1958) was also the son of an immigrant: like Van Woerden he is also a ‘halfbaked Hollander’ (there is even a verbal affinity between their names that plays unwittingly across the text, as if they are scrambled versions of each other). The intense ambition and ideological fervour brought to bear as Verwoerd’s administration sought to disentangle the complex, creolised communities of Cape Town is seen in part as the over-compensation of the outsider trying to assimilate: to better himself and those like him. If Tsafendas was a migrant’s son who found every venue of the modern state inhospitable, then Verwoerd was the obverse: a man granted every political honour and eventually given dictatorial power over South Africa’s black population, whom he sought to render ‘foreign natives’ in the land of their birth. Despairing of this hardening Afrikaner nationalism (but also of the ineffectual response of white liberalism in his student circles), the young Van Woerden leaves South Africa in disgust in 1968: ‘wholly unprepared for the great thirst that awaited me, the nostalgia I would feel for the future I had left behind’ (20). As such, the work sets up a complex relay of equivalences and partial identifications between assassin, victim, and (auto)biographer. For some reviewers, this risked being an ‘onerous’ postmodern strategy, and the personal elements were substantially reduced by Jacobson when he translated the work from the Dutch (Kaplan 396). Yet those that remain represent an intriguing strategy for dealing with a personal investment, an over-investment perhaps, in a given 11 In this sense it is part of an autobiographical triptych that also includes Moenie Kyk Nie (1993) and Tikoes (1996).

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research project. This is the ‘back end’ of the work of biography, so to speak, which is able to speculate about why certain writers are drawn to certain lives, but which must generally be downplayed or effaced from more generic or standardly informational works. One sees this richer account of ‘subject formation’ (in multiple senses) in the complex scene that is given as the genesis of A Mouthful of Glass. In the second chapter, ‘The Way Back’, Van Woerden describes his return to South Africa in the 1990s, an experience that is by turns uplifting, emotional, confusing. At one point he takes shelter in the National Library of South Africa; but ‘[f]rom that world, the world outside, the library hardly offered me a refuge’ (26). Here he finds himself ‘scavenging and gathering material by instinct, basketsful of material, hoping that I might find a use for it all – though I could not imagine what that use might turn out to be’ (26). Turning to newspapers on microfiche, he orders a four-months sampling of Die Burger newspaper from January 1, 1960 to the end of April: ‘one hundred and twenty days under Verwoerd’s premiership, chosen more or less at random’ in which the past unfolds ‘incoherently’ in lurid caricatures and stereotypes: Again and again the ugliness of that period thrust itself into my consciousness: the stupidity, the lies, the violence, the censorship [...] the grotesquely obscene political and ‘immorality’ trials, the Dutch Reformed dominees trapped in garages with their Coloured maids, the farmers spied on in the open veld with their female domestics and duly brought to reckoning before the courts. (27)

The rising nausea of this particular archive fever forces him outside again, into the Company’s Garden established by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century, now a city parkland in which parliament is located – and so the association with Verwoerd’s assassination is (rather glibly) made: ‘So many important events had taken place in this precinct: demonstrations, marches, processions. Murder too’ (28). At this point, the autobiographical narrative is displaced by the appearance of the 1966 report: Van Woerden describes going back to find it among the documents he has ordered up: ‘I paid my money and carried away a photocopy of the report in its entirety. I had no idea then how extensive and how revealing was the material about Tsafendas which I would find elsewhere’ (28). It is, at least in the English version, a dense scene of origin: the narrator moves back and forth between exterior and interior, world and archive. Taking refuge from a confusing present, he is propelled into it again by a sense of historical disgust, a sense of the past as incorrigible and unusable. Through it all sounds a note of belatedness and intellectual intensity that characterises many works by artists returning during the 1990s transition: the need to make up for lost time, to write oneself into ‘the new South Africa’, and the pressure of trying to find a subject able to sustain this. In Van Woerden’s autobiographical

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sections more generally, there seems to be a sublimated fascination with, or erotic longing for, the ‘Coloured’ body: something that leads to the visceral reaction to the ‘scandals’ of the past, but is also registered in the inclusion of crass remarks (‘You like chocolate?’) from onlookers as he walks around town with a young woman in the 1990s present. Within the scene in the gardens, this unspoken psycho-sexual charge combines with all of the above to produce the ‘subject’ of Tsafendas, and on cue the governmental report appears as a kind of deus ex machina. But intriguingly, its influence is immediately downplayed, as if the narrator is reluctant to concede how much his work must have relied on an official apartheid document, one steeped in the concept of ‘immorality’ that so disgusts him in the library.

Staging, refusing and reimagining the documentary Tsafendas on stage and in film; Siopis’s Obscure White Messenger

A continuing chain of textual influence can be traced in two less supple responses to the Tsafendas story. One is Antony Sher’s 2003 play I.D., which acknowledges its debt to Van Woerden’s work on the title page and adapts many of its ‘images’ for the stage. In Sher’s script, though, the tale of Tsafendas and his victim is rendered as a kind of tragi-comedy with a caricatural, almost cartoonish element. His wanderjahre, for example, are compressed into a ‘The Ballet of the Suitcases’, ‘a speeded up sequence in which TSAFENDAS and the CAST play out his travels, using suitcases to create boats, desks, stairs, cells, etc. It’s like a routine from an old silent comedy’ (33). This caricature is amplified by Sher’s decision to make the tapeworm itself into a character, Lintwurm: a sinister narrator figure who also comes to play a Mr Hyde to the amiable Jekyll of Demetrios. This ‘smiling, seedy bar-fly type’ wearing goggles and ‘speaking in a smoky South African drawl’ addresses the audience directly, keeping up a continuous patter (14). As a stage device, it is useful for exposition, but risks reconfirming the popular myth about Tsafendas – that he acted on instructions from a worm inside him – rather than debunking it. Like Anton Krueger’s slightly earlier work for the stage, Living in Strange Lands: The Testimony of Dimitri Tsafendas (2001), Sher’s play is also drawn to giving the unruly mass of information surrounding Tsafendas a romantic arc. From the first lines – ‘I dream of a girl... waiting for me... somewhere in Africa...’ (13) – one is nudged toward imagining a Homeric saga of a ‘Wandering Greek’ wanting to return home to his African Penelope: in this case Helen Daniels, whom he had met through the church and had been corresponding with from Durban, exploring an offer of marriage. The much more complex and internalised racial hurt that the Tsafendas story allows us to glimpse in Van Woerden’s work is externalised and pressed into a plot of thwarted love

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across the ‘colour bar’: one of the well-worn tropes of South African literature under apartheid. In Krueger’s one-man play, this is even given as the motivation during the moment of assassination: ‘In the Neck. Shoulder. Lungs. Heart.... Bastard! Where’s that Bastard! Why’d you have to take her away from me?’ (28). Here again it is revealing to read such sympathetic recuperations of his life alongside the governmental report that underwrites them. Both plays circle back to the initial (physical) meeting of Tsafendas with Helen in Cape Town, one rendered as a moment of hope and possibility. But on this matter, the ‘flat prose’ of the report is in its own way inimitable: ‘Miss Daniels testified how he arrived at their home with a big hole in his jersey, and dressed untidily. Her brother fetched his luggage from the station. This consisted of a suitcase containing mainly dirty washing and another suitcase containing tools, pots and pans. She immediately lost all interest in him, and he never showed any interest in her either’ (9). A few paragraphs later, we read, ‘One gains the impression that he was unacceptable to the female sex’ (9). The summary verdict is a jolt after reading entire plays pinned on a tragic romance: unlike those, it never allows us to forget the violence inherent in representing such a figure in the first instance, or the sense of failure, discomfort, and incoherence that should properly attend it. In making the character Tsafendas speak for himself – in metabolising the disparate archival traces into an actor’s monologue – the very form of these well-meaning dramas seems like the wrong aesthetic choice: one that places too great burden on this historical subject in expecting him to interpret his own life coherently. Finally, it is revealing to consider a response to Tsafendas that is based on a very different aesthetic, and one that works more closely in and out of the archival grain. Obscure White Messenger (2010) by Penny Siopis is a filmic reimagining of the Tsafendas story, its title alluding to Mandela’s one-line dismissal of the man. At just under fifteen minutes, it consists of ‘culled and combined bits of anonymous home movies’ on grainy 8mm film, as Siopis explains in a catalogue essay: a shifting sequence of images from South Africa, Greece, and other, unidentifiable locations (Siopis, ‘Obscure White Messenger’ 201). Turkish music plays in the background while subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen in a question-and-answer format: Does God speak to you? Not personally Are your thoughts normal? They are too rapid

Some of these are drawn from psychiatrists’ interviews with Tsafendas conducted in Groote Schuur Hospital after the murder, as well as medical reports

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and legal documents; but other fragments come from the secondary archive of Key’s documentary and Van Woerden’s prose. The result is a form that is able to collapse into one space accounts given at very different times, and shows the fictive and irrational lineaments within ‘the documentary’ itself. The intimate address and therapeutic expansiveness of Sher’s and Krueger’s dramatic monologues are replaced by a disjointed and dream-like poem in multiple media, a bricolage of ‘answers’ that are unpredictable and sometimes contradictory. Set against footage of ships and ports, swimming pools, Greek Orthodox ceremonies, and fish markets, we see on screen the unvoiced, deeply affecting lines from the ‘Transcript of Interview with Demetrios Tsafendas Conducted in the Groote Schuur Hospital Casualty Department on September 6th 1966 at 7.00 P.M.’: Why are you crying? I don’t know Aren’t you pleased with what you have done? Yes I’m glad to speak to you Better class I am always among the poorer class of people.

As the words hang in filmic space, the ‘line breaks’ between each subtitle catch the audience in the act of furnishing an explanation prematurely: ‘My father was a special drinker / of Turkish coffee.’ So too, the viewer is tempted to forge linkages between text and the kaleidoscopic reel of images behind it: ‘traditional’ dances by crews of miners on the Witwatersrand, pageants and fancy dress parties from the apartheid past. As in Siopis’s other mediations on this period of South African history – Verwoerd Speaks 1966 (1999) and The Master Is Drowning (2012) – the resulting filmic texture is an uneasy splicing of sublimated violence and colour-saturated nostalgia, with the physical surfaces of the medium itself damaged by the effects of light and age. The ‘coils and springs in front of my eyes’, which Tsafendas describes as a result of his high blood pressure and being ‘troubled in [his] nerves’, are echoed in the experience of watching the stained and mottled film. Reflecting on what led her to make the piece, Siopis recalls working through the 1966 press clippings relating to the assassination and happening on a short Cape Times report of September 8 that described Tsafendas’s studio apartment in Rondebosch. Since the state had prohibited photographs of anything linked to the assassin, the newspaper anatomises the contents of the room via language instead, objects spilled out from the luggage that Helen Daniels and so many others remembered in their testimony before the commission:

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Except for two suitcases on top of the wardrobe and three threadbare jackets hanging inside it not an article in the room lay in an appropriate place. A hammer, a file, a pair of soiled socks, tins containing odds and ends, polish, shoe brushes, cutlery, an Oxford English Dictionary, and a hair brush lay scattered on the dressing table.

Whereas later recuperations tend to list Tsafendas’s identities (Key’s litany, for example, which was placed on his coffin in 1999), here we simply have objects: inanimate things that retain their stubborn facticity and wordless testimony. Under one of the telegraphic subheadings, ‘DISORDERED’, the list continues unabated – compensating for the assassin’s ideological opacity by entering more deeply into an inscrutable material world: ‘On the floor lay clothing, shoes, more cutlery, a box containing pots, pans and a crumpled togbag, a tool box, a spanner and screwdriver lying loose, jars, tins, paper and rubbish.’ ‘This short report captivated me’, Siopis remarks: ‘Its detail, its sadness, and how words worked when an image was not possible’ (‘Obscure White Messenger’ 201). These two principles – working with found materials and refusing the explicit image – create a disruptive response to the state-sponsored archival surfeit surrounding and producing Tsafendas. As in A Mouthful of Glass, the obliqueness and concision of the piece could be read as a formal riposte to the exhaustive, forensic audit – while also refusing any easy notion of recovering lost voices. Indeed, the fact that Tsafendas’s words remain unvoiced accounts in large measure for the peculiar force of the work. Rather than undertaking the task of diagnosing this man, or making him explain himself, this open form uncouples words and historical subject, braiding his explicitly political motivations (‘I thought this thing had gone too far / They have made an ideology out of it / The sexual part of it too’) together with long and cryptic disquisitions on his ailments, throwing into disarray the truth claims of either mode. When the text turns to the subject of the tapeworm, the strident Turkish music combined with images of sea creatures being gutted and an octopus in a tank create a particularly disturbing and uncanny sequence. The text details the ‘very big mistake’ made by Tsafendas’s stepmother when she flushed away the parasite that had come out of him as a young boy without showing it to him, and without making sure that all of it was out: I think it’s still alive in the sewers Because it doesn’t die It’s very strong The Portuguese chemist was very angry He said Why did you throw it away? But the sewer is still there

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I want to study the sewer Under the old house I want to go back to the sewer.

Via a ‘screen memory’ of grainy, flashing images, the biological otherness of marine life comes to stand in for the infamous, metaphorically over-exploited tapeworm – much as the dream-work uses what Freud called the Tagesreste (the arbitrary ‘day’s remainders’ or ‘residues’) for its obscure purposes, encoding latent meanings in the bric-a-brac of daily life (‘On Dreams’ 154). The psychoanalytic vocabulary of condensation and displacement seems apt here, for Siopis’s film generates an unpredictable and uncanny loading of apparently minor and random visual fragments. These everyday scenes are estranged and endowed with (in Freud’s words) a ‘psychical intensity’; and in a similar way, Mandela’s throwaway phrase accrues an unexpected resonance. It is the worm itself that now threatens to displace its host and become the obscure white messenger. And at a further remove, Obscure White Messenger parasitises a foundational text of the new South Africa to hint at all those ‘useless’ lives that might have been obscured by the heroic narrative template of Long Walk to Freedom. * In taking as my first case study the radically unsettled, transnational and perhaps incomprehensible life of Demetrios Tsafendas, the aim has not been to recover a submerged or subaltern history, or at least not only that. Rather, I have attempted to track different artistic and formal strategies as they engage the apartheid archive, ranging across the non-fiction/fiction divide, and each confronting the difficulty of how such a ‘meaningless’ life should be plotted in narrative form. As a bizarre and labyrinthine story which escapes the ‘readymade plots’ (Nkosi Home and Exile 126) of apartheid (and anti-apartheid) thinking, the case of Tsafendas shows up the tension between the symbolic demands of national allegorical modes (in which lives are reduced to ‘units of national history’) and the textured, contingent world of microhistory, literary and psychobiography, with their more tentative and experimental ways of reckoning with past existences.12 12 The phrase ‘units of national history’ is from Rassool, ‘Rethinking Documentary History’ (29), which questions what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘biographical illusion’ of chronologically ordered, coherent and self-determined lives, and argues for an approach that overlaps in many ways with the literary and critical theory that informs my account. Rassool writes: ‘I have sought to understand the complex relationship between life and narrative, the dialogue between biographical practices and autobiographical traces, and the narrative world of institutions such as political formations, which have given rise to storied lives’ (30).

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Of course, any narrative treatment (my own included) will ‘use’ the past for its own purposes, and involve a degree of ideological closure. But to what extent can a damaging or premature rush to significance be resisted within the work of representation? If life writing as national allegory (or state of the nation report) tends to read and ‘reverse engineer’ an already sanctioned shape back into historically distant worlds, then the non-fictions that I am interested in here, while also concerned with the relation between the individual and the larger social body, may to some degree reverse the terms of this equation. In them, an individual life is used to refract and tentatively ‘read’ a larger social world, the contours and complex dynamics of which have not been (and cannot be) fully described. We have seen how certain forms try to ‘diagnose’ Tsafendas – medically, culturally – while others are more able to accommodate states of unknowability within his narrative. The 1966 governmental report labours to metabolise coherence and closure from an event that, more than anything, may have signified an end to any politically ordained certainty within the Afrikaner nationalist project. Even within sympathetic accounts of his life, once can see the risk of recasting into heroic form a life that should properly remain unusable. In a passionate obituary of 15 October 1999, ‘Place in Heaven for an Unsung Hero’, John Matshikiza reflects on the uncertainty among black South Africans with regard to this assassin during the 1960s, but then replaces it with a postapartheid certitude of his own: ‘Tsafendas killed Verwoerd because Verwoerd’s relentless need to place people in race-labelled boxes was a personal disaster for himself ’ while also being ‘an affront to all humanity’: ‘His act of murder was based on the same principles as the Congress Alliance’s Freedom Charter: apartheid was a crime against life’ (With the Lid Off 170). If such recuperation and retroactive politicisation risks downplaying the role of Tsafendas’s very real mental disturbance, then other accounts are inclined to magnify it, or to transmute the idea of madness entirely into the realms of national metaphor. Journalistic accounts often speak in terms of ‘a rational act in a country gone mad’ (Robins 30), while the back cover of A Mouthful of Glass describes Tsafendas’s ‘long exile from a society madder than he was.’ This, I would argue, is to dilute the meanings of the word too far; so that when Van Woerden writes that this is a story in which ‘the power of madness’ had shown itself equal to ‘the madness of power’, the chiasmus is too easy. At its most rhetorically assured, the text is least convincing. Instead, the larger work suggests how one might see the assassination, ‘bizarrely enough, as an almost inconsequential or marginal event’ (Van Woerden 93), and how the meanings of Tsafendas might be located in other parts of his biography. Rather than a ‘freakish footnote’ in the liberation story, Tsafendas emerges as part of a much larger, global narrative. In one sense he is a precursor of the twenty-first-century figure with whom discourses of political

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economy and postcolonial thought must reckon more and more urgently: the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker. As a member of the precariat – those forced to live an unrelievedly precarious existence – his story anticipates how the modern nation-state can expel or refuse an individual without any thought as to whether he might be able to exist elsewhere with any level of safety, security or dignity. Beyond this, the works of Van Woerden and Siopis gesture towards what one might call a history of open forms; they are cultural texts that investigate ways of maintaining the otherness and ‘unusability’ of past lives within the demands of a narrative structure. They also raise the question of whether such experimental anti-realist forms of the documentary (if we can accept this oxymoron) might be able to access registers of experience unavailable to more conventional non-fictive genres.13 In refusing any actual footage of its subject (and any explicit attempt to portray the parasite that so obsessed him), Siopis’s Obscure White Messenger generates a revealing paradox: that Demetrios Tsafendas may be more fully represented here than in Key’s on-camera interviews with him in Sterkfontein Hospital. This mixed-media document is able to leave his message poised between sense and incoherence, at once utterly clear and terminally open: I remember stabbing him What made you do a thing like that? 13 A new biography of Tsafendas appeared just as this book was going to press: Harris Dousemetzis’s The Man who Killed Apartheid (2018). The product of intense research, lengthy interviews with those who knew Tsafendas and using previously secret police archives, it makes a compelling case that its subject was politically engaged and fiercely anti-apartheid (and anti-colonial) from young age. Tsafendas emerges as the son of a committed anarchist, and someone who joined communist, anti-apartheid and anti-fascist organisations all around the world during his travels. It also shows in greater detail than ever before how the apartheid state conspired to construct Tsafendas as a madman, and how carefully Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh (de facto author of the 1966 government Report into the assassination) worked to suppress elements of his life story.   Nonetheless, there is a curious dynamic that this factually insistent and ostensibly definitive work generates in its effort to set the record straight. Dousemetzis claims that Tsafendas’s madness (and the tapeworm) was a cleverly contrived sham engineered early on in his life to secure him accommodation in hospitals around the world, to avoid military service in the United States and to slip in and out of employment as he pleased. But when one checks the basis for such claims, they all rely on interviews conducted by the author in recent years with those who knew Tsafendas, many of them Greek Orthodox clergymen, family members and well-wishers long after the fact. As such, to read their (presumably semi-mythologised) remembrances of him translated into an authoritative biographical voice which claims intimate access to Tsafendas’s interiority (while never signaling such narrative mediations) makes this factually dense biography, in a curious way, more fictive than Van Woerden’s avowedly partial and speculative work.

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I didn’t agree with the policy I didn’t care about the consequences I was so disgusted by the racial policies What did you feel When you committed the murder? Nothing I just went blank

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Confession, collaboration and collapse in post-TRC narrative

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In July 1964, during a wave of raids across South Africa, the apartheid security police arrested several members of the African Resistance Movement (ARM). This was an underground organisation of ex-communists and liberalsbecome-radicals who had sabotaged pylons and other infrastructural targets in an effort to send a message, post-Sharpeville, that serious, principled resistance was still alive in South Africa. Soon after being taken into detention, one of its members began to talk. Adrian Leftwich had been a charismatic student activist responsible for recruiting many of the ARM members; his ambition meant that he knew too much about an organisation that was supposed to be built from secret cells. His exhaustive and gratuitously detailed testimony, first in detention and then as a state witness, was used to convict his closest friends and associates. To refer to him as a rat was hard on genus Rattus, the apartheid judge remarked when sentencing those at whose expense he had bought his freedom. In a 2002 edition of Granta magazine, Leftwich published ‘I Gave the Names’, a piece which had taken him 15 years to write. ‘What follows’, we read in the opening section, ‘is as much an essay in the personal politics of fear as it is in the politics of failure and betrayal’ (11). The piece is striking in the extent of its self-examination and self-disclosure (the detail about him giving rats a bad name is, after all, drawn from this very essay). And yet this confession was variously judged as sincere and powerful, inadequate and evasive, by the different individuals affected by his actions.1 ‘I Gave the Names’ is a reckoning with self in prose – a shameful and even reprehensible self – that takes the reader into some of the most difficult and unstable registers of autobiographical awareness. How, for example, can one navigate through those difficult terrains where life writing embodies both a strenuous attempt at self-understanding and the concurrent drift towards selfexoneration that follows on from any enlarged understanding of wrongdoing? Further quandaries open up on reading a confession that is self-consciously

1 See the obituary by Chris Barron (‘Adrian Leftwich’) and also the essay ‘Understanding Betrayal’ in Rebecca Davis’s collection Best White.

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aware of precisely such problems – and which, indeed, anticipates and writes them into itself. What happens when a confession is too perfect? This chapter tracks how the ARM story reverberates through many literary and cultural texts from the 1960s onwards. I begin with Hugh Lewin’s Stones Against the Mirror (2011), a fragmented and challenging exercise in autobiography (and group biography) which describes the journey which eventually led the author, after decades of silence and bitterness, to find and reconcile with Leftwich, a man whom he had once regarded as almost a twin brother. Though perhaps reconciliation is the wrong word for the uneven and hard-togauge cadences that end the book. Stones Against the Mirror, I suggest, joins several other non-fictional texts that express a post-TRC aesthetic. No longer able to operate under the guarantee of an ethical or desirable political future, these non-fictions turn towards an increasingly complex and disorientating past, working amid the debris of personal and public histories. Extending this argument, the following chapter turns to the work of Jacob Dlamini, author of two acclaimed but divisive non-fiction texts that are also formally uneven and (to use his own word) ‘messy’ in interesting and vulnerable ways. Dlamini’s project has been to challenge ‘the comforting fictions that South Africans often tell themselves about their history’: so runs the back cover copy of his first book, Native Nostalgia (2009). Part memoir, part sociology, it poses the potentially treacherous question of what it means for black South Africans to remember elements of an apartheid childhood with fondness – a premise that was regarded as an act of cultural betrayal by some of its early readers and reviewers. His second, more substantial work, Askari (2014), explores ‘The Strange Saga of Mr X1’: a man who defected from the ANC’s armed struggle in 1986 to become one of the most notorious collaborators with apartheid’s death squads. It is a book that folds the ARM/Leftwich story into its own set of complex and anxious meditations on the question of political betrayal, and which is also menaced by the interplay between blame, understanding and exoneration within historical narrative. Restlessly comparative and compulsively intertextual, Dlamini’s work looks to both Eastern Europe and Latin America to find shapes for thinking about societies emerging from authoritarian rule. In doing so it sets up a series of global analogies that are seductive and revealing, but also revealingly misaligned and sometimes strained. Both Lewin and Dlamini have won the country’s premier non-fiction award for these unresolved mixtures of historiography and personal narrative – an indicator of the post-TRC cultural moment that they emerge into. From different subject positions, and in different tonalities, their texts (and the many intertexts they involve us in) work to unpick the dominant narrative shapes that underwrote South Africa’s re-entry into the global community as a political ‘miracle’. As with the ‘useless life’ of Demetrios Tsafendas, the

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stories of Leftwich, the ARM and ‘Mr X1’ emerge as auto/biographical plots that do not easily fit received narrative templates premised on progression and closure, and cannot be resolved into the binary of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ as formulated by the TRC Final Report. As ‘a significant depository of voices from the “wrong” side of history’, such ‘literatures of betrayal’ point toward the untold humiliations, compromises and personal collapses that have often been edged out by the narrative template of heroic lives dedicated to fighting oppression (Askari 217, 216). They pose a challenge to therapeutic ideas of healing through narrative, to glib ideas of ‘coming to terms’ with the past, and to the liberal humanist confidence that underscores many foundational documents (both literary and otherwise) of the new nation. ‘The whole thing’, wrote Alan Paton about the ARM trials, ‘is so splendid and tragic and useless’ (cited in Vigne 205). ‘They felt useless as they were’, wrote Nadine Gordimer, distilling so much into a single sentence, ‘and so became what they were not’.2 At the same time, these narrative engagements with the past emerge as a veiled comment on the post-transitional present. Each is about an historical act of betrayal; but equally their ambitious and experimental ways of telling risk other forms of contentious or ‘disloyal’ disclosure in the public sphere. As such, I ask what the rhetorical forms and receptions of these works might reveal about the post-apartheid settlement in a larger sense: its conditions of rhetorical possibility, its cultural strictures and the contours of its increasingly fragile expressive spaces. The object of the verb ‘to betray’ can be something external and easily defined – to betray a comrade, country or cause. But it can also be something inward, abstract and self-reflexive: to reveal something involuntarily or unconsciously, to betray something about oneself. If the first, externally directed kind of betrayal can be understood as the breaking of a legible moral code (and can be discussed in a public register in which language takes up a position and means just what it says), then tracing the second, involuntary kind requires a more sceptical, even psychoanalytic approach to the stories we agree to tell each other. Here language itself might be the medium of betrayal: always overexposed and letting on more than its user intends. In this sense, we do not know what we are saying, and continually risk (as the idiom goes) giving ourselves away. Such fluid semantic ranges – moving between transitive and intransitive, between harmful intimacies and those that are generative – suggest the conceptual space in which I wish to read these uneven and risky works of narrative 2 The line is from her essay ‘The Price of a White Man’s Country?’, in which Gordimer judged the ARM ‘[i]ll-organised, apparently ill-equipped temperamentally, and doomed to ignominious failure’, ‘a deadly logical outcome of a situation that is triumphantly outlawing liberalism’ (quoted in Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 322).

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non-fiction. Friendship, collaboration, betrayal, struggle: the words from the subtitles of Lewin and Dlamini’s books then exist in a constellation where the terms do not so much preclude as summon each other. Collaboration with an enemy implies a prior collaboration with a collective that is now being doublecrossed; betrayal presumes an earlier trust that has now been violated. And indeed it is Njabulo Ndebele’s paradoxical idea of a ‘fatal intimacy’ generated by South Africa’s political history that underwrites these explorations of the psychic afterlives of apartheid, of its moral grey zones and its slow, uneven demise (Jones and Dlamini, Categories of Persons xii).

A tale of two autobiographies: Writing as resistance and self-incrimination Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet and Stones Against the Mirror

My closest friend was Adrian. We met as students. We never lived in the same town but we worked together as activists, then as undergrounders, through four, maybe five precarious years. I grew to think of him as my twin brother. (9)

The opening sections of Stones Against the Mirror suggest the fragmentary, multi-angled nature of its enquiry into betrayal as the narrative voice slips in and out of a range of different modes, beginning the story several times over in a series of false starts. There is a distantly reflective narrative intelligence and the informational, flatly autobiographical ‘I’ of the opening lines (above). But there is also an immersive and confrontational ‘you’ that is (simultaneously) a hypothetical activist involved in a thought experiment about the use of political violence; a distant and estranged earlier self on trial; and, at a further remove, the ‘you’ of the reader, drawn into the memoir’s sparse but complex textures, complicit in its revelations: You decide to blow up an electricity pylon. It’s an obvious target in your campaign of protest against an unjust system. The pylon’s far away from habitation, so toppling it won’t cause harm. But its collapse will hit the headlines and show the regime that opposition to apartheid is alive and well. That’s what you hope. (13)

In the early sections we read of Lewin’s childhood as a parson’s son, the brutalities of an adolescence at boarding school, and then the student years of coming to consciousness, ‘a cascading, seductive time of intense relationships’ (46) as political roles and personal lives become entangled in the most complex and intimate of ways. The combination of seriousness and naivety that gave rise to the organisation is finely drawn. The ARM has at times been written off as a group of misguided amateurs, or liberals out of their depth. Yet the organisation predated the formation of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe

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(MK) and in the thirty-six months of its active existence this ‘amateur (but not amateurish) organisation’, in the words of its most devoted historian, did as much damage to state infrastructure as MK managed during a comparable time period (Gunther 212).3 This was partly because of the ease of movement and lack of official suspicion conferred by the racial profile of most members (the ARM was largely, but not entirely, white). Lewin writes perceptively about the ‘cloaks of immunity’ (41) that he and others believed were granted them by their whiteness, perhaps at some subconscious and unexamined level. The result, he implies, was an inability to believe that their band of saboteurs could be punished with the full weight of apartheid’s laws, and a fatal underestimation of the reach and skill of the Security Branch. As such, we are led to the tragic final act of the ARM story, in which John Harris – a member recruited by Lewin, and one of the few still at liberty following Leftwich’s collapse – planted a bomb on the ‘Whites Only’ platform of Park Station, Johannesburg. Despite his telephoned warnings to the police and newspapers, the concourse was not cleared and so a suitcase stuffed with dynamite and petrol exploded at 4:33 pm on 24 July 1964, at the height of rush hour. An elderly woman died as a result of her injuries, her twelve-year-old granddaughter was badly burned, and twenty-two others seriously injured. It was, Lewin writes, a disaster on every level: ‘it consolidated white opinion, led directly to the demise of the Liberal Party, and strengthened the hand of the white government for more than a decade, until Soweto 1976’ (116). Harris was executed in Pretoria Central on 1 April 1965, the only white ‘political’ hanged by the state, and went to the gallows singing ‘We Shall Overcome’. In an epilogue, Lewin wryly notes the anxieties that infuse and shape the book we have just read – ‘It’s been a struggle, writing about the Struggle’ (187) – fearing that its very existence might constitute just one more variation on its theme: ‘A whole line of induced betrayals, especially by those closest to us’ (98–9). In a recurring tic, the writing abdicates narrative control precisely where it reaches such moments of self-doubt. At this point Lewin quotes an email from Harold Strachan, an old friend (and prison contemporary) who functions as a more bluff and confident narrative alter ego, and provides a retrospective ars poetica for the work: You don’t in fact have any material other than your own recollections, and what you’re suffering from is a lack of confidence; so why not get in there, my china, gaan tekere with all craft, chisel at the form as does a poet, in tranquillity, get 3 Gunther provides the most detailed historical account of the ARM. Yet he died before completing his book project on the subject, leaving the archive to the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archive at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg (from which I have drawn details and documents for this chapter).

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the utmost compression from the fewest words, make technique and style as important as content? The risk otherwise is of falling into archival truth. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it’s an honourable moral compulsion, but it’s not what literature is made of. I mean, nobody wants to read it. Literature is not a court record. All power to your pen, comrade. Throw caution to the winds! I mean what are you afraid of? Disrepute? You already have a criminal record. (187)

The passage plays provocatively within the entanglement of history and aesthetics that the memoir must work through, defining the literary in literary non-fiction largely by what it is not: not a court record nor a factual deposition; not a lapse into ‘archival truth’; not a morally worthy but dull exercise in setting the record straight. The joking reference in the last line is to the time that Lewin did in Pretoria Central prison as a result of Leftwich’s testimony, the subject of his earlier memoir Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Jail (1974). Its opening lines suggest how this pre-text is a far more conventional exercise in autobiography than Lewin’s later memoir: Accused No. 2 states: ‘My lord, I am twenty-four years old. ‘I was born in Lydenburg in the Eastern Transvaal, where my father was the Anglican priest’. (11)

A court record, in other words, has indeed become a point of literary origin: this is Lewin’s statement from the dock of November 1964 when charged in Pretoria under the Sabotage Act, reproduced verbatim in the opening pages of Bandiet. This autobiography within an autobiography reveals the paradoxical doubleness of life-narrative under apartheid. It was at once a medium for voicing and sustaining the liberation struggle; but it was also a technology of state control, manipulation and incrimination. A statement from the dock operates under the imperative to be as factual, coherent, logical, sequential and selfjustifying as possible – and it provided a rare opportunity for voicing the ‘I’ amid the silences and violations of 90-day detentions and torture that increase dramatically in 1960s South Africa. Yet by the same token, this ‘I’ must function under duress, employing the fictions and formulae of courtly decorum within a discursive framework that is ‘legal’ but not moral.4 In its dual opening (the ‘real’ autobiographical ‘I’ appears on page three: ‘I made that statement from the dock…’), Bandiet joins the large sub-canon 4 The way in which the apartheid regime ‘both fetishised and brandished legality’ in the process of violating rights was an aspect of its ‘legal personality’ that several commentators saw as insufficiently addressed within the TRC project (Mamdani, ‘Amnesty or Impunity?’ 49, 51) – an insight that will be taken up more fully in the next chapter.

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of apartheid prison books that show up how the textual command of a life becomes, in the most literal of terms, a site of bitter political struggle. During the narrator’s detention, we encounter another embedded autobiography, one generated by the reams of telexes brandished in his face by the interrogators. These are documents sent from Cape Town, where (it gradually becomes inescapable) ‘Mark’ is talking: ‘They laughed and taunted: We know all about you – and they began telling me all about myself, precisely so. It was eerie’ (23). In one of the few extended references to ‘Mark’ in Bandiet (which preserves the ARM alias for Leftwich throughout, contra to the ‘Adrian’ in the very first line of Stones Against the Mirror), we hear about how it was precisely his organisational zeal with regard to other ‘lives’ that made his betrayal so catastrophic: He had also made a point always of insisting more than most on the constant need for security; all records and documents should be destroyed immediately they were done with, and nobody should press to know the actual identity of members of the organisation. But Mark in fact knew more members of the organisation than any of us. And he had, it seemed – in contravention of his own rules – become archivist. (Bandiet 18)

Setting itself against the archival ambitions of the authoritarian state, Bandiet then undertakes its own project of forensic documentation. It is perhaps the most exhaustively textured of all South African prison books: in densely informational prose, it methodically logs the micro-routines of detention and incarceration. An entire chapter is devoted to daily diary entries that the narrator describes as ‘a sort of profit and loss account of the battle’ with prison authorities, a record kept ‘because I thought I would never properly be able to remember how ridiculous and petty were the things that caused the crises in our lives’ (179). And yet, the original edition of Bandiet is not able to document one of the most successful modes of writing resistance developed by the white politicals of Pretoria Local: the creation of a clandestine newspaper, ‘The Gleek’, that was collectively produced each Christmas, circulated, avidly read and then destroyed. The original 1974 version of the book has no mention of this; it is only the revised edition Bandiet Out of Jail (2002) that is able to document the ingenuity with which this samizdat news rag was generated, and the enormous sense of communal affirmation it brought. To have mentioned it in writing during the 1970s would have incriminated friends and comrades still in jail. * In contrast to this expansive and sometimes comic voice (one that is alert to the multiple ironies of writing against a regime that would often turn such writing against its creator), the prose of Stones Against the Mirror is severely clipped and abbreviated: subject, perhaps, to an internal rather than external

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censor: ‘We are in this together, reader and writer on the same page. […] Conspirators. Interrogators and captors. We are wardens of the Struggle, scanning each word to make sure it is polished and shiny, unsmudged by “incorrectness”’ (40). Perhaps even more than the original prison book, this reflective voice is ‘still caught up in the confessional penal logic by borrowing its jargon’, and using this means to navigate the autobiographical as a ‘daringly uncertain, humbling and at times shameful confessional space’ (Ndlovu, ‘Autobiography’ 1238, 1244). External reference has been radically pared down; instead the writing would seem to mirror the operations and syntax of memory itself, in all its fallibility and deceptiveness, its methods of symbolic condensation and displacement. ‘It sometimes feels that memory itself is a form’, writes the poet Mark Doty: ‘associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic’ (in Lazar ed., Truth in Nonfiction 12). The ‘utmost compression’ recommended by Strachan makes the sentences and sections so curt that it can at first be difficult to sustain any kind of affective relationship with the writing. Yet as the book approaches its terminus – a long-awaited meeting with Leftwich on the platform of York rail station – it seems that this economy is less a stylistic affectation than a way of managing the extreme personal difficulty of the material: a holding pattern for the intense weight of emotion and memory which the prose must work through. The marked tonal and stylistic differences between these two works – even as they emplot the same ‘story’ – is revealing when mapping the coordinates of a post-transitional, post-TRC aesthetic in South African non-fiction. The confidence of testimony and solidarity in the earlier prison book; the narrative momentum and sheer non-fictive energy that characterises it as a future-directed memoir (even as it evokes seven years of confinement and stasis) – all this has given way in the later memoir to a much more fractured and self-doubting reflection on privilege and complicity. ‘I am white’, we read in Bandiet, ‘I had to go inside to know what it’s like to be black’ (14). Stones Against the Mirror edges away from such large claims and reads as much more ambiguous, unstable and sometimes acerbic meditation on the lingering forms of self-delusion and ignorance embedded in the ‘consciousness’ of the white political. Lewin had been responsible for recruiting the Station Bomber John Harris into the ARM. This, and the fact that he gave up Harris’s name while being assaulted in detention (albeit after the Security Branch had already apprehended their man), introduces a more complex sense of shame and complicity into the later memoir as it tries to unravel the tangle of intimacy and violence at the heart of the ARM story: ‘My non-involvement with the bomb, yet my closeness to it’ (Stones Against the Mirror 18). One passage concerns Glynnis, the young girl on Park Station who was burnt across sixty per cent of her body, underwent thirty-five operations and eventually moved to the United

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Kingdom (‘because the African sun was too hard on her skin’) where she worked in ‘agterkamertjies’ (back rooms) out of the public eye. When Lewin’s cousin runs into her by chance, it leads to this victim of the 1964 bomb passing on a message: that at least she has been granted the certainty that all her friends like her for who she is, and not how she looks. ‘It is a certainty, said Glynnis, that is not given to everybody’ (19). But this statement of a kind of triumph over adversity (and possibly overture to a reconciliation) fails to signify for the Lewin narrator, who conflates the PC monitor on which he reads it with a very different kind of screen memory. I stare at my cousin’s words in the email on the computer screen. And I read them and I read them and I read them. The screen has become the perspex window of the visiting room in prison. I can’t hear any meaning. The words exist in a different world. I cannot reach them. (19)

It is a dissonant note of derailed or suspended reconciliation, and typical of the unresolved cadences that characterise the book, its almost autistic quality. It is as if an unfolding, post-TRC present makes notions of fraternity and empathy incrementally less possible, retrospectively colouring the testimonies of actual victims and perpetrators as steadily less believable, less real. It is these fictive and phantasmatic elements embedded in this history of activism and betrayal – its political unconscious, so to speak – that the next section seeks to explore.

Elegies for a revolutionary Writing the African Resistance Movement (ARM)

Stones Against the Mirror joins multiple other ways in which this complex and contested chain of events has been written. Reading across them, one finds (as with the case of Tsafendas) a complex refraction of historical plot points across different forms and genres: some fictional, some non-fictional – or rather, each possessing different ratios of ‘archival truth’ to authorial invention and intervention. The ARM is dealt with in several other Struggle memoirs and ‘jail diaries’ of an earlier mould, among them Albie Sachs’s Stephanie on Trial (1968) and Eddie Daniels’s There and Back: Robben Island 1964–1979 (1998). Sachs’s memoir describes Leftwich in the witness box, ‘giving evidence with an assurance and co-operativeness which suggested that his only fear was the fear that he might not make a good impression on the court. Whatever he did, I thought bitterly, he did well, even testifying against his friends’ (116). As with other meditations on activists who turned, the narrator ponders what exactly has changed within the personhood of the betrayer: what has remained and what has been effaced within his psychic make-up: ‘The extraordinary thing was

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that he seemed to be unaware of his transformation, for he glanced around court without showing any signs of shame or embarrassment’ (117). Despite receiving the longest sentence of any ARM member as a result of this testimony (15 years on Robben Island), Daniels adopts by far the most forgiving attitude towards Leftwich’s turning state witness – ‘The fact that he gave evidence against me was unfortunate, but I can appreciate his position’ (135) – and his memoir also reproduces an exchange of letters with his betrayer. It is one of the paradoxes of the TRC moment that Lewin dwells on when recounting his own experience as a member of its Human Rights Violations committee between 1996 and 1998: that those who had suffered much worse losses than his own often seemed far more ready to forgive (or at least ‘enter into correspondence’ with perpetrators in diverse ways) while his own narrative of betrayal and bitterness had grown into a means of self-definition that was now difficult to abandon. Given that the TRC made no provision for amnesty for those who were already dead, the case of Harris was barely discussed. The ARM and the station bomb of 1964 usually ‘didn’t make it into a footnote’ writes Lewin, reflecting on how events pre-1976 seemed like ‘ancient, long-forgotten history’ during the Commission hearings (144). Nonetheless, the story lives a secret life in literary history, its themes of traitor and hero having migrated into fiction in ways that are both thinly veiled, and more creative in their adaptation. C. J. Driver’s Elegy for a Revolutionary (1969) unfolds as a roman à clef, a literary mode often associated with fantasies of retribution and the settling of scores. In this compelling novella set amidst student activism in 1960s Cape Town – with its finely drawn undercurrents of political and sexual rivalry – a symbolic revenge is enacted on the febrile, self-aggrandising figure who goes on to betray his comrades. In a fictional corrective to actual events, the ‘Leftwich’ and ‘Harris’ characters are conflated in one figure, James Jeremy, who by the end of the book has been hanged, in an uneasy mixture of poetic and apartheid justice. In another significant departure from the historical record, an act of sabotage by the group goes wrong even prior to Jeremy’s arrest. When the group targets a reservoir in the hills above Bellville in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, a night watchman is unintentionally killed. At one level this enables the novella to stage a familiar debate about the justifications for revolutionary violence. At a deeper, perhaps unconscious level it seems to ask what might have happened beyond the ‘real’ history of the ARM and its demise in the Leftwich/Harris affair. The invention of an earlier killing before Jeremy’s act of ‘terrorism’ suggests that the death of innocent bystanders was in some ways inevitable rather than anomalous: a fated product of ARM’s ideological ill-discipline, or its idealistic belief in the possibility of violence without violence. The fact that the victim in this case is ‘an African nightwatchman’ also raises the anxiety that haunts many of these works: whether

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the actions of white activists who involved themselves in an armed struggle that was ultimately beyond their psychological capacities always risked harming the cause of the black majority which they sought to take on. Certainly, the atmosphere of hubris and unreality that resulted from this encounter is something that these fictions are well poised to explore, and the failed attempt of Driver’s white student activists to establish an alliance with a black underground cell in Cape Town’s townships generates one of the most telling scenes in Elegy for a Revolutionary.5 Nadine Gordimer’s novella The Late Bourgeois World (1966) also fuses the figures of traitor and bomber in Max van den Sandt, a priggish and immature figure who betrays his colleagues after a failed act of violence against the state, and eventually commits suicide. As by far the shortest of her novels, its ‘well wrought austerity’ provides ‘the textual capture of a bleak era’, in the words of biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts (No Cold Kitchen 280), who also draws attention to a line from Hermann Hesse quoted in her notebooks of the time: this was to be writing that ‘can perform the useful function of confessing with maximum honesty its own poverty and the poverty of its times’ (280). Also reaching for the metaphor of compression that we have seen in Lewin and Van Woerden, Stephen Clingman suggests how Gordimer’s ‘method of symbolic contraction and abbreviation argues for a moment of intensity and compression standing behind the novel’: ‘the false start’ of a South African revolution and ‘the outright victory of the counter-revolution’ (Nadine Gordimer 99). In picking over the traces of a compromised and embarrassing life, Gordimer’s tough-minded narrator (Max’s widow Elizabeth) draws an equivalence with Tsafendas’s act of regicide: [P]oor madman: I suppose it will be possible to say that, now, as it has been satisfactorily possible to say, in the end, of many who have proved awkward, including the one who didn’t know that a Prime Minister with a divine mission might need a silver bullet. Only madmen do such things. But can any white man who wants change really be all there? (28)

As in the previous chapter, we are taken into the realm of psychic instability and collapse, and the matter of how these might be figured in a narrative of political resistance. The quality of being ‘not all there’ shifts between a positive figuration (a morally clear act in a world gone mad) and the more sceptical suggestion that the domain of revolutionary violence tends to draw to itself 5 The sometimes deluded grandiosity of the National Committee for Liberation (the initial name of the ARM) is evident in a document which suggests that when ‘the revived military bodies of the ANC and PAC’ came together, the NCL would be prepared ‘to recruit, train, and jointly lead the National Freedom Army’ (quoted in Karis and Gerhart 23).

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the social outliers, the ill-adjusted, the suspect. If apartheid, as Dlamini writes, ‘rested on a fundamental denial of reality’ (Askari 107); if it represented, in Gordimer’s words ‘one of the twentieth century’s most devastating experiments in the denial of a common humanity’,6 then the denial of the denial surely entailed a certain degree of derangement: a defamiliarisation of the ‘real’ accepted within an unjust society. Yet there remains the lingering suggestion in these works that the turn to violence, at least among middle-class white activists, represents something compensatory, something questionable or inauthentic. For the pan-Africanist Patrick Duncan, however, John Harris was ‘the sanest white man in Africa’, a phrase that is taken up approvingly in Driver’s The Man With the Suitcase (2015). It returns to the mid-1960s in a different mode (that of an essayistic biography), disentangles Harris from Leftwich and seeks to recuperate this ‘liberal terrorist’ as a Struggle hero. Harris was, Driver suggests, the most hated white man in white South Africa even before planting the bomb, given that he had been heading the campaign to have South Africa banned from international sport: ‘One of Harris’s acquaintances from university days had actually pointed him out in a crowded railway carriage with the remark “There sits Judas Iscariot”’ (13). Harris’s letters to his wife from death row, which Driver’s work relies on and treats with great delicacy, have also been threaded into the Guardian correspondent David Beresford’s memoir Truth is a Strange Fruit (2010), subtitled ‘A Personal Journey Through the Apartheid War’. They are, however, dropped into Beresford’s text at random intervals (with little narrative preparation or contextual embedding) and are subsumed by a larger story of the author’s struggle with encroaching Parkinson’s disease. As such, the work effects its own set of unfortunate betrayals of the ARM/Harris story, in treating the specificity and sheer actuality of these letters too casually and comparatively. For this reader at least, the different autobiographical strands of confronting mortality in the memoir are conflated and cross-wired with the biographical materials in ways that seem diminishing rather than revealing. The station bomb also underlies Athol Fugard’s radical experiment in theatre, Orestes (first performed in 1971) – a work that is in some ways released from the imperatives of fictional characterisation and (auto)biographical plotting. It braids the question of revolutionary violence together with Greek myth: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia prior to the Trojan War, and the inter-generation cycles of revenge that it sets in motion. Literature may not be a court record (in Strachan’s phrase) but here, again, a court record is nonetheless taken up as literature. The testimony of Harris, Fugard remarks, 6 The phrase appears on the back of Stephen Clingman’s 1998 biography, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary.

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had been one of the actors’ ‘major provocations’ during the rehearsal period (‘Orestes’ 126). In a way comparable to Penny Siopis’s short films (discussed in the previous chapter), the work transposes found text from official medicolegal documentation into an artwork, allowing the uncanny images embedded within the texture of the real to expand and resonate within an entirely different realm of signification. From the court testimony of Harris: I felt, terrifically, ecstatically happy while sitting on the bench. The suitcase was on the right of me in the shelter above Platforms Five and Six. I knew that what I was doing was right. Later I heard that people had been hurt, but this did not make sense because I had known that people were not going to be hurt. (Quoted in Fugard, ‘Orestes’, 126)

As a workshopped performance indebted to Jerzy Grotowski’s compressed and minimalist ‘poor theatre’, the violence of these dual narratives was enacted in displaced and condensed forms: ‘Every night, every performance, that is, Clytemnestra destroyed one unique, irreplaceable chair called Agamemnon. It was an awesome and chilling spectacle’ (123). The description comes from virtually the only record of the performance, a letter written by Fugard to an American friend in 1973. Some of its most haunting lines are in turn excerpted by Lewin for an epigraph. It is an image which leaves this figure both poised to make history and yet also floating strangely free of it: semi-mythological, suspended at a site of departure, destined never to arrive: From our history comes the image of a young man with a large brown suitcase on a bench in the Johannesburg station. He was not travelling anywhere. (Fugard, ‘Orestes’, 118)

* From the perspective of literary studies, this varied cluster of responses to historical events again raises the question of what differing narrative typologies or artistic languages can or cannot say. And as Lewin’s later memoir is well aware, the act of life writing risks discrediting or disqualifying other storied lives: ‘I am the storyteller, trying to describe my own mythologies. In so doing, I trespass on the stories of others’ (40). Excavating the ARM story also poses a challenge in thinking through the relation between interior and exterior histories; between personal recollection and historical memory; between definitive, or defining, public events and the ill-defined, doubting and perhaps unknowable sites of selfhood that many of these texts circle around. In one sense, such generic migrations to and fro across the non-fiction binary suggest the extent to which these legacies have both ‘required and invited sustained meditation’ – to adapt Clingman’s remarks on fictionalised versions of Bram Fischer: the life-long communist, ‘Afrikaner revolutionary’

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and volksverraier (traitor to his people) who was also detained and imprisoned in this era of massively increased state repression (Bram Fischer 452). At the same time, the compulsive return that they have called forth across time and genre points to something profoundly unsettled or unresolved at the heart of this mid-1960s story, and, perhaps, to the kind of betrayal and failure that any representation must entail. In reading Driver’s and Gordimer’s imaginative treatments, there is a sense in which a certain strain of literary fiction is almost pre-programmed to effect a set of betrayals in the act of narrativising political action. In Gordimer’s compressed and airless evocation of the ‘stunned world’ of the 1960s, a certain kind of liberal humanist aesthetic – one premised on a rich account of character, consciousness and inter-personal relations – reaches the limits of its explanatory power. Fictional investigations like The Late Bourgeois World and Elegy for a Revolutionary are inevitably drawn to the psychosocial underpinnings of political commitment. Invested in a textured and plausible account of individual subjectivity, drawn to the fractious ironies of group dynamics, they risk the insight that psychological formation (often flawed) is the base that underlies the superstructure of revolutionary fervour. In this sense, the evocation of Max van der Sandt as a recognisable ‘type’ of failed revolutionary risks being ‘a travesty of the kind of commitment of some of those actually involved in the ARM’ (Clingman, Nadine Gordimer 99) – and this in what must have been the most widely read fictional treatment of this history, given Gordimer’s international reach. More broadly, the ironic, liberal humanist stance that focalises so many Anglophone literary novels is primed to demote and dissolve political activism into more petty or limited forms of social life – at least according to the detractors of ‘litfic’, the genre that, supposedly, does not know it is a genre.7 Such literary treatments, then, risk standing accused of depoliticising human action even as they take political struggle as a subject. Yet a less sceptical, more open-ended reading might be that the work of the literary here is to reveal the narrowness of the political if it is conceived only as rational, collective, goal-directed action in the public domain. In this sense, Stones Against the Mirror takes the question of what exactly political consciousness might be into realms that are not often admitted by more conventional Struggle memoirs (or by the South African Communist Party mantras which sought a destruction or disavowal of ‘bourgeois individualism’ and the private life). It is by turns braided into the sexual coming-of-age story, inflected by the homosocial intimacies of the male institution Lewin passes 7 I take the phrase ‘litfic’ as connoting simply a genre among other genres from an interview with writer China Miéville, which identifies Ian McEwan’s Saturday, set around the 2003 London demonstration against the second Iraq war, as a ‘paradigmatic moment in the social crisis of litfic’ (Jordan, ‘A Life in Writing’, online). See Twidle, ‘Literary NonFiction’ for a fuller discussion.

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through, and sometimes even figured as a kind of fiction. The irrational, even delusional dimensions of being politically conscious are likened at one point to ‘sleep walking’: an unusual metaphor within a story of political awakening. The important theoretical yield in reading across such different genres might be broadening the category of the political (or politicised) subject to admit the unpredictable, heterodox quality of activist experience, or the unknowability of the self, even when that self is most unambiguous about its ideological commitments. Andrew van der Vlies’s account of post-apartheid writing argues that the turn to affect in recent literary and cultural-studies scholarship ‘allows us to understand as political those feelings – and especially bad feelings – that might otherwise seem merely personal or private. Rather than a sign of its evacuation, these feelings index a potential to reinvigorate the political’ (Present Imperfect ix). Given the limited and diminishing repertoire of so-called subject positions offered by a contemporary South African public discourse, such examinations of a shifting past might hold shapes for thinking towards a less predictable, less authoritarian future. Having taken this broad survey, I will now move to a close reading of Leftwich’s confession as it seeks to represent, many years after the event, the hollow centre around which so many of the other narratives pivot.

To what end? ‘I Gave the Names’ and the problem of perfect confession

On the back cover of Granta volume 78 (theme: Bad Company), a less familiar name appears alongside contributions by global literary figures like Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller and Edmund White. ‘THE BETRAYER: Adrian Leftwich: Selling out his comrades and friends in the South African resistance’. Appearing in an eminent forum for global reportage and distinctly literary non-fiction, the piece is positioned at an uneasy convergence of historical testimony, cultural validation and readerly pleasure. Following on from the bald title, the opening passage strikes a note of flat admission and clear-eyed accounting, as if to say, let us begin by admitting the worst: In July 1964, when I was twenty-four, my life in South Africa came to a sudden end. The events which brought this about were of my own making. No one else was to blame. In the gulf that opened up between my reach and my limits, between my knowledge and my self-ignorance, between my fantasies and my capacities, I crashed. It did not happen privately, but publicly and in full view of everyone who knew me. The events which took place wrecked a pattern of life which up until then had been active, promising and committed. For reasons which I still do not fully understand, I tried to do things which were far beyond me, and I failed. (11)

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The writing is simple, unadorned, undeceived: ‘No one else was to blame’. We are, it would seem, in the presence of a sober, chastened, retrospective narrative intelligence that will now guide us through a process of reckoning, tracing the inner history of a betrayal that lives within the carapace of historical fact. In this autobiographical pact, we are offered not perfect self-understanding (‘For reasons which I still do not understand’) but a rather a sincere will-to-truth, a truth-directedness that (we are to assume) is the product of much self-reflection: It has taken me a long time to be able to look at what happened and try to come to terms with it. But now that the obscenity of official apartheid has been formally buried, perhaps it is time to do so. What follows is as much an essay in the personal politics of fear as it is an essay in the politics of failure and betrayal. (11)

Yet even in such an apparently simple passage, something contradictory and interminably self-defeating threatens to open up within the mechanics of autobiographical confession. As Michiel Heyns points out in his reflection on white South African memoirs in the wake of the TRC, ‘to come to terms with’ is an ambiguous phrase (42). In the first instance it might suggest confronting culpability, addressing the past head on and unflinchingly; but embedded within it is the concomitant sense of accommodating culpability, of establishing a more comfortable relationship with it. That is: any process of excavating a shameful truth through narrative risks drifting into exoneration and excuse; if not toward absolution, then at least towards making that truth ‘intelligible, and hence perhaps less reprehensible’ (Heyns 50). This is something that will haunt Dlamini in his biographical enquiry into an infamous collaborator with apartheid’s death squads, and so too Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s encounter with their commander Eugene de Kock in A Human Being Died that Night: that any increase in understanding – that any narrative presentation, perhaps – risks a reduction of responsibility. How much more complex, then, is the matter of autobiographical confession, a mode where the self is both subject and medium of writing? ‘I Gave the Names’: the simplicity of that title – the most basic, declarative English sentence – is belied by the oscillating particle of the personal pronoun. This ‘I’, of course, is both the ‘I’ of 1964 and the ‘I’ of 2002. The reflective, penitent self is compelled to occupy the very same linguistic shifter as a historical, reprehensible self, and then to delineate the relation between them. In doing so it must also rehearse and retrace the stations by which one has become the other, so as to (in Georges Gusdorf ’s words) ‘draw out the structure of his being in time’ (45). As such, the autobiographical text activates as series of

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different temporalities that are compacted or elongated in the time of writing, which is also ‘now’, the time of reading: I cannot give a clear profile of my motives except to say that, looking back now, I detect a fatal mixture in them which I was not able to explore. Without realising what I was doing, I slipped into a kind of danger for which I was neither suited nor prepared. (13)

A passage like this produces a complex dance of current and past identities as it tries to work through the tangle of self-knowledge and self-ignorance that make up a confessive first-person narrative. The six personal pronouns in those two sentences are all somehow differently inflected; but the difficulty of reading their different valences, of visualising their exact relations, the extent of their collaboration and complicities, begins to suggest why (in Hugh Kenner’s words) plain prose, ‘the plain style, is the most disorientating form of discourse yet invented by man’: ‘no probity, no sincerity, can ever subdue the inner contradictions of speaking plainly’ (183). Attempting to theorise a poetics of the personal essay, Philip Lopate suggests how its truth-directedness is dependent on an awareness of human consciousness as an incorrigibly self-rationalising, self-deceiving set of mental processes; and that sceptically acknowledging as much equips the essayist for ‘the difficult climb into honesty’ (xxv). ‘So often the “plot” of a personal essay’, he goes on, ‘its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how far the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defences toward deeper levels of honesty’ (xxv). In this sense, there is ‘a vertical dimension in the form’; whereas an essay that remains at ‘the same flat level of self-disclosure and understanding’ throughout will not provoke the same frisson of self-recognition in the reader (xxvi). In this sense, the deeper plot of ‘I Gave the Names’ is less the truth of the historical narrative that it discloses than its evolving strategies of selfawareness – and their limits. * In considering the matter of ‘coming to terms’ with culpability, Heyns opens his discussion with the case of Mark Behr, the author of a bestselling 1993 novel of a white South African childhood The Smell of Apples. Behr pre-empted his unmasking as an apartheid spy by delivering a confession at the Faultlines Conference at the University of Cape Town in 1996. During a speech, Behr revealed that he had been ‘an agent of the South African security establishment’ while a student leader of the left-wing student organisation NUSAS (the same organisation that Leftwich and other ARM members had graduated from). Despite his professing ‘the profoundest imaginable regret’ for his ‘moral decrepitude’, Behr’s confession was critiqued for its attempt to minimise his actions and distance his spying from the brutality and violence (‘Living in the

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Faultlines’). Indeed, it has been read by various commentators as a textbook example of an inadequate and evasive confession – its sincere formulae of regret nullified by his caveats, his insistence that he personally had not murdered or tortured, and that it was ‘unlikely’ that his actions on Stellenbosch campus had ‘led directly to any such atrocities’.8 By contrast, ‘I Gave the Names’ might be taken as an example of a far more skilled, even a ‘good’ confession – to employ a suggestively dissonant oxymoron. Certainly, this was how I first experienced it, encountering the text as a PhD student without detailed knowledge of its larger historical context, or the many ARM intertexts that it is in dialogue with. Experienced initially in this naive way as purely a literary or rhetorical performance, it seemed virtually answerable. Leftwich methodically itemises the jail terms that resulted for each of those he testified against, and gives a textured, almost novelistic account of events leading up to 1964, and then the slow, staggered process of reckoning that culminates in ‘I Gave the Names’. Divided into eleven sections, each punctuated (so the form suggests) by a hiatus of elapsed time and silent reflection, the piece has a cyclical, eddying structure. The early sections evoke a privileged and happy Cape Town childhood, then a torrid and energised involvement in radical student politics, and then the moment of arrest, detention and collapse. Halfway through comes the temporal and geographical breach of disgrace, betrayal and exile: ‘Finally, after five months, when there was nothing left to betray and the court cases were completed, the authorities kept their side of the filthy bargain I had struck, removing me from detention, and from South Africa, forever’ (21). The later sections relate Leftwich’s years of wandering, failed relationships, episodes of psychotherapy and finally the establishment of a career as a politics lecturer in York (where he died in April 2013 as a respected academic and teacher).9 This is the chronological axis of the piece; but woven through it is a recursive pattern that continually returns to his 1964 moment of collapse and betrayal, examining it from various perspectives, with incrementally greater analytic and rhetorical purchase. While the moment of collapse is initially rendered in clichés and formulaic phrases that are strangely at odds with the analytic intelligence of the rest of the essay (‘I just caved in’; ‘I eventually cracked’; ‘Slowly but surely I spilled the beans’; ‘I simply collapsed like a house of cards’), by 8 In Askari, for example, Dlamini cites the Argentine political scientist, Guillermo O’Donnell, once Behr’s teacher, who felt compelled to write an open letter to his exstudent: ‘Have you tried to find out what happened to the individuals on whom you reported? Why do you not tell us about this, in a text in which you – just you – are the only human being who apparently matters?’ (quoted 114–15). 9 For an account of Leftwich’s academic and teaching career, see Katzenellenbogen, ‘Adrian Leftwich’.

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the second half, the reflective voice is circling back with increasingly powerful paragraphs (and unusual metaphors) that seek to peel back the layers of self-delusion, cognitive dissonance and political unconsciousness underlying that apparently confident and successful younger ‘I’: ‘It was much less what was done to me in detention, and much more the encounter with myself that brewed the acid that stripped me’ (20). In section six, the speaker suggests that ‘I will never really understand the inner history of my actions’ (23), acknowledging sites of opacity with the psyche that should properly remain unknowable: I have come to think that not all of the choices we make are as rational as we might want them to be, especially the fateful ones. Perhaps they are more like lunges, propelled by deeper currents of animal fear, survival urges, aggression, insecurity, pain, hate, lust or hunger which surface unpredictably and which can have the power to push aside all values, beliefs, morals, culture, restraint, reason and self-dignity. They don’t always do this but they can. I think something like that was going on when I came to choose what I was going to do. (24).

The piece reads as the most powerful articulation of the insight that some of the other ARM texts which I considered in the previous section were groping towards: that the politicised subject can not simply be seen as a rational, self-aware being; that its commitments and investments should be seen as simultaneously refracted through a psychoanalytic register of transference, fantasy and compensation. Reflecting on his youthful involvement with ARM, Leftwich writes: ‘But I now have the uneasy sense that perhaps it was my personal needs that found expression in those activities, needs that had only a tenuous relationship to the country’ (13). He goes on to draw a distinction between himself and those white South Africans who loathed the regime but nonetheless realised they could not commit to an armed struggle that was, finally, beyond their psychic capabilities: Where they had the self-discipline, self-knowledge and honesty to match their involvement with their capacities, or to leave the country, I made the error of crossing the threshold into danger. […] Was this not my real crime, my original one, the crime of self-ignorance, and did my other crimes not follow from that? (25)

On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine a more unflinching reckoning with the self. And yet, here it seems necessary to pause and consider how the very notion of a skilled confession takes us into still more unstable ethical zones. In an intriguing moment of his article on confession, Heyns considers the emotive and jagged outburst of a police constable, one William Harrington, at the TRC: ‘For all its artlessness, the man’s confession has about it the saving confusion of a nature taken unawares by emotions it has not been trained to

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deal with’ (46). In contrast to this confused, incoherent and ‘live’ speech, we have in ‘I Gave the Names’ a written document in which artfulness, editing and the ability to self-correct might be figured as damaging to raw truthfulness. It cannot really be taken unawares; it can only model this. Its emotions and responses have been carefully trained, refined and modulated in prose. Or (at an even more sceptical remove) might it even be that the clumsiness of the initial formulations around the moment of betrayal (‘I spilled the beans’) are a deliberately placed artlessness, a strategic cack-handedness (for surely these would have been picked up on by the skilled literary editors at Granta) which may work to win the reader’s trust, prior to the modulations into a more powerful analytic register. This is a speculative, possibly baseless reading. But it points to the kind of corrosive scepticism that follows when confession shifts from a religious to a secular (or psychoanalytic) narrative scene: what Derek Attridge calls ‘the structural interminability of confession in a secular context’ (J. M. Coetzee 142). ‘The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself ’, writes Coetzee in one of his major essays, but because of the nature of consciousness in a post-religious worldview, ‘the self cannot tell the truth of itself to itself and come to rest without the possibility of self-deception’ (Doubling the Point 291). What opens up in a piece like ‘I Gave the Names’, then, is a potentially endless spiral of doubt regarding the sincerity of such truth-telling, since it has been removed from a cultural setting where only the intercession of divine grace could provide an end-point that is not arbitrary, expedient or suspect. At this juncture, Lopate’s rather basic idea of ‘a vertical dimension’ of the essay form – a series of hierarchically arranged levels of truth-value through which a reflective intelligence plots its course – must be replaced by a poststructuralist metaphor of autobiography as a closed loop of discourse, a Moebius strip, a labyrinth or else the infinite regress of two mirrors reflecting each other. Coetzee’s exercises in third-person autobiography – or, in his coinage, ‘autrebiography’: writing the self as a kind of distant other, or stranger (Doubling the Point 394) – might be read as an attempt to short-circuit or cauterise this process of infinite regress before it can even begin, while also refusing what Heyns calls the ‘implicit amnesty’ accorded to the child-as-victim (53).10 In a scene from Boyhood, the young ‘John’ persuades his brother to put his hand down the funnel of a mealie-grinding machine, then turns the handle:

10 See also the 2002 interview with David Attwell in which Coetzee remarks that to rewrite Boyhood or Youth with I substituted for he throughout ‘would leave you with two books only remotely related to their originals. This is an astonishing fact, yet any reader can confirm it within a few pages’ (Coullie et al. 216).

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For an instant, before he stopped, he could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed. His brother stood with his hands trapped in the machine, ashen with pain, a puzzled, inquiring look on his face. […] He has never apologised to his brother, nor has he ever been reproached with what he did. Nevertheless, the memory lies like a weight upon him, the memory of the soft resistance of flesh and bone, and then the grinding. (119)

The third-person prose, in exiting the circuits of self-justification that would more likely infiltrate a first-person narration, is itself able to preserve a kind of ‘resistance’ to post hoc explanation or glib apologia (while the technical challenge of managing the awkward shifters ‘he’ and ‘his’ – now referring to self, now to other – make the prose still more guarded against itself). In his reading of the scene, Attridge suggests that the ‘chiselling of language that the reader senses here is part of the experience of a struggle to articulate a truth that could only be diminished by explanation or justification’ (154). In this sense, the sparseness of the passage should be read not as a withholding but ‘as a sign of the adult author’s continuing bafflement, of an essential truth that he […] cannot penetrate’ (155). Here one approaches the limit zone of non-fiction, since the option of a confessing in the third person was hardly open to Leftwich: it would surely have compounded the sense of his being an evasive, overly stylised or questionably ‘literary’ performance. Locked in the first person, ‘I Gave the Names’ must navigate the labyrinth of self-reflexiveness, and does so with singular skill. ‘Whatever he did, I thought bitterly, he did well, even testifying against his friends’ – Albie Sachs’s sardonic line could perhaps be re-applied to this model confession, one that is hyper-aware of the quandaries outlined by Heyns, Dlamini and Attridge; one that indeed, continually and pre-emptively writes such difficulties into itself: Any attempt to explain how these things came to happen will also carry with it the whining implication of justification of some kind, by shifting responsibility to some other place, persons or situation. I have no wish to do that. It was me. […] If I could change the past, I would. But I cannot. So there it must rest. There it must stay. And some would say that it would therefore be best for me to shut up, say no more about anything and crawl away. But I do have something to say. (26)

It is an odd moment, since this is more than halfway through the piece, and followed by a section break that leaves hanging what exactly the piece might have to say, or why it keeps on saying it – that is, why it keeps on going for as long as it does, why it hasn’t ended already. If any kind of confessional narrative works, however unconsciously, towards self-exoneration, would it not be

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better if it did not exist at all? Should it not simply have ended (‘come to rest’) after the simple declarative admission of the title, ‘I Gave the Names’, trusting to ritualistic verbal formulae which (as in protocols of religious confession) evacuate the hyper-articulate self, rather than allowing its operations to fill up all the rhetorical space of the text – and so lending it a kind of overweening, overly fluent quality that some found suspect (see Davis, ‘The Unforgiven’). This impulse to pre-empt any objection, as we will see in a later chapter, creates a similar problem within the ambitious and hyper-aware works of Jonny Steinberg: there is simply no ‘chink’ in the rhetorical surface where the reader can find purchase as a critical interlocutor. Is there even perhaps even an element of gratuitousness here, a note of gleeful self-abasement that Coetzee finds in Dostoevsky’s narrators? Or at least a kind of self-satisfaction in being able to consider oneself so brutally, a compulsive momentum in this self-lacerating ‘honesty’ that threatens to tip confession into little more than ‘a special form of bragging’ (Doubling the Point, 283). In the economy of confession, writes Coetzee in another context, ‘everything shameful is valuable; every secret or shameful appetite is confessable currency’ (‘Truth in Autobiography’ 3) and it is not in the interests of narrative to spend this currency too quickly. Something of this suspicion – a wariness towards an inappropriately skilled or successful confession, of a job too well done – seems to linger in the rather ambivalent passages of Stones Against the Mirror where the Lewin narrator takes us through his own reading of ‘I Gave the Names’. On the surface, Lewin would seem to praise the piece: it ‘affected me deeply. It was as if I had been waiting for it for years: this explanation, which didn’t duck any responsibility’ (179). The reading is figured as an encounter that impels him to set aside his own self-defining narrative of bitterness and make contact with Leftwich again. In a twenty-first-century, networked world, the crossing of this psychological hurdle has become a ‘frighteningly simple’ action: ‘I googled and emailed – and Adrian replied immediately, saying that he’d like to meet’ (182). The actual meeting in York is dealt with in just a page, less a climactic encounter than an exchange of small talk and glib phrases: ‘We have met again and found what we were before. Friends. It is better that way’ (186). However, there is a postscript to Lewin’s encounter with ‘I Gave the Names’ that introduces a more dissonant and unresolved (but also more convincing) note in these final cadences. Just as the internet has made the shift from memory to actuality so abrupt, it also immediately reveals how this text, which Lewin has read so personally, has also become the property of a global audience. Having googled ‘adrian leftwich granta i gave the names’, Lewin finds that it even served as the inspiration for an installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale by an artist from the Philippines, Miljohn Ruperto. In it, Leftwich’s

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words were flashed onto an LCD screen, allowing participants to read the essay aloud through the microphone. The quality of audience partly inhabiting the ‘I’ of personal narrative, of vicariously experiencing its vicissitudes and dangers in language, is thus given a literal embodiment in this multi-media work. Ruperto’s installation is accompanied by the kind of tired explanatory art-theory discourse that comes as standard with such conceptual works, and which Lewin quotes a length, though without comment. The participant is able to ‘embody’ and ‘enact’ the limits of the confessional by sharing and occupying ‘the space of the transgressor’: ‘The promises of acting, of empathy, transparency, and the transgression of the limits of self, become the channels by which the participant re-enacts the betrayer’s sin, that is, the lack of self-knowledge’ (quoted 184).  Lewin’s response to this ‘“art project” performed in a Venetian piazza’ is only: ‘Oh well. Who’d have thought?’ (184). And so while the larger narrative demand of his memoir impels a re-encounter and reconciliation with Leftwich, this wry rhetorical question betrays a lingering irresolution. Even as ‘I Gave the Names’ works to bring the plot of Lewin’s memoir to a denouement, Stones Against the Mirror seems to bridle against the essay’s literary and artistic pedigree, its international acclaim and the global currency by which it becomes (quite literally) the property of others, performed and re-performed by strangers in a rarefied European precinct. * In my introduction I quoted Njabulo Ndebele’s account of discovering a box of banned books in his father’s garage, a moment of encounter with African life writing that marks a moment of beginning, of embarking on a long intellectual journey. In ‘I Gave the Names’ we have a kind of obverse or photographic negative of this expansive humanist vision. One of its most haunting images – the punctum of the essay, for this reader at least – describes a packing case that follows the narrator into his physical and moral exile: A year later, some books and a few personal possessions followed me to Britain, artefacts from a different time and place. They arrived in a wooden crate when I was living in a freezing stone cottage on the Welsh border and teaching nearby at a school in Oswestry. I found the crate one evening when I came home from work; it had been dumped outside the cottage door, in the snow, as if rejected and abandoned there. (27)

It was incriminating material discovered in his bookcase in Cape Town that precipitated Leftwich’s arrest and betrayal – exactly what this was remains unresolved, and quite why he may have not given full disclosure about it in a confession otherwise so expansive remains more unresolved still. Now some

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of these books from a ruined life follow him into exile, dumped anonymously in an icy Welsh village. Beyond the explicit engagement with history that the piece records, the autobiographical essay also works via the images that it has selected and encoded in and across time: particular details from the past around which significance has condensed. They are bits of detritus that are in one sense redundant to the narrative arc, but which for that reason carry an uncanny, affective charge. This orphaned and dislocated library – a crate of ‘artefacts from a different time and place’ – might be taken to figure the personal debris, the arbitrary fragments that the autobiographer must reckon with for years, then reassemble for public display. The result is a literary performance that will in one sense always be just one more entry in a long line of betrayals.

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Nostalgia, heterodoxy and the work of memory

4

To the Chinese, it was the year of the Ox; to the Soviets, the year they said nyet to the broadcast of the imperialist Sesame Street on Soviet television; to the Germans, the year both East and West were admitted to the United Nations; to the Israelis, the year they won the Yom Kippur War; to the Brits, the year car owners scrambled to fill up as the government introduced fuel rationing; to the Americans, the year the Supreme Court legalised abortion with its decision in Roe v. Wade; and to Evelinah Papayi Dlamini, a 45-year-old working-class woman from Katlehong, a black township about 30 kilometres east of Johannesburg, the year her only surviving child was born. I was born on a Monday in Natalspruit Hospital, a 900-bed edifice since condemned to demolition for lying on dolomitic ground, on 29 January 1973. (25)

So begins chapter one of Jacob Dlamini’s first book, Native Nostalgia (2009), an attempt ‘to understand the question of what it means for a black South African to remember his life under apartheid with fondness’ (2). The passage suggests the intersection of the personal and the political, or even the geopolitical, which characterises his writing: it is an œuvre that often seems more interested in the relation between the local and the global than in remaining within an increasingly vexed and limiting national imaginary – a comparative ambition that I will be tracing throughout this chapter. The paragraph also suggests the playful, insouciant tone that Dlamini brings to this portrait of his upbringing in Katlehong, even as he navigates the pitfalls of such unstable terrain. This autobiographical, personable beginning, however, is not allowed to stand for itself. It is pre-empted by an introduction in a far more analytic and often anxious register, one that turns to social and political theory to gird itself and to justify the intimate and vulnerable memory work that follows. Native Nostalgia is in this sense a book formed from a double helix of personal narrative and generalised analysis: a mixture of implicit and explicit ways of telling that make it an unusual and shape-shifting piece of writing. ‘For all its academic and theoretical aspects’, writes David Medalie, Native Nostalgia is at the same time ‘a work of tender filial homage’: ‘It is also an act of literary emancipation, for Dlamini wishes, so to speak, to rescue his deceased mother, a woman whose beliefs he describes as constituting “political gradualism and religious conservatism” (22), from both the accusations and the neglect of history’ (48). The

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mini-essays that make up its chapters braid together autobiography, anecdote and sociological analysis to evoke ‘the sense of township life’: the sensory texture of the everyday, the ordinary and familial; but also the process of sense-making by which the autobiographical subject creates a world. The book pays particular attention to the unpredictability and pleasures of popular culture – to pop music, radio and TV, to local vernaculars, gossip, fashions and brand names – but all of this amid the repressions and humiliations of the final stages of apartheid, post-1976 and the Soweto uprising. In doing so, it warily circles the question of how black South Africans of a certain generation could possibly make the claim that ‘things were better under apartheid’, and asks what this might mean about memory, social change and familial relations. Such are truths ‘that cannot easily be cognitively absorbed’, as Wamuwi Mbao puts in his reflection on nostalgia among black South Africans for ‘Bop’ (the homeland of Bophuthatswana) and the ambiguous legacy of its leader Lucas Mangope (‘On Bop’ 3). Native Nostalgia then takes a similarly inadmissible, illogical and unreadable sense of the past and, in Carli Coetzee’s words, ‘uses its very unreadability as a deciphering mechanism’ in unlocking a history of black South African sensibilities; as ‘a text in search of lost archives’, it seeks ‘to construct and reconstruct a consciousness precisely where its existence had been denied and ignored by some’ (Accented Futures 129, 133). As a social theorist-cum-tour guide of a remembered Katlehong, Dlamini is particularly drawn to remembered scenes and structures of feeling that now read as counter-intuitive, heterodox or even vaguely blasphemous. We learn how his neighbourhood cheered on the (white) South African boxer Gerhardus Christiaan Coetzee against the African American defending heavyweight Michael Dokes in a bout on 23 September 1983, when the ‘Boksburg Bomber’ became the first white world champion since 1960: ‘My family was ecstatic. So were all the other families in the street. We had all been cheering Coetzee and had all been following the fight on the radio’ (29). Was Coetzee’s public condemnation of apartheid (which had endeared him to black South Africans) genuine or just due to the savvy and cynical promotion of Don King? Did some white supremacists find vindication in his triumph? Dlamini admits these possibilities, but in his reminiscence they are overwhelmed by the virtuosic skill with which sports presenters on Radio Zulu had mediated and translated Coetzee into a ‘local boy’: a repository of proximate hopes and identifications. Expanding on the theme of radio, the chapter ‘Sounds on the Air’ evokes how the South African Broadcasting Corporation under apartheid, despite its vision of separate stations for different languages, actually produced among its listeners a dynamic that exceeded intention and top-down ideological control. Radio in Katlehong became (in Liz Gunner’s words) ‘a socioscape that provided a thick sense of the varieties of place’ (quoted 31); Dlamini remembers it as the hub of an evanescent, imagined community that gave the lie

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to apartheid’s denialist ideology of ethnic balkanisation. The memoir evokes the knowing intimacy between virtuoso presenters and an active listenership, paying tribute to a wry news reader on Radio Zulu who (in a kind of Brechtian alienation effect) would start bulletins with the line ‘Kwangiphinda kelokho’ (meaning ‘There we go again’) or preface every item with the line ‘Bathi ngithi’ (They say I must say this): ‘They say I must say that three terrorists were killed in a shootout with the police yesterday’ (36). ‘The man was a genius’, Dlamini comments, ‘He was funny too. His ironic take on the news was perhaps his means of survival’ (36). Native Nostalgia, as we will see, is continually drawn to vernaculars that confound immobile political scripts which deemed the townships only as ‘sites of struggle’: inert receptacles, that is, for a pre-determined Struggle historiography. An attention to the linguistic basis of identity and social being – of language itself as the site of struggle and power, but also of agility, play and surprise – runs throughout the work. It is in precisely such idioms and speech acts that Dlamini searches for traces of imaginative survival and renewal; yet at the same time, his project itself becomes entangled in a risky process of cultural translation: the problem, in other words, of transmitting his localised findings in the flattened, rootless lingua franca of South African English.

Waar was jy? (Where were you?) The work of memory in Dlamini, Denis Hirson and Rustum Kozain

Perhaps the most striking chapter of Dlamini’s debut work considers the ‘delicious conundrum’ (160) of Afrikaans being the language of black nostalgia, at least within the milieu where the author grew up. Dlamini reflects on how the gruff and guttural medium of courtrooms and ‘Bantu Education’ was simultaneously a resource for some of the most colloquial and intimate speech acts in Katlehong. Phatic particles from Afrikaans like ‘Ag’ and ‘tog’ and ‘eintlik’ were used to lend pungency and flavour to colloquial speech; proverbial phrases were used to navigate daily life: ‘Dis kak maar dis alright’; ‘Alles sal reg wees’. Language, nostalgia and music constellate in various ways: he evokes the song by kwaito artist Skeem, ‘Waar was jy?’ (‘Where were you?’) that nostalgically revisited hits of the 1980s by Brenda Fassie, Stimela and Sello Chicco Twala. We are taken into the gatherings at which older relatives would turn to Afrikaans to express their appreciation of John Coltrane, Kippie Moeketsi or other jazz musicians: ‘Hoor net daar!’ (Just listen to that), an uncle would say as a note ‘slaat hom diep in die binnekant’ (hit him deep in his insides). Another uncle would look into the sky, tap his shiny Florsheim shoes on the floor and then say: ‘Hoor net daar’ (141–2).

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In a revealing moment, the writer himself turns to Afrikaans to rebut a certain kind of orthodoxy in writing about ‘the township’ as a South African space. He quotes Denis Hirson’s critique of apartheid’s spatial lexicon: the ‘location’, the ‘Bantustan’ and the ‘sweetly cynical’ ‘homeland’, all described (in Hirson’s phrase) as ‘politically frozen zones; amputated portions of the country laid down in the dust of no man’s land’ (quoted 147). Dlamini immediately counters with: Eish, maar Hirson. Where are my uncles, the township clevers with their tapping Florsheim shoes, Brentwood trousers and Viyella shirts? Where in this politically frozen zone, this amputated portion of the country, are the men and women who would ‘witty’ (chat) in Afrikaans, because they felt like it and like Afrikaans? […] Township; location – ‘lokasie’ in Afrikaans; ‘kasie’ in township lingo. (147)

The trans-lingual modulation in the last sentence here, the change in tonality tracked via a single word, reveals much about how Dlamini attempts to exit a certain, inviolable mode of political economy that has dominated South African historiography. Hirson is in fact the author of several complex and subtle meditations on the act of remembering a South African childhood. Works like I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (2004) and White Scars: On Reading and Rites of Passage (2006) should properly form intriguing intertexts with Native Nostalgia. In White Scars there is a detailed meditation on the author’s encounter with Georges Perec’s 1978 work Je me souviens (I Remember): how its compact, apparently affectless litany of short sentences approximated the pointillist syntax of memory, marking out ‘the tiny, inter-meshed, resurfacing co-ordinates of a gone world’ (White Scars 138), and inspiring Hirson to apply the format to a South African context. On the first page of I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), one finds: I remember the sting of wet tennis ball. I remember when tennis balls were fluffier, and almost white. I remember the cinema ad for Brylcreem in which Gary Player ran his fingers through his hair. I remember the sweet oily smell of Brylcreem in its squat glass jar. I remember the commotion in a Yeoville bioscope during matinee performances. (11)

In White Scars, Hirson writes how Perec’s exhaustive attention to inconsequential and even banal details can at first seem ‘impossibly light’ (146). As with the above passage, the details are pared down and impersonal; often the text simply itemises brand names and signifiers from popular culture. But he

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then reveals how Je me souviens begins its archiving of the everyday in 1946. As such it contains no data from the first ten years of Perec’s life, or of the war years in which his father was killed in combat and his mother deported, probably to Auschwitz, along with several other members of his family: ‘In Je me souviens, this central absence, and everything associated with it, is precisely what goes unmentioned’ (143). Hirson’s engagement with memory and writing, in other words, is deeply aware of a nostalgia inflected with both felicity and historical pain: the coded and complex relations that these may come to have in the act of writing; the play of presence and absence that structures the literary imagination. He goes on to suggest that Perec’s attention to ‘the lighter collective mental souvenirs of a whole generation’ (139) posited an imagined but perhaps impossible national community in the aftermath of trauma, occupation and collaboration. Yet within the passage that Dlamini lifts out from White Scars, the township space is dealt with by Hirson under an entirely separate order of discourse: an obligatory language of political geography that Dlamini finds ‘stultifying and ultimately ahistorical’ (147). Why (the buried implication seems to be) should Hirson’s textured and haunting essays in memory not also be extended to black South African childhoods? Must the inequity of spatial apartheid be replicated by an unequal access to discourse? ‘Eish, maar Hirson’: Native Nostalgia sets out to scramble such pieties via both its content and its form. At the same time, however, Dlamini’s very mode of address in the chapter returns us to a recurring problematic of narrative non-fiction in South Africa: the difficulties and incipient betrayals that attend the transfer of information held in trust across certain social, racial or linguistic boundaries. When he writes how he will not easily admit to knowing Afrikaans when asked by a foreigner how many languages he speaks – ‘We do not care to have it known that we are fluent in the so-called language of the oppressor’ (135) – or confesses that he is not comfortable speaking Afrikaans to a white South African – ‘I find the exchange carries too much baggage, too many unstated assumptions, too much history’ (142) – there is a self-defeating dynamic that opens up within this confession, one that threatens to violate precisely the kinds of intimacy and community that it seeks to celebrate. In attempting such risky moves of cultural translation – in breaching certain silences and possibly betraying the confidences of a particular community to a wider (and whiter) audience – Native Nostalgia caused a brief fracas in the review pages. In the Sowetan, Eric Miyeni deemed the premise (‘that growing up in apartheid-designed townships was fun’) ‘so sickening that I decided never to read it’ and went on to claim that ‘The only purpose it serves is to reduce white South African guilt over its past transgressions’ (‘Defining Blacks’, online). Another public commentator aligned with Black

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Consciousness, Andile Mngxitama, deemed Native Nostalgia ‘an insult of a book’, filing it under the ‘apartheid was not that bad’ genre,1 while Sandile Memela, a spokesman for the national Department of Arts and Culture, suggested that it contributed to a form of ‘new black literary self-sabotage’, written to please white audiences ‘at the expense of black integrity and history’ (‘Celebrity Authors’, online). There was, in other words, a major breach between the careful way that the book sets up its enquiry, and the quick dismissal of detractors believing that such a project might be taken up for reactionary ends. Such objections are, after all, already pre-empted and addressed by Native Nostalgia, which gives a clear rationale of its political project: an attempt to restore agency, creativity and dignity to ordinary South Africans, rather than casting them as an undifferentiated and inert mass who were ‘rescued’ by the liberation movements. ‘There is a way to be nostalgic about the past without forgetting that the struggle against apartheid was just’, Dlamini writes: ‘In fact, to be nostalgic is to remember the social orders and networks of solidarity that made the struggle possible in the first place’ (17). Without reanimating such memories, he remarks in the conclusion, ‘we cannot understand why apartheid suffered the kind of moral defeat that led to its demise’ (152). Nonetheless, Native Nostalgia is a work that registers a kind of formal unease and lingering anxiety as it undertakes the paradoxical work of moving stubbornly local idioms and life worlds into a wider currency. With the end of formal apartheid in the 1990s came the kind of homogenising, free marketdriven globalisation that begins to erode precisely those intimacies, intricacies and socioscapes that Dlamini is drawn to as anchors and shelters for remembering; and yet his own project of cultural translation is surely caught up in the same process. He is, for instance, dismissive of Ukhozi FM, the post-apartheid incarnation of Radio Zulu, where programmes on politics and community issues have become sideshows to ‘the “real” business’ of making it sound like a youth station: ‘It is as if, having survived apartheid censorship and a lack of imagination, the radio station has found itself with an incurable complex: a complex about being a Zulu-medium station when English has been privileged in democratic South Africa as the language of advancement’ (40). He cannot speak, Dlamini goes on, for the millions of rural South Africans who depend on Ukhozi FM, but wonders: ‘Are they, too, nostalgic for the days when to listen to Radio Zulu was to “listen against the grain”’? (40). It is an unusual moment of linguistic purism in a work otherwise so committed to code-switching and syncretic cultural forms. For Native Nostalgia is surely also caught up in the same process: it moves previously and idiomatically local 1 The remarks were made at a panel discussion for the launch of Anton Harber’s Diepsloot on 20 September 2011 at the Centre for the Book, Cape Town.

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experience into English as a national lingua franca, and then looks increasingly towards global analogues for the conundrums that it is exploring. In setting up his enquiry, Dlamini moves beyond the national to borrow an analytic frame from The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym’s essay on collective memory and personal desire that takes the reader through the postcommunist cities of eastern Europe, a site of various forms of nostalgia for a Soviet past (in post-reunification Germany, this has given rise to the compound word Ostalgie: nostalgia for East Berlin and the GDR). Native Nostalgia, in other words, relies on a distinctly non-native (or non-nativist) framing of the problem, turning on Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. If restorative nostalgia connotes the kind of selective hindsight that gives the word a bad name – a reactionary, backward looking sentiment that seeks to reconstitute the past, harking back to a wholeness that never existed in the first place – then reflective nostalgia is imagined as something different: a way of addressing historical traces in a way that does not suspend critical thinking, that admits irony and humour, that lingers on fragments, ruins and the incomplete. ‘Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals’, writes Boym in another context: ‘It knows two main plots – the return to origins and the conspiracy’ (‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’ 13–14). By contrast, reflective nostalgia ‘does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols’ (14). Restorative nostalgia is caught up in a nationalist imperative to produce a monolithic and usable past, conceiving of itself not as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, retains a self-conscious and ironic awareness of its own processes, always alert to how its recoveries of the past are inflected by present anxieties. So ‘[w]hat is it about the present that makes me cherish shattered fragments of memory?’ Dlamini wonders, then answers: The book should be considered as a modest contribution to ongoing attempts to rescue South African history and the telling of it from [...] the distorting master narrative of black dispossession that dominates the historiography of the struggle. The master narrative would have us believe that black South Africans, who populate struggle jargon mostly as faceless ‘masses of our people’, experienced apartheid in the same way and fought the same way against apartheid. That is untrue. (18)

This narrative, he goes on, ‘blinds us to a richness, a complexity of life among black South Africans, that not even colonialism and apartheid at their worst could destroy’ (19). At the heart of the book, then, is the question of agency: how to articulate the insight that individuals make history even as they are determined by it. ‘To say’, as poet and critic Rustum Kozain writes in his 2008

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essay cycle ‘Dagga’, a comparable account of growing up in the apartheid ‘community development project’ of New Orleans, near Paarl in the Western Cape: ‘this is how it was, in all its fullness. That it was full beyond apartheid. That apartheid did not matter at all; and yet, that it was all that mattered. That apartheid was at once ever-present and never-present’ (22). If it is the pointillist syntax of the litany that underlies Hirson’s work, in Kozain’s sociologically textured (but non-academic) reflections on ‘my coming to memory and, thus, to human life’ in the wake of the Group Areas Act, it is the intoxicant dagga (cannabis) that slyly lends an underlying poetics (14). Never the main subject of the memoir, it works below the prose surface as a Proustian mnemonic trigger and incitement to vivid recollection, yet also as an agent of amnesia, numbness and meaningless digression; of the solitary, the cryptic and socially withdrawn. All are registers of experience that Kozain accesses in notating ‘that strange, even uncanny mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for remembered times and places’ (Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias 1). Native Nostalgia, by contrast, abstracts much broader claims for what it undertakes, and attempts a more explicit theoretical yield. And despite the self-conscious ingenuity of Dlamini’s conceptual set up (or perhaps because of it), one can see the vulnerability of the position, and how it might also be taken up and used for inappropriately revisionist ends. ‘I find the exchange carries too much baggage, too many unstated assumptions, too much history’ – Dlamini’s rationale for not speaking Afrikaans to white South Africans might be applied to his larger project: for certain readers (some of my students among them) it represents an experiment in cultural translation too risky for the post-transitional context into which it emerges. This quality of intellectual risk, perhaps, is what produces the generic flightiness of the work: it is not quite memoir but not quite sociology either; and in fact there is a kind of tic whereby the argumentation tends to jump rails from one genre to the other before it reaches a crux. Its very insouciance and hybridity, that is, can function as a kind of evasiveness, a way of not bringing matters to a head, suspending the work in an uncertain zone somewhere between the self-sufficient, even cryptic inwardness of personal reminiscence (which Kozain’s piece inhabits to brilliant effect) and the explicit analytic yield demanded of a more academic text. The prose is densely intertextual, whimsical and self-consciously ‘literary’; a quality that perturbed some commentators, as did the fact that its reference points are largely Euro-American thinkers even as it claims to evoke the local world of Katlehong. Moreover, its central theoretical formulation – relying on a clear difference between reflective and restorative nostalgia – is perhaps too neat and absolute to capture the difficult registers of experience it goes on to explore, or rather, doesn’t really go on to explore. Even the positive reviewers,

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of which there were many, suggested that it was in some ways an unrealised work, one that (like many an academic research proposal) promises more than it can deliver, and never arrives at an answer to many of the questions it poses (even well into the third chapter, we are still reading about what ‘this book’ will be about: a kind of scholarly tic that has not been ironed out of a general trade paperback). While Dlamini had succeeded brilliantly in evoking the senses and textures of township life, Eusebius McKaiser remarked, ‘the full exploration of the act of remembering, with all its conceptual, psychological and philosophical complexity, awaits another day’ (‘Remembering Apartheid’, online). As such, there were certainly criticisms to be made of an ambitious yet uneven debut work. But its over-determined reception – the kinds of preemptive censoring it called forth – provides a telling example of how the complex rhetorical positions of ambitious non-fiction can be flattened as they enter an increasingly polarised cultural arena, or an online world that selfselects for absolutist judgements. And where (this is the point I want to carry forward into a discussion of his second book) the very notions of complexity and nuance are often dismissed as a problematic liberal inheritance – one too easily amenable to reactionary impulses that evade the urgency of present demands and seek to preserve the status quo. Beyond even this, there is the larger question of an entire literary style and sensibility – one imbued with the kind of heterodox, cosmopolitan freedom that a writer like Dlamini claims from his opening paragraphs, the ‘insouciant, pleasurable writing’ acclaimed by Jonny Steinberg on the cover – that is increasingly regarded as somehow inauthentic or escapist and so unwelcome within the historical situation that it tries to explore. There is, in other words, a great deal of ‘noise’ around a text like this, the noise of the post-TRC moment. It is a cultural predicament that tends against a close reading of narrative form and technique; that is often impatient with the speculative and tentative manoeuvres of literary investigation; that is less inclined to regard ambiguity and irresolution as positive or productive qualities. Given this context of reception, it is precisely those texts which limn the vulnerable and difficult terrains broached by Native Nostalgia that are most likely to be flattened and misread: translated back into bald summary and tendentious paraphrase (‘growing up in apartheid-designed townships was fun’) which then set the terms of the ensuing debate. With all this in mind, I now turn to a work that is about betrayal, but also poised to be regarded as one, or even to betray itself in interesting ways.

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The last word in racism Shifting etymology and intimate enmity in Askari

If Native Nostalgia is a book-length essay that promises more than it delivers, Dlamini’s second work is an enormous and passionate research project into the question of political collaboration, one which, if anything, seems almost reluctant to metabolise or fully elaborate its own findings. Askari begins with the author remembering an article that he came across in an anti-apartheid magazine of 1988, when he was a schoolboy. ‘The strange saga of Mr X1’ told of a senior member of the African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) who had defected and become a collaborator with the South African Police (SAP). Mr X1 was ‘one of apartheid’s most notorious turncoats’, to use Dlamini’s phrasing: a man who ‘turned collaboration into a career choice’ (1) and went about his work, some said, with unseemly ‘relish’ (237). Comrade September, as he was known in the ANC, had been one of the liberation struggle’s most respected and promising operatives, someone who (as many comment with the wisdom of hindsight during the course of the text) would probably have occupied a position of senior leadership in a democratic South Africa. September’s real name was Glory Sedibe, born in 1953 in the small asbestos-mining town of Penge in what was then the ‘homeland’ of Lebowa in northern South Africa. His story is used to open a wide-ranging reflection on the uncomfortable complicities and grey zones of South Africa’s political history, a history in which the maintenance of the apartheid system relied on degrees of accommodation and collaboration that are not often or easily acknowledged in public discourse. Political conflict in South Africa, writes Dlamini, ‘has always been a racially promiscuous affair’ (9) and indeed the complex etymology of the word ‘askari’ suggests the kinds of intimate enmities that the colonial project has always produced, and also sketches the broad historical and geopolitical range in which this text is entangled. From the earliest arrivals of Portuguese caravels on the eastern coasts of Africa, the Persian/Urdu word lashkar/lashkari (soldier, army) was taken up as referring to a man of the Indian Ocean world who was taken as crew on European ships.2 The word had its cognate in the Arabic askari (soldier), which then passed into Swahili, coming to mean a member of a local population who fought for colonial armies in Africa (today it connotes policeman or security guard in Kenya and Tanzania). In its migration south across the continent 2 In his 2008 reflection on the Indian Ocean world and ‘Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail’, Amitav Ghosh writes that the word ‘lascar’ ‘belongs to two kinds of jargon, the nautical and the colonial, and its meaning is specific to those contexts’ (rep. in Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson, Eyes Across the Water 16).

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during the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century, the term was taken up by white Rhodesian counterinsurgency units who had recruited and ‘turned’ guerrilla fighters of the liberation movements fighting for independence in what would become Zimbabwe. Because members of the South African Police Service often received training in Rhodesia, askari passed in turn into South African usage. Carrying this more particular sense, it was brought into the final stand of white supremacy in Africa, the delayed decolonisation that makes South African history seem out of time with the continent’s history – apartheid as, in the title of Jacques Derrida’s 1983 essay, Le dernier mot du racisme (‘Racism’s Last Word’). Again, one can see vulnerability of a project that engages the question of collaboration within a just liberation struggle, or the risk in making a statement like ‘for most South Africans the face of apartheid was black’ (12) – here Dlamini is referring to the bureaucrats, teachers and policemen that staffed apartheid institutions. Some reviewers deemed it a book that could only have been written by a black South African; others worried about its arguments falling into the wrong hands, and being used to support a resurgent apartheid denialism, or (more insidiously) to enable a vision of South African history which collapses together Afrikaner and African nationalist projects – whether as worthy foes, similar kinds of political project, or comparable political aberrations (see Davis, ‘Betrayal Chronicles’). As such, we enter the world of mirror images and mirages that any history of intelligence and counter-intelligence must navigate. Not everyone could become an askari, we are reminded during an interview with the imprisoned Gregory Sibusiso Radebe: ‘One needed to have been a trained insurgent before once could become a counterinsurgent’ (41). Showing his characteristic linguistic attentiveness, Dlamini remarks: ‘Askaris were a breed apart. They were lethal because, as former freedom fighters, they were fluent in the rhetoric of revolution. They could identify activists in any locality and knew how to trade in fictions of racial solidarity’ (42). Radebe comments, ‘without irony’: ‘These guys [askaris] were not impostors. They came from the outside [exile]. He knows exactly what to say. He speaks the language’ (42). But what kind of language of can this subject’s story be told in? Sedibe spent nine years as a highly respected ANC operative, and then virtually the same length of time as part of the apartheid government’s counterinsurgency unit, or rather death squad, based at the notorious Vlakplaas farm near Pretoria. The release of its commander, Eugene de Kock, on parole in 2015 (not to mention his subsequent appearance at a literary festival where a book about him was being launched in 2016) has renewed debates about memory and accountability in South Africa – and also the way in which victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations are required to occupy the same civic spaces.

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‘Mr Sedibe would today have been either the Head of the army or Head of the Defence Force or the Minister of Defence’, De Kock stated in a TRC amnesty hearing of 15 February 2000 (quoted 133). As with Leftwich’s ‘I Gave the Names’, such fluent confession takes us into tonally and ethically uncertain zones. A militaristic tribute to a worthy enemy works towards self-exoneration in subtle ways, producing the liberation struggle as a conflict of two warring nationalisms with comparable historical claims: ‘By interfering in his fate, we destroyed a person who could today have acted for us in the same stature as some of the greater military leaders we have known’ (133). Testifying at the TRC, De Kock stated that Sedibe was not a traitor (because he had never abandoned pro-ANC views) but rather ‘a hostage of circumstances and he did not have a choice’ (184). ‘I never used him like an askari. I treated him like an officer’, De Kock states when interviewed by the author, repeating his ‘by-now standard line’ (56). But Dlamini rejects the claim, undercutting such decorous language with a depiction of the grotesque intimacies and sadistic co-dependencies of the Vlakplaas unit. In one chapter, the text seeks to reconstruct Sedibe’s torture at the hands of De Kock and other policemen who took turns to ‘work on him’ while lamb roasted on a spit outside: What could be more personal than De Kock sharing his anxiety meds to prevent Sedibe from dying of a heart attack, or using his bare hands to beat Sedibe to within an inch of his life, almost precipitating the very heart attack he did not want to claim Sedibe? (79)

Nine years as a heroic comrade; nine years as a notorious askari – the book works across the symmetry and discontinuity of these two different identities, trying to theorise the relation between them: as political labels but also psychological states of being. Did the latter identity entirely efface the former? Could it even be said that some askaris (as several claimed) retained their initial belief system even while working for the enemy? What decisions, calculations and rationalisations inform this kind of life, and can anyone who has not undergone torture even presume to comment on it? In a review for the Mail & Guardian, Gcobani Qambela objected to Dlamini’s use of the word ‘choice’ in such a context, quoting American academic Saidiya Hartman’s reminder that ‘consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option’ (‘Torture’, online). He goes on: ‘Dlamini’s conclusion – that Sedibe “was a moral agent who made informed choices along the way” – is a form of violent erasure.’ Yet in fact, this is less Dlamini’s conclusion than an anxious hypothesis that he tests in an enormous range of different cases and historical contexts, trying to isolate notorious instances of collaboration within a broad spectrum of complicity and accommodation; unwilling to limit his enquiry by nullifying or discounting the agency of the individuals he writes about.

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Sedibe died in 1994, officially from alcoholism and depression, and apparently having made overtures to the ANC about rejoining the organisation. Many rumours circulated around whether his death may have been accidental, and this dependence on unverifiable information is something the text must grapple with throughout: it works amid secrets that continue to act on and shape the post-apartheid settlement. Indeed, metaphors of the unsettled and unreconciled permeate the work, almost to the point of formal collapse. The book ‘owes its existence in a general sense to the TRC’, we read in the introduction, but ‘it avoids the simplistic binary of perpetrator and victim favoured by the Commission’ (16). It also finds itself unable to rely on the Commission’s model of truth as something aggregative or additive, as a series of converging processes that will lead to the kind of ‘full disclosure’ required for amnesty applications. As we saw in the introduction, the TRC Final Report posited four different modalities of truth-telling: factual and forensic truth; personal and narrative truth; social or ‘dialogue’ truth; healing and restorative truth.3 But it was largely beyond the scope of such a report to engage the question of when such differently conceived techniques or genealogies of truth might contradict or work against each other. It is just this kind of contested and cross-stitched non-fictional terrain that Askari enters in trying to read the complex encounters of circumstance, psychology and agency in the act of political betrayal – and what the psychic and social aftermaths of these might be for post-liberation South Africa. ‘As a nation, we would do well to examine the taboos, the secrets and disavowals at the core of our collective memories’ (260) – the last lines of the book leave open the question of exactly how its implications might be taken forward, and how a largely unspoken history of intimacies between opposing political elites continues to shape the post-apartheid settlement. The result is a highly complex and unresolved text, but one that must remain suspicious of complexity and irresolution – in the sense that these might work to excuse the inexcusable, or explain the inexplicable. The remaining sections of this chapter explore how this plays out in the book’s narrative positioning, its techniques of analogy and its acute attention to language – a quality which I see as Dlamini’s covert, ongoing subject as a writer: on every page one senses an impatience with the narrow orthodoxies of available public discourse.

3 See Vol. 1, Chapter 5 of the TRC Report: ‘Concepts and Principles’: ‘Truth’, 110–114.

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Writing the absent subject Non-fiction and the problem of the non-verifiable

‘The story recounted here does not have a reliable narrator’, we read on the second page, in an introduction notable for the range of its caveats about the evidentiary basis of the book we are about to read: ‘Mr X1, whose voice can be heard in snippets through the book, told so many lies that he cannot be trusted’ (2). Neither, Dlamini goes on, can any of the individuals who worked with Sedibe on both sides of the political divide be regarded as entirely reliable: ‘Their recollections are tainted by fear and the desire to give apartheid secrets an afterlife in democratic South Africa’ (4). The factual basis for the book becomes still more destabilised when we read about the enormous destruction of documents by the outgoing apartheid state’s military, police and intelligence services in 1993, when 44 tonnes of archival material were fed into the furnaces of the state-owned steel producer Iscor. This ‘paper Auschwitz’ (in the hyperbolic metaphor of Bell and Ntsebeza in their book Unfinished Business) hampered the investigative work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and consigned much evidence about the extent and nature of secret accommodations between outgoing and incoming nationalisms to oblivion. Bell and Ntsebeza go on: ‘Into the flames too went the files of the frightened ones, their craven acceptance of compromise and collaboration etched in dry officialise, but still sweating fear from every syllable. There were also the records of the venal individuals whose greed had driven them to verbal betrayal and beyond’ (quoted in Askari 117). To read these self-assured and rather lurid lines is to realise the scope of Dlamini’s achievement in refusing the shop-worn languages of public censure, or what he elsewhere refers to as the ‘denunciatory politics that marked authoritarianism’ (259), whether of the left or the right. The result of this ‘purge on social memory’, in the words of historian Verne Harris (‘Destruction’ 42), is more insidious and hard to gauge than simply a documentary absence; it also means that what does survive (the police file of Mr X1, for example) is in danger of being awarded too much significance – so skewing the proper relation between individual and collective histories, between the anomalous and the typical. Askari, in other words, has an informational vacuum at its centre. It is a biography grafted onto (as one reviewer put it) ‘the slightest of frames’: a textured and immensely detailed work, but one built on a very small core of verifiable information (Donaldson, online). Virtually the only time we hear Sedibe’s own voice is in the context of a stagemanaged and carefully scripted apartheid show trial, and the result is that he emerges less as a re-animated biographical subject than a kind of hollow man, or silhouette, around which is ranged an enormous apparatus of knowledge guarantees: rhetorical caveats, maps, photographs, and almost 1000 endnotes

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detailing sources with very different evidentiary bases, provenances and levels of authoritativeness. As such, the text stages a dialectic of archival absence and excess: as if the abundant textual signs of non-fictionality and ‘facticity’ are in a kind of compensatory relationship with the necessary hollowness at its centre.4 Even beyond this, the Dlamini-narrator confesses his own lack of control and adequate analytic distance from a research project that has obsessed him for more than half his life. Entering the complex rhetorical positioning where an admission of not knowing may actually serve to consolidate narrative authority, he suggests that he has not achieved the right balance between exposition and understanding: ‘Furthermore, I cannot say that I have not judged him’ (2). Like Van Woerden’s account of a long-term fascination with Tsafendas, or Gobodo-Madikizela’s engagement with Eugene de Kock, we are again in the realm of an over-invested, over-determined research endeavour. Askari is then a non-fictive text in which the relation between personal affect and sociological analysis – between the different kinds of ‘subject’ posited by autobiographical and biographical impulses – becomes increasingly difficult for the text to model and manage. As in Native Nostalgia, this is registered in a generic unsteadiness: it splices together and code-switches between a range of different prose types, creating a revealing narrative unevenness. In an interview, Dlamini describes the spy thriller as one kind of narrative model, and claims that he read a great deal of Ian Fleming in preparation (Grant-Marshall, online). This is perhaps evident in the parts in which we hear of Sedibe’s abduction in Swaziland, his torture and ‘turning’ at Vlakplaas, and then the apparent relish with which he applied himself to the task of hunting down former comrades. But in general, Askari is very different from those versions of the anti-apartheid struggle modelled on the political thriller. Peter Harris’s In a Different Time (2008), about the trial of the Delmas Four, would be a prime example of the latter. His work (also a recipient of the Alan Paton award for non-fiction) is plotted via red herrings and the bait-andswitch models of crime fiction and the legal thriller. That is, crucial narrative information is deliberately withheld; and so part of the pleasure of the text 4 In his discussion of Dlamini’s work, Nick Mulgrew applies the concept of facticity as developed by historian Barbara W. Tuchman to explore ‘how webs of accepted “good facts” can be structured in a narrative to make non-facts seem like facts, and thus shore up a text’s claim to authority’ (‘A Negotiated Authority’, forthcoming). Considering the 37 pages of notes at the end of Askari (which list items ranging from interviews to film reels, novels to essays, public trials and police files to confidential Vlakplaas documents recording askaris’ pager numbers’) he remarks: ‘Even though such an esoteric range of reference will contain sources of wildly differing authorities, the scale of such research invokes the mutual self-validation that is the hallmark of a collection of related facts’.

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resides in readers being deliberately misled or duped by subterfuges (‘It reads like a John Grisham novel, but it’s all true’, reads one of the reviews on the back cover). In contrast, the momentum of Askari is mainly analytic; the narrative discourse is powered less by the relation of historical events than an evolving struggle to understand them. It is a book of false starts and cul-de-sacs, with various chapters logging the often-frustrated attempt to plot a figure like Sedibe, or to inhabit the decisions he made. It is a domain where, as the author comments, ‘the social sciences reach the limits of individual prediction’ (149). As it approaches this border zone – that which separates non-fiction narrative from the experiments in notating another’s consciousness permitted by literary fiction – Askari also braids in a variety of autobiographical traces. It not only tells the story of how Dlamini came to the story, but also examines episodes from his life which might have been said to involve degrees of complicity and collaboration, however minor, with the apartheid regime (for example, siding with a schoolteacher against some older, disruptive ‘comrades’ when he was a young pupil, post-1976). In another section, the prose migrates into third-person autrebiography (not unlike Coetzee’s Boyhood) to explore the question of a possible collaborator within the family, a section that Dlamini (citing the built-in anxieties of Lewin’s epilogue to Stones Against the Mirror) recommends the reader treat as fiction. Indeed, the book is in many ways self-reflexive discourse on life writing and its problems, tracing the warring auto/biographical impulses at play in a political struggle which traded in biographical information, and in which power was manifested through the textual command of a life. One of the standard requirements for recruits joining the ANC was the writing of an autobiographical sketch: a practice which allowed the organisation to contact family and next of kin in case of disappearance or death, but which also functioned as a kind of basic security screening, whereby different versions could be compared to each other for discrepancies.5 As we have seen in the ARM materials, the extensive archive of South African prison writing often shows up the double-edgedness of life writing during the Struggle: as testimony but also as a possible means of incrimination. Activist memoirs often default to a scene of interrogation in which captured activists are shocked by the accuracy of the autobiographies read to them by security police. ‘It was mindboggling to listen to their exposition’, claims Mwezi Twala, an ANC member who defected to the Security Branch in the late 1980s, and 5 Interview with Stanley Manong, author of If We Must Die: An Autobiography of a Former Commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe (2015), 13 May 2016. This interview was conducted in the writers’ enclosure of the Franschhoek Literary Festival, with Eugene de Kock sitting at an adjoining table in conversation with author and journalist Redi Tlhabi (he was subsequently asked to leave the Sunday Times awards dinner, and a media debate ensued).

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is quoted by Dlamini: ‘They knew more about me than I did’ (121). Dlamini also turns to Lewin’s account of his interrogation in Bandiet: ‘And they began telling me all [his emphasis] about myself, precisely so. It was eerie’ (quoted 121). At another point, the text quotes Breyten Breytenbach’s True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist to evoke well-thumbed police files with mugshots that were ‘brought up to date in the way other perverts would their girly magazines’ (quoted 69). (Though here again we enter the unstable and convoluted realms of confessive autobiography: as Twala, Lewin and Breytenbach discuss the discussion of their own ‘lives’, an insistence on apartheid omniscience could in turn be treated as partly self-interested, in the sense of being self-exculpatory.) This is a recurring pattern in Dlamini’s work: a continual quoting, a reaching for supporting sources that (when examined more closely) are themselves unverifiable, doubtful, fictional, ‘literary’. Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Achmat Dangor, Patrick Flanery, Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Serote, Gillian Slovo, Zoë Wicomb: the fictions of all these writers are braided into the enquiry, fictions that are nonetheless quoted as a kind of ‘evidence’, and often in abbreviated or attenuated ways. The appeal to referential authority, that is, often seems to lie more in the act of citation rather than its content.6 The problem of information, in other words – its reliability, provenance, and its double-edgedness – is embedded in both the subject and methodological challenges that the work faces. The dense web of information woven around an absent centre is also evident in the analogical quality of the book: its constant reaching for historical comparisons with other parts of the globe. Askari is intensely, even compulsively, comparative, even more so than Native Nostalgia. The enquiry into this ultimate form of collaboration is framed within a long awareness of those who have been on the wrong side of history, spinning off centrifugally into other examples and case studies to form a kind of global anthology of political betrayal. Dlamini quotes Jean-Paul Sartre’s reflections on Paris under German occupation, and the instinctive ‘humanitarian helpfulness’ that French citizens found themselves showing, despite themselves, to German troops (quoted 6). Several comparisons are also drawn with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, and the revelations about the extent of collaboration provided by the release of the Stasi files after German reunification. At one point, Dlamini writes: 6 For example, when Dlamini takes up the question of the African Resistance Movement, he records the unwillingness of one former activist to forgive Leftwich, stating that ‘it was one thing to talk under torture […] but quite another to go beyond even what the police asked of them’ (246). Following the footnote of this statement, one is directed to a reference that simply states ‘Personal communication’, with no further guidance in how this claim might be corroborated.

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Sedibe’s story could be told in a number of languages, including the Afrikaans of the hensoppers and joiners who worked with the British against their fellow Afrikaners in the South African War; the Arabic of the Harkis who fought with the French against Algerian independence; the Umbundu and Ukwanyama (to mention just two languages) of the Africans who fought for Portugal against the liberation of Angola […] (101)

But the first claim here is intriguingly complicated or belied by the book’s global reach. For while Sedibe’s story may have general analogues in all of these anti-colonial struggles, what Dlamini’s text underlines is how much resides in the locally specific idioms of betrayal, the irreducibly particular nature of the terms that have evolved in various political conflicts. The verraiers of the South African War; the quislings who worked with the Nazis in Europe; the notorious ralliés of the French-Algerian conflict; the paranoia surrounding the figure of the impimpi in the 1980s in South Africa – the book reveals a lexicon of betrayal where etymologies emerge from very specific historical circumstances, and language is always an event under contest. (The precise meaning and lexical field of the term askari is something that the book explores rather than states outright – indeed, a discussion of its definition is the way that Dlamini begins his interviews with the few anonymised ‘cadres’ or ‘policemen’ who agree to be interviewed for the project.) This tension – that Sedibe’s story could, in one sense, ‘be told in a number of languages’, but that it also carries irreducibly local and untranslatable inflections and specificities – is one that surfaces ever more as the book progresses. As Askari circles back to the psychology of those who were turned – and the vexed question of agency and ‘choice’ within the dark chamber of detention and torture – it increasingly draws links between South Africa and Latin America, moving to and fro along a South-South latitude and seeking to shore up an impossible subject via continual recourse to similar (but, of course, not identical) situations. As such it is a work that throws up questions about the mechanics of comparative work itself (what it enables, what it elides) and also the politics of an analogy that did much to shape the TRC’s conditions of possibility.

South Africa, South America and the politics of analogy Comparison and misreading in the TRC Final Report

At this point, I want to digress and consider an intriguing moment of literary quotation (or rather, misquotation) across the South Atlantic, one that is embedded within volume one of the TRC Final Report itself. In the Chairperson’s Foreword, Archbishop Desmond Tutu invokes the work of Chilean

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playwright Ariel Dorfman as a rebuttal of those ‘who urged that the past should be forgotten – glibly declaring that we should “let bygones be bygones”’: This option was rightly rejected because such amnesia would have resulted in further victimisation of victims by denying their awful experiences. In Ariel Dorfmann’s [sic] play, Death and the Maiden, a woman ties up the man who has injured her. She is ready to kill him when he repeats his lie that he did not rape or torture her. It is only when he admits his violations that she lets him go. His admission restores her dignity and her identity. Her experience is confirmed as real and not illusory and her sense of self is affirmed. (7)

As such, Tutu presses Death and the Maiden into service for one of the TRC’s dominant narrative shapes: that of a therapeutic restitution of selfhood through victims’ acts of telling their stories, and of having the truth of gross human rights violations publicly acknowledged by perpetrators (‘Revealing is Healing’, to quote the banners hung in the locations where TRC hearings were held). The comparison between South Africa and Latin America was one often made during the TRC process of the 1990s: these were parts of the world that had suffered and then emerged from repression at roughly the same time. Such concurrent histories of repression and reckoning would also seem to have produced comparable bodies of narrative non-fiction. While Pablo Calvi explores the well-established genre of testimonio as ‘Latin America’s Own “New Journalism”’, his survey shows that in fact, its landmark works by authors like Miguel Barnet, Gabriel García Márquez and Rodolfo Walsh would seem to have more in common with the documentary narratives of late apartheid and the TRC texts of the South African transition than with Tom Wolfe and Co. These are non-fictions emerging from ‘a sense of journalistic urgency and humane disgust for the aberrations committed by the authoritarian regimes in their countries’ (73). Like many works of postcolonial life writing, they are texts that work through subjects with emblematic and allegorical resonances, narrating collective experience in a way that, as Calvi remarks, ‘greatly differed from the seeming “atypicality” or individualism of the characters and stories portrayed by American narrative non-fiction’ (76). In a 2011 collection of essays and non-fiction, Writing the Deep South, Dorfman explores these two theatres of political struggle in the southern hemisphere as ‘mirrors’ for one other, while simultaneously explaining how ‘September 11’ had signified in a different sense for Chileans long before the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. Tuesday 11 September 1973 marked the date of General Pinochet’s coup (with covert support from the United States) against the socialist government of Salvador Allende: ‘in 1976, the year of the Soweto massacre’, he remarks in his 2010 Mandela Lecture, ‘we were suffering a slow massacre of our own’ (4). The north-south disjuncture is replaced by a further series of south-south resemblances: ‘Vorster and Botha were the pals

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of our Generalissimo, Augusto Pinochet – they exchanged medals and ambassadors and pariah state visits, they sent each other admiring gifts, they shared weapons and intelligence and even tear gas canisters’ (4). Writing the Deep South also includes ‘Final and First Words on Death and the Maiden’, a reflection on his globally successful and much travelled play that suggests why it might have seemed so amenable to the South African situation. The questions he sought to address were as follows: How can those who tortured and those who were tortured co-exist in the same land? […] And how do you reach the truth if lying has become a habit? How do we keep the past alive without becoming its prisoner? How do we forget it without risking its repetition in the future? Is it legitimate to sacrifice the truth to ensure peace? (122)

The questions operate at a level that is sufficiently generalised for international travel; indeed they partake of a global human rights discourse that came to surround the TRC as a heavily mediatised, internationally broadcast event – one in which a range of global hopes and proxies were invested. Registering something of this tension between specificity and universal applicability, Dorfman goes on: ‘How to tell stories that are both popular and ambiguous, stories that can be understood by large audiences and yet contain stylistic experimentation, that are mythical but also about immediate human beings?’ (123). And yet, here it is worth considering the limits of this South-South analogy, or what happens when seductive but unsettled narrative shapes (‘stories that are both popular but ambiguous’) are put to work as evidence. For, as Kerry Bystrom remarks of Tutu’s invocation of the play in the Chairperson’s Foreword, this ‘transposition of an actual play into the juridical drama of the TRC’ is intriguing on a number of levels: ‘not only is the use of a fictional character to justify the decision to pursue the “truth” of apartheid a bit unusual, but Tutu also refers to a character from a Chilean rather than a South African play, and a play that, moreover, he misreads in a fundamental but meaningful way’ (‘Literature, Remediation, Remedy’ 25). In the original playscript (as well as the South African version staged in 1992 at the Market Theatre), the effect is considerably more ambiguous and ‘open’ than Tutu suggests here. The drama concerns Paulina Salas, a victim of torture and rape under the Chilean dictatorship who believes (many years later) that the perpetrator has fallen into her hands in a remote setting. The scene is then set for a self-directed trial and a confession – a kind of accounting for the past that was not structurally available in Chile’s Rettig Commission of the early 1990s, given that it was concerned only with cases of death or disappearance. Yet much of the play’s power turns on the lingering uncertainty as to whether the man in question is indeed the torturer and rapist Dr Robert Miranda, or whether a ‘confession’ has been extorted from an innocent man in an act of

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displaced anger over an unresolved, unacknowledged past. In either interpretation, the final scene of the play retains a troubling irresolution rather than an achieved psychic wholeness. Paulina encounters Dr Miranda at a public performance of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ (his String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, the music that had been played by her tormentor while she was blindfolded). But the dreamlike language of the scene leaves open the question of whether Paulina has ‘come to terms’ with occupying the same civic spaces as her erstwhile torturer, or whether she remains ‘transfixed – traumatised – by the memory of his ghost’ (Bystrom 29). This unexpected instance of literary criticism is emblematic of the intriguing misprision that can happen as comparisons are drawn across space and time. It is also revealing of how the comparison between South Africa and Latin America shows up a marked series of disjunctures and transferences, beyond the obvious and overt resemblances. In one of the early, most searching critiques of the TRC project, Mahmood Mamdani expressed reservations about the manner in which the Commissioners inclined towards global analogies that ‘tended to dehistoricise the phenomenon of apartheid by seeing it as just another version of a political dictatorship that carried out gross violations of human rights’ (55). In trying to locate South African history on a universal plane of rights violations, such global comparisons (he argued) risked dislocating both apartheid and its victims from a larger history of colonialism and its victims. The particular Latin analogy obscured what was distinctive about apartheid, because it ‘obscured the fact that the violence of apartheid was aimed mainly at entire communities and not individuals, and, as a consequence, reconciliation too would need to be between communities and not just individuals.’ He goes on: Finally, it obscured the fact that, unlike political dictatorships that could look back to a time in history when today’s adversaries were members of a single political community – and could thus speak of reconciling and thereby restoring that political community – South Africa was confronted with a unique challenge: how to bring erstwhile colonisers and colonised into a single political community for the first time ever in history. (55–6)

In its eagerness to assert the universal relevance of the Commission, Mamdani suggests, the dominant TRC discourse rewrote the history of apartheid as one of a drama played out between warring political elites (of state agents against political activists) rather than addressing itself to the more difficult question of apartheid’s larger crime against humanity, its confounding mixture of legalism and illegality that affected the lives of millions, not just the 20,000 or so victims listed in the TRC Final Report. The ‘rule of law’ upheld and fetishised in white South Africa, he shows in Citizen and Subject, was combined with multiple ‘customary’ regimes, descended from colonial rule, that were used to govern

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black South Africans. And in accepting the legalistic distinction between, say, ‘political prisoners’ and pass-law offenders, the TRC could only address a partial and symbolic fraction of the violence that constituted apartheid. That is to say, the TRC’s focus on state-sanctioned murder from the 1960s (which stressed the removal of constitutional limits to the exercise of state power, and had clear parallels with the Latin American dictatorships) meant that it could not pay sufficient attention to what was distinctive about the regime: the creation of a juridical structure that racialised the population into fundamentally unequal groups. It was the latter development, Mamdani writes, ‘that defined apartheid as a legal form of state, providing the real benchmark for its legal birth and illuminating the contours of its legal personality’ (57). This last phrase is, I think, a telling one in suggesting the deeper subject of Dlamini’s project. It is one that seeks to sketch the psychic contours and schizoid personality of a regime that ‘operated without contradiction both within and without its own “legal” bounds’ (15).7 Even as Sedibe might emerge as a kind of hollow man or silhouette, the ramifying narratives that surround him sketch in the legal illegality and socio-political ‘personality’ produced by colonial and apartheid orders: a cross-hatched and complex psychic realm of due process mixed with extra-legal torture and terror; of everyday accommodations combined with iconic and spectacular violence; of life experience not easily or adequately captured via the dyad of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’. In doing so it sketches the psychic posture underlying the transition, which came to depend on keeping secrets about collaboration that would have been too damaging to reveal, given the levels of collusion produced by apartheid. In one sense, then, Askari, reactivates the South Africa/Latin America analogy in a productive way, paying attention to the unfinished business and unsettled accounts of other post-repression societies. In another sense, though, it is revealing that the most articulate and far-reaching models for the psychology of collaboration in Dlamini’s book emerge in the autobiographical accounts of collaborators from Chile and Argentina whose words have been translated from Spanish into English. Again, it must reach elsewhere to theorise this hollow centre. In the later chapters of Askari, Dlamini draws increasingly on a substantial body of work on collaboration in Pinochet’s Chile and under the Argentine junta. The most explicit comparison is drawn between Sedibe and Luz Arce, a Socialist Party activist and member of Salvador Allende’s security detail who was entrapped in March 1974. Described by a Chilean academic as a ‘definitive 7 At one point Dlamini provides the grimly comic anecdote of how John Vorster, on an official visit to South America in 1975, asked the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner why his country possessed a navy given that it had no seaport: ‘Stroessner replied that it was for the same reason that South Africa had a minister of justice’ (15).

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part of our national history of infamy’ (quoted 232), Arce eventually became a salaried member of the National Intelligence Directorate (even giving Pinochet’s officers lectures on Marxism); yet she also moved back from exile to Chile in 1990 order to take part in that country’s Rettig Commission. As such, Dlamini is able to draw on a textured body of work from a society that held a much more explicit discussion of collaboration during its transition. Among various other voices, Dlamini cites the Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit in wondering whether the ambition and ‘bureaucratisation’ of Arce’s collaboration might be read as ‘a compensatory act designed to accommodate herself to power and, more importantly, to rebuild her shattered ego after it was “broken” during torture’ (233). Dlamini speculates that Sedibe, like Arce, might have been ‘seduced by his proximity to power’: ‘It is possible that, given the licence to kill by a state whose agents had brought him close to his own death, Sedibe acquired a sense of self that compensated for the shame of his collaboration’ (239). Again, the reach for analogy is revealing but vulnerable. The South African situation was one in which, as Mamdani commented, the idea of single political community, with a shared lexicon or language, was something that still needed to be achieved. While the Latin American examples furnish the reader of Askari with a range of nuanced enquiries into the psychology of confession, they also show up how South Africa’s (and the TRC’s) official lingua franca, English, remains a blunt and evasive medium for the realms of experience that it is seeking to express. ‘Bad English’, Antjie Krog has remarked, is ‘our national language’: ‘the language in which all South Africans can, for the first time, talk as (un)equals to one another’ (‘Literature’). Within Dlamini’s book, nothing comes close to the level of self-examination and disclosure that we read (translated from the Spanish) in the auto/ biographical texts from Latin America. Instead, Askari is filled with language, the English language, as a means of circumlocution and concealment. In the transcripts of trials, interviews or TRC hearings – those few moments in the text in which we actually get to ‘hear’ the words of various askaris – what one hears, if anything, is meaning disappearing and receding behind a language that struggles to capture the tonalities and textures of South Africa’s long history of intimate enmity. Instead, it falls away into a zone of tautology and obfuscation – intentional, unintentional, who can say? – where any working notions of truth or sincerity can hardly be recovered. ‘There are many people in South Africa who have this historical problem with their past’, Tlhomedi Mfalapitsa stated during a TRC hearing of May 1999, one of the few individuals to apply for amnesty both for crimes committed as an MK member and as a Vlakplaas askari: ‘some being leaders in this country’. He goes on:

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Even though perhaps they might be exonerated in terms of their status. But in a sense we all grapple with this history and this history we didn’t invent it, invent it somewhere in the ghettos or in the backyard of my mother. It was invented in the arena of politics in South Africa. (quoted 215)

Yet context and complexity, Dlamini remarks when reviewing such testimonies, ‘can only take one so far’: ‘complexity is no argument by itself ’ (221). Pressed by Advocate Leah Gcabashe to account for his own choices rather than invoking a broader context, Mfalapitsa objects to the line of questioning as ‘mutilating my history’: MFALAPITSA: […] I don’t say she mustn’t interrogate me, as it is her right. But I have a problem when she want [sic] to run away with one part of my integrity, sir, and make it my motive. Once she want [sic] to say I was, you know, inspired by my self-preservation. I don’t think that is right. I was inspired by all forces taken together. I was one person. I was one person who had fear. (216, square brackets as in original)

The result, on the page, is a confounding mixture of artlessness, evasion and linguistic slippage – the kind of impossibly involuted speech act that Askari must take as its data throughout. From the TRC’s grey zones, to the Farlam Commission into the Marikana massacre, to the Life Esidimeni hearings into the death of over 140 patients after release from psychiatric facilities in Gauteng – the question of what happens to English as lingua franca in the context of the commission or the enquiry is, I would suggest, part of the unfinished business of literary and cultural studies in South Africa.8 * ‘I have tried to treat Sedibe with dignity’, writes Dlamini in his closing passages, ‘to tell his story as part of a series of stories about collaboration and complicity under apartheid. By telling his story as just one among many, I hope I have shown those with similar stories to tell that it can be done’ (260). Yet as I have suggested, the text is barely able to tell his story. It is less a biography than a centrifugal, labyrinthine encyclopaedia of betrayal. At one point, Dlamini invokes Borges’s story ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ to reflect on the case of Peter Mokaba, a beloved ANC organiser who was honoured in having a World Cup football stadium named after him. The cost of officially outing him as an informer was deemed too damaging to 8 The death of patients after being transferred by the state from healthcare provider Life Esidimeni to 27 other NGOs was described as ‘the greatest cause of human rights violation since the dawn of our democracy’ in advocate Dirk Groenewald’s opening statement at the alternative dispute resolution hearings in Parktown, Johannesburg, October 2017 (quoted in Bornman, online).

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the ruling alliance: hence the decision to collaborate (as Borges’s Irish rebels do when discovering that their messiah and leader Fergus Kilpatrick is a traitor) in a pageant of blamelessness and heroic commemoration. The Borgesian intertext (from a writer whose most famous Ficciones impersonate documentary prose) seems apt for an exhaustively referenced work that teeters on the edge of its impossible subject, a shape-shifting book that one can take different routes and ‘itineraries’ through, according to the web of narratives and references that make up its pages. As a post-TRC work, Askari departs from the allegorical investments (or receptions) of earlier South African life writing and Struggle memoirs (in which an exemplary life comes to figure as a narrative of national becoming) and moves towards the more complex operations of archival retrieval and speculation within realms where more traditional historiography would yield only silence. If life writing as allegory often reads an already existing narrative shape ‘backwards’ onto past existences, then the more tentative, psychobiographical experiments in authoring ‘useless lives’ that I have considered over the last three chapters seek out more open, less overbearing and narrative plots. Rather than serving a metonymic function, a life as ‘archival sliver’ becomes a point of narrative access to a past that is still in formation and contention (Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver’). Unable or unwilling to posit the ultimate truth of a figure like Sedibe, Askari nonetheless sets about reducing the number of lies in circulation – a suitably negative definition of the project of this ambitious non-fiction. Its larger, more diffuse subject could be read as the disappointment of the post-transitional moment, a disappointment not easily voiced in more explicit public modes (where it is likely to be betrayed into simplifications, and overlap with reactionary critiques of a post-liberation South Africa) but distilled and refracted instead through the webs of intricate and coded non-fictional forms. Finally, perhaps it is possible to make some larger, theoretical remarks about the ‘literatures of betrayal’ considered across the last two chapters. In reading a series of ambiguously poised non-fictional and documentary works, I have tried to trace the relation between (profoundly destructive) betrayal described within the texts, but also the kind of (possibly generative and productive) betrayals effected by the text in the world. In doing so, I have been gesturing towards the idea that the work of the literary in literary non-fiction might be to take the risk of betraying itself (or of allowing itself to be betrayed). As historical document, Askari could be said to be limited, perhaps even dangerous; but should a work of critical non-fiction be safe? Perhaps it is a quality of discomfort and risk – the spectre of a dangerous, even catastrophic misreading within the fraught cultural politics of contemporary South Africa – which might be the property distinguishing certain strains of narrative non-fiction, making them disturbing and elusive rather than generic and informational. These are

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works of narrative art that continue to act on private and social imaginaries, long after the historical events that they take as their subjects have elapsed. The sustained attention that these post-TRC texts give to doubtful sites of selfhood and expediency does risk muddying or undermining the moral absolutes of the anti-apartheid Struggle as it is often produced. But this, I would argue, is merely a secondary by-product of their real importance: to narrate how the death of apartheid was not a punctual event, but an on-going, uneven social process: one that is happening in different ways and at different tempos, split in innumerable ways across institution and individuals, ranging from the most public languages to the finest tissues of subjective awareness, and one that will reach across generations.

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A very strange relationship

Ambition, seduction and scandal in post-apartheid life writing

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Questions of autobiography and the truth of the self have occupied many writers and thinkers across the South African transition. The previous chapters addressed just a few entries in the outpouring of memoir and personal testimony that, from the late 1980s onwards, makes this country’s literature a rich case study in the construction of the non-fictional ‘I’ and the limits of the confessional mode. Yet the question of biography remains curiously undertheorised in comparison, both locally and internationally, despite its high sales and strong cultural presence as a genre of trade non-fiction. Often the most far-reaching reflections on the form tend to be by practitioners: Hermione Lee’s life of Virginia Woolf is often cited as a conceptually rich account of literary biography, especially given that its subject had herself thought so carefully about the form. A good biography, Woolf wrote, ‘is the record of the things that change rather than of the things that happen’ – a line that the biographers I consider in this chapter and the next will keep circling back to.1 The phrase ‘life writing’, which Lee uses throughout her scholarship and has done much to popularise, was coined by Woolf to suggest a more liberated way of writing about people, one that the novelist set up in opposition to the dully informational, commoditised or pompous ‘shilling lives’ of nineteenthcentury great men. The modernist impulse of Bloomsbury and ‘the New Biography’ – to access psychological complexity, to deal ironically with selfmythologisation and to puncture biographical heroism – this finds a South African echo in William Plomer’s Cecil Rhodes (1933). As a slim and bitingly satirical work modelled on Lytton Strachey’s irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918), it takes aim at the hagiographic tomes that had begun to appear on the now departed imperialist. ‘As a character put faithfully into a novel, Rhodes might impress but would no doubt fail to “convince” the reviewers’, Plomer remarked, playing within the literariness of literary biography: ‘They would complain that a character must develop and it is perhaps difficult to find traces of real development in Rhodes’s nature’ (46). Later in the South African century, it is the psychologist N. Chabani Manganyi, an accomplished and experimental biographer of Es’kia Mphahlele and 1 The line is from the Times Literary Supplement of 29 November 1917, quoted by Lee in the introduction to her 1996 biography of Woolf (11).

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artists Dumile Feni and Gerard Sekoto, who has done most to think about the intricate and intimate process of interviewing and writing about another over many years, and how the complex relationship that accrues between biographical author and living subject might be approached via a more analytic lens. ‘Practitioners of psychobiography’, he wrote in a 1983 essay, ‘believe that a biographer in seeking the truth of his subject must seek his own truth simultaneously. This is another way of saying that a biographer must strive for a satisfactory degree of self-knowledge’ (36). Interviewed by Thengani Ngwenya in 2002, he clarifies that this does not exactly mean ‘that while writing about somebody else’s life you are at the same time writing about yourself ’: his interviewer’s formulation. Rather, the ‘psychological meaning of that statement’ is that you must in one sense ‘write against yourself – trying to understand and overcome your own prejudices’: ‘What I was trying to say is that it’s important to understand yourself, your own curiosity about the life you are writing about […] so that you do not contaminate the narrative of the other person’s life with your own burdens’ (Ngwenya, ‘“Making History’s Silences Speak”’429). At first glance, this might seem too innocent an idea for literary theory: that a biographical narrative could emerge in some way pure and ‘uncontaminated’ by its author. But Manganyi is less interested in deconstructive or postmodern accounts of the subject than in the psychoanalytic/biographical encounter itself: as a laboratory for sifting, testing and comparing various modes of narrating a life history. And so while he acknowledges Dostoevsky’s remark that ‘A true autobiography is almost an impossibility… man is bound to lie about himself ’ (quoted in ‘Psychobiography’ 37), this does not lead him to the kind of cul-de-sac which we saw in Coetzee’s idea of an interminably selfundermining, infinitely deferred confession. Instead (and importantly for the following chapters), Manganyi moves the question of auto/biography into the frame of an inter-subjective encounter, or what he calls ‘the relationship paradigm’ (48). That is: a process of working towards ‘a sharing of a truth supposed possible’ via a method of ‘disciplined scepticism’ in which the relation of biographer and subject has something in common with that of analyst and patient (41, 37). A major presence underlying the essay is Erik Erikson, biographer of Gandhi, who remarked in 1968 that just as those who make a profession of ‘psychoanalysing’ others must have undergone their own process of self-analysis, ‘so must we presuppose that the psychohistorian will have developed or acquired a certain self-analytical capacity that would give to his dealings with others, great or small, both the charity of identification and a reasonably good conscience. Ours, too, are “experiments with truth.”’2 2 Erikson quoted in Manganyi, ‘Psychobiography’ 49. In his 2016 memoir Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist, Manganyi applies the Gandhian phrase to his own

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The guiding idea then is one of process: not to divine or discover an ultimate truth of the self, but to experiment with different ways of narrating a life, and via trial and error to re-emplot an individual’s history in the shapes that might be most adequate to the contradictory truths of individual psychology, and most conducive to some measure of psychic integration and health. Though even as he shares this applied and fairly optimistic form of biographical thinking – a ‘therapeutic alliance in which there is a patient’s personal narrative and a two-person search for meaning through psychological interpretation’ – Manganyi also leaves the reader with Freud’s dissonant and cryptic remark on biography (the prospect of his own biography, that is), and one which again summons metaphors of the impossible, unusable and the useless: ‘Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn’t be used’.3 * With all this in mind, the following sections attempt to think more deeply about South African biography as a literary and political form. In this chapter and the next I read across two long and controversial post-apartheid works: Ronald Suresh Roberts’s unauthorised, or rather de-authorised, life of Nadine Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen (2005), and Mark Gevisser’s Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2007). Both eight years in the making, these brick-sized volumes amount to some 1,500 dense pages of life writing when stacked together. While the work of Lewin, Dlamini and Van Woerden that we have encountered in previous chapters was imbued with a poetics of absence and fragments – of microhistorical speculation and archival slivers – the differently poised macrobiographies here tip towards an aesthetic of excess and superabundance. These are ambitious ‘lives’ in the double sense that the word carries in literary history: as both actual existences in time and their writing up. That is: they are long, obsessively researched and immensely detailed biographical projects formally innovative biographical projects, specifically his life of Es’kia Mphahlele. Exiles and Homecomings (1983) involves fictionalised conversations and even the ‘imaginative self-projection’ of the biographer writing in the first person, i.e. from the imagined perspective of his subject Mphahlele (90). As David Attwell remarks, these experiments merit comparison with Boyhood and Youth where Coetzee ‘does the opposite, writing autobiography in the third person’ (Bury Me at the Marketplace 15). For a reflection on these two strategies, and their conditions of possibility, see chapter four of Manganyi’s memoir (which also records his personal and intellectual engagements with Hermione Lee). 3 Manganyi’s line is from his memoir (Apartheid 90). Freud’s is from a 1936 letter in which he fended off an enquiry from a friend and would-be biographer, the novelist Arnold Zweig (quoted in Manganyi ‘Psychobiography’ 50).

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about two individuals – a Nobel laureate and a president – determined to reimagine the narrow templates of socio-political identity that they were born into. Yet the very word ‘determined’ carries the difficult ambiguity that resides at the heart of critical biography. It needs to offer a sufficiently complex and supple account of the relation between individual determination (i.e. personal ambition, resoluteness, the purposeful drama of self-fashioning) and larger social determinants, the supra-individual forces that condition subjectivity in ways that may not even be available to conscious awareness – and are certainly harder to give a satisfying narrative shape to. And if these works are ambitious, I will argue that perhaps they are over-ambitious; if they are determined, then maybe they are over-determined – by which I mean that they exceed or overspill their immediate subjects and become coded discourses about other things: not least the place of the writer and the nature of intellectual freedom under the Mbeki and Zuma administrations. Both biographies show an intriguing lop-sidedness or unevenness as texts bent out of shape by their own determination, and (at least in one case) not sufficiently uncontaminated by personal prejudices and burdens. ‘Thus we have the thickest volumes on some of the strangest subjects’, Steve Biko remarked of ‘liberal’ research projects into black African lives: a 1971 paper that we encountered in the introduction, and one quoted by Roberts in the course of a rhetorically unstable work that continually returns to Gordimer’s encounter with the challenge of Black Consciousness thought. Unstable because Roberts cannot adequately model or manage his mixture of initial admiration and then growing disenchantment for Gordimer following a very public fallout with regard to her authorisation and oversight of the project. ‘My experience with Gordimer is that she acted in relation to the manuscript like the stereotype of Thabo Mbeki, an autocratic control freak’, he told the press, ‘He’s acted in the last two years like the stereotype of Nadine Gordimer, a champion of intellectual liberty’ (quoted in Donadio, online). Roberts was able to make this provocative, cross-wired comparison because his subsequent project presented itself as an account of the ANC leader’s intellectual formation; but Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki (2007) was widely condemned as hagiographic and too close to its subject – a work that effectively destroyed this writer’s reputation in South Africa.4

4 See Meersman (‘Legacy’) for an even-handed survey of works on the Mbeki years, in which he deems Roberts’s Fit to Govern ‘an intellectual hagiography posing as an exegesis of Mbeki’s philosophy’ (427). The biography was dogged by allegations of considerable financial support brokered via the presidency, as well as accusations of plagiarism. HIV/AIDS dissident Anthony Brink would devote an entire, self-published, and often bizarre book to accusations that Roberts had plagiarised his work (see Brink).

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By contrast, The Dream Deferred has been acclaimed as a landmark postapartheid work, and ‘one of the great explanatory narratives of South Africa over the past 60-odd years’ (Russell, online). Almost a decade in the making, Gevisser’s deep (and deeply literary) immersion in Thabo Mbeki’s personal and political formation was published just before the second president of a democratic South Africa was defeated in his bid for a third term as party president of the African National Congress in December 2007, losing to Jacob Zuma (in September 2008, Mbeki was ‘recalled’ as president of the Republic by his party, at which point he resigned: a humiliating end to a once brilliant career). As such, The Dream Deferred is a book whose explanatory power came curiously late; its exhaustive determination to understand a supposedly inscrutable figure like Mbeki placed it in a time out of joint in some way. I will also work toward the idea that it marks some kind of threshold or limit text in post-apartheid life writing. Its ‘literariness’, moreover, did not impress those political economists who saw Mbeki’s life through a more pre-determined narrative of South African transition, and accused his biographer of psychological over-reaching. For critics who regarded the Mbeki era as a slide into AIDSdenialism, centralised political control and neo-liberal capitulation, Gevisser’s empathetic narrative, with its pilgrimages to the sites of Mbeki’s life, relied too heavily on a welter of metaphor and baroque hypotheses at the expense of more systemic analysis. In both Roberts’s Gordimer and Gevisser’s Mbeki, it is the unruly excess, or excessiveness, of these lives that I am interested in tracing. In different ways these works register the lingering difficulties produced by a history of unequal access to narrative, self-determination and cultural power – and this in the ‘intricate and intimate’ domain of author-subject relations where, to return to Manganyi’s thoughts on psychobiography, ‘culturally activated transferences are easily traded for truth’ (36). Half a century after Biko’s challenge (and in the wake of renewed calls for the decolonisation of intellectual practice in South Africa), the latent question remains the matter of authority: how it is constructed or unravelled, earned or assumed; how it might replicate previous, historically painful modes of being authoritative about others – or how it might refuse or evade them. As unusually ‘thick’ biographies (physically and conceptually), The Dream Deferred and No Cold Kitchen open the question of who can plausibly write about whom; who can be a researcher and who a research subject, especially in a literary and cultural system so deformed by colonial and apartheid aftermaths. And finally, how this might be done in a way that balances the tensions between psychic complexity and narrative coherence, between dissent and dignity, in the construction of a life.

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‘A most amusing literary scandal’ Nadine and Ronald, ‘Gordimer’ versus ‘Roberts’

On the back cover of Ronald Suresh Roberts’s biography of the South African novelist and Nobel laureate in literature there appears, instead of the usual blurbs, an image of a Sunday Times poster. ‘GORDIMER BANS BOOK’ reads the headline that appeared, the caption explains, ‘days after Nadine Gordimer attempted to stop the publication of No Cold Kitchen, 11 August 2004’. But below the photograph is an excerpt from a letter that Gordimer wrote to her biographer dated 16 January 2003, full of praise for his work in progress: The critical writing – yours – about my work, its development, its contradictions as well as its creative solutions painfully arrived at, its relation, through me and my evolvement [sic], with politics and the history-as-politics that we call ‘our times’ – all this is outstandingly excellent.

The gatefold cover is full of similar tributes, taken not (as is usual) from advance reviews, but rather from private correspondence to the author on his as yet unpublished manuscript. There is high praise from editors at Bloomsbury in London and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) in New York – the prestigious publishing houses that the authorised version was initially destined for. ‘You bring Nadine and her various worlds marvellously alive’, writes Jonathan Galassi in December 2002, head of FSG and at the time one of the most powerful literary arbiters in the English-speaking world: ‘I don’t know anything of her reaction yet, but my own hunch is that she too – once she has absorbed the shocks that being written about so intently must give rise to – will be taken with, glad about, what you have done.’ This, obviously, was not how the story unfolded. Having for years given Roberts privileged access to her papers and correspondence, on condition that she would have the right of final review, Gordimer was displeased with some aspects of the first full draft sent to her on Christmas Day 2002, and demanded changes that her biographer was unwilling to make. Details of an affair she had in the 1950s; an account of the decline and death of her husband Reinhold Cassirer that she found distasteful; a deadlock between biographer and subject over his portrayal of her attitude to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – these were among the flashpoints where the rival claims of Gordimer’s authorisation and Roberts’s authorial autonomy had, it seems, become incommensurable (Donadio). She eventually revoked her authorisation of the project, and prevailed on its international publishers (which were also her publishers) to drop the book, which they did. And so No Cold Kitchen appeared, complete with its cryptic title and unusual packaging, via STE Publishers in Johannesburg, a

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self-described Black-empowerment initiative.5 Following publication in 2005, she put out a statement that the presentation of the work garlanded with her praise was misleading. She had only seen the final artefact when it appeared on shelves in Johannesburg, and claimed that the book as published contained ‘changes including highly offensive additions’, in breach of her final right of review (quoted in Naidu 2). Reconstructing exactly what happened between the novelist and her biographer is perhaps impossible by now; in any case it is not the primary aim here. Rather, I am intrigued by the book as an example of a life writing project that slips its moorings and runs out of control. Veering between incisive criticism and gratuitous polemic, No Cold Kitchen is a baggy monster of a biography that (most reviewers agreed) needed far more editorial cutting, shaping and discipline; but which in its formal misbehaviour provides a compelling case study in the shifting ethics and cultural politics of a literary life. I briefly map some coordinates of the controversy, then turn to the work itself, tracing its curious metamorphosis from bracing criticality to corrosive hostility, and reading for (to use a phrase from Roberts on Gordimer’s own fiction) ‘a poetics of interpersonal power that the crude word “politics” cannot capture’ (No Cold Kitchen 267). * The Gordimer–Roberts affair, wrote one commentator, ‘provided our small and all-too-tranquil literary world with its finest ruckus in years’ (Dawes 25). Nonetheless, it might be seen as part of a cluster of disputes concerning cultural restitution and cultural authority in the first decade of democratic South Africa. Controversy over the post-apartheid representation of |Xam and !Kung indigenous oratures by poets, artists and museum curators; the long-running accusations of appropriation surrounding works like Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000); a whole series of moral panics over South African writers being plagiarists – each of these cases had their own dynamics and specificities.6 Yet they are suggestive of a broader, revisionist moment of post-apartheid reconstruction when new and 5 The kitchen metaphor is drawn from an epigraph by Doris Lessing: ‘The life of the house went on in the kitchen…She stood by the oven where various dishes were shortly to reach their moments of truth’ (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 11). Presumably it suggests Gordimer’s ability to withstand the heat of South African cultural politics: she decides not to ‘get out of the kitchen’ but rather to remain rooted in her Johannesburg home as a site where domestic rituals and fierce intellectual creativity were not set at odds. 6 On the question of curating and representing indigenous histories, see Skotnes: Miscast and Rassool, ‘Power, Knowledge’. On Krog and her use of testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Highman ‘Forging’. On Zakes Mda and his use of the work of historian Jeff Peires, see Offenburger, ‘Duplicity’.

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ambitious exercises in historical recovery and cultural border crossing were undertaken in an attempt to ‘forge’ (in Krog’s uneasy metaphor) a sense of new nationhood. All this was happening at a moment in history, the 1990s, when ‘the new South Africa’ was re-joining a globalising international world; when its insularity or lag time in the wake of the cultural boycott was becoming entangled in rapid transnational circuits of goods, capital, concepts and personnel. Roberts’s cultural positioning in South Africa was in some ways an index of this process. A child of West Indian and Indo-Malaysian parents, Roberts grew up in Trinidad and attended Oxford’s Balliol College on the same scholarship that had been won by V. S. Naipaul. He then worked as a lawyer in New York before arriving in South Africa ‘as the coordinator of an international election monitoring delegation’ (according to the dust jacket copy of No Cold Kitchen). He coauthored a book on the TRC with lawyer and ANC intellectual Kader Asmal and increasingly styled himself as scourge of the liberal commentariat and a maverick, unaffiliated commentator on the transition – someone introducing the bracing edge of United States culture wars into a South African system that was too placid. On the other hand, his detractors deemed him an opportunistic ‘carpetbagger’ and even an intellectual ‘hit man’ for the ruling party, suspicious of how quickly he had inveigled himself into the administrations of presidents Mandela and Mbeki as policy researcher and speechwriter (Barron ‘The Obsessive Mr Roberts’; Wilhelm). Roberts evokes the divisive figure of Naipaul in his preface as a kind of foil or counterpoint to Gordimer, given their diametrically opposed attitudes towards black-led liberation and the prospects of the postcolonial world: ‘In her you see intricacies of affirmation; in him […] rarifications of disgust’ (25). He goes on to invoke the South African novelist’s life-long dissent from a racialised identity: If Gordimer was making a way out of whiteness, Naipaul seemed to be inbound on the reverse journey […] ‘It was my wish, in Mississippi, to consider things from the white point of view’, Naipaul actually wrote in A Turn in the South (1989), ‘as far as was possible for me’. Gordimer’s objectives were quite neatly the reverse (25).

Yet by the end of the biography, Gordimer has been re-consigned to a predictable form of whiteness and Roberts has shifted to a different comparator, ridiculing her outmoded positions on world politics via his intimacy with another public intellectual, Edward W. Said, to whom the biography (in a curious paratextual moment) is dedicated. How and why had the initial poetics of affirmation curdled into one of disdain and disgust? What exactly had transpired in the interval between Gordimer’s admiring letters and the withdrawal of her blessing? Such matters were picked over as the feud was relayed and discussed,

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first in the South African press then abroad, since, unlike some of the other cultural scandals of the 1990s, this one travelled. The Gordimer–Roberts affair made its way into Hermione Lee’s primer Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009) as an example of how efforts by living subjects, relatives or executors to control a biographer can backfire. Gordimer was exposed ‘to just the kind of gossipy publicity she had wanted to avoid’ (98), as well as ‘sarcastic remarks about the paradoxical contrast between Gordimer’s own resistance to the repressive era of apartheid and her “censoring” of his work’: ‘She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but she wanted complete control’ (Roberts quoted in Lee, Biography 98). Yet what did the withdrawal of authorisation mean, exactly? In his Essays on Biography (2005), Carl Rollyson remarks, ‘The modern way to censor or suppress an authorised biography is to carefully ration or withhold permission to quote from the biographical subject’s unpublished work’ (3). This was the case with Peter Ackroyd’s life of T. S. Eliot (which was forced to rely on paraphrasing all correspondence), and perhaps most famously in Ian Hamilton’s dealings with J. D. Salinger.7 Beyond this, the question about the withdrawal of authorisation is an amorphous one, concerned with the vagaries of interpersonal trust and a network of silent assumptions. Reflecting on his earlier authorised biography of Robert Lowell, Hamilton remarks that authorisation can be ‘a narrow licence’: “For all that you enjoyed this magic-sounding right of access, you still had to be endlessly judging and rejudging limits of propriety’ (10). Or as Shaun de Waal, the literary editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, put it from the opposite direction: ‘It is presumed that the biographer will be sensitive and just in his or her use of such material’ (3). The delicate phrasing and passive voice is telling: just such tacit presumptions and sensitivities had been ridden over rough-shod following Roberts’s ambitious forays with a Xerox into the novelist’s personal archive. As Roberts writes in his acknowledgments, Gordimer gave him ‘more than 20,000 pages […] from her private correspondence’, above and beyond his unrestricted access to the Lilly Library’s Gordimer archive in Indiana (8). When her home photocopying

7 The reclusive Salinger sued for infringement of copyright and won, even though his biographer had quoted only modestly from his correspondence in accordance with his own understanding of the ‘fair use’ doctrine. I had at first assumed that this option was not exercised by Gordimer or her lawyers, given that the biography is laden with quotations from both her published and her unpublished writing. Yet in an extensive personal correspondence with me, Roberts explained that Gordimer’s lawyers did raise the supposed copyright prohibition ‘in a formal threatening demand letter, but were rebuffed by my own publisher’s lawyers, who emphasised that Gordimer in reality had no such option, because of the clear terms of the contract between us (an advantage that Ian Hamilton lacked).’

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machine, ‘a doughty veteran from the 1980s’, surrendered under the strain and had to be replaced, ‘she hardly grumbled’ (8). ‘In such a trust necessarily lies the possibility of betrayal’, De Waal continued, ‘and it is hard to believe that a writer of Gordimer’s sensitivity or one of Suresh Roberts’s gimlet keenness can have failed to imagine that possibility, or even its inevitability’ (4). This edge of risk and brinkmanship captures something of the game that unfolds in the work. ‘“Ronald is my biographer”’, Gordimer is reported to say in the final chapter, when introducing him to a publisher in London: ‘“He is dangerous.” She paused with the kind of grimace easily mistaken for a smile: “It’s a very strange relationship”’ (628). Interviewed by South Africa’s Sunday Times in 2004, Galassi claimed that his publishing house had independent objections to the manuscript, specifically ‘the meandering quality of the narrative and the author’s gratuitous insertion of himself into it’. If Roberts ‘had been more rational and measured in his approach’, Galassi went on, ‘I believe his book could have been published as originally planned’. Roberts responded, ‘Haven’t we had enough of New York editors scolding the natives to be rational?’ and told the New York Times Book Review he felt Gordimer ‘was treating me like a benefactor in a certain way, as though I was a product of patronage rather than a professional doing the work I wanted to do and doing it to the best of my abilities’ (Donadio, online). No stranger to public feuding, Roberts defended his de-authorised approach in high-minded terms while also fighting off Gordimer’s defenders with gusto. Some commentators turned to Janet Malcolm’s metaphors of biography as a kind of duplicitous seduction always doomed to go sour – one in which the writer will always be ‘a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ – while others suspected a more literal, calculating kind of confidence trick (Taitz 21).8 Responding to an article by long-time adversary John Matshikiza, who had accused him (not in so many words) of conning an elderly woman,9 Roberts suggested that his loyalty was to the work rather than the person: ‘To celebrate such a classic writer as Gordimer, one must discomfit the writer’s felt sense of self ’ (Roberts, ‘Gordimer’s Authentic’ 31). With recourse to J. M. Coetzee’s argument that ‘the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even 8 These lines are from Malcolm’s infamous opening paragraphs to The Journalist and the Murderer (3), which I will revisit when turning to the work of Jonny Steinberg. 9 Matshikiza’s article reads: ‘The man comes over from Trinidad, proceeds to insinuate himself with oleaginous charm into the heart of her intimate and public life and memoirs, and then accuses her of being racist when she tells him the book he’s so studiously worked on in Killarney Mall is not up to scratch’ (‘The Good, the Bad and the Ungrateful’ 32).

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to be welcomed’, Roberts argued that the most intensive forms of criticism should properly be seen as a kind of oblique tribute to the work: ‘“For so long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself a classic.” Gordimer, a writer of truly classic grandeur, needs not Matshikiza’s sadly inarticulate protections’ (‘Gordimer’s Authentic’ 31). Having effected this slippage, where Gordimer comes to signify more a posthumous body of work than a living person, Roberts ends his rejoinder with the kind of overblown rhetorical flourish that made the affair so entertaining, at least to those not directly implicated: ‘I have not forsaken Gordimer. I have instead cast off the treacherous epaulettes of her “authority.” I am Gordimer’s authentic celebrant, while Matshikiza is killing her with kindness, and himself with hypertension’ (Roberts, ‘Gordimer’s Authentic’ 32). As Rian Malan writes in his account of the rise and fall of ‘the unlikeable Mr Roberts’, it was ‘a most amusing literary scandal’ (Resident Alien 39). Yet despite the media attention at the time, very few discussions have considered the resulting work in any detail. No Cold Kitchen remains the only life of Gordimer yet written and brings a compelling yet unruly mass of primary material into the public domain.

‘Not for publication’ Fictional biographies and biographical fictions

‘It is not generally known – and it is never mentioned in the official biographies – that the Prime Minister spent the first eleven years of his life, as soon as he could be trusted not to get under a car, leading his uncle about the streets’ (7). So runs the opening line of ‘Not for Publication’, a story that lends the title to Nadine Gordimer’s 1965 collection of short fiction. It narrates how a young boy, Praise Basetse, is taken off the streets and educated by a series of liberal white benefactors. ‘I begin to believe we may be able to sit him for his matric when he is just sixteen’ (Not for Publication 15), pronounces one of them, a leftist clergyman named Father Audry (with certain similarities to the activist Father Trevor Huddleston of Sophiatown). Praise is soon revealed to be a kind of prodigy and is diligently cultivated by teachers and well-wishers of the institutions that he passes through. Yet by the end of the story he has disappeared, and the final cadences, as in so many of Gordimer’s short stories, are unresolved and ambiguous. When Father Audry seeks out the family with whom Praise had once lived as a beggar, there is the sense that benefactor has become pursuer – one not easily distinguishable from agents of the state. In any case, we have no further access to Praise’s biography, whether official or unofficial; the narrative of how he might have become the prime minister reaches an impasse, and its subject disappears from view. ‘Not for Publication’, we learn in No Cold Kitchen, was originally conceived as a novel begun in 1960 after the early international successes of books like

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The Lying Days (1953) and A World of Strangers (1958), as well as the regular appearance of Gordimer’s short fiction in The New Yorker. Yet this book was a project she found herself unable to finish: ‘I am fighting a curious kind of self-consciousness about my writing, something I’ve never had before’, she writes to long-term correspondent (and, eventually, authorised biographer of Nelson Mandela) Anthony Sampson on 11 August 1959: ‘It’s something to do – everything to do – with this blasted country. You can’t write a word without everyone pouncing on it and subjecting it to analysis –the colour test’ (215). Five years later, in a letter to Hilary Rubinstein dated 4 March 4 1965, she reflects on a ‘real crisis in my writing at present’ and the failure of a novel ‘that has bitten the dust all the way, something I can’t master, and now finally I’ve abandoned it’ (216). She goes on to chart the original ambitions of the project: a long-form, cross-racial fictional inhabiting of a subject position very different from those that had focalised her existing novels and an attempt to enlarge her fictional terrain in the wake of the great wave of African independence to the north: It was to be a sort of following the boy through the maze of white encouragement, black nationalism, the hot-and-cold of being taken up, kicked around, neglected and wooed, until he put himself together and ended up in an inevitable logic of his own, on trial as a political leader, faced with the possibility of death, which, like everything else he’s expected, doesn’t quite come off, and turns out to be indefinite imprisonment instead. Anyway, I couldn’t do it, and not being able to stopped me from doing anything else, so I hope I’ve seen the last of it. But it’s been a blow. (216)

From an abandoned draft of 20,000 words, Gordimer recouped a 5,000-word story that scrupulously avoids inhabiting the consciousness of its central figure; instead, he is refracted via those around him. With its title ‘naming her impasse’, ‘Not for Publication’ was, Roberts writes, ‘a still-born fictional counterpart’ to the kind of premature post-racialism embodied by the 1950s Drum writer and journalist Nat Nakasa (215). In ‘One Man Living Through It’, Gordimer’s tribute to Nakasa following his suicide in July 1965, she called him ‘a new kind of man in South Africa’, one who ‘accepted without question and with easy dignity and natural pride his Africanness’ and who took equally for granted that his identity as ‘a man among men, a human among fellow humans’ could not be legislated out of existence (Telling Times 156). Yet, the biography suggests, the critical intelligence of Gordimer’s fiction often ran ahead of her non-fiction, offering more acute and prophetic social analysis than the sometimes generalised humanist register of her essays. In this sense, the abandoned novel is an early sign of how the poetics of hybridity and cultural border-crossing of 1950s Johannesburg became steadily less viable under an entrenching police state following the 1960 Sharpeville

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massacre: ‘Gordimer could not see into the inner life, the going growth, of a black nationalist politician’s formative years spent outside the circle of kind white patronage’ (No Cold Kitchen 215). Later we learn that the story is turned down by The New Yorker, the latest in a string of rejections from the magazine where Gordimer had enjoyed such precocious and regular appearances. ‘I have been troubled by your lack of success here in past months’, writes editor Roger Angell to Gordimer on 23 March 1964, ‘and I hope that you won’t think me presumptuous when I say that a number of your recent stories have given me the same feeling that this one does.’ Gordimer’s passionate concern for the ‘problem’ in her story, he suggested, had damaged her gifts as a fiction writer: Somehow, you seem less involved with your characters as individuals, and more aware of them as representatives of a group or social class or as figures in some larger contemporary drama. We see what they represent, rather than what they are. (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 272)

Rather than literary characters, Angell saw here ‘figures in a sociological report’, a ‘case history instead of a story’ (272). Angell expresses a common trope in liberal humanist critiques of literature written from politically pressured cultural systems like that of 1960s South Africa: the supposed richness and idiosyncrasy of individual character has been sublimated or traduced by the demands of the political moment. Roberts, however, rejects this kind of simplistic dichotomy, and much of the first half of his biography seeks out a far richer and more interesting account of how to model the relation between inadequate binaries like public and private, life and work, problem and story. In his reading, Gordimer’s abandonment of the work shows a kind of intellectual maturity and steely self-awareness: a recognition of the difficulty of writing about the psychological workings of liberal patronage – which Gordimer calls ‘the projection on people other than oneself, of one’s idea of who they are’ (quoted in Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 582) – without reproducing them. That kind of projection, however, could also describe the operating principle of biography. And here one sees the kind of vexed terrain that No Cold Kitchen enters: a biography of a white South African by a person of colour (already a rarity in the country’s biographical annals), and one highly attentive to how the biographical subject writes, or does not write, black lives. Both within the short story, then, and the larger story of how the novel never came to be written, ‘Not for Publication’ sets in motion a range of questions regarding narrative authority, technical ability, and the ethics of writing across a balkanised society, ‘issues that peaked fully in the roiling black consciousness period a decade later’ (343), but which Gordimer had already sensed and absorbed into her creative imagination by the early 1960s.

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Roberts reads Gordimer’s falling out of favour with The New Yorker at this moment as a kind of badge of honour – evidence of her creative imagination turning toward larger fictional ambitions and away from a magazine that was less a gold standard of literary excellence than an insular publication unreceptive to the transnational energies and geopolitical ructions of the era (274). Able to draw on an enormous array of previously unseen material, the biographer turns to an unpublished Neustadt Prize nomination letter written by Sontag in 1987 for an articulation of this larger vision; they are, Roberts judges, ‘some of the most insightful paragraphs ever written about Gordimer’s work’ (275): It seems as if absorbing the astringent lessons of modernism saps confidence in subjects. Ms Gordimer defies this modern tradition of inhibition, supposedly mandated by our historical situation as writers in the late bourgeois world, which has all great art springing from a privation rather than a plenitude of being and consciousness. She gives us an exemplary model of the fullness of the literary project… Her essentially lyrical gift having been thrown on the wide screen of politics, Ms Gordimer occupies a strategic terrain in the perennial, necessary battles over the relation between art and morality, expressiveness and conscience. (quoted in Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 276)

The above represents just one small strand through the thick weave of source materials that make up Roberts’s account of Gordimer’s writing life. Comparable stories of artistic creation and mutation are told about many of her works in the style of a dense mesh of correspondence and quotation that creates a thick, complicating context for her writing – an exemplary model (to adapt Sontag) of the fullness of the biographical project. In reading through at least the first half of No Cold Kitchen, one can understand how the Nobel laureate would have been seduced by the kind of critical attention that her biographer offers. Rather than using the life to explain the work, Roberts often turns to the work to deepen the life, his exhaustive familiarity with her œuvre enabling us to see how her novels are in themselves often deeply biographical projects – artificial or ‘fake’ biographies, in a sense.10 In the chapter on her key novel Burger’s Daughter (1979), for example, we learn how Gordimer presented the manuscript to Ilse Fischer, the daughter of 10 In his primer How to Do Biography (2008), Nigel Hamilton remarks that in nineteenthcentury Britain, the best Victorian writers moved into the fictional arena of the novel partly as a response to biography being ‘so enchained by the rules of convention, social acceptability, and sheer hypocrisy’: ‘As a result the Victorian novel abounded in fictional biographies’, a domain free of the spectres of libel, defamation, or social condemnation for daring to explore the private life of famous individuals (17). For the complex fate of this idea of literary ‘freedom’ under the apartheid Censorship Board, see Gordimer, What Happened to Burger’s Daughter? and Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police.

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Communist and Afrikaner revolutionary Bram Fischer, prior to publication. The novel was not only or directly about the Fischers; nonetheless it had been inspired by the sight of Ilse as a young girl, waiting outside prison to visit her father. Fischer’s daughter’s verdict on this challenging work – ‘This was our life’ – was taken by Gordimer as one of the most important affirmations of the ‘truth’ of her fiction: ‘No critic’s laudation could match it’, she remarked in her Norton Lectures, ‘no critic’s damning could destroy it’ (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 400). Set against the truth-claim of the fictional version is the more limited authority of non-fiction: Roberts lifts out the ironic portrait of Lionel Burger’s official biographer in the novel, someone whom the struggle hero’s daughter describes as ‘respectfully coaxing me onto the stepping stones of the official vocabulary’ (Burger’s Daughter 171). Already we see here an intimate and cross-stitched relation between the different kinds of truth claims and psychological reach offered by the fictional and non-fictional strains in her œuvre. Gordimer often remarked that the truth of her novels was greater because it was less susceptible to the kind of self-censoring she experienced when writing non-fiction. This revelation becomes more intriguing still when Roberts reveals that in the original jottings for Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer had at one point envisaged writing in precisely the ‘real life’ scene of vetting her manuscript as a self-reflexive twist at the end of the novel: ‘Final chapter the visit to the real daughter of such a man to explain that this that has been written is not her life but an imaginative exploration of what might have been’ (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 401). This metafictional elaboration was dropped from the novel as it appears, but Roberts takes this complex entanglement of historical and novelised lives as revealing of how to approach the braiding together of found and imagined materials in the creative process: ‘In meeting with Ilse she was living out a script that she had initially designed for inclusion in the novel itself. This was life borrowing from art – an instance less of life being raided for art than of an artistic conceit invading the real world’ (401). In the parts of the biography that, one imagines, initially won over the Nobel laureate and her publishers, the fiction is often positioned like this, as an internal mirror of the larger biographical project: it becomes both evidence and theory of a life in writing. In the Preface, Roberts selects a passage from her debut novel The Lying Days to frame his own project, a kind of elaboration of Woolf ’s epigram, which he also quotes, that worthwhile biography is the record of things that change rather than things that happen: It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women – a new job, a new town, a divorce – which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward chang-

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es of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of a life. (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 27)

‘A long, slow mutation of emotion’; ‘a shifting quality to the whole surface of a life’ – again, the fiction-derived phrases offer ways of thinking about the non-fiction into which they are embedded, with Roberts ranging between the different strands of Gordimer’s written output, often cutting across chronology to create a complex and shifting prose surface of his own. The idea of a gradual emotional mutation has a still larger, meta-textual significance when one considers not just the changes logged in Gordimer’s life, but the shifting nature of the biographical project itself – a modulation in the writing that was obviously driven in part by a souring relation between novelist and biographer, but which also reflects a larger, tectonic shift in its intellectual approach as the work moves across the South African transition and into the post-Mandela era.

An ethics of reading Intellectual loyalties and emotional instincts

The revoking of authorisation, wrote one reviewer, had in fact placed Roberts in a remarkable position. He had ‘all the privileges of Gordimer’s initial cooperation, but the constraints of her authorisation had been removed’, providing what seems the ideal basis for a genuinely interesting biography, ‘deeply informed but capable of sustaining a certain distance from its subject. It was an ethics of reading that Roberts would now have to negotiate, rather than the force of any contract (expressed or implied) with Gordimer or her publishers’ (Dawes 25). This positioning is close to how Roberts styles the biographer figure in his preface: someone who is ‘inevitably a kind of importuner’ (29). Instead of seeking friendship, he continues, ‘worthwhile biography seeks intimacy without loyalty, proximity laced with dissent’ (29). Yet what is unsettling and difficult to capture about No Cold Kitchen is the way that precisely this ethics of reading mutates or erodes over the course of its seven hundred pages. The dialectic between intimacy and dissent, initially taut and revealingly critical, becomes increasingly lop-sided. It moves from being just on the right side to squarely the wrong side of an interpretive zone where revealing ambivalence shades into gratuitous polemic. What start out as methodological or stylistic strengths become its most glaring flaws, and in this inversion one can track how an intellectually live form of identity politics shifts into a dogmatic and lifeless one.

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At first, the dissenting tone is a welcome corrective to the rather stultifying idea of Gordimer as ‘voice of conscience’ or blow-by-blow chronicler of a national story. The notion of her as ‘some Diva of South African history’ writes Lewis Nkosi, ‘able to produce a novel with the cut and fit for every twist of South African politics, has an alienating effect that is hard to describe’ (quoted 465). Roberts channels some of Nkosi’s irreverent, unaffiliated criticality in seeking to recover a creative life that has not been retrospectively smoothed over by linear chronology or academic assimilation. Here he seeks to differentiate his project from Stephen Clingman’s The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986), probably the most widely read monograph on her work, in claiming that he presents her as ‘fundamentally a writer who progresses from strength to greater ideological strength with an inexorable momentum of self-betterment’ (459). By contrast, No Cold Kitchen sounds a debunking, demythologising note from the very first pages. Roberts sets about dismantling the idea of Gordimer as a voice of historical witness, a ‘realist’ writer ‘carting hard-fetched facts from the apartheid gulag’ (15), by immediately introducing a note of minor scandal. The biographer reveals how her early essay ‘A South African Childhood’, ‘published in 1954 under the superintendence of the famous fact checkers of The New Yorker’, actually described a visit to the Kruger Park years before Gordimer had ever been there; it also entailed the invention of an entirely imaginary branch of her family. ‘Well, I fooled them’, Gordimer laughs when he confronts her with his sleuthing, ‘They were not to know the difference’ (15). The biographer’s insertion of himself into the narrative here enables us to see the novelist’s self-constructions; but the intrusion does not, at this stage, adopt a moralistic or punitive attitude towards the semi-fictive practices that make up a life. The biographer also foregrounds his presence in an interview with Gordimer’s sister, Betty, who complains to him about the failings and ‘corruption’ of the ANC government according to the most predictable script of reactionary whiteness. Roberts writes: ‘I have now been drawn into the category of Betty’s mind marked “Black Exceptions”. I am from “overseas”; I am not like “them”. She feels safe. She confides’ (19). With an associative leap that becomes a kind of stylistic tic, he goes on: ‘The task of biography, Sartre says, is to review in detail the history of the writer’s liberation’ (20). In this sense, ‘the meandering quality of the narrative and the author’s gratuitous insertion of himself into it’, to return to Galassi’s objections, have their uses, at least to begin with. In this example they compel a reflection on how two siblings could have taken entirely different intellectual and emotional trajectories through apartheid and the South African transition. The discursive, associative structure of the biography, often written in a kind of interlocking mosaic of short sections, proves

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itself suitable for rendering a rich and complex life that was lived in conversation with multiple audiences, constituencies and correspondents. As the biography follows Gordimer from early adulthood in Johannesburg through a series of travels in post-independence Africa, the generous quotations from her letters access a vein of non-fictive prose that Roberts reads in revealing counterpoint with her essays and travelogues. In a letter to long-time correspondent Anthony Sampson of 16 December 1958, following a visit to Egypt, she confesses her automatic ‘strong unconscious identification not only with the French and English who were kicked out after Suez, but with the idea of a white minority of any kind kicked out by a dark-skinned minority [she means ‘majority’] of any kind, anywhere…You know?’ (quoted 123). Roberts places this quotation alongside an essay on the same experience, collected in The Essential Gesture (1988), where Gordimer explores how a slow process of travel, reading and writing undid this ‘empathic identification with the dispossessed foreign community’ (quoted 123). Roberts comments: ‘She had long thrown off the intellectual loyalties of the colonial; through her writing she was discarding the emotional instincts as well’ (123). This dialectic of intellectual loyalty and emotional instinct – how they inflect each other and yet might not always be aligned or equivalent – provides an expansive and productive frame for her correspondence in the early sections of the biography. Tracing the stations through which Gordimer seeks, as she put it, to ‘leave the house of the white race’, the biographer is able to admit and admire the kind of contradictions and self-corrections that the later sections will pounce on as evidence for the prosecution.11 In one sense, then, the biography’s obsessive but scattershot trawl through her personal archives does the writer a paradoxical if painful service, with No Cold Kitchen bringing the reader closest to the (non-existent) Letters of Nadine Gordimer. Precisely because the correspondence was originally premised on being kept private, or at least being treated with a certain set of discretions and sensitivities that make up an ethics of reading, the text allows a non-fictive voice more irreverent and agile than many of her essays, with their sometimes more limited ideas of witness, honesty and sincerity. Whether rebuffing an importuning acquaintance over a lunch date – ‘I am embarrassed by your persistence in wanting to claim more from me than I am prepared to give’ (29) – or rejecting screenplays based on her novels, the correspondence reveals Gordimer’s determination to defend her work and the personal space needed to produce it. Responding to a Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. treatment of her novel July’s People in March 1989, she despairs about how her suburban protagonists Maureen and Bam are portrayed as 11 The phrase is from an early interview with Gordimer, cited and used as a chapter title in Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond (10).

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‘going native’, warping her novella into a colonialist imaginary of primitive tribalism: ‘What has been made of my screenplay is a soap opera with Tarzan touches, written by an incompetent hack. There are competent hacks, and one of them might have done what was necessary. This man was not one of them unfortunately’ (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 436). While showing Gordimer’s struggle to retain authority over localised narratives as they passed into global currency, the biography also reveals the unexpected transnational itineraries of her work – the fact, for example, that the same novel was a major influence on Philip Roth’s celebrated ‘American trilogy’ of the late 1990s. ‘Perhaps you can understand how July’s People pointed me in the direction of American Pastoral (even if that’s a book you don’t care for)’, Roth wrote to her in July 2000, ‘which in turn got me eventually to The Human Stain’ (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 437). These are pathways of global influence and aesthetic connection that importantly reorient criticism about Gordimer’s writing. At the juncture where her fiercely defended intellectual autonomy meets the challenge of separatism, self-reliance and radicalism that came with the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s, the central chapters of No Cold Kitchen are some of the most intellectually rich. ‘If Gordimer understood the legitimate rigours of Black Consciousness criticism’, writes Roberts, ‘she was, like Soyinka and Mphahlele, equally alert to the bogus temptations of it’ (338). A growing awareness of the movement’s epochal significance on Gordimer’s part is balanced with her unwillingness simply to inhabit postures of easy political rectitude within the cultural system. In these sections, Roberts deems Gordimer ‘an unpatronising patron’ in her position of cultural power as literary gatekeeper: ‘Encouragement of writers meant unsparing criticism’ (143). The purpose of launching a ‘New Authors’ scheme was not, Gordimer wrote to a Johannesburg publisher in October 1964, ‘to indulge in special pleading for work which is too indifferent to be launched in another way’ (quoted 143). In a letter to Columbia academic Frank McShane of 7 November 1976, she ‘wondered over a piece of bad writing handed to her by a black friend during the 1976 Soweto uprisings’ (143): ‘Will he give himself refuge – dangerously, if he wants to write – in the lofty decision that as I’m white I can’t judge what he has to say or how he says it?’ Here again, Roberts’s treatment of the correspondence gives us a rich account of a creative imagination assessing the possibilities and limits of its cultural predicament, and registering the complex responses to the activist forums in which she immersed herself. The contrarian in Roberts quotes with admiration her sketches of strained non-racial cultural gatherings in the 1970s. Writing to Per Wästberg in November 1978, she describes a PEN poetry reading in Pretoria, led by a writers’ group called Kwanza:

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People read their own work with sincerity and passion. Some of it was sung, to the accompaniment of drum, flute, penny whistle, mbira […] The sentiments are always moving and ninety-percent of the time poorly or/and banally expressed. […] We are all addressed, irrespective of race, as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. This may mean little to you; but in South Africa at present such forms are generally reserved strictly for blacks. So how can one describe the moving sense of real brother/sisterhood, the warmth and welcome – and at the same time the glimpse of the spine-chilling depth of resentment and the anachronistic absurdities of our gathering [?] (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 354)

Such passages are left to stand for themselves in all their frankness, embarrassment, ambivalence and irresolution – without the biographer needing to overtake them with a meta-analysis. That is to say, in these sections the ambivalence of the biographer rides in tandem with that of his subject’s own life-writing project, producing a textured narrative that acknowledges both the social determinants of identity but also the contingencies and individual signature of self-making, and the fragile process of building non-racial cultural spaces: ‘The fact is, it is such a delicate fabric that we have managed to weave crisscross’, she writes to Sampson in September 1979 about a PEN conference organised by Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘we are aware that a snagged fingernail could rip it’ (quoted 355).

‘A long, slow mutation of emotion’ Ambivalence, superintendence and polemic

In other parts of the biography, however, the question of cultural ‘superintendence’ – of who can assume critical authority, and over whom – comes to infiltrate and over-determine all aspects the biographical posture. ‘Superintendence’ is a repeated word in the text, one that the biographer’s prose snags on. In a letter to Sampson on 26 June 1959, Gordimer gives her reaction to Mphahlele’s autobiography Down Second Avenue: the writer ‘emerges from it, as a personality, triumphant, I think. His own man, well at ease, in spite of everything’ (quoted 80). Roberts comments: ‘The compliment was sincere and well-merited: the odour of assessing superintendence was perhaps inevitable’ (80). It is an odd turn of phrase and over-reading of this encounter, but revealing of the latent sub-plot that will increasingly determine the biographical posture as Roberts begins, compulsively, to critically assess Gordimer’s own critical assessments. ‘The very cadences and criteria of praise’ he goes on ‘were inflected with the hierarchy in which they were involuntarily enmeshed’ (80). This hierarchy is the prism through which Roberts would eventually interpret the revoking of authorisation and their disagreement. As I noted earlier,

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he claimed that Gordimer ‘was treating me like a benefactor in a certain way, as though I was a product of patronage rather than a professional doing the work I wanted to do and doing it to the best of my abilities’ (quoted in Donadio, online). The entire biographical project, in other words, gradually becomes entangled in the problematic that it has been seeking to excavate. Questions of authority become entangled in questions of race and representation, but now in a much more immobile and deterministic way. By the final sections, a far more hostile portrait emerges, with Roberts now beginning to revise his earlier findings, returning to and reprocessing earlier elements of Gordimer’s life and correspondence. Once an ‘unpatronising patron’, she is increasingly figured as ‘bustling and parental; possessive’ towards her black literary contemporaries, writing about them with ‘clucking regard’ (289), her critical reflexes repeatedly lapsing into ‘the assessing gaze of the white cultural authority’ (342). Her ‘constructive engagement with black consciousness’ in the 1970s and 1980s is now framed differently, with recourse to academic tautology void of specific detail: ‘But it is true that Gordimer’s voice occupied a space made vacant by the same racism that she deplored. In that sense she was indeed part of the intellectual economy of apartheid while the native was silenced’ (623). At the same time the tone of the writing changes: this kind of overweening pronouncement is increasingly spliced together with sharp asides and anecdotes that are seemingly given the same valence. For example, we are told that the ‘most significant black post-apartheid voices’ such as Zoë Wicomb and Zakes Mda ‘have relationships with Gordimer ranging from non-existent to prickly’, and, as Robert’s presence in the biographical narrative becomes increasingly corrosive, the same page continues with phrases like: ‘“Gordimer hates women”, Wicomb told me, while Mda pointedly names J. M. Coetzee as his “favourite” writer’ (623). The tonal instability of the later sections creates an amalgam of discourses with different evidentiary bases and wildly varying kinds of authority; and yet all these are run together as data points in an increasingly frenetic and competitive text. In the final section of No Cold Kitchen, Roberts shuttles between Johannesburg and New York, repeatedly visiting Edward Said as both try to puzzle out Gordimer’s position on Middle East politics – why she is unwilling to equate Israel’s actions with those of apartheid South Africa – and why she remains intimate with the Israeli novelist Amos Oz: ‘“Well, he is apparently very good looking”, a puzzled Said speculated – his provocation was deliberate – on why Oz is of any interest to Gordimer’ (582). This kind of content is typical of the later sections, which presumably carry most of the ‘highly offensive additions’ Gordimer complained of, marked by a tone that starts to veer uneasily from authoritative, high-minded pronouncement to tabloid-like point scoring, all

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of this amid an increasingly disparate welter of random quotation, intrusive asides and what is best described as intellectual name-dropping. As the cultural boycott wanes and South Africa becomes a locus of international attention in the transitional moment, Roberts indulges in a kind of global competitiveness or intellectual arms race with his subject, attempting to match her remarkable range of correspondents and interlocutors (from Sontag to Chinua Achebe, Kurt Vonnegut to Milan Kundera) with his own set of highlevel connections. The prose becomes still more overwrought as Roberts now begins to write in Gordimer’s prior objections: In her marginalia on my manuscript alongside this comment Gordimer simply refused to accept the legitimate depth of Said’s feeling about Oz. She demanded a watering down: ‘What a cheap insinuation. Shame on you’. Said’s comment on Oz instinctively struck Gordimer as a departure from respectable protocols. (582, emphasis in original)

Insinuation, shame, respectability, protocol – all these problems are brought into play, and yet they are not placed in a trustworthy relation to each other. Roberts’s judgemental interjections, writes one of the only academic respondents to the work, ‘sound like addenda inserted into a manuscript too near completion (and in any case far too long) to allow for the production of evidence and argument which might render them substantial’ (Lenta, ‘De-authorising’ 92). At another juncture, Roberts excerpts words by Sontag, Said and Gordimer to produce a kind of playscript, with each ‘line’ drawn from different publications or contexts of utterance. Their exchanges about whether Sontag should accept or refuse the Jerusalem Prize are all run together in a string of cryptic, decontextualised remarks, an artificially engineered drama that brings into sharp relief the oscillation between mandarin cultural pronouncement and ad hominem swipes: Sontag: If I have to choose between truth and justice – of course, I don’t want to choose – I choose truth. Gordimer: I don’t know how she can see truth and justice as separate. Sontag: Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voice of simplification. Said: Staggeringly bad. The worst thing I’ve read in the past 5 years … really unbelievable fudging and Barthesian preciosity, a lot of it only because it’s Israel. Wow! Sontag: He’s a bit of a hack [i.e. Said]. (quoted in No Cold Kitchen 576) 12 12 Intriguingly, one of Gordimer’s late stories, ‘Dreaming of the Dead’, conjures a scene in which Said, Sontag and Sampson (as three of her close, recently deceased friends) eat

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If many novels, including some of Gordimer’s greatest, can be considered as artificial biographies, then can a biography be imagined as a ‘fake’ novel? The inversion captures something of the tone of parts five and six of No Cold Kitchen, which carry the feeling of being focalised by an increasingly unreliable narrator, one whose tendentiousness needs to be continually factored in to recover some kind of truth claim from the text. The biographer-figure now becomes a hyperactive, censorious presence, sifting the subject’s output for increasingly minor and arbitrary infractions, which are then subjected to overanalysis that verges on the absurd. In picking over Gordimer’s response to the American invasion of Iraq, Roberts goes as far as providing mid-sentence commentary to one of her op-eds: ‘my interpellations in bracketed italics’ (596). The paragraph as it appears in the biography gives some idea of the fraught pitch that the work reaches: And I deplore the almost general laissez-faire attitude of the world [Actually the world was unusually united in condemnation] to the obvious power-manipulations [Which ones? By whom?] evidenced in the bungled and bloody ‘reconstruction’ of the country [Would a smooth conquest and occupation – the absence of bungle and blood – have ‘evidenced’ an absence of these unspecified ‘power manipulations’?]…The consistent factor on all present conflicts [all of them? India versus Pakistan? Ivory Coast? Tibet? Taiwan? Thwarted Irish Republicanism? Referenda on the European Union?] is the vast gap between rich and poor [Iraq was in fact relatively wealthy and potentially powerful in the region], and the subliminal racism [Was the racism of Abu Ghraib ‘sublimina’l or crassly overt?] that constitutes, under the seven veils of democracy [Whose democracy? Iraq’s puppet government? The court-appointed Bush regime that invaded Iraq?], to justify it. [Who regards ‘it’ as justified and what is the ‘it’ in question? Subliminal racism? The Iraq invasion? Democracy?] (596)

together in a Chinese restaurant. In the disconnected, disembodied prose of this 2007 short story collection, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, Gordimer’s ‘stylistic mannerisms risk becoming so distilled as to make them unpalatable’ writes Graham Riach, who goes on to read such fictions via the lens of Said’s writings on late style (1090). By summoning Beethoven into her book, Gordimer ‘invites parallels between the composer’s uncompromising late music and her increasingly intransigent late prose. In this collection, Gordimer’s long-term commitment to formal and stylistic experimentation is at its most intense, and as such becomes marked as “late” in another sense. In an era of diminished faith in the power of disruptive form to enact societal change, such experimentation reads as if an elegy for the death of a modernist poetics of difficulty as the ground for engaged authorship’ (Riach 1090). Riach’s is, in other words, a more sympathetic take than that of Roberts on the tonal shifts and mannered stylings of her late fictions.

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Even typographically, the passage provides an image of the increasingly overwrought attempts of the biography to show up or outflank its subject as the project moves to a close – or rather, falls apart. Gordimer’s writing of the new millennium is generally treated in this way: as a kind of school exercise or exam script to be marked up by an all-knowing pedagogue who pounces on the smallest phrases, correcting, chiding and querying. In a slow-building irony, the entire project comes to replicate precisely the kind of overweening cultural superintendence – the ex cathedra pronouncements, the unearned authority, the lack of self-awareness – that it previously deplored. Writing about Gordimer’s correspondence with Sampson, Roberts comes to a judgement that is entirely apt for his own work: ‘The tone is pungent. Yet it is supremely knowing, effortlessly assessing, complacent in its own insights’ (611). Finally, No Cold Kitchen violates its own early and brilliant insights into the politics of identity formation, and so dilutes its own complexity. From seeing Gordimer as complexly symptomatic of the vexed and racialised history in which she is enmeshed, it moves to a more reductive vision of her as emblematic of it, until in the final parts we are left with little more than a ‘figure in a sociological report’ (to borrow that New Yorker editor’s phrase). The text takes on an oppressive knowingness; her every action and utterance is now deemed predictable and pre-determined within a much narrower, predictable repertoire of subjectivity, one in which any words or actions by Gordimer are folded back into the already known. The biography breaches its own intellectual ethics, in other words, and its own readings of her novels. But the problem of what constitutes critical authority, or authoritative criticality, is in turn symptomatic of a cultural moment that extends far beyond than the souring of relations between individual biographer and subject. Until 1994 and the coming of South African democracy, No Cold Kitchen is able to portray and admire Gordimer as a fissile and fiercely individual intellect, one who disparages a certain strain of South African liberalism and allies herself with the liberation struggle, but is also not shy of questioning the nativist assumptions of Africanist or Black Consciousness discourse (or hazarding a fictional trespass across racial lines). Yet post-1994, Roberts increasingly constructs the Nobel laureate as a pillar of the post-apartheid cultural establishment – a grandee to be attacked and cut down to size, her style of critique now considered indistinguishable from the reactionaries and conservatives she spent a lifetime distancing herself from. Such transformations along different axes – within Gordimer’s life and work but also within the nature of the biographical project itself, and all of this sited within South Africa’s transition to democracy and freedom of expression – produce an overwrought and tendentious book, albeit one that can still be read against the grain for its wealth of source materials, correspondence and primary research.

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For a work so attentive to the privileges and pleasures of criticism, No Cold Kitchen leaves open a series of important questions that have only become more vexed in the decade following its publication. What might a valid language of critique sound like in post-transitional South Africa? How can the ideal of an unaffiliated, unfettered critical intelligence evade the legacies of a suspect universalism, or a patronising liberalism that discourses too confidently about others? How might progressive and reactionary languages of critique be disentangled (particularly when directed against the post-apartheid state)? What are the modes, textures and terms of an intellectual freedom that might win a necessary authority in a place like contemporary South Africa? How does dire and persistent inequality warp and evacuate the language of intellectual exchange? Roberts dodges and muddies these questions, possibly because of his own concurrent investment in a biography, or rather hagiography, of Thabo Mbeki during the later stages of the Gordimer project. As we will see when turning to Mark Gevisser’s life of the president, the reflex of writing off all criticism of a black-led government as reactionary and crypto-racist is one that envelops the Mbeki administration. Just as No Cold Kitchen culminates in an unremittingly hostile attitude to Gordimer’s post-apartheid persona as a cultural ‘type’, the obverse of this ideological position was Roberts’s unswerving loyalty to an increasingly beleaguered head of state, one whose dissidence on HIV/AIDS and whose quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe have been interpreted by many as a reaction, or over-reaction, to the perceived superintendence, the assessing gaze, of ‘Western’ authority. The poetics of intra-personal power glimpsed in the Gordimer–Roberts affair, that is, would play out on a much larger scale, with much greater consequences, than a single literary scandal, and it is to this complex terrain that I now turn.

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Political biography and the limits of the liberal imagination

6

‘When I saw that the Wits Great Hall was the venue for the launch of Mark Gevisser’s biography of Thabo Mbeki’, wrote a journalist for the Sunday Independent in November 2007, ‘I feared that he and his publisher might be being a trifle overambitious’ (Gordin 12). Yet the central venue of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg was full to capacity well before the start, with over 1,000 people crammed in for a presentation and panel discussion, and many more turned away. Gevisser was ‘feted in a manner reminiscent of a pop star rather than an earnest writer’, his 900-page life of the president, eight years in the making, emerging to huge national and then international acclaim (Saunderson-Meyer 13). The Times Literary Supplement judged it ‘probably the finest piece of non-fiction to come out of South Africa since the end of apartheid’ (Plaut, online). Published at a moment that marked the onset, according to some, of a more difficult and fractious ‘second transition’ in South Africa, and one characterised by non-fictional registers of ‘surprise, shock, bewilderment’ (McGregor and Nuttall, At Risk 10), Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred was a book accorded an enormous, perhaps unrealistic explanatory power. A general enthusiasm for biography as a genre had fused with a deep hunger among South Africa’s political class, intelligentsia and the book-buying public to puzzle out the country’s predicament via Mbeki’s complex and contested career. As the figure who had done most to initiate and maintain negotiations with white South Africa’s elites under apartheid, and then served under Nelson Mandela as a de facto prime minister, Thabo Mbeki might be seen, his biographer suggested, as ‘the primary architect of South Africa’s transition to democracy’ (A Legacy of Liberation 1). At the Johannesburg launch, Gevisser gave a presentation based on the photographs included in the book, images that drew expressions of surprise and delight from the crowd.1 For a South African public more familiar with the Zapiro cartoons depicting Mbeki as an impassive, pipe-smoking technocrat, they are startling pictures. We see him as a confident student leader in Dar 1 The photographs included in the book can be viewed online at Gevisser’s personal website: http://www.markgevisser.com/books.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.

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es Salaam and then at Sussex University, posing with his bohemian English girlfriend; as a composed young revolutionary leading a march from Brighton to London to protest against the sentencing of his father and other Rivonia trialists in June 1964; as an eligible bachelor in paisley ties, then an elegant groom in polka-dot shirt, marrying Zanele Dlamini at Farnham Castle in Surrey in 1974. The mingled cast of revolutionaries and aristocrats suggests the different constituencies and identities that the ANC’s ‘Crown Prince’ would move between during his decades of exile. Another set of images shows a lithe demonstrator of kwela and gumboot dancing (now with shirt off) during a cultural encounter session in Germany; a consummate diplomat and communicator, radiating charm and self-assurance in a bewildering range of engagements from Lusaka to Moscow, Dakar to New York, and then finally South Africa, where he returned from exile on 28 April 1990. ‘At one o’clock I was in Lusaka, and at three o’clock I was in Cape Town’: this is the reply of ‘calculated blandness’ that Mbeki gives his biographer when asked to recount the experience of returning after 27 years out of the country. He goes on to express the unreality and sadness of the moment, wondering ‘why people had to wait for so many years, and so many dead just to do something which is as easy as what we are doing’ (572). How could this affable, seductive figure, seemingly so at ease in his own skin, be reconciled with an aloof and increasingly embattled leader who had estranged so many of his erstwhile supporters? This is one of the questions that Gevisser’s account sets out to answer: what psychic transformations underlay the political transition that he had been so instrumental in? Many in the audience were also looking for insight into the bitter succession battle then currently underway within the African National Congress. Gevisser’s largely sympathetic (for some, overly sympathetic) account of Mbeki’s career appeared just before his downfall. The following month, in December 2007, the president’s attempt to seek a third term as head of the ANC would be defeated by supporters of his allyturned-rival Jacob Zuma during a party conference at Polokwane. The intellectual, technocratic and reserved political ethos that Mbeki had embodied was rejected in favour of a turn towards populism, expressionism and the politics of patronage. The expunging of Mbeki’s name and the lexicon of signature projects like the African Renaissance from public life was swift and dramatic. ‘Polokwane’, as Gevisser remarks in the epilogue to the updated and abridged international 2009 edition of his biography, entered South African shorthand as signifying one of the most decisive shifts in post-apartheid politics; for many it seemed ‘a culmination of a shift in the national psyche’.2 2 The phrase is from McGregor and Nuttall in their introduction to the 2009 non-fiction anthology Load Shedding (9). The title adopts the term for the rolling power blackouts

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At Polokwane, Mbeki’s tedious three-hour speech to delegates, in which he hectored opponents with evidence of his achievements, was eventually drowned out by chants of Zuma’s signature chant ‘Umshini Wam’ (‘[Bring me] my machine gun’), the Struggle song that this rival had appropriated for his political persona as a son of the soil. And yet, as we learn in The Dream Deferred, it was Thabo Mbeki who first instructed Zuma in how to use a firearm while recruiting undercover in Swaziland: ‘What it is’, Zuma recalls when interviewed by Gevisser, ‘the theory of it, the dismantling of it, all the rules of it’ (345). It is the kind of ironic detail that signifies the texture, contingency and unpredictable affective charge that many readers look for in biography, and which come thick and fast in Gevisser’s book. Understandably, most reviews and responses to The Dream Deferred approached it in mind of assessing Mbeki’s legacy – a debate that continues, now with a revisionist and even nostalgic aspect, considering the venality and indignities of the Zuma years.3 However, my approach is again more interested in biography as a narrative construction, metaphorical patterning and an imaginative ordering of information: a form that works with the careful arrangement, control and interpretive treatment of facts so as to disclose a figurative potential embedded in the real. And just as the previous chapter read No Cold Kitchen somewhat against the grain, drawing out the revealing qualities that were overlooked in the heat of a media scandal, so this account swims a little against the current of critical opinion, seeking out dissenting notes as a means of stress-testing Gevisser’s landmark work of political biography, one that remains intriguingly suspended between the promise and deferral of analytic authority.

‘Strategies of inwardness’ Woolf, Marx and the question of literary biography

The Dream Deferred signals its literary affiliations from the first lines, where the author remarks that Virginia Woolf was to him what Karl Marx might have been to the man he is writing about – ‘the spark that lit my intellectual life’ (xxi) – and quotes the novelist’s 1917 epigram on good biography: that it is ‘the record of things that change rather than of things that happen’. The that had begun during the previous year, in the last months of Mbeki’s rule as a ‘lame duck’ president. In the conceit of the volume, the euphemism for an over-stressed national grid doubles as a metaphor for the kinds of risk, unease and overloaded psychic demand registered in these post-TRC narratives of the ‘second wave’. 3 See for example Mahmood Mamdani’s foreword to Ndlovu and Strydom eds. The Thabo Mbeki I Know, which goes so far as to suggest that the handling of the Zimbabwe and the HIV/AIDS crises were arguably this president’s great successes.

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invocation of Marx and Woolf at the outset of this massive work of life writing is suggestive. Both are theorists of change; but while one experimented with ways of notating psychic interiority – Woolf ’s ‘semi-transparent envelope of consciousness’ (The Common Reader 150) – the other is the wellspring for a vast body of theory about historical transformation that is more likely to regard Bloomsbury’s streams of consciousness and ‘strategies of inwardness’ as a mere epiphenomena, or sublimations, of socio-economic conditions and the contradictions of bourgeois life.4 The challenge that Gevisser’s biography sets itself, then, is not just to record the things that change during the South African transition, or to explain Mbeki’s ‘apparent metamorphosis from affable Anglophile into prickly racial nationalist’ (Glaser 11). It also sets in motion two very different theories of subjectivity: of its relevance and analytic potential in the project of writing political history. Set against the discourse of the ‘definitive’, ‘authoritative’ and ‘monumental’ that envelops the work there is the counter-figuration embedded in the title, which summons ideas of the unconscious and inconclusive. The phrase is from a poem by Langston Hughes, one that Mbeki quoted in parliament to open a debate on reconciliation and nation-building in 1998: ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ In the immediate sense, the deferred dream is the unrealised promise of liberation: the unfulfilled promise of the ANC election slogan of ‘A Better Life for All’ and the dangers of a mounting crisis of expectation among black South Africans who found their material circumstances and prospects unchanged post-1994. Mbeki’s answer, paraphrasing Hughes, was: ‘It explodes’ – a warning to a complacent, untransformed nation. And yet the original poem is in fact structured as a litany of questions: ‘Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore – / And then run? […] Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?’ The answers are only implied by the literary work, as a language event that acts as a catalyst to ramifying thought and interpretation rather than a final pronouncement or diagnosis. As such, beyond its obvious import for the state of the nation, one can also think of deferral in narrative or rhetorical terms: with regard to the (intra-textual) matter of analytic delay and withholding. It is there in the way that the biography must negotiate the tension between conclusiveness and speculation – and also tack between the (liberal humanist) idea of language as intimate, individual signature of personhood versus 4 The phrase is from the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s formulation that the ‘most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages: such wills to style have seemed in retrospect to reconfirm the very privatisation and fragmentation of social life against which they were meant to protest’ (Fables of Aggression 2).

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the (historical materialist or structuralist) conception of language as a collective, impersonal and contested set of signs. And, unsurprisingly for a political life cast in the mould of literary biography, there is much attention to Mbeki as reader and writer. As a boy working at his parents’ shop in the village of Mbewuleni, he became ‘letter-reader and letter-writer for the illiterate adults in his community, privy to all the intelligence communicated between migrant labourers in the cities and the people they left back home’ (62). In discussing this ‘much-mythologised locus’ of Mbeki’s coming to political consciousness (60), Gevisser sees the beginning of the kinds of burden – of confidentiality, intelligence, impersonal judgement – that would characterise his style as a political operator. He was ‘hearing about things at an age when [he] should not have been’, his father, Govan Mbeki, tells Gevisser, who evokes a gifted child given more responsibility than he could handle, and suggests that the son’s ‘lifelong commitment to struggle would be one of joyless responsibility’ (63). As such the scene is set for Mbeki as a mere conduit for other people’s words. Throughout his long career as ANC intellectual – drafter of party documents for Oliver Tambo, ideological sparring partner of Joe Slovo, speech writer for Nelson Mandela – we see him as a perfectionist, revising drafts obsessively, carefully working to efface any individuation and so disarm criticism: sublimating any personal trace that might weaken what should be a collectively agreed text, or allow unwanted, unintended meanings to crowd in. In the introduction, Gevisser offers his work as the ‘biography of a man in whose hands my country lay’ but whose revolutionary ethos impelled him (in the master conceit of this psychobiography) ‘to sublimate his subjective experience to the imperatives of struggle’ (xxii). An enormous analytic requirement, in other words, is invested in the personal story of someone who was determinedly impersonal; who is only won over into cooperating with Gevisser when the biographer signals his understanding that ‘you govern through policy rather than personality’ (xxv). The sentences go on to become complex, even contradictory, in their attempts to model the relation (or non-relation) between individual and collective struggle. Unlike Mandela who made a fetish of his biography for South Africans to identify with (‘I was in chains, you were in chains; as I was liberated, so were you; as I can forgive my oppressors, so too can you’) Mbeki denied any relationship between his life story and the work he did. ‘I am the struggle, and the struggle is me’, he seemed to be saying. ‘There is nothing beyond or beneath that’. (xxii)

As such, one can trace how a mode of literary biography that is attuned to the idiosyncrasies and idiolects of self-making must stretch to accommodate a subject whose political ‘grammar’ rested on an idea of strenuous selfabnegation. In exploring this awkward pairing, the sections to follow trace the

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playful, affective and erotic registers that The Dream Deferred infuses into the work of political biography: the candid, emotionally frank manner in which it seeks out ‘some claim to intimacy’ (xxiii) with its subject; the metaphors of seduction that it returns to; and the sometimes awkward intensity with which it treats the visual archive. * In the expansive early sections of The Dream Deferred (before it resorts to a flatter, more journalistic style to keep up with an unfolding present) Gevisser writes of Mbeki’s maternal line. The Moeranes were Bafokeng agriculturalists who had been among the first settlers of the Lesotho mountains in the 1400s: Mbeki’s mother Epainette could trace her direct ancestry back 15 generations. Gevisser sketches the relation between the court of the early African nationalist King Moshoeshoe and the arrival of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society at Morija during the nineteenth century. He pauses on the figure of Mokhanoi, one of the mission station’s earliest and most celebrated converts – and one of Thabo Mbeki’s ancestors. Mokhanoi, we are told, was immortalised in the 1888 edition of the Society’s journal, where there appears a biography by the missionary Arbousset, as well as an accompanying line drawing (reproduced in The Dream Deferred, though not in A Legacy of Liberation), a portrait in which ‘there is something raffish, even louche’ (22). Gevisser goes on: He is, writes Arbousset, ‘a man very slender, a little short but well built, lively, intelligent, and so gay!’ In his compact, almost feminine features – his fluted nostrils, his rosebud of a mouth, those perfectly almond eyes that interrogate a future lying somewhere to the right of the page – he bears a striking resemblance to the youthful images of Thabo Mbeki. (22)

It is the kind of speculative register that one finds throughout the biography. On the one hand, it introduces a note of intellectual range, freedom and pleasure that sets the work apart from many other, more turgid political lives working primarily within an empiricist frame. In the 1990s, Gevisser found his niche as an agile profile writer of the new South African elite for the press, his energetic and sometimes comic tone well matched to the cultural energies released during the Mandela years. ‘I have taken much delight in crafting these profiles’, he writes in the Introduction to Portraits of Power (1996), ‘I hope you will take as much delight in reading them’ (xvi). In The Dream Deferred Gevisser applies the playful, major tonality of this life-writing technique to a subject who embodies a modulation to the more diminished key of the post-transition. The earlier profiles, while substantial, are short enough to allow Gevisser to position himself as merely an observer. In the course of scaling up his biographical work to such a large canvas, however, the question of profiling and the racialised impress that it carries

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becomes (as with No Cold Kitchen) meta-reflexively implicated in the project of life writing itself. In the passage above, for example, it is intriguing to see how directly the fulsome descriptive registers of colonial missionary and evangelical biographer are run together. The interpretive confidence (and rhetorical flourish) of Gevisser’s writing strikes a complex note: what does it mean to assume such an intimate right to describe? And which bodies and faces are conceptually available for such description? Is this lavishly detailed and confident biography to be seen, in some sense, as an extension or literary descendant of the kind of ethnographic reflex one sees here? These are some of the second-order questions that arise when considering The Dream Deferred as a literary construction, and one which circles around its visual materials in a tone that braids together confident ekphrasis with intimations of the limits of its own biographical gaze. The section ends as follows: But just as there are hints of something unknowable and potentially dangerous lurking beneath the beauty of Arbousset’s linedrawing of Mokhanoi, so too there are shards, in his narrative, of an inscrutable identity, one far beyond the author’s ken: ‘I am the brother of the wolf ’, says Thabo Mbeki’s great-greatgrandfather, opaquely, to Arbousset. ‘We eat together’. (23)

What opens up across the 900 pages is an intriguing mismatch between the intellectual (and verbal) styles of president and biographer. The former is guarded, defensive, aloof, his literary career culminating in the ‘Letters from the President’ posted on the ANC website: addresses to the nation that were widely derided as arcane, cranky and intellectually impenetrable defences of his policies. The latter is felicitous, voluble, confessional, analytically expansive – writing imbued with a sense of intellectual relish, perhaps even what one might call (contra to his judgement on Mbeki’s life in struggle) joyful irresponsibility. This expansiveness drew critique from political commentators who wanted less psychologising and more systemic analysis, with the demurrals often framed via an idea of unwieldy excess and over-reaching. Gevisser’s ‘thoroughness overwhelms the narrative’, wrote the New York Times reviewer, who eventually found the work ‘oddly unsatisfying, more a history of the liberation movement than a window into this curious, elusive man’ (Delaney, online). ‘President on the Couch, but Analysis in Doubt’ was the title of ANC stalwart Mac Maharaj’s response, which questioned the ‘looping analysis that goes back and forth’, unconvinced by a ‘style imbued with ambiguity, with twirling qualifiers and twisting hedges’ (17). At the Johannesburg launch, and in a subsequent column, public intellectual Xolela Mangcu (later the biographer of Steve Biko) posed a question that resonated with many: ‘Why should we be implicated in one individual’s search

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for identity, and why should an entire nation suffer the consequences of such a search?’ (‘No Excuse’ 7). As a ‘well-meaning white sympathiser’, Gevisser had (Mangcu suggested) allowed too much leeway, empathy and affect to permeate his narrative. The biographical transaction, one might extrapolate, was caught up (as per ‘Ronald’ and ‘Nadine’) in a syndrome of lop-sided authority, dubious intimacy and cultural atonement. In the New York Review of Books, Joseph Lelyveld (later the biographer of Mohandas Gandhi) questioned the extravagant effort devoted ‘to spelunking through the hidden recesses to Thabo Mbeki’s psyche’ and judged Gevisser ‘the kind of writer who can’t help squeezing a metaphor dry through constant repetition’ (26). One of the most striking qualities about The Dream Deferred is its metaphorical profusion. Over the course of its 900 pages we see Mbeki described as a hedgehog, a bat, a fish in the stream of history, a ‘quick weasel’, a ‘loungelizard’ – and these are just the animal similes. Chapter titles portray him as ‘Sussex Man’ (connoting his immersion in Western socialism, Englishness and liberal democracy) and ‘Moscow Man’ (where the young revolutionary receives ideological training at the Lenin Institute). Back in Lusaka in the 1970s he is ‘the Duke of Kabulonga’ – suave, patrician and distant: drinking whisky and listening to jazz in his private residence where the garden is raked Zen-style to show up intruders’ footprints. But he is also ‘The National Interferer’: apparatchik, perfectionist and workaholic who ‘interfered in everyone else’s portfolio, sometimes with permission and enthusiasm, sometimes with resentment’ (414). At other points we read of him as a polished gem (as opposed to the rough diamond Zuma), a black Englishman in tweeds. In needing to shuttle between delegations of privileged white South Africans on political ‘safari’ and fractious, economically stressed ANC party structures in exile (some of whom resented his privileged Western education and were inclined to brand him an impimpi or sell-out), he is also a figure divided between a ‘vineyard-self ’ and a ‘bush-self ’. The latter dichotomy is worked up via photos of the ANC delegation at the Vergelegen estate outside Cape Town, shortly after Mbeki’s return from exile in April 1990. Dressed in ‘a too-tight suit over a pullover’, his (uncharacteristically) unstylish outfit conjures ‘the threadbare revolutionary rather than the urbane statesman-in-waiting’ (573). Gevisser goes on to read a figuration of the South African interregnum (popularised by Gordimer, drawing from Antonio Gramsci) into Mbeki’s dress code.5 He is ‘no longer in the broad paisley ties and floral shirts of the fashionable young Sussex-trained freedom fighter’, but 5 The line from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is used as the epigraph to July’s People, and reprised in Gordimer’s 1983 essay ‘Living in the Interregnum’: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms’ (Telling Times 375).

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nor, yet, ‘has he appropriated the stockbroker style of broad-striped shirts, or the comfy middle-age of black cardigan over a golf shirt’ (573): The photo seemed to me to capture its subject, uncomfortably, in some interregnum of style – Gramsci’s old-not-yet-dead-and-new-struggling-to-be-born rendered sartorially – as he negotiates the space between exile and home, the transition between being in opposition and being in power. (573)

Reading this somewhat strained metaphor, one has the sense of Mbeki (suffused with his impersonal ambitions of self-determination) being uncomfortably captured not so much by the photographer as by the biographer, one who (as he does with Mbeki’s great-great grandfather) assumes a certain kind of unwanted, or unwarranted intimacy. If the compulsive metaphors and insistent ekphrasis are two literary strategies of wrangling an elusive intimacy, another is the stacking of rhetorical questions. The Dream Deferred is full of chains of enquiry that (as in Hughes’s poem) spool out to great length at certain moments in the text. Gevisser remarks at one point that Mbeki’s ‘intellect is marked by perpetual questioning: he advances not through enthusiastic exclamation points or staccato full stops but along a line of question marks’ (56). As Brent Meersman notes, this pattern of cascading enquiry is one that infiltrates the biographical style, its chapters often concluding with a string of rhetorical questions, ‘notably when touching sensitive issues that might offend his subject’ (428). ‘The impression’, Meersman suggests, ‘is that Gevisser is trying to find a point of identification with Mbeki and perhaps offering a tacit apologia for his public probing’ (428). In contrast to ‘the unlikeable Mr Roberts’ (and the deliberately disagreeable figure of Naipaul, whose disagreeability is surely a heuristic strategy), Gevisser’s narrative persona is based on an idea of likeability. The approachability and anecdotal warmth of the voice (one that is carried through, albeit with some difficulty, into his 2014 memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg) no doubt contributed to the wide readership of the biography;6 yet it also required a range of workarounds for making its prickly and recessed subject more amenable and emotionally available to the reader. These include the enormous number of people interviewed – over two hundred voices, functioning as a kind of lively chorus compensating for the subject’s ‘calculated blandness’ and rhetorical caution – as well as a narrative structure that entails a series of 6 As Leon de Kock writes, Gevisser’s ‘stylistically elegant and ultimately upbeat meditation’ on living in Johannesburg is ‘held up (both in a temporal and criminal sense)’ by a violent home invasion which the author was a victim of while finishing the manuscript, and which must then be written into the work as a dissonant coda. The result is a lurch from one generic signature into another: ‘And so it is that a respected literary stylist finds himself writing a true-crime story’ (Losing the Plot 147).

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journeys to places that its subject had deliberately and definitively left behind. ‘I’ve told Thabo that the villagers want to see him’, Epainette Mbeki says to Gevisser when he visits the remote Mbewuleni in 1999, ‘but he told me that this is the last village in the whole of South Africa that he will ever come to’. It is a comment that ‘says much about Thabo Mbeki’, Gevisser goes on, ‘about his stern disavowal of the sentimentality of ethnic identity and the favour of familial patronage’ (5). The biographical narrator quite literally goes great distances to reconcile his own ambitions to be personable with a subject whose version of ambition entailed a rejection of anything that smacked of populism.

‘Generous anthropologies of African mistakes’ Tragedy, seduction and the limits of the liberal imagination

So how can this close attention to the literary form of a biography be related to the larger debates surrounding the Mbeki presidency, and the policies that brought him so much unpopularity while in power? There are two deep figurations that the work comes to rely on – one of Shakespearean tragedy and one of cross-racial seduction – which suggest a linkage between personal psychodynamics and the larger structures of feeling through which the Mbeki presidency has been understood. Tracking these figurative clusters more carefully reveals something hard-to-see about Mbeki’s self-determination and its discontents, particularly as the president moves into his deeply unpopular and polarising positions on the aetiology of HIV/AIDS. The anti-populism registered by Epainette Mbeki in Mbewuleni is of a piece (the biography suggests) with her son’s identification with Shakespeare’s most unlikeable tragic hero, Coriolanus: another of the metaphors that Gevisser will squeeze. As a young man studying at the Lenin Institute in 1969, Mbeki interpreted the tragedy’s eponymous general – ‘conventionally seen as a vainglorious proto-fascist’ (xxxix) – as prototype for the clear-sighted modern revolutionary. The Roman general was a model of ‘truthfulness, courage, selfsacrifice, absence of self-seeking’, Mbeki wrote to correspondents in Sussex, a patrician figure unconcerned with the mood of the public, the ‘rabble’, the ‘unthinking mob, with its cowardice, its lying, its ordinary people-ness’ (xxxix). ‘Would you have me be false to my nature?’ Coriolanus asks at one point, ‘I play the man I am’. ‘This assertion of self-determination has been Mbeki’s mantra’ (xxxix), Gevisser remarks in the introduction to The Dream Deferred, a leitmotif that is reprised at several points to account for the president’s refusal to spin the media or compromise on positions he believed were principled: the toxicity and unconscionable expense of antiretroviral drugs, for example, or the right of Zimbabwe to resist regime change directed from outside its borders. In the updated international version of the biography, the Shakespearean section is

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moved to the epilogue, in which the biographer charts his subject’s downfall at Polokwane. Here we see unfold a tragic fifth act in which it is precisely Mbeki’s arrogant and Coriolanus-like insistence on self-determination that proves his undoing, revealing his inability to connect with the majority of delegates, or to read the popular mood (while his nemesis, the master populist Zuma, plays to the crowd). Mbeki as Coriolanus is a metaphorical schema that has received sustained attention by Daniel Roux, whose analysis of the uses of tragedy in South African liberationist discourse reveals that what is at issue is not simply divergent interpretations of Mbeki as political actor but, again, a contest between very different ways of conceiving the subject. While traditional Anglophone Shakespeare criticism often relied on the idea of a fatal flaw embedded within an individual psyche, Mbeki had (through his immersion in Soviet thought and culture at the Lenin Institute) been exposed to a Marxist critical tradition that inverted this figurative axis. Instead, it read the protagonist’s demise as the symptom or result of insoluble contradictions within wider society: the death of the tragic hero as a consequence of social disjuncture. For literary scholars it is, as Roux remarks, ‘an interesting situation’ (‘Shakespeare and Tragedy’ 8). Mbeki becomes attached to a play by Shakespeare as a guide to conduct for a revolutionary, his response ‘guided by a geographically and historically distinct tradition of literary scholarship’ (9), a Marxian theory of tragedy that travels through the global networks of exile and anti-colonial thought during the Cold War. Then Gevisser, a journalist with a Yale University literary background, uses Coriolanus as a symptom, a key to unlocking the personality of his subject: ‘he is reading Mbeki’s reading, a recursive exegetical exercise that makes sense in the genre conventions of the biography’ (9). As such, it is ‘almost irresistible to ask if Coriolanus can be used to read Gevisser reading Mbeki reading Coriolanus like a series of Russian dolls’ (9). This he goes on to do, tracing how Shakespeare’s refraction of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (a foundational text of Western biography) is one that turns precisely on the disjuncture between self-directed and socialised notions of identity. The result is a play-text that can sustain both ‘personal’ (Anglophone) and ‘structural’ (Soviet) interpretations of the protagonist’s downfall in a faminethreatened Rome. ‘Something about Coriolanus is simply in excess of the symbolic roles he is enjoined to play; and nobody seems able to form a coherent opinion of him, at least not until he is dead’ (13) Roux concludes, suggesting that what we should recognise here ‘is precisely the logic of the subject as it emerges in Early Modern literature and thought’ (13–14). These warring, irreconcilable and excessive ideas of the self can both be derived from Coriolanus’s ambiguous mantra – ‘I play the man I am’. Even as it seems to reject dissembling and insist on the self as stable basis for meaningful action, this line

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also broaches the contrary idea (or counter-subject) of identity as perpetually staged rather than internalised, of the self as a performance scripted by larger forces of expectation and social constriction. Pondering the wedding photographs of aristocrats and revolutionaries gathered at Farnham Castle in 1974, Gevisser quotes friends who admired Mbeki’s skilful negotiation of a hybrid identity. In this reading, his dress code indexes the necessary opportunism of a liberation struggle that needed to keep one foot in Moscow and one in the West, while operating from various locations in Africa all the while. But he closes with a remark from an old acquaintance from Sussex who cites the theatricality and disjunctures of the event as suggestive that the groom’s identity might have been staged rather than internalised; the wedding suggested ‘that lack of a core from which everything emanated’ within him (302). This tension between identity as self-derived (or autotelic) versus relational (or performed) is one that the biography, in its strongest moments, is able to keep in a dynamic relation, as a kind of analytic double helix. It allows a forcefully acute reading of Mbeki’s ambitions within the surrogate family of the ANC. Reflecting on his closeness to Tambo, Gevisser remarks that this political ‘father-son’ pairing achieved such effectiveness and intimacy precisely because it was removed from the complexities and rivalries of actual familial relations. The Tambo–Thabo liaison was ‘exemplary in revolutionary terms: a father-son relationship able to reach its fullest potential because there were no genetic strings attached’ (222). Similar, he is able to capture the mixture of self-making and self-evacuation that (as with Shakespeare’s confounding hero) gives rise to Mbeki’s political persona: perhaps what drives him (an old friend reflects) ‘is the satisfaction of being or doing what was expected of him. It’s a very different thing from ambition, but it’s an immensely powerful motivation’ (237). Yet as ever, it is not just one figurative schema that The Dream Deferred comes to rely on. Along with vision of a sexless, impersonal Coriolanus, we are also asked to hold in mind a metaphor of political seduction and its failed aftermath. It is a conception that increasingly shapes the later sections of the biography, as the ‘courting dances’ between the ANC in exile and the overtures of white business elites turn to an unhappy morning-after within the post-Mandela era. ‘Shit, I’d die for that bugger’, begins the chapter titled ‘The Seducer’, as Gevisser quotes Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the leader of the liberal, reformist Progressive Federal Party, who had led a ‘safari’ of Afrikaner dissidents to meet the ANC in Dakar in 1987 (496). He is one of many white leaders entirely overwhelmed by Mbeki’s charm and authority in the 1980s. Yet by late 1990s, this intimacy has soured. Mbeki’s disappointment with (in his view) uncommitted business elites, an unrelentingly critical press and the lack of promised investment from the private sector (despite his government’s painful

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structural adjustments and detour from socialist redistribution) – these are read through the prism of a political morning-after. On the one hand, the use of seduction as master metaphor sits rather uneasily with Gevisser’s decision not to dwell in any detail on his subject’s actual sex life. He devotes much space to the homosocial intimacies between Mbeki and white leaders like Van Zyl Slabbert, but passes over the ANC leader’s marriage and his sexual adventuring – which was (it is hinted) complex and extensive. For some, this was again a metaphor given too much explanatory power, its reliance on psychology misrepresenting the fraught context of political decision-making given the debt inherited from the apartheid system, and the strictures of structural adjustment forced on an emergent nation. At a panel discussion in 2008, for example, political analyst Adam Habib found Gevisser’s psychological portraiture ‘weak’ in its attempt to account for the disaffection of the Mbeki presidency, and the shift from the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of the Mandela years to Mbeki’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). In its place, Habib substitutes his own totalising explanatory discourse, that of political economy, to give a structural accounting for the increasing centralisation of his administration: The ANC liberation movement inherits the straining state coffers, and [is] brought to power by people with legitimate expectations – of houses, schools etc. But the people with the money are the big companies and they are on an investment strike. So, to get investment, Mbeki has to make concessions. The result is programs like GEAR. But you don’t pass it through parliament because you won’t get it through your own party. So, you pass it through cabinet and say it is the implementation of the transition. But then you have to appoint premiers to implement these policies. The result is a centralised system. Hence, it is clear that in order to explain the current situation, analysis has to understand systemic variables. This is why Mark’s presentation was weak.7

There is little place for biographising here: we are presented with a systemic script that would have played out, inexorably and predictably, through any given leader’s actions. As such, it points to all those structures of feeling that the discourse of political economy, evacuated of all personalities, cannot access: the excessive and cryptic nature of Mbeki’s changing language as president, for example, and how this constituted not just diagnosis or symptom of an underlying social reality, but was itself constitutive of that reality. As the political commentator Eusebius McKaiser writes perceptively in a close 7 Quoted in Harold Wolpe Foundation, ‘Harold Wolpe Foundation Minutes’, 19 February 2008, 3. http://www.markgevisser.com/images/pdf/wolpelectureminutes.pdf. I am grateful to Roux, ‘Shakespeare and Tragedy’, for drawing my attention to this. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.

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textual analysis of the president’s changing language, in Mbeki’s turn towards generalisation and racial essentialism, he had become ‘solely concerned with speaking theoretical and historical truths while no longer grasping the impact of his speeches as a public performance whose very delivery constitutes part of our public engagement with those truths’ (in Glaser ed., Mbeki and After 204). Tracking the shift from the generous inclusiveness of his 1996 ‘I Am an African’ speech to his cryptic and involuted pronouncements on HIV/AIDS, Gevisser shows Mbeki’s language on the pandemic and its science to be one of immense irresponsibility and stubborn excess. As the book was in its final stages, the president couriered his biographer an anonymously-authored, 114-page document that had been distributed to party members during the 51st national conference of the ANC in 2002. From its title onwards, ‘Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot and Mouth and Statistics: HIV/ AIDS and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African’ is a bizarre and confounding hybrid of different registers: copious literary quotation; stringent position paper; sarcastic rehearsal of racist stereotype; conspiratorial or even paranoiac exercise in AIDS denialism (which went so far as claiming that Mbeki’s own presidential spokesperson Parks Mankahlana had died because of consumption of toxic antiretrovirals rather than the disease itself.) The tract was rumoured to have been authored, at least in part, by Mbeki himself (a claim which he does not deny); in any case, he signals to the biographer that it reflects his views, and confesses his regret at having been made to withdraw from the AIDS debate by his own party. It is here that Gevisser’s idea of a seduction as a space of mutual misprision and misunderstanding comes into its own. It becomes a way of addressing how a particular style (and language) of leadership detonated an incipient crisis, and is able to explore the difficult ambiguity at the heart of signature projects like Black Economic Empowerment and the African Renaissance. The suturing in the latter phrase suggests the precariousness of a politics that was to be (simultaneously) self-defined and externally vetted; as both ambitiously and self-reliantly African, but also inescapably relational, in being constantly routed through recourse to a perceived Eurocentric gaze and lexicon. Despite his interest in Black Consciousness, and his deft work of bringing BC exiles into the folds of the ANC, Mbeki emerges from Gevisser’s biography as a figure who did not fully internalise Biko’s vision of a Black identity no longer subject to externally defined (‘white’, Western or Anglo-American) criteria and standards.8 The prioritisation of technocratic governance and managerial efficiency according to the criteria of business elites, and the desire to be ‘world 8 Here and elsewhere, I have used the upper-case spelling ‘Black’ when the word is used or inflected in a sense that invokes the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and its legacy.

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class’, which became hallmarks of the Mbeki presidency – these suggest the kind of conceptual double-bind that unfolded during his tenure. There is some embarrassment in devoting systemic analysis to an individual, writes political analyst Steven Friedman in the edited collection Mbeki and After; yet he goes on to suggest how the psychic architecture of this administration was one that literally determined national discourse and macro-economic policy. Its leitmotif, he suggests, was ‘the desire to refute white racism by showing that black people were at least as good as whites at that which the latter were assumed to value’ (Glaser ed. 172). The result was a skewed encounter between reciprocal cultural myths and racial stereotypes, a spiral of perceived crypto-prejudice and reactive defensiveness that continues to characterise the post-Mandela era. Here we are returned to the unstable zone where, to reprise N. Chabani Manganyi’s deft formulation, ‘culturally activated transferences are easily traded for truth’ (‘Psychobiography’ 26). The Mbeki years, Friedman goes on, were a lost opportunity to engage South Africa’s most debilitating fault line, in that ‘the president and political leadership’s particular form of preoccupation with race made it impossible to discuss productively the most salient of South African divides’ (174). At a further remove, there lurks the implication that the seductive intimacies of the negotiated settlement were less the result of a meeting of equals than of a function of low expectations and romanticised expediency on both sides. At one point Gevisser remarks how Mbeki seemed unimpressed by the adulation afforded to him so easily as a student leader when at Sussex: something put down to his suspicion that he had been construed as an ‘African fetish object’, and came to partly resent those whom he had so easily won over. As such, the intellectual ambitions of both president and biographer propel the work into ever more difficult terrains – so that the whole posture of the biography might be said to become implicated in the kind of syndrome it seeks to diagnose. As a final way of approaching this: in a June 2007 column for Business Day, Jonny Steinberg discusses a book by the French anthropologist Didier Fassin which offers an exceptionally generous, empathetic attempt to understand the AIDS dissidence of Mbeki. In both Fassin’s When Bodies Remember (2007) and The Dream Deferred, we are shown that Mbeki is no eccentric dissident; rather ‘he gives voice to an aggrieved and quintessentially African experience, one shared by millions’ (Steinberg, Notes 270). As with orthodox, colonially blinkered medical histories of tuberculosis in the twentieth century, the international discussion on AIDS is yet another discourse on illness that remains ‘silent about poverty, about political economy, about the modern environmental conditions that have been killing Africans for generations’ (272). At this juncture Steinberg makes the surprising move of invoking Lucy Lurie, the rape victim in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, who (in Steinberg’s

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words) ‘comes to see the attack on her as a kind of historical reparation’ (Notes 274). In her decision to remain on her Eastern Cape smallholding (we are told), Coetzee conveys Lucy’s subtle racism, portraying someone who is ‘fatalistic about the future because her expectations of black-ruled South Africa are terribly low. Trying desperately to understand her attacker, she condemns him’ (274). He goes on: One hopes that history will come to judge Mbeki’s AIDS dissidence as an aberration in the African nationalist project. For an African nationalism congenitally suspicious of foreign knowledge and technology beckons a future of low expectations, the sort to which Lucy Lurie resigned herself. In the meantime, we should beware generous anthropologies of African mistakes. (Notes, 274).

This ‘literary’ addition to the debate is an unusual and risky one, surely relying on a misreading of Coetzee’s novel (something to which I will return in the following chapter, when I look at Steinberg’s work proper). Yet for now, I want draw out the suggestion that, in their ostensible generosity, Mbeki’s apologists end up condemning African nationalism – by implying that it was destined to get the aetiology of AIDS horribly wrong. His last lines might even be read as a coded response to The Dream Deferred, sketching the double-bind that Gevisser’s seductive and empathetic work of life writing finds itself caught up in, and the limits to its ambitions. * ‘Almost any biographer’, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1939, ‘if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’ (‘Art of Biography’ 126). The biographies of Gordimer and Mbeki that I have considered are suffused with a poetics of the fertile fact: an overflow of suggestive but ambiguous personal data as a counterpoint to what the historian Shula Marks called ‘the aridity of unpeopled political economy’ (‘Context’ 39). Yet this excess is an unstable element, generated from the odd pairings that produce these works. Roberts applies an increasingly immobile brand of identity politics to a fissile, dissident life in literature; Gevisser conducts a generous, personable and effusively literary reading of a man socialised in notions of impersonality and historical materialism, in party political and fiscal discipline. No Cold Kitchen turns the drama of writing across subject positions into a drama of ambitious excess, a chaotic and even carnivalesque work that plays across South Africa’s vast scene of unresolved difference. Beginning as a dissenting biography, it undergoes a slow mutation into a kind of biographical fiction, one that reveals more than it ever intended about the debased and damaged forms of authority produced by colonial and apartheid history, and

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how long these will continue to act on the social body. Gevisser’s generous anthropology of Mbeki and his mistakes carries within it a dissonant counterpoint: that such well-meaning generosity might itself be the function of lowered expectations; that an overweening, overly attentive desire to understand its subject might work to compromise the sovereignty and self-determination that the president took as his lodestar. This is not a fault to be laid at the feet of the biographer; rather, the immense scale of the project allows one to see, in unusual detail, the long endgame of a particular syndrome: the ambitions of liberal humanism encountering the lingering suspicion and intimate enmity produced by twentieth-century South Africa’s socio-cultural engineering. What seems to be at stake in these nonfiction epics (above and beyond their immediate subjects) is the role of the writer-intellectual in the postcolony, or the career of a certain strain of liberal humanist confidence in South Africa. The discursive malleability and metaphorical abundance of Gevisser’s Mbeki, as a kind of prism through which the biography can trial an enormous range of theories and interpretations of subjectivity, make it not just a biography but also an exploration of post-apartheid intellectual possibility. In this sense The Dream Deferred might be seen as marking a kind of limit text in South African life writing. Put bluntly, it is difficult to imagine that a political biography of such intentness, intimacy and intellectual self-­ confidence could now be written (or, at least, so widely acclaimed) by a ‘white’ writer about the ‘black’ experience.9 The fault lines that it reveals run still more strongly through the next chapters, particularly in the work of Steinberg, whose literary journalistic persona emerges out of precisely such moral quandaries. His books are always self-reflexively aware of the power imbalances inherent in their own non-fictional ambitions, and the pressure these imbalances exert on recovering any measure of collectively valid truth. The result is a strain of non-fiction riddled with risky gambits and haunted by a deep sense of narrative unreliability.

9 Contrast, for example, the more distanced and deferential tone adopted by Brian Willan in his 2018 biography of Sol Plaatje.

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Literary journalism in the postcolony

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In an epilogue to Little Liberia, his 2011 account of an African diaspora in New York, Jonny Steinberg records a telephone conversation with a man whose life he has just spent two years researching. The author has given Jacob Massaquoi a printout of the manuscript, along with a note proposing that 50% of the royalties be channelled to community projects. Four days later he receives a call: ‘I have read everything’, he said. ‘There are very serious problems with this book: problems that will hurt family back home, problems that will have repercussions for me in Staten Island. And then there are still more problems I cannot discuss now. In short, there are problems.’ (260)

Reading a book-length description of yourself for the first time, the author remarks, is a shock for anyone who has had the experience. It marks the moment at which your embellishments, evasions and self-presentations – as recorded in the researcher’s notebooks or audio files over many months – are wrested violently into a narrative contrivance that is recognisable but other: ‘The writer has cheated. He has written a you that is not you’ (260). Most find the experience confusing: ‘Something is wrong, but how to put one’s finger on it? Where does one’s complaint begin?’ (260) Where does one begin with Steinberg’s non-fiction? Where to find a point of departure that has not been pre-empted by the self-aware and hyper-­articulate persona at the centre of his works? Anticipating, articulating and even relishing the range of ethical quandaries generated by the process of writing so intimately about people from worlds very different to his own – this set piece of authorial consternation in Little Liberia recurs in different guises all through his wide-ranging body of work. It is one that began by addressing, in quick succession, the murder of a KwaZulu-Natal farmer as a window into that region’s racially charged land disputes (Midlands, 2002); social engineering, prison gangs and violent criminality in the Western Cape (The Number, 2004); and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, medical history and social stigma in Pondoland (Three-Letter Plague, 2008). This loose ‘trilogy’ of books on some of South Africa’s most contested subjects established Steinberg as perhaps the country’s foremost practitioner of narrative non-fiction or (as American respondents to his work tend to call it)

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literary journalism. Though as with a writer whom he cites as a primary influence, Janet Malcolm, what is often called journalism might better be described as some other, more original art form: ‘some singular admixture of reporting, biography, literary criticism, psychoanalysis’, and one that also borrows liberally from fiction’s codes of characterisation, world-making and plot development (Roiphe, online). By the age of thirty-five, Steinberg had been awarded the Alan Paton prize twice for addressing subjects talked about constantly but often emptily within the public sphere: dealt with in the languages of myth, conspiracy and cliché. ‘It is possible to chatter about AIDS incessantly, and many people in South Africa do, even while plummeting down the abyss of denial’, he reflected in a column of April 2011, which traced the dearth of ‘imaginative and intimate literature’ on the subject (‘An Eerie Silence’, online). In fact, he went on, ‘people talk about AIDS in South Africa all the time’ – in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television – and yet, a special language is reserved for it: ‘a numbed, meaningless, evasive language that speaks incessantly and abstractly of hope and togetherness and thus manages to change the subject even while raising it.’ Seeking to redress such evasions, his books turn to some of the most overwrought, heavily mediatised and phantasmatic signifiers of post-apartheid South Africa – ‘farm murders’, ‘AIDS’, ‘crime’ – and imbue them with dense historical and explanatory context, as well as the texture of intimate and often ambiguous lived experience. Later works like Little Liberia and A Man of Good Hope (2014) address more geographically dispersed and transnational stories; but they still turn on some of the most vexed and defining problems of the twenty-first-century nation-state: questions of armed conflict, trauma and collective memory in Liberia and the Horn of Africa; of lives shaped by forced exile, chronic insecurity and xenophobia. As per Jacob Massaquoi’s objections, it is precisely those realms of experience and representation which generate problems – multi-dimensional ethical and epistemic problems – that Steinberg’s narrative and analytic gifts have been drawn to as he moved from book to book. Each focuses on a living person, and someone whose life is likely to be materially affected by the fact of publication. ‘What is the protocol in your business?’ Jacob goes on to ask: ‘Because the book you have written: I did not expect you to write this book. It is very close, very private. It is the sort of book you publish when you are old and will soon be dead. It is not the sort of book you publish when you are thirty years of age’ (261). To deem something ‘problematic’ (a common accusation in contemporary intellectual discourse, virtually a cliché) is often to suggest that it should stop: that it is ethically inappropriate and best abandoned. Yet it is at precisely from these ‘wicked problems’ that Steinberg’s non-fiction projects begin, and from

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which they derive their analytic energy.1 ‘I hope I am scrupulous about the fact that there are two adults entering the exchange and no one is being deceived or double-crossed’, he remarks in a revealing interview with Daniel Lehman, ‘But the very structure of the relationship is a deeply problematic one, and that is what makes it, hopefully, material for good writing’ (37). Scenes of costing, accounting and transaction; of double-crossing and deception – these are threaded through Steinberg’s narrative architecture. This contractual metaphor refracts how a scrupulous attempt to ensure an ethical transaction rides in tension with a range of more dubious and vulnerable moments thrown up by the inherently exploitative, or at least, instrumentalist and transactional nature of the journalistic project – particularly when it operates within a social scene so corroded by racial and economic inequality. Yet such difficulties are in turn folded back into the reflective voice that powers the works, a voice that seems confident enough to absorb any situation, no matter how intractable, into its analysis: ‘I am a middle-class white South African who has generally written about poor black South Africans’, he says to his interviewer: ‘Behind the ways in which my subjects perform for me, want to please me, resent me, need to conceal things from me, lies the story of a whole country’ (32). The comment is revealing of how the subjects of his books become diffuse as the texts oscillate between biography, autobiographical inflections and social history; as the portrayals of the figures at their centre weave between the psychoanalytically intimate and the socially representative. On the one hand we read the life stories of the farmer ‘Arthur Mitchell’ whose son has been murdered; of the prisoner and ex-gang member Magadien Wentzel trying to change his life; of the young man ‘Sizwe Magadla’ who refuses to test for HIV. At the same time we are presented with the story, the meta-discourse, of Steinberg’s encounter with these worlds; and then what this encounter between writer and subject – uncertain, often ironic, sometimes irredeemable – might reveal about a larger social world. In this chapter and the next, I am particularly drawn to moments in the first (South African) triptych, because my sense is that by the time of Little Liberia and A Man of Good Hope, Steinberg has evolved an approach that verges on the formulaic in the way that it deals with the ethical difficulties of narrative journalism. Passages such as the epilogue above can read as too 1 The concept of multi-dimensional, multi-scalar ‘wicked problems’, originally formulated in social planning during the 1970s and subsequently extended to other areas (for example, climate change policy) is worth holding in mind: particularly in the sense that such problems have no stopping rule, that each case is unique (a ‘one-shot operation’) and that ‘solutions’ cannot be seen as true-or-false, but only better or worse (see Rittel and Webber, ‘Dilemmas’, 155–69).

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practised in their suspicion, even slightly glib in their caveats. By contrast, the earlier works tend to be more obsessive and idiosyncratic reading experiences, books riddled with odd digressions and detours, less in control of the details and insights they amass. Showing Steinberg in the process of working out his non-fictional modus operandi through trial and error, they are more vulnerable in their confidences and (possibly) the confidence tricks played on or by their subjects. ‘A good liar always admits to one lie’, one of my students remarked when seeking to voice her disquiet with these complex non-fictions, but finding it (as Jacob did) hard to put her finger on. What then are the less visible, inadmissible ‘lies’ threaded through the books? If this strain of non-fiction is so reliable in flagging its unreliability – its known unknowns – then what of the unknown unknowns: the zones of unreliably unreliable narration that cannot fully be acknowledged or brought into view? The rest of this chapter sketches three possible genealogies for this ambitious and problem-riddled strain of literary journalism in South Africa, signalled via three opening paragraphs: one famous, one less famous than it might have been, one infamous but now largely forgotten. In doing so, it considers the The Number and the South African prison, while the following chapter spends more time immersed in the rural worlds of Midlands and Three-Letter Plague. Along the way I touch on other writers – Adam Ashforth, Dugmore Boetie, Breyten Breytenbach, Liz McGregor, Charles van Onselen – whose creative treatments of actuality open similarly difficult questions about what the ‘literary’ in literary journalism might mean: its privileges, liberties and limits.

An overreliable narrator The power and privilege of the literary journalist

‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible’. Looking back on her famous opening lines to The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book now assigned to journalism students around the world, Janet Malcolm remarks that today her critique ‘seems obvious, even banal. No one argues with it, and […] it has degenerated – as critiques do – into a sort of lame excuse’ (Roiphe, online). Appearing so frank in articulating the inevitable betrayals of the journalistic encounter, but carrying on nonetheless: one can sense the tonal affinities between Malcolm’s voice and that of Steinberg, particularly in the austere pleasure her writing takes in its own unflinchingness. The journalist, Malcolm goes on, is ‘a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ (3). The South African writer recalls discovering her work while struggling with the unlikeable subject of his first book and finding it ‘enormously empowering’;

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she became ‘by far and away’ his most important stylistic influence (Lehman, ‘Counting the Costs’ 32). Here then is one of the main currents that feeds the kind of non-fiction practised by Steinberg and those influenced by him: part of the robust tradition that is, for all its variety, generally recognised and discussed as ‘literary journalism’ in the United States. Its historians trace its emergence from nineteenth-century reportage, via the digressive and intimate portraiture of Joseph Mitchell and the early New Yorker writers, while also having to reckon with the large claims made by Tom Wolfe in his introduction to the 1973 anthology The New Journalism. Infused by energies of the counter-culture, this was a manifesto which claimed the right, as did Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in their ‘non-fiction novels’, to annex the fictional techniques of scenic construction, divergent narrative perspective and dialogue for the evocation of ‘real’ subjects. Granting itself ‘every device known to prose’ (34) to engage the social spectacle of America, the new non-fiction (according to Wolfe) had dethroned the novel as the sacred vessel of literary esteem in the West – or rather, harnessed the energies of an earlier, more glorious moment in its evolution. In his potted literary history, the post-war American novel – having abandoned the close link with reportage that distinguished the monuments of nineteenth-century realism by Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy – directs itself inwards, towards ‘neo-fabulism’ and self-indulgent wordplay, leaving the ‘hulking carnival’ of 1960s New York and California entirely to the attentions of writers like Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and (most importantly) himself (47). Rereading Wolfe’s famous set-piece today, and from South Africa, it is hard to accept his blithe self-confidence in assuming that the New Journalists can have the best of both novelistic and non-fictional worlds: the ability to move exuberantly between viewpoints and different streams of consciousness, all the while banking on ‘an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened’ (The New Journalism 49). If writers like Rian Malan, Bongani Madondo and Richard Poplak carry some of the more expressionist, ‘Gonzo’-like reflexes of literary journalism in modern South African writing, Steinberg embodies its more analytic and stylistically spare incarnation: a long reaction formation to the access-all-areas pass that Wolfe insisted on; a scrupulousness about demarcating the relation between what can and cannot be known; a rejection of its overweening confidence and autobiographical impositions. While still partaking of the agility and reflective power that this strain of non-fictional investigation permits the central narrator – a figure who is able to intervene, address the reader, ‘honestly’ admit the challenges of the project at hand, write him- or herself into the unfolding narrative, work out implicit covenants with the reader regarding

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accuracy and candour – Steinberg’s is, like Malcolm’s, a poetics of great intellectual caution, and one which relies on a theoretical separation between the journalistic and the autobiographical ‘I’. The character called ‘I’ is unlike all the journalist’s other characters, writes Malcolm in the afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer, ‘in that he forms the exception to the rule that nothing may be invented’: The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike, the ‘I’ of auto­ biography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way […] The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life. (159–60)

It is a paradoxically mixed idea of invention and limit at the heart of the journalistic process. Her division between the journalistic and autobiographical first person is perhaps too absolute; but the passage does, I think, hint at the problems that Steinberg’s work is perhaps not able to admit or entirely reckon with. As we will see, at certain crux points in his books, he blends the privileges of journalistic and autobiographical first person – respectively, an analytic (overreliable) rhetorical device and an actual, fallible (semi-reliable) protagonist. It is this that might account for the uneasiness that some readers feel with a commanding, ‘at-times overwhelming narrative presence’, one that comes to occupy all available intellectual space within the non-fictional text (Mulgrew, ‘Tracing’ 15). Malcolm reappears in the epilogue to Little Liberia as Steinberg seeks to model a distinction between non-fiction and the novel much less porous than that of Wolfe (or of David Shields in Reality Hunger, a more recent attempt to scramble such categories): ‘The writer of fiction’, one of America’s most thoughtful journalists has mused, ‘is the master of his own house and may do what he likes with it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined. But the writer of non-fiction is only the renter, who must abide by the conditions of the lease’. (quoted 264)

Along with a prose style orchestrated by the scrupulously analytic ‘I’, it is this contractual imaginary that Steinberg carries over from Malcolm: a metaphor of leases and legal agreements where clauses forbid any gratuitous or presumptuous invention. In this sense, she remarks, the writer of fiction ‘is entitled to more privilege’ (quoted in Little Liberia 153); whereas what a non-fiction writer cannot do, Steinberg remarks, ‘the one twist he cannot accomplish – is pretend to know what is happening in a character’s head’ (Lehman, ‘Counting the Costs’ 32).

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And yet, for the writer working in an extremely unequal and linguistically balkanised society, the ‘privilege’ (both technical and social) of the novelist might translate into its own kind of limit. With the diagnostic social sweep of nineteenth-century realist, or twentieth-century ‘Great American novel’ simply unavailable to a privileged, English-medium South African writer, it is then non-fiction’s project of fraught cultural investigation and translation that might provide the most suitable (or least unsuitable) literary equipment for social understanding. And here Steinberg is not above some Wolfe-like provocation of his own, in reanimating a rivalry between fictive and nonfictive modes. Most South African writers, he remarks, ‘simply don’t know this country well enough to write fiction about it’.2

‘Without ever wishing to deceive’ ‘History from below’ and its discontents

That is one beginning, and one possible genealogy; here is another: This is a biography of a man who, if one went by the official record alone, never was. It is the story of a family who have no documentary existence, of farming folk who lived out their lives in a part of South Africa that few people loved, in a century that the country will always want to forget. The State Archives, supposedly the mainspring of the nation’s memory, has but one line referring to Kas Maine. (3)

The opening of Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (1997) – a 700-page account of the life of the farmer, sharecropper and patriarch named here – confidently enlists an idea that is threaded though diverse twentieth-century practices of social history: that of restoring an unofficial, undocumented existence to historical visibility, and of using interviews, oral narrative and memory work to do so. The one line referring to Kas Maine is a record of him being fined five shillings by the Periodical Criminal Court at Makwassie on 8 September 1931 for being unable to produce a dog licence. ‘Other than that, we know nothing of the man’, writes Van Onselen, and then goes on: Life transcends bureaucratic notation and legal formulations, however. Words – no matter how precisely chosen – mislead, phrases obscure, and sentences deceive. The man’s name was Ramabonela Maine. But depending on when and where you met him in a life that spanned ninety-one years, he was – without ever wishing to deceive – also Kasianyane Maine, Phillip Maine, Kas Deeu, Kas Teeu, Kas Teu or just ‘Old Kas’. (3) 2 Steinberg made the remark in conversation with Duncan Brown and Antjie Krog at an event held by the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, on 1 March 2011. See Brown and Krog, ‘Creative Non-Fiction’.

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‘The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is theirs’ – a line spoken by Kas Maine provides the epigraph to the work, which is then framed as an enormous exercise in ‘history from below’, to use the well-worn phrase of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Thompson wrote famously of his intention ‘to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan […] from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (12). The working class, he argued, ‘made itself as much as it was made’; it ‘did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making’ (8), and the task of the historian was then to reconstruct this process from sources beyond the written archive. Thompson’s work formed an influential strand of left-wing historiography in the post-war British universities where many (white) South African academics finished their training. Such ideas then underlay the establishment of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1977. In the decade following the Soweto Uprising, the work of historians like Phil Bonner, Belinda Bozzoli, Tim Couzens, Isabel Hofmeyr, Bill Nasson, Noor Nieftagodien, Jeff Peires and van Onselen formed a research culture that sought to fuse political engagement and scholarship, and to evolve a lucid and public intellectual voice that departed from the more mandarin and theoretically laden languages of the left. Their books took on different subjects and theoretical approaches; but linking them was a commitment to an accessible written style that largely avoided the abstruse vocabularies of Marxist structuralism and Louis Althusser (Thompson’s great adversary) as well as the doctrinaire, Soviet-aligned jargons of the South African Communist Party. The impact of this strain of social history on Steinberg (who was a student at Wits at the height of its influence) is unmistakeable. The historians above are threaded through his bibliographies, their unadorned prose and strongly narrative methods providing an array of usable literary models for his own textured, analytically poised scene-painting. Van Onselen’s life of outlaw and bandit king ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, The Small Matter of a Horse (1984) is taken up at length in The Number.3 Yet as early as Midlands, Steinberg quotes a paragraph from The Seed is Mine that is drawn to another key motif in this tradition of social historiography – the awkward and often unacknowledged intimacies produced by South African history: ‘What analysts sometimes fail to understand’, the historian Charles van Onselen wrote recently, ‘is that without prior compassion, dignity, love or a feeling 3 In writing a foreword to a 2008 reissue of The Small Matter of a Horse, Steinberg recalls hearing it as Van Onselen’s inaugural lecture while a student at Wits University.

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of trust – no matter how small, poorly or unevenly developed – there could have been no anger, betrayal, hatred and humiliation.’ (quoted in Midlands 63)

The lines suggest the buried utopian dimension to this strain of scholarship: that the institutionalised racial stratifications of apartheid were not an inevitable consequence of the South African past, and should not be crudely projected back onto it. That it had in fact taken an enormous amount of ideological and political work to wrench the apartheid vision onto a social scene vastly more complex, nuanced and unpredictable in its cross-racial interactions and codependencies. In showing how Jacob Dlamini’s work has also been under-written by such ideas, Jonathan Hyslop remarks that this view ‘challenged not only the state’s racial ideology, but also the essentialist arguments of some African nationalists’; hence the ‘mix of wariness and sympathy’ towards the exiled ANC that ran through the scholarship (the History Workshop tended to be more aligned with the ‘inzile’ anti-apartheid forces of emerging black trade unions and community-based organisations) (‘E. P. Thompson’ 104, 99). Here one sees another genealogy of transitional South Africa’s narrative non-fiction as a civil society endeavour: a ‘non-governmental’ intellectual project intent on monitoring the emergent state – with all the difficulties of erstwhile political allies of the African National Congress now becoming its auditors. (This will come strongly to the fore in Three-Letter Plague as Steinberg traces the efforts of organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and other NGOs to effect the roll-out of antiretroviral medicine in the Eastern Cape.) If all this evokes the progressive or enabling legacies of Wits social history, one also needs to consider the critiques levelled at it. Its stylistic plainness and assumption of a ‘theoretical commonsense’ could lead to a kind of conceptual closure or parochialism: currents of postcolonial or poststructuralist thought in the late 1990s were not taken up in the way of, for example, the Indian Subaltern Studies group, which went on to have such wide international influence (Posel, ‘Social History’ 34). Sometimes suffused with a romanticisation of resistance, the History Workshop’s activist imaginary was drawn more to modes of opposition rather than complicity and accommodation.4 For other critics, its materialist insistence on the agency and rational, explicable choices of ‘ordinary’ people and the working classes might have led to an avoidance of apparently opaque, ambiguous or ‘irrational’ domains of existence – religious 4 Posel traces its notable gaps as the quiescent 1960s, the Bantustan administrations and the question of collaboration – all of these being areas that the post-TRC non-fictions in previous chapters have been drawn to. She goes on to remark that an ethnography or thick description of elite institutions like the Broederbond or the Anglo American mining conglomerate would have been unthinkable (‘Social History’).

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belief, superstition, the occult – which might in any case, as Hyslop suggests, have their own rationality (‘E. P. Thompson’ 105). Some have even argued that its initial wariness of cultural nationalism within the exiled liberation movements could become hard to distinguish, in certain cases, from a coded or even reactionary alarmism towards a de-centering of white intellectual authority.5 Perhaps the most sustained objections to the ascendancy of social history emerged from scholars based at the University of the Western Cape. In tracing the institutional production of history and the making of public pasts, Ciraj Rassool wondered if Van Onselen’s project of restoring Kas Maine to the historical record might paradoxically have led to ‘a deepening of his subordinate status’ (‘Power, Knowledge’ 83). This was because of an unreconstructed empiricist methodology that regarded oral history as a ‘supplementary source’ or ‘data bank of experience’ that could be mined for verifiable facts, and was less concerned with ‘how those instances of orality as life history told their own story of remembrance, forgetting and narrativity’ (83). Because of its epic promotion of narrative over theory, a work like The Seed is Mine then risked a shallow engagement with long-running debates about knowledge production: how it is gained, how it is translated into new contexts or (to continue the mining metaphor) ‘beneficiated’ in sites far removed from its point of origin. Often glossing over the question of the (mostly white) authors’ proficiency in African languages and the difficulties of engaging socially distant vernaculars, the late twentieth-century heyday of radical social history in South Africa could risk reproducing, in Rob Nixon’s words, a ‘structural and tonal paternalism’ whereby ‘in filling in one type of silence such scholars risked generating silences of a different type’ (‘Non-fiction’ 41). ‘Van Onselen’s history’, writes Rita Barnard, ‘is haunted by the powerful words of the old peasant recorded in its epigraph’; but ‘the very power of this verbatim quotation of Kas Maine’s words alerts the reader to how few such quotations the work actually contains’ (‘Coetzee’s Country Ways’ 392). And as one reviewer of The Seed is Mine noted, 5 In his collection of profiles, Portraits of Power, Mark Gevisser suggests that Van Onselen’s much-publicised feud with the then Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Wits University, Malegapuru Makgoba, may well have overshadowed the reception of his magnum opus. Hence my suggestion that The Seed is Mine is less famous than it might have been, a text often referred to but not, I suspect, often read. To pick up on arguments made in a previous chapter, I would suggest that Van Onselen’s massive work might in fact be classed with The Dream Deferred as a limit text, in marking the high tide of a certain, culturally confident strain of left-liberal biography in South Africa. For one reviewer of The Seed is Mine, author and subject ‘collapse’ by the end of the work: ‘Biography becomes sublimated autobiography’ and one is ‘left feeling that Van Onselen is writing autobiographically, indeed confessionally’ about a different kind of patriarch: ‘a white and embattled academic living in a democratising South Africa, whose once iron control has begun to falter’ (Crais 1002).

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the 14-year labours of Thomas Nkadimeng, research assistant, interviewer and translator on the project, are confined to a mere ten lines of text (Crais 1002). ‘The sociology of their production’, writes Rassool of such racially inflected histories from below, ‘the politics of the research process, and the multiple layers of narration involved were questions that were overlooked’ (‘Power, Knowledge’ 83). It is just such difficult realms of experience – a series of spectres haunting radical history – that the literary (or literary journalistic) element of Steinberg’s texts is able to restore to view, that it is drawn to and fascinated by. These are the kind of problems that Jacob Massaquoi takes up with his author: unequal power relations; recessed and multiply layered narratives; obscure or opaque motivations; racially coded or ‘neo-colonial’ responses; the work of memory as an act of creation rather than simply retrieval. As I will explore more carefully in the next chapter, there is an intriguing double-move at work as socially textured literary journalism in South Africa transposes scholarly modes into a more public genre of trade non-fiction. On the one hand the dense information load of academic historiography might be abbreviated and, in some measure, simplified, with larger social conclusions put on hold or left implicit. On the other hand, the agility of the literary journalistic ‘I’ allows a much more complex portrait of the difficult narrative scene at the heart of social or oral history, with its subtle interfaces between spoken and written, and the challenges of cultural translation. It attempts to keep in play all the impurities and anxieties that more disciplined forms might ignore, or else consign to the separate section of ‘methodology’. The Seed is Mine may unfold in the magisterial, third-person voice established in its opening lines – a commanding, almost Tolstoyan narrator who raises the matter of deception only to dismiss it – but Van Onselen does reflect on his methods in another forum (as Rassool and Minkley admit elsewhere).6 In a 1993 article for The Journal of Peasant Studies, the author writes in candid ways on the linguistic mediations between Sesotho, Afrikaans and English that underlay the work, credits the immense labour of Thomas Nkadimeng as interviewer, and wonders whether the analyst can ever ‘uncouple the processes of data-generation and interpretation’ (‘Reconstruction’ 513). There is also a glancing, anecdotal admission of the story behind the story: as a ‘financially comfortable, car owning, urban based white man’, the grand historian recalls, he was soon under considerable pressure from his subject to be ‘not only interviewer, taxi driver and banker’ (508). It requires little imagination, he goes on, to work out how Kas Maine, ‘an exceptionally intelligent man, schooled in the arts of survival in the harsh South African Highveld, 6 Minkley and Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory, and Social History in South Africa’, in Coetzee and Nuttall eds., Negotiating the Past, 89­–99.

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could put such ambiguities to use, in the course of a friendship’ (508). It is just such ‘ambiguities’ – a rather coy word – that point to the final genealogy that I want to sketch: less obvious or easy to capture, but one which goes a good deal further in puzzling out the slippery author-subject relations at play as social history becomes literary non-fiction.

A literary con Collaboration, confidence men and the ‘non-political’ prison book

‘This book was meant to be the first volume of the autobiography of Dugmore Boetie. Now I don’t know what it is’ – In an afterword to Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (1969), its editor and amanuensis Barney Simon strikes a complex note of fondness, confusion and exasperation (184). Giving an account of working with (and financially supporting) ‘Duggie’ in the last two years of his life, the piece is a frank and unflinching account of narrative collaboration across the ‘colour bar’, one in which theatre maker Simon pays tribute to Boetie as both irrepressible raconteur and friend, but also as inveterate liar and scam artist: ‘Duggie was essentially a con man, so that attempts I have made to establish the facts of his life have led only to chaos and contradiction’ (184). Their relationship emerged from a non-racial theatre improvisation group that Simon was running in 1960s Johannesburg, one that ‘attempted to investigate, through improvisation and monologues, the everyday encounters between us. Not the dramatic ones; the seemingly simple ones, where the convolutions were as complex, the poisons as insidious’ (Familiarity 184). Boetie was a ‘vital and voluble’ member of the workshops – ‘His stream of anecdotes was endless’ – though journalist Nat Nakasa (who had published some of his writing in The Classic) warned Simon (and other enthralled, white members of the group) that such stories were ‘merely apocrypha of the townships’, rejigged by Dugmore to place himself in a starring role (Simon, ‘My Years’ 77). ‘Nor did Dugmore take himself seriously’, wrote Es’kia Mphahlele about this dubious autofiction in The African Image (1974): ‘He establishes in one’s mind a “Dugmorean” way of life’, ‘as if he were at the helm of things’.7 Even while half suspecting that he was being taken in, Simon worked with Boetie for the next two years, supporting him financially and slowly drawing out of him enough material for a book. It appeared only after its protagonist had succumbed to lung cancer – an ordeal that Simon becomes deeply and sometimes uncomfortably involved in. During his visits to Boetie in hospital, it 7 Quoted in Familiarity, no page number. Stephen Gray’s 2007 Penguin Modern Classics edition helpfully collects a range of (often bemused) reviews of the work from the late 1960s, as well as later critical responses, within the front matter.

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slowly emerges that the latter has fabricated all the most important plot points of his life: among them the death of a tyrannical mother in the infamous opening lines of the book (she eventually appears at Duggie’s deathbed), and also the loss of his leg (which happened when he was a child, not when fighting Rommel in North Africa). Simon’s deeply felt essay registers both the intimacy and contempt bred by Familiarity – a text which could be described as both an act of sincere and deeply felt narrative collaboration but also a project of mutual, long-term duplicity with many flash points: Now I knew the score. The lies. The cons. Those hospital trips to the ‘loner’. Even the money for the old woman hadn’t reached her. But he was there. On my back. For the rest of his life at least. I hated him. He hated me. I just wanted to walk out, to be left alone. (193)

Boetie’s work was widely read and reviewed internationally when first published, its scrambled codes of autobiography, pulp fiction and gangster thriller allowing it to circulate within South Africa when so many other autobiographies of the time were banned. But today it is largely forgotten, or regarded as something like the joker in the pack of Sophiatown-era life writing.8 Rather than providing the kind of usable testimony expected of apartheid autobiography, it instead enacted ‘a literary con’ (as one reviewer put it) in multiple senses.9 It is firstly the picaresque account of Boetie’s life as thief, confidence trickster and convict: a rollicking and often very funny narrative of its onelegged subject’s adventures as scam artist in Johannesburg , Cape Town and Durban. The narrator talks the reader through an encyclopaedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles and hoaxes, often pandering to the prejudices of white South Africans in order to dupe them, or else matching the absurdities of apartheid bureaucracy with the narrator’s own surreal gambits. ‘The white man of South Africa suffers from a defect which can be easily termed limited intelligence’, Boetie writes, ‘I say this because no man, no matter how dense, will allow himself to be taken in twice by the same trick. […] Call him “Baas” and he’ll break an arm to help you. He takes advantage of his white skin, we take advantage of his crownless kingdom’ (58). In a story first published by Nakasa in 1963, ‘The Last Leg’ (subsequently chapter 14 of the ‘autobiography’), the hero is sent to prison and demands to check in his prosthetic limb as a personal effect, so as not to have it worn out 8 Writing in Staffrider in 1992, Mark Beittel comments: ‘Three reasons, I suspect, have concurred to silence Dugmore Boetie: doubts about authorship, discomfort with its form and suspicions about its politics’ (quoted in Familiarity front matter). 9 The phrase is from Joseph Lelyveld in The New York Times book review (3 May 1970): ‘A racy, picaresque novel presented as a memoir; more accurately, a literary con’ (quoted in Familiarity front matter).

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during his time in prison. It has, he insists, been given to him by well-meaning social workers, is far above the standard of government-issue (wooden) legs for black patients, and so should be preserved in storage until the end of his sentence. It is a request that wreaks comic havoc with the bureaucratic order of the prison, and joins several other Drum-era writers in sending up the absurd legalism of apartheid thinking. Like many of Dugmore’s hoaxes, it plays within the dynamics of mutual self-deception, ironic accommodation and (in Homi Bhabha’s phrase) ‘sly civility’ that pass between black and white. Such are the dynamics recorded with lacerating frankness in the different tonality of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History – a work that appeared in the same year, but one trapped in a cul-de-sac of doomed liberal humanism and confessive but corrosive ‘honesty’ that Boetie’s narrator has gleefully exited.10 As a yarning ex-convict whose narratives are fuelled by the lexicons of criminal subculture, Boetie is then also a ‘literary con’ in another sense, and one that led some critics to compare his work to the ironic voice of Herman Charles Bosman. In Cold Stone Jug (1949), Bosman’s ‘Unimpassioned Record of a Somewhat Lengthy Stay’ in Pretoria Central (as the subtitle wryly puts it), he smuggles some of the techniques of an unreliable narrator – so finely honed in his Oom Schalk stories – into the genre of a prison memoir. This translocation of a deliberately or knowingly ‘limited’ narrator (a longstanding fictional device) into a work posing as non-fiction threatens to dissolve the sincerities of the autobiographical pact, creating an opaque narrative mood that strikes a dissonant note in South Africa’s large sub-tradition of prison autobiography. Bosman takes great pleasure in recording the stories ‘spoken out of the side of the mouth’ by convicts engaged in a continual verbal battle with warders, where the act of ‘swinging a lead’ is part of a time-honoured practice of gulling, entrapping or humiliating authority. Ultimately, it extends to implicate the unsuspecting reader who is taken in by Bosman’s account of sharing a death row cell with a man, Stoffel, who seems never to have existed, but becomes

10 Here I have in mind Tlhalo Raditlhalo’s reading of Modisane’s ‘situation’ (via Homi Bhabha) as involving ‘a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once’ (‘Autobiographical Beginnings’ 37) and also Thengani Ngwenya’s account of the vexed ‘symbolic self-translation’ in Blame Me on History. He traces how the narratorprotagonist attempts to ‘untangle the conundrum resulting from what is presented as an unbridgeable chasm between the kind of person he could have become in a country devoid of racial oppression and what he was forced to become in the racially segregated South Africa of the twentieth century’ (‘Symbolic Self-translation’ 34). As Rob Nixon writes, Modisane’s life writings, together with those of Can Themba, ‘serve as the clearest statements of the historical need for Biko and Black Consciousness’, that 1970s moment which ‘helped release into politics that blocked anger’ of the Sophiatown memoir (Homelands 39).

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instead a vehicle for the author’s gallows humour: a fictive creation whose fictionality we are only partly or slyly warned about.11 Here then is the still larger, meta-textual con: an elaborately rigged trick at the expense of the socially concerned, bien pensant reader looking for an indictment of prison conditions or other social ills. Boetie’s Familiarity and Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug then form a strand of autobiography that also takes in another unstable and anti-realist work of non-fiction, Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984). As a famous poet who was permitted to write while in prison ‘for the sake of Afrikaans literature’ (106), Breytenbach reflects sardonically on what it means to be interpolated as ‘the writer’ in such a community, where inmates are continually petitioning him for help, asking for assistance with legal documents, showing him their poems or stories, desperate to affirm and record their experiences via texts that are deeply felt but often derivative or fantastic exercises in wish fulfilment: I wrote requests for parole, for release, for transfer, for interviews. You name it. I am the writer. I wrote the personal histories that they had to submit to social workers. A prisoner would come and say: well, you know, just write that I’m OK, you know what to put in, I’m sure you know better. In fact, they were quite convinced that whatever life I could invent for them would be better than the one they had. (True Confessions 166)

As with Bosman, who devotes an entire chapter to the argot of daggasmoking, Breytenbach’s work is deeply immersed in the linguistic energies of prison slang;12 it also represents an early attempt to set down in words the oral 11 See Stephen Gray’s 2005 biography of Bosman, Life Sentence, which checks the Nominal Roll of Pretoria Central for those dates and does not find the name ‘Stoffel’. Gray also points out Bosman’s debt to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prison narrative Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), ‘as supplied to him by the Orange Free State library service, to the extent of taking over his character Petrov (as Pym, the hardened recalcitrant on indeterminate sentence who pursues this guileless Fyodor, pestering him with love-letters and endless gifts of twists of sugar, a spoonful of jam)’ (129). In Bosman’s half-joking, half-menacing figure of Pym, the question of sexual assault, which lurks always below the surface of Cold Stone Jug, is then refracted via the Russian novelist most associated with unreliable, in the sense of unreliably unreliable, narrators. 12 Breytenbach’s True Confessions warns about the dangers of becoming tydmal (timemad, calendar-crazy), labels the horrors of introspection and metal breakdown kopvriet (literally head-eating) and transcribes the rich lingo for different types of inmate with great relish. Beyond the primary opposition of bandiete vs. boere there are the lallapype – the ‘pipe-sleepers’ so poor that they would be sleeping under culverts on the outside – the vlamslukkers or bloutreinryers – ‘flame-swallowers’ or ‘blue-train riders’ who drink blue-tinted methylated spirits; the trassies (transvestites) and rokers (dagga smokers), the boop millionaires, who have amassed internal prison fortunes worth nothing on the outside, the boop puddings made from left-over bread, hoarded jam and peanut butter by those desperate to settle their gambling debts.

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mythology of the Number gangs that Steinberg will take up in such detail. These mock-serious, tonally unstable ‘confessions’ experiment compulsively with their own mode of address, styled as monologues delivered to a Mr Interrogator – a ‘Mr Eye’ or a ‘Mr I’ – who is simultaneously the apartheid warder, an implied reader and also a dialogical counter-voice emerging from the authorial self within a radically dismantled, over-spilling memoir. The result is less a documentation of prison life than a tangled skein of dubious narrative practices. ‘Touch a man like that anywhere, and a story would flow from him like blood from a wound’ – Steinberg quotes Bosman’s resonant line about longterm prisoners in the opening sections of The Number; on the same page he references the mixture of sensory deprivation and imaginative abundance in Breytenbach’s memoir, going on to remark that: Pollsmoor is a journalist’s paradise; it is an interminable labyrinth of pure story. You walk down a corridor, a journalist clutching a notebook, and you are assailed by a thousand groping hands. Everyone wants to stop you, to own you, to unload his tales into your notebook. (17)

Bosman, Boetie, Breytenbach, Steinberg – this genealogy of the literary con is one acutely aware of the narrative labyrinth, of how stories circulate and calibrate social power within subcultures, whether these are rural communities or carceral institutions. Drawn to the arcane narratives of ‘non-political’ (i.e. common-law) prisoners, these works are experimental outliers within the corpus of the South African prison book. They form a counterpoint to the many anti-apartheid autobiographies that seek to build needful solidarity and an archive of testimonial data. They also trouble the divide between criminality and political resistance within an unjust society – a zone of constant ambiguity and ideological anxiety within many Struggle memoirs. How, for example, were the ‘politicals’ to imagine the common-law prisoners that they found themselves incarcerated alongside during the Struggle? Were the latter victims of an unjust system and possible converts to the liberation movements? Or were they gang members and likely informers, upholders of a rival, conservative and profoundly anti-social order who carried the threat of physical and sexual assault? Such questions, which go to the heart of what the political might be in the modern nation-state, fall curiously into abeyance post-1994. The prison as major locus for South African writing (and for the country’s larger imagination of itself) ebbs dramatically; and the prison narrative, ‘once a central pillar of South African autobiographical writing’, moves abruptly ‘to an almost-invisible periphery after the demise of apartheid’ (Roux, ‘Inside/Outside’ 247). The country’s large prison population is soon demonised in populist discourses, consigned to the pathological and ‘non-political’; horrifying post-apartheid

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exposés of prison conditions have less purchase on a national imagination transfixed by the spectre of violent crime. It is just such lingering questions that Steinberg reactivates in The Number, which is essentially a reading of the South African transition from the perspective of the prison, and one which blurs the line drawn in 1994 (and reinscribed by the TRC) between the prison as ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ space. His book is drawn, Steinberg remarks, to those social phenomena that ‘will never find a place in the lexicons of political orthodoxy; movements both politically articulate and chillingly anti-social’ (11). These are domains of experience that hover ambivalently ‘between an aspiration to social equality and anti-social violence, between a disdain for the current order and disdain for social order in general’ (8). As such, The Number must navigate a complex narrative tissue of irony, veiled language, symbolism, disclosure and denial – a world where the vocabularies of political struggle can be conscripted and instrumentalised for multiple and often cynical ends. On the one hand, the complex mythology of The Number is a vexed attempt to position the gangs as political actors or ‘freedom fighters’ engaged in a century-old battle with racist colonial and apartheid prison authorities. Hence the sense of betrayal that the book records as the coming of democracy does not yield the kinds of blanket amnesties and pardons expected by prisoners who remain incarcerated (while members of apartheid death squads walk free). On the other hand, the gang world is one of rampant exploitation of the weak, and one now capitalising on a burgeoning drug trade as South Africa opens up to global markets. It is also a cryptic and coded means for a masculinist and deeply homophobic subculture to countenance sex between men – a prison reality that is simultaneously all-pervading and shrouded in denial via a canon of intricate, Talmudic myths and legends. Like each of the ‘non-political’ (but highly politicised) prison books above, The Number is suffused with a mood that oscillates between a desire for sincere disclosure and intimations of an incorrigibly suspect narrative performance. To respond to such works is to be aware of the complex and labyrinthine play of storied lives under duress, as well as the moments of selfconscious performance and even deliberate duplicity of voluble subjects who want their wisdom affirmed but are nonetheless wary of releasing too much of the information that their community holds in trust, or spending their narrative capital too quickly. ‘Van Onselen is fucking with something very fucking important’, Magadien Wentzel insists when Steinberg reveals that the great Nongoloza, venerated by prison gang mythology as a fiercely anticolonial rebel, had in fact collaborated with prison warders and reformers later in his life (thus providing an uneasy echo of Magadien’s own trajectory): ‘This is history people believe. It is like a power. People are prepared to die for their stories’ (238).

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In these acts of fraught cultural translation, some of the power of Malcolm’s ‘confidence man’ has shifted from writer to subject. In The Number, Steinberg knows from the outset that he is dealing with some of the Western Cape’s ‘master bullshit artists’ and worries about tying himself to a subject who might be nothing more than a ‘sophisticated trickster’ (26). In one throwaway scene, we are led to see a commitment to duplicity – and the protection of subcultural lore – that extends to even financial disadvantage. The author has employed a young gang member on the Cape Flats to do a piece of research work, and ‘he agreed on condition that I pay a third of his fee in advance’: A week later, I phoned him to ask how the work was going. ‘I’m not going to do it,’ he replied. ‘I’m a 26. My work is to con you out of your money.’ ‘You’re a fool,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t much work and if you’d done it you would have earned a whole lot more.’ He laughed patronisingly. ‘You don’t understand. I’m a 26. That’s my ethos.’ (The Number 280)

Steinberg’s books are full of such failures and dead ends: moments when the journalistic transaction cannot escape a meeting of pre-determined cultural types, with credulous researcher and narrative con artist locked in a self-fulfilling embrace. Some of these are explicitly named and identified; but even within the long-term stories that he entrusts years of research to, there are vertiginous moments when the reader might feel that the non-fictional contract (or the rug) has been pulled from underneath them. As we will see in turning to the rural worlds of Midlands and Three-Letter Plague, certain revelations released late into the works continue to detonate through what has been taken on trust, placing into real question the confidences that we have been taken into.

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Necessary fictions and broken contracts in the heart of the country

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The Mitchell property lies on the slopes of one of the most beautiful valleys I have ever seen. It is in the heart of the southern midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, Alan Paton country, and it is true that ‘… from here, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest scenes of Africa’. Later I will tell you more about that landscape, and how it changed during the course of my investigation; a spectacular backdrop of giant shapes and colours when I first saw it, a myriad dramas of human anger and violence when I left. (3)

So reads the opening of chapter one in Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands, a book that will chart the author’s immersion in a southern KwaZulu-Natal farming community as he tries to understand the circumstances that led to the murder of a 28-year-old man, Peter Mitchell. It begins with the grieving but resolute father, Arthur Mitchell, proprietor of the farm Normandale, a man determined to stay on the land even while convinced that his labour tenants are harbouring the perpetrator. In one sense this establishing shot announces the beginning of the book’s primary journalistic narrative, its ‘story’: ‘I arrived at the Mitchells’ front gate at mid-morning on an unforgivingly hot day in the summer of 2000’ (3). But as this temporally split and self-consciously literary opening suggests, Midlands is a work haunted by all manner of other, possibly unknowable or untellable stories, stories that precede, interrupt, divert and perhaps even fatally undermine what seems at first to be a work of investigative journalism or true crime. The book achieved immediate visibility in South Africa for addressing what have come to be called ‘farm murders’: a contested and controversial term, since (amid very high rates of largely black homicide victims in rural areas), it principally connotes the killings of white farmers. A new phenomenon within the post-apartheid dispensation, such murders have come to occupy ‘a strange and ambiguous space’ in the national imaginary, writes Steinberg, in that ‘they tamper with the boundary between acquisitive crime and racial hatred’ (Midlands vii). Peter Mitchell, we read early on, ‘was killed, not just figuratively, but quite literally, on the southern midlands’ racial frontier, the dust road on which he died a boundary between the white-owned commercial farmlands to the west and the derelict common land of a dying black peasantry to the

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east’ (viii–ix). Whether Midlands works to unpick this racialised physical and political topography or simply reinforces it; whether the work is able to register the continued mythic charge of ‘the racial frontier’ without becoming complicit in its symbolic tropes – these remain, as we will see, open questions. Steinberg worked as a journalist in Johannesburg during the 1990s and recalls how, even as South Africa’s cities were suffused with Mandela-era optimism and ‘a sense of common humanity that had been absent for centuries’, the news from the countryside seemed to reflect ‘a host of unsettled scores’, bringing ‘a grim portent of life after the honeymoon’ (viii). Rural towns, he remarks, tended to be represented as inscrutable, fantastical or irredeemably strange by the news media. Yet Midlands begins from the premise that perhaps ‘the countryside was way ahead of us’, that such ‘dispatches from farming districts appeared to be telling us something all too real’ (viii). In 1994, some two million labour tenants were living under the proprietorship of 50,000 or so white farmers. ‘What was to become of their relationship now that apartheid was over?’, he writes in a subsequent essay for Granta, looking back at his debut work from a distance of 15 years (‘The Defeated’ 27). In the decades to follow, ostensibly progressive new legislation to safeguard tenure for farm labourers (for example, the 1997 Extension of Security of Tenure Act) would in many cases come to have an effect opposite to that intended. The post-1994 lawmakers, Steinberg writes, ‘jumped into this complicated world and tried to make it simple’ (Midlands 67). Thousands of black South Africans were driven off farmland by white owners unwilling to shoulder extra social and financial responsibility, or anxious about ‘strangers’ arriving from urban areas to make land claims. As a member of the local Farm Watch explains to Steinberg as they tour broken-down, abandoned and destroyed buildings in the area, landowners increasingly opted to abandon the vexed filigree of relations that constituted racialised rural paternalism (the world of The Seed is Mine) for late capitalist, neo-liberal and contractual modes of employment, with workers sourced from the labour pools of growing urban townships: ‘They established rules of occupation that made their tenants’ lives unliveable and they watched like hawks until a tenant committed a crime. Then they would go and evict’ (‘The Defeated’, 33). This is the larger social narrative within which Midlands unfolds, one in which an incoming farmer’s attempts to formulate a set rules for tenants who have lived there for generations are interpreted by those tenants as a coded and arrogant attempt to drive them off the land. ‘The Mitchells were new’, Steinberg writes, ‘but they had stepped into the drama of an endgame’ (‘The Defeated’, 27) As such, even though the author duly references the famous opening of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) in setting his scene, Steinberg’s work complicates the trajectory that underlies this and so many other South African novels of literary liberalism the twentieth century, from R. R. R.

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Dhlomo’s An African Tragedy (1928) onwards, with their migrations from an often idealised pastoral world to a corrupting metropolis. In both Midlands and Three-Letter Plague – the non-urban non-fictions that I read in this chapter – the narrative apparatus moves to the countryside, yet one every bit as complex and contested as the post-apartheid city. In the process it subjects the urbane assumptions and self-assured reflexes of left-liberal social thought to close-knit and conservative communities invested in very different kinds of language and symbolic exchange. ‘It has been so long since I have spent time with a person who thinks this way that I have forgotten that his kind exists’ – this is the narrator’s response when Arthur Mitchell maintains that ‘My story is a simple one’ and that ‘As long as you tell the truth, I can’t possibly have a problem’ (93). But of course, this story – and the question of who has the credibility and authority to tell it – are anything but simple. In this sense, the non-fictional rules of engagement – the pact, the contract, the lease – which one sees Steinberg tentatively working out with regard to his often unlikeable or inscrutable subjects in Midlands become enmeshed within a wider set of signals sent back and forth across the landscape of the racial frontier: a ‘whole gamut of wordless games’ by which farmers and tenants test the limits of the rules governing their lives (177). * In effecting this narrative migration – from urban to rural, and from constitutional or national imaginaries to customary and intensely local ones – Midlands can hardly escape being read alongside an influential novel of the same period. Lauded on the Vintage paperback edition as being ‘on the frontier of world literature’, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) begins as a kind of urbane campus novel but modulates into something very different – perhaps a deconstructed farm novel, an anti-pastoral or even post-pastoral – as its protagonist David Lurie moves from the city to a smallholding in the Eastern Cape (another historical and metaphorical frontier) to join his daughter.1 In an earlier chapter, I noted how Steinberg rather surprisingly invokes the character of Lucy Lurie in a debate about HIV/AIDS denialism. Reviewing Didier Fassin’s When Bodies Remember, he suggested that those who devoted too much intellectual effort and sympathy to understanding President Mbeki’s position on the epidemic – who undertook overly ‘generous anthropologies of 1 See Rita Barnard, ‘Coetzee’s Country Ways’, for an account of ‘the curious generic form of Disgrace: half academic novel and half anti-pastoral’ (393). She offers a revealing contrapuntal reading across generic boundaries, placing Coetzee’s work in dialogue with Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine, and suggesting how the self-aware forms of the novel are able to avoid falling into the ‘unconscious autobiography’ which, as we saw in the previous chapter, some critics detected in Van Onselen’s treatment of Kas Maine.

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African mistakes’ – risked reproducing her low expectations of post-apartheid South Africa: ‘Trying desperately to understand her attacker, she condemns him’ (Notes 274). Perhaps Coetzee’s novel was read in these stark, unforgiving terms by some in South Africa; yet it is surprising to see such an interpretation cited as cultural orthodoxy, as ‘fact’, by such a formidably intelligent writer. A nuanced and carefully historicised reading of the politics of HIV/ AIDS dissidence, in other words, yields to a surprisingly cursory account of a novel, glossing over the subtlety and indeterminacy built into the narrative mechanism of Coetzee’s fiction. Ever since Disgrace was cited in a 2000 submission by the African National Congress about racist stereotypes in the media (whether as symptom or diagnosis was never quite clear), its defenders have argued that this is not a language event that can be taken at face value; that all its events reach us through the narrative filter of a protagonist for whom we feel a disquieting mixture of complicity and repugnance. If anyone is the fatalist (this argument goes) it is David Lurie, the unreconstructed male presence who filters the narrative and sees events in abstract terms that are of no help to his daughter: ‘It was history speaking through them, a history of wrong’ (156). Able to deploy the fictional technique of free indirect style, the narrative voice of Disgrace weaves between a grammatically distant or ‘omniscient’ third person and a ‘close’ third person: at points the reader becomes a secret sharer of Lurie’s thoughts as the language of the novel seems to bend around his sensibility and inhabit the same vocabulary as its protagonist. Lurie is in this sense a twenty-first-century descendant of the unreliable narrator, or perhaps the more disquieting case of an unreliably unreliable narrator, given that (as in some of the literary confidence tricks we considered in the previous chapter) Disgrace does not easily or reliably flag how to read the limits of its main character’s awareness. Filtered through the unquantifiable distortions of this narrative prism, Lucy’s decision to remain on the land is surely something more opaque and open-ended than Steinberg’s paraphrase suggests. When Disgrace does explicitly articulate its limitations, what it is asked for is, ironically, something very much like what Midlands attempts to offer: ‘The real truth’, Lurie suspects, ‘is something far more – he casts around for the word – anthropological, something it would take months to get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation with dozens of people, and the offices of an interpreter’ (118). And in fact, Steinberg’s wider account of rural South Africa’s predicament provides a revealing gloss on the troubled world evoked by Coetzee. In Notes from a Fractured Country, a collection of his journalism, he describes the ‘drifters, not yet properly urban, no longer properly rural’ who ‘journey […] back to their ancestral homes incessantly during the course of their failed adult lives’ (327). The pastoral binaries of tradition and modernity have been scrambled into a far more complex and opportunistic

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pattern of switchbacks and crossings between country and city. Here then is a wider sociological accounting of why Lucy sees the perpetrators still hanging around the district after her ordeal, young men whom her neighbour (or bywoner) Petrus seems to have no choice but to support. Steinberg writes: The old patriarchs scan the horizon in the hope that one day soon they will no longer be greeted by the sight of their sons and daughters, returning emptyhanded. The longer the city falters, the heavier the countryside’s burden becomes. It has not the strength to survive as the dumping ground of the unwanted. (Notes 327)

Contra to his paraphrase of Disgrace, Steinberg’s work then becomes an intertext which might go some way to dispel the morbidity and apparent irrationality of Lucy’s decision to remain on the land in a situation which Lurie (and many other readers) see as irredeemable: ‘ridiculous, worse than ridiculous, sinister’ (200). To read these respectively fictional and non-fictional stories of an African farm in counterpoint is revealing of the possibilities and limits of each mode. On the one hand, the novel evolves immensely supple narrative techniques that are structurally unavailable to the writer of non-fiction who must abide by the documentary pact. On the other hand, Disgrace emerges into a situation – South Africa’s scene of unresolved difference; the reality hunger of the twentyfirst century – in which the intricate narrative focalisations of this ‘high’ strain of literary fiction struggle to signify in their full sense. They always risk being translated (as in some of the reviews of Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia) back into a flatter, more paraphrastic kind of language which must mean what it says, and which can be pressed into service as ‘evidence’ in the public sphere. In this sense, both Disgrace and Midlands remain unsettled, divisive, vulnerable books. They take the risk of simply reproducing (or being seen to reproduce) overwrought tropes of the white imagination – inter-racial rape, the colonial frontier, farm murders – even as they might seek to deconstruct and disarm them. ‘It is an intriguing, if exasperating read’, wrote Cherryl Walker in a dissenting review of Midlands, suspecting that the book’s enthusiastic public reception ‘resides largely (perversely) in the way in which the author reinforces rather than shifts existing sensitivities and confirms widely held stereotypes and fears’ (‘Review’ 96) – the same suspicions, one might add, that have surrounded Coetzee’s fictional story of an African farm. Leon de Kock’s reading differs: while admitting that ‘one bumps unceremoniously into the oldest trope in the South African book: the frontier’ in Midlands (‘Freedom’ 75), he sees this compulsive return as a necessary one, the index of a refusal to move on too quickly or glibly from the impress of the past. Moreover, it is embedded in a project conducted via renovated methods that seeks ‘to discriminate between orders of information folded into stories’ (Losing the

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Plot 21): to hold in mind both the mythic (fictive) and evidentiary (non-fictive) valences of the stories we live by. These divergent responses sketch something of the tension between the archetypal and the emergent that runs through Steinberg’s work: for one reader a series of over-worked tropes; for another an innovative and taxing form of literary fieldwork that is constantly ‘sifting, writing and reckoning with one’s own relation to the intelligence gathered’ (De Kock, ‘Freedom’ 74). While largely agreeing with the latter’s argument, I would suggest that it does not go quite far enough in considering the taintedness of the intelligence with which Steinberg is forced to work. An unreliable narrator – a deliberately or knowingly unreliable ‘I’, that is, as central focaliser – would seem to be a nonsensical or impossible idea within a non-fictional text; and yet Midlands carries something of this fictional aura, or stain, within its increasingly complex and tangled ways of telling.

‘A defeat of sorts’ Narrative postponement, composite identities and suspect intelligence

In developing his establishing shot, Steinberg introduces a device that will run throughout the work: the disjuncture between the region’s beauty, as registered by an outsider, and an insider’s knowledge of its long-standing historical tensions: ‘a spectacular backdrop of giant shapes and colours when I first saw it, a myriad dramas of human anger and violence when I left’ (3). The strategy is a risky one from the start, for even as it seeks to dismantle a politically innocent aesthetic response, the conflation of topography and history risks reconfirming one of the silent implications of the colonial pastoral: that the division of black worker and white owner on the land is inevitable or ‘natural’, ‘a primordial fact of South African life’ (Smith, ‘Beloved Countries’ 378).2 Not that this is something not registered by the narrative discourse: it repeatedly and retrospectively self-corrects, adjusts, revises itself: ‘I read over what I have written’, we read after Steinberg has described the dirt track and thick bush where Peter Mitchell was killed, ‘and the scenery is ominous in a kitsch and obvious way, as if this place was designed for a murder’ (7). This mixture of prolepsis (‘Later I will tell you’), recursion (‘I read over what I have written’) and fastidious signposting is a reflex that runs throughout the work. As a narrative tic this ‘stage-managing’ (Walker 98) becomes so insistent that 2 In another example of contrapuntal, cross-genre reading, Smith places the ‘intimate spatial ecology’ of Midlands alongside Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novel of rural KwaZulu, And They Didn’t Die (1990), arguing that despite its self-awareness, Midlands is not quite able to escape the generic pull of the South African pastoral.

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it can only suggest a deep anxiety about how best to order and release the information it has garnered, and to what extent it can be left ‘unsupervised’. These continual kinks in the tense of the narrative discourse are symptoms of an uneven book that must work with or between very different orders of information and intelligence. Before reaching the beginning of the journalistic story in chapter one, the reader has undergone a complex briefing about a number of aesthetic decisions underlying the narrative presentation, and been comprehensively warned about its semi-fictional status and ethical workarounds. Indeed, there can be few literary careers that have begun with as many caveats as that of Jonny Steinberg; but such, he remarks, are ‘the consequences of writing about an unsolved murder’ (ix). In the preface we are told that the name of the farms and villages in question have been changed; so too have the names of the living and dead individuals in the book. The name ‘Arthur Mitchell’ is a pseudonym, and the same goes for all the principal characters. Such decisions, he admits, amount to a loss of authority and of ‘a defeat of sorts’ (ix); but they seemed to be the only option given the fact that many of those interviewed only consented to have their words reproduced if their names were removed from the record: ‘My choice’, Steinberg remarks, ‘was either to write a book that divided the names of people and places into the real and the fictitious, or to change all names’ (x). As the preface goes on, we see how the need to change the most proximate details also required the modification of other, more contextual elements in the book: episodes from the past that threatened to reveal a location; historical figures, events and dates; the clan names of the Zulu families who make up the Normandale tenants. As such, there is a disconcerting ripple effect that spreads through the fabric of the text: a densely local story must at the same time be meticulously untethered from its regional setting, and its larger, tell-tale historical coordinates. Already then, there is a strange fictive or imaginative susurration within the book: within its social depth of field, both foreground and background are known to have been tampered with, but in ways that cannot easily be calibrated by the reader.3 3 A clue to this strange puzzle lies in the ellipsis (…) within Steinberg’s quotation of Paton, with which I began this chapter. The famous opening lines of Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) name the actual region in which the events described in Midlands took place: ‘There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it’ (7). To add another meta-texual layer: Steinberg is actually quoting not the opening lines proper, but the 1948 author’s note, in which Paton quotes himself in the course of specifying what is actual and what invented within the world of his novel: ‘It is true that there is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. It is true that it runs to Carisbrooke, and that from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest scenes of Africa, the valley of the Umzimkulu. But there is no Ndotsheni there, and no farm called High Place’ (1). In other

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At a further remove, one could add that this careful labour of renaming, disguising and subtly reimagining has itself become consigned to history. Midlands appears at a moment just prior to the Google-dominated era in which the actual details of the case can now be brought up within a few keystrokes: its laborious process of concealment, in other words, now reads as strangely anachronistic.4 The contemporary reader is torn between immersion in the text as presented – an insulated, self-consistent world whose parameters have been carefully set, as in the ‘knowable community’ of a realist novel or roman à clef – and researching the ‘real’ backstory of the murder and its aftermath online. All of the above might still be regarded as falling within the increasingly elastic boundaries of journalistic practice within the twenty-first century – and such workarounds have, after all, been admitted to. Yet as Steinberg goes on to discuss a figure in the text named ‘Elias Sithole’, the book’s still more risky and strained moves begin to show. Here the preface reveals that two people who helped the author in his research did so on condition that ‘they remain not just anonymous but invisible’, a particular dilemma given that ‘[m]y conversations with them had constituted one of the most formative aspects of my research’. So, he goes on, ‘we struck a compromise’: I took a fairly innocuous character in the book, whom I have called Elias Sithole; I altered his personal history to the extent that he became unidentifiable. And then I filled him up with the discourse of two people who refused to appear in this book. So the words exchanged between Elias and me at the dinner in Izita and in the Pietermaritzburg pub are real enough: they are verbatim transcripts of my discussions with the two men who demanded they remain invisible. All that has changed is that I have disguised the identities of those who have uttered them. (xi–xii)

It is a jolting to turn back to this disclaimer once finishing the work, for the scenes with ‘Sithole’ (which I will come back to) do constitute some of the crucial moments in the work, scenes on which its entire viability pivots as it attempts to redress the fundamental asymmetry that dogs the investigation. The deep structural problem that Midlands must contend with is that while part one records the author’s all too easy adoption by Arthur Mitchell and the white farming community (who assumed, through an unconscious idea of racial solidarity, that his account would be sympathetic to their position), the words, the literary key to the code of Midlands is offered even as it is elided; and so even the syntax of the opening paragraph is emblematic of the text’s play of disclosure and/in concealment. 4 For the ‘real’ details of the murders at the centre of Midlands, see the Human Rights Watch report: Manby et al., Unequal Protection 219–21.

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later sections record a process of stonewalling, silence and evasion when the book turns to the tenants’ side of the story. Indeed, there is no other ‘side’, even in the most basic sense, since in the village that Steinberg calls Langeni, it is in almost nobody’s interest to have the murder looked into by a white outsider. The result is a book with a broken-backed structure, in which the processes of gathering intelligence – and the nature of information itself – are markedly different in each half. ‘Later I was to learn that none of the white farmers in the district had thought not to trust me’, we read on page 14, another proleptic ‘kink’ in the temporal surface of the narrative. Later still he became persona non grata in this community: when the book received the Alan Paton award, farmers from the region published a letter in the press suggesting that it should rather have been awarded the Lenin Prize (‘The Defeated’). But for ‘now’ – i.e. throughout the leisurely, novelistic opening movements of the book – the narrator is welcomed into the interior worlds of the white farming community. Quite literally, given the amount of descriptive energy expended on households and domestic arrangements. ‘It was more an emblem of a middle-class home than the particular home of a particular family’, Steinberg writes of the Mitchell residence, noting the absence of any pictures of Peter: Its decorator appeared to have had no particular taste, but had chosen the furniture only for the trappings of bourgeois respectability it signalled. For a strange moment, I imagined I was in a museum rather than a home, a distilled exhibition of a white middle-class lifestyle. Mitchell was its curator, ushering me through its silent rooms. (4)

It is indeed a strange moment: there is a hard-to-describe dynamic in such scenes, as the narrator forensically anatomises the codes of a conservative South African whiteness while also trading on them for access. Even while taking on Janet Malcolm’s dictum that every journalist hurts the person s/he writes about, and even while conceding that the unaffiliated non-fiction writer will always be ‘a kind of confidence man’ or treasonous double agent, there is something corrosive to the larger epistemic architecture here in the narrator’s asides about those who have never thought not to trust him, especially since it is a trust that he simultaneously disdains in the narrative present. Another way of putting this is that in Midlands the Steinberg narrator exploits all the privileges of the autobiographical ‘I’ – in this case, his whiteness as passport into this world – while also deploying the full, caustic scepticism of Malcolm’s journalistic ‘I’. The result, perhaps, is a confidence trick that extends beyond what is acceptable for preserving a workable degree of trust in the book’s narrative operations (more baldly, one could say that it is Steinberg having his cake and eating it). In this scene it only concerns minor domestic details, but the dynamic takes on a more serious dimension when

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a ‘staggeringly naïve policeman’ hands the author a file of secret affidavits, signed by the inhabitants of Langeni who have given statements against the men, ‘Mduduzi Cube’ and ‘Ngwane Mabida’, who are initially arrested for Peter Mitchell’s murder: These were secret affidavits; the prosecutor would only give them to the accused on pain of being thrown in jail. Those who signed their names had taken their lives in their hands by doing so. And here I was, a stranger pawing through pages of other people’s fates. That I was white was enough for Sullivan to trust me implicitly with the lives of black witnesses. I was tempted to remind him that I was a journalist, and that we were only meeting at all because I was publishing a book. But I held my tongue. (195)

The project does acknowledge or flag its ethical quandaries, in other words, but these are never allowed to derail the larger narrative momentum: ‘But I held my tongue’. Nor, perhaps, can these admissions fully absorb or neutralise the consequences they raise. The result is that such dissonant notes keep echoing and gathering within the orchestration of the work, which modulates from being a work of investigative journalism (as presented by its publisher) into something other. * A central crux in the backstory, and one that the book returns to from various angles, is the scene when Mitchell as new farm owner goes to brief his tenants about his ‘rules’. Chief among them is that he must be given names and identity numbers of all people living on the farm. In the farmer’s rendition, he is civil and respectful, someone with much experience of negotiating with trade unions in the corporate world – ‘I do not lose my temper. I do not confront. I listen, then withdraw’ (21) – only to be met with provocative hostility from one of the long-term tenants. A man named Mhila Mashabana ‘got up and started shouting’: ‘He said blacks do not give their names and identity numbers to umlungu – the white man – because umlungu cannot be trusted with such information. He will keep it innocently for a while and then turn it against you’ (20). As Midlands unfolds, we realise how radically differently this event was experienced by the tenants who are angered by Mitchell’s demand for names, but still more disgusted by a further stipulation that the farmer has glossed over in his account of events to Steinberg. In order to prevent ‘strangers’ coming onto the farm, Mitchell demands to photograph all kraals to monitor building work, and requires that tenants must seek his permission to extend their dwellings if they are expecting children. Hearing about these rules provokes visceral disgust in many of Steinberg’s black interlocutors within Midlands, who immediately regard them as the key to the murder, evincing an

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‘unambivalent satisfaction’ and a degree of empathy with the killers that jolts the narrator: ‘The pervasive rage, the powerful identification with the killers, was awesome and shocking’ (235). As a scene that the narrative loops back to several times, it becomes emblem and conduit of a profound and unexpressed anger in the region, and one that Steinberg will place carefully within a larger historical arc. Drawing on histories of the area, he shows that the matter of taking names and policing domestic space is a one that goes back to a 1904 census conducted by British colonial authorities of Natal. This was precursor to a series of taxes – on each hut in a kraal, on each wife in a polygamous household – intended to drive members of the black peasantry into wage labour. The millennarian sense of foreboding and desperation that this created amid black farmers led in turn to what is now called the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906, a moment of resistance suppressed with immense brutality by the colony. Midlands accrues substantial explanatory power here, in tracing how the matter of divulging names and intimate domestic details is one that signifies through a complex network of folk memory about ‘the Census’, and is bound up with a complex history of carefully engineered dispossession that sought to foreclose the ability of black families to sustain themselves across generations on the land. Just as the quotient of explanatory power and ‘history from below’ in Midlands increases, however, so the likelihood of any kind of epistemic balance within the work ebbs, since the matter of gathering information is increasingly revealed as such a vexed one. In the first sections, Steinberg reports with disdain on the intelligence operations and vigilantism of the local Farm Watch who rely on a network of informers and bought information. Such information, the narrator remarks, is impure: ‘It is shaped by the desire to please the buyer, to give him what he wants. It dawned on me that the stories white men gathered about Izita might well depart very little from the stories their own imaginations had invented’ (152). And yet in the latter sections of the work, Steinberg himself must come to rely on paid informants, and his account of this process forms a parodic and unsettling echo of the militarised interrogations that are going on elsewhere in the district (and which will eventually lead to a further two killings): ‘I would press and press until they were so full of caffeine and nicotine, and the room so full of words and memories and forced inductions, that they would stumble out and hope never to see me again.’ (109) Inevitably the narrative discourse seeks to catch itself in this very irony before the reader does: ‘There is something amusing about my adventure, is there not?’ Steinberg writes, ‘I smugly tell you of the white men who have gone to Izita to get information and chased their own tails. And yet I am surely one of those white men’ (218). Again, one is confronted with the question of whether simply naming an ethical blind spot or technical conundrum is sufficient; or what exactly transpires within the apparent security and ‘honesty’

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– or the shadow – of such explicit flagging. The later sections of Midlands become increasingly rhetorical in this sense, and within this spiral of metatextual speculation and self-consciousness, the figure of Elias Sithole comes to have a crucial anchoring effect. He provides by far the most direct and powerful black counter-voice in the text, one that can meet the author with some degree of discursive equality. In the scene at the Pietermaritzburg pub, late in the work, the author and Sithole engage in what the former calls ‘a complicated, disturbing fight’ (237). The section is particularly compelling in its dramatic, dialectical quality: as a meeting of thesis and antithesis that keeps evolving, the upper hand of authority passing back and forth as the afternoon unfolds. When Steinberg scorns Sithole’s idea that Mitchell’s mistake when meeting his tenants was a matter of style and tone, that he should have approached his tenants in a different way, bringing a crate of beer, ‘black people’s beer’, with him, his interlocutor responds: ‘I see we are set for a battle this afternoon. So let me begin by conceding the first round. Yes, this is not a matter that can be resolved over a crate of beer. You’re right. Every inch he gave they would have taken, and then some more’ (245). And yet as Steinberg builds on this admission and rehearses Mitchell’s case, the scene modulates again. The journalistic imperative to stress-test a story or challenge a source merges in and out of an unwanted but ineluctably racialised identity: When I rose to Mitchell’s defence, I did so as a journalist. I wanted my subject to work for his prejudices. But a part of me listened to myself defending Mitchell, and as I heard my voice, I knew it was for real. I was not a journalist, but a white man, like Mitchell, and I was in his corner. I needed Elias to lose his argument because he scared me. As he dug in his heels, and spoke to me as a racist, I slipped out of this primordial whiteness, became a journalist again, listened to my subject sweep across time, was excited in the most abstract and unsatisfying of ways, as if I was observing a foreign country, and would send a dispatch home, to be read by other disinterested observers. I feel cramped and inhibited, miles away from myself. I would rather be Elias or Mitchell, a protagonist, full of fire and conviction, ready to fight to the death. (Midlands 249–50)

The dance of first person pronouns is a complex one here, both closely implicated in what it is describing but also able to distance itself in ways not available to those being written about. It is, one might say, moving too freely between the journalistic and autobiographical ‘I’, inhabiting too many zones, flitting between tenses, taking up too much space – even as it laments having to occupy the middle ground, the ‘midlands’, in which the book makes its meanings. Taken aback by Steinberg’s defence of Mitchell, and tiring of the civility of the exchange, Sithole’s arguments modulate in turn, until eventually he ‘goes for the jugular’: ‘Yes you go to the other side with your informers and

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your old friends from Cosatu. And you try to do the blacks justice. But no matter what you say, your book is still about the white man being chased off the land’ (249). An account of a ‘farm murder’ by a white journalist, he confirms, can never hope to emerge from the epistemic lop-sidedness embedded in the project, and they part on a sour note: ‘It would be better if you did not come. Just let things sort themselves out quietly. If it is the destiny of the place to become a peasant society again, then so be it. Get on with your own life in Johannesburg’ (249). The non-fictional voice of Midlands, we see here, is able to show up even its most intimate failings. And yet even as it does so, the lingering caveats in the preface to the book undermine the scene’s power. Sithole is, recall, a composite who has been ‘filled up’ with the discourse of two other men; we know the scene is drawn from ‘verbatim transcripts’ of discussions, but we have no way of gauging the shifts effected by the scene-painting or contextualisation here, or indeed what it means for such a fully achieved character to be carrying the sensibility of two different people. The structural importance of the scene, that is, rides in tension with a degree of tampering to which the reader does not have access. Contra the disclaimers in the preface, I would suggest that it is by no means clear that ‘all that has changed’ is a simple matter of identities. Indeed, one could argue that such an admission changes everything in how the book makes its meanings. The result, resonating backwards through many other scenes, is that it reads in part less as a work of investigative journalism than a polyphonic ‘novel of voices’ or ‘documentary novel’ – to borrow phrases used by the 2015 Nobel Prize committee for Svetlana Alexievich’s accounts of the Russian transition (online). Midlands becomes a tissue of disembodied, competing discourses, a polyglossic and even experimental array of competing narrative propositions that become fundamentally destabilising to the central investigative authority of the text. Despite the narrator’s rhetorical moves and agile self-consciousness, the reader might still come to see (as with a fictional narrator) certain ironies and unreliabilities and over his shoulder. Or perhaps the problem lies in precisely the narratorial knowingness and overreliability, in the claustrophobia that it generates by depriving the reader of any interpretive purchase. One might even suggest that the work risks leaving a disconcerting, unwanted affinity between the ‘rules’ established by Mitchell and the overbearing contract established by narrative intelligence at the centre of the book: its tendency, as new owner of a non-fictional terrain, to occupy and police ‘every inch’ of analytic space. The verdict of one ‘Elias Sithole’ remains hanging in the air, at once quasi-fictional and all too telling: ‘It would be better if you did not come’ (249). I offer this rather stringent reading of Midlands less as an accusation than a tribute to Steinberg’s ambitions at the outset of his career, and also as a way of

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marking how his feel for non-fiction narrative evolves. By the time of ThreeLetter Plague, something different has been achieved. The counter-voices ranged around the authorial intelligence are accorded more discursive equality, privacy and power; the narrator is, in turn, forced to surface and acknowledge a more shameful and vulnerable ‘I’. The sometimes overbearing sense of narrative ownership recedes and the result is a warmer, more intimate, more credible work of non-fiction – though not, of course, without its problems.

‘The architecture of shame’ Secrecy and disclosure in Three-Letter Plague

In an article of 2011, Steinberg describes the preparatory work for his book on HIV/AIDS and antiretroviral medicine in the Eastern Cape. One of the first steps was to review ‘the imaginative and intimate literature’ on the epidemic in South Africa, at which point he discovered, to his surprise, that ‘there was almost none’ (‘An Eerie Silence’, online). At the time (the early years of the millennium), only two memoirs by HIV-positive people had been published in the country: AIDSafari (2005) by Adam Levin and Witness to AIDS (2005) by Constitutional Court judge Edwin Cameron, joint winners of the Alan Paton award in 2006. Yet, Steinberg remarks, as accounts by gay white men in the midst of a pandemic transmitted largely between black heterosexual men and women in South Africa, neither could be said to come from the heart of the crisis. The article does point to fiction – Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007), Siphiwo Mahala’s When a Man Cries (2007), Thando Mgqolozana’s A Man Who is Not a Man (2009) – for subsequent, more oblique and sometimes guarded refractions on masculinity and sexuality by black writers during the time of AIDS.5 Yet the closest to an AIDS memoir by a black South African man at the time, the piece suggests, might have come disguised as an experimental autobiographical novel, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), that is transposed into the second person, ‘you’. Yet even this powerful and prophetic rendering of HIV as it impinges on the lives of students and young professionals in Johannesburg is suffused with a difficult silence: Mpe’s own death at age 34 from an undisclosed illness.6 5 In tracking the uneasy politics of representing the epidemic, Steinberg also points to Zakes Mda’s anger when he was faulted by Norman Rush in the New York Review of Books for not mentioning the crisis in his widely read novel The Heart of Redness (2000): ‘Why didn’t he ask Coetzee why he didn’t write about AIDS? [...] Nobody takes issue with him because he’s white. But because I’m black, it’s my issue’ (quoted in Steinberg, ‘An Eerie Silence’). 6 As Lizzy Attree remarks in the introduction to a posthumously published interview with Mpe collected in Blood on the Page, ‘the ambiguity that surrounds his death is in

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Against this background of politically vexed, constrained or symbolically coded articulation, Three-Letter Plague joined, in the words of one reviewer, ‘an uneasy South African sub-genre’ of life writing about the black experience of HIV/AIDS by white writers (Wilbraham 67), one which includes Adam Ashforth’s Madumo: A Man Bewitched (2000), a biographically anchored enquiry into illness, social envy and occult belief in 1990s Soweto, and Liz McGregor’s Khabzela (2005). The latter is a journalist’s account of Fana Khaba, a muchloved radio host and DJ who became an icon by publicly disclosing his status on air and beginning antiretroviral treatment, only to abandon it and revert to quacks in an increasingly desperate and fatal search for a cure. In the tragic story of Khabzela – with its confounding mixture of frank talk and persistent secrecy, of ongoing private stigma amid apparent public openness – one can discern the kind of cultural silence amid noise that Steinberg seeks to understand and address in his work. Like the ‘loveLife’ prevention campaign of the time, with its sexualised billboards (‘What’s Your Position?’) and media-savvy messaging that avoided any reference to sickness, frailty or death, Khabzela’s story showed that ‘[i]t is possible to chatter about AIDS incessantly, and many people in South Africa do, even while plummeting down the abyss of denial’. Steinberg goes on to remark that ‘a special language is reserved for AIDS, a numbed, meaningless, evasive language that speaks incessantly and abstractly of hope and togetherness and thus manages to change the subject even while raising it’ (‘An Eerie Silence’, online). Over ten years later, the literature on the epidemic in southern Africa – its aetiology, political economy, sociology, its controversies, activists and artists – is now enormous; Kgebetli Moele’s novel The Book of the Dead (2009) even features, as a ‘character’, the voice of the epidemic itself. But it is the particular cluster of ideas about discourse, disclosure and evasion above that I want to hold in mind as a way of approaching Three-Letter Plague (the title of which is taken from a euphemism for the epidemic: Amamgam’ amathathu meaning ‘three letters’ i.e. HIV). It is a book that pays close attention to the various competing languages of HIV/AIDS at work in the Lusikisiki district; in doing so it carefully sifts and searches for a counter-voice to the numb, evasive registers of public messaging. Yet even as the text argues for and embodies the imperative not to change the subject, the analytic and narrative confidence in Three-Letter Plague must reckon with matters of stigma and shame that are intensely private and resistant to expression. ‘Narrative gets to shame quicker than any other device’, Steinberg remarked at a 2011 seminar on the ethics of narrative journalism (‘Ethics’). Shame emerges as the deep subject of

keeping with the cultural mystification of AIDS that he laid bare in his fiction, always performed at least one remove from reality’ (15).

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Three-Letter Plague, and one that will eventually draw out an autobiographical persona very different from that of Midlands. * In the opening pages, the narrator writes that his enquiry was spurred by a passage in Cameron’s memoir, Witness to AIDS, which tells of how the government of neighbouring Botswana offered free antiretroviral treatment to every HIV-positive citizen in 2001. At the time, it was a dramatic and unprecedented declaration of intent in sub-Saharan Africa, underwritten by careful logistical provision and a massive public awareness campaign. And yet two years later, only 15 000 of over 100 000 affected people had come forward to be treated. Why did they not come forward to access life-saving drugs? Cameron’s answer is stigma: ‘In some horrifically constrained sense’, he writes, ‘they are “choosing” to die, rather than face the stigma of AIDS and find treatment’ (quoted 1). Three-Letter Plague undertakes a deep exploration of this encounter between biomedical intervention and local recalcitrance, suspecting that when people die en masse within walking distance of treatment, ‘there must be a mistake somewhere, a miscalibration between institutions and people. This book is a quest to discover whether I am right’ (2). In undertaking this quest, Steinberg turns to what is touted as the most progressive and successful treatment programmes in South Africa at the time: the roll-out of antiretroviral medicine in the Lusikisiki district of the Eastern Cape, where NGOs, activists and the state are working in a newly formed and fragile partnership. Contrary to the wishes of Médecins Sans Frontières doctor Hermann Reuter, who hopes Steinberg will write an account of the HIV-positive campaigners whose lives have been transformed by openly acknowledging their status and urging others to do the same, Steinberg’s work turns, as ever, toward more opaque domains of social experience.7 There is a more interesting story to be told, he suggests, about ‘those beyond the margins of the ARV programme, those who are sceptical and unsure’ (88). As such, the narrative invests most of its energy in a young man whom Steinberg calls ‘Sizwe Magadla’: the owner of a successful spaza shop in a village called Ithanga, newly married and intent on building a family, yet anxious about how his peers and rivals are monitoring his modest success, and (he suspects) waiting for him to fail. When the narrator meets him, Sizwe is ‘healthy 7 Didier Fassin traces how ‘biographical or autobiographical narrative’ became ‘a political weapon for fighting AIDS’ as part of an organised collective activity that produced ‘many such testimonies and traces’ (When Bodies Remember 22–3). A prime example here would be the 2003 collection Long Life: Positive HIV Stories with an afterword by TAC founder Zackie Achmat, as well as the ‘Memory Box’ project developed by the AIDS Counselling, Care and Training Association, active in Soweto.

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and strong and has never tested for HIV, which puts him in a category shared by most South African men his age’ (7): ‘In this narrow sense, and no more, he was an Everyman, and it was his perspective on the antiretroviral programme that I wanted to understand’ (7). Yet at the same time Sizwe is a specific kind of Everyman. As someone who has received financial help to start his business from a group of well-meaning tourists – bird-watchers who were captivated by his local knowledge and ability to translate the Latin names of species into Xhosa – he is known as a kind of cultural broker between Ithanga and the world of white people, someone who is simultaneously open to new ways of being (and of growing his business), but also wary of divulging what he calls ‘black people’s secrets’, particularly as the HIV/AIDS crisis draws to the surface some of the most fearful and toxic legacies of the racial frontier. What opens up over the course of the work is a tension between the ethical contract of narrative non-fiction (as it tries to respect Sizwe’s privacy and personhood), and the urgency of a health crisis in which treatment campaigners preach a doctrine of radical openness and transparency (as a political imperative and the most effective method of dismantling stigma). Early in the book, Sizwe describes the day that MSF’s mobile testing unit came to Ithanga in February 2005. By the end of that day, everyone knew who was HIV-positive simply by watching to see the duration of the post-test counselling: ‘for some it lasts two minutes, for others, it is a long, long time’, Sizwe explains, ‘They don’t come out for maybe half an hour, even an hour. And then you know’ (31). For him, this charade of patient confidentiality is experienced as a social disaster. The ‘eight or nine healthy, ordinary-looking young villagers, most of them young women’ who have tested positive have been ‘marked with death’ and over the next months are silently separated from the village: ‘They were watched. Nobody told them that they were being watched. Nobody said to their faces that their status was common knowledge. But everything about them was observed in meticulous detail’ (31). These observations, Steinberg continues, ‘were not generous; they issued from a gallery of silent jeerers’; and worked to place ‘an invisible fence around the nine women’ (31). For Sizwe, the moral of the story is clear: ‘I must never test for HIV in my own village. If I test positive I would be destroyed’ (33). As in Madumo and Khabzela, the question of ‘knowing your status’ (or having it made known) within the community becomes densely imbricated in a micro-geography of scarcity, competitiveness and envy. The Ithanga and Soweto evoked by these works are places of ongoing and chronic poverty in which the communal imaginary forged by the anti-apartheid struggle has been corroded and fractured by unemployment, economic stasis or aggressively neo-liberal and transactional modes of social relation. Madumo, Khabzela and Three-Letter Plague join several other literary works that refract what several

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critics have theorised as the unresolved and ‘ugly feelings’ of the post-transition: disappointment, jealousy, resentment.8 In Madumo and Three-Letter Plague, AIDS and its metaphors come to be permeated with ideas of bewitchment: the belief that others are acting against you via secret or occult means. Beyond the matter of CD4 counts (the medical discourse that many villagers are fluent in) lurks the more amorphous elusive language of a virus laced with social toxicity: an epidemic of envy, suspicion and silence. Shortly after their conversation about the young women, Sizwe confides to the narrator that a friend of his has tested positive elsewhere, but that they never discuss the matter of seeking out treatment. Feeling a surge of anger, Steinberg confronts his interlocutor, urging him to take action, but then immediately regrets it: His silence makes me feel foolish. Until now, I have studiously replicated his muteness on the question of treatment. I do not know what it is he refuses to express, and I fear that if I begin to preach, he will forever censor himself in my presence. My outburst is a mistake. I have shut off a channel of communication between us. (34)

This short chapter, ‘Testing Day’, is typical of the ebbs and flows of disclosure and concealment that make up the book. It seeks to render the structures of feeling of those deciding how to respond to an epidemic that is laden with social judgement. At a further remove it is bound up with the question of narrative discourse itself, with its quandaries about how to release information, and how to manage the confidences it has been taken into. Steinberg’s outburst here, an instinctive humanitarian response to an individual’s plight, places in jeopardy his channel for understanding a larger story, and for allowing the revealingly unsaid dimensions that reside in Sizwe’s world to surface. The latter is repeatedly characterised as ‘a very opaque man’ (232), someone who is intensely aware and cautious in his modes of self-presentation: a master of timing, tactical deference, calculated mildness, but also someone quick to point out the errors in Steinberg’s own project of watchfulness and meticulous observation when he reads drafts in progress. Here there is a modulation in Steinberg’s approach to constructing nonfiction narratives. As the work progresses, Sizwe himself also becomes a kind of detached and inscrutable observer when the author employs him as translator in exploring the region’s clinics and ARV programme. Now placed in the dual role as ‘interpreter-subject’, Sizwe begins to draw his own conclusions on behalf of his community and family members who are ill but have not yet sought treatment. It is a process happening some way below the narrative 8 See for example Barnard, ‘Reflections’ and Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect.

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surface, and which the reader catches only glimpses of. In this sense, there is a kind of epistemic balance, or tautness, achieved here that was absent in Midlands. While Steinberg is gathering information on Ithanga, Sizwe is concurrently undertaking his own muted ethnography and analysis of the MSF treatment programme, a social movement that he initially views with distaste as a kind of evangelical cult or secular church invested in a particular kind of jargon – ‘the unmistakeable fervour of young people speaking a newly learned language’ (98). Embarking on this ‘radically experimental’ journey together within the region, both ‘Jonny’ and ‘Sizwe’ have a great deal at stake; as in a tightly plotted novel, the characters are in a dialogical, co-dependent relation to each other. This neat double act, however, does not convince the bluff Dr Reuter, whose entrance creates a triangulated narrative structure that allows a still more robust stress-testing of each conceptual position (and moves the work beyond the binary frontier metaphors of Midlands). When Steinberg relates Sizwe’s account of the testing day, the doctor remarks that it is nothing new to him, and that those in MSF have ‘a very different attitude to confidentiality compared to the health department’ (88). Such disclosure, witting or unwitting, can only be regarded as a positive step: yes, a person who tests positive will form new enemies, but they will also form new alliances and relationships that will be all the more meaningful for being based on total transparency. Yet for Steinberg, the activists have seemingly forgotten the ‘delicate tissue of privacy’ that is essential to selfhood and dignity (317). This fundamentalist insistence of full disclosure and public confession even puts him in mind of ‘the radical practice of outing’, of forcing people out of the closet and into the glare of public knowledge for their own good, of healing through ‘violent humiliation’ (317). This dialectic of humanist and biomedical ideas of what a life means – both of them convincing on their own terms – weaves its way throughout the book. Reuter will not be detained by any false consciousness of an inviolably private self: as a medical Marxist and materialist committed to reducing mortality, his attitude to the crisis is entirely structural. If there are clinics nearby, if they are staffed in the right way, if treatment provision is decentralised from doctors to nurses and lay health care workers who can follow up in local communities – then people will come to test, and to access drugs. From the doctor’s perspective, Steinberg remarks, the book project is irrelevant: ‘“I am exploring the health-seeking behaviour of ordinary people. You’re telling me that’s worthless.” “Yes”, he replied. “Not to discourage you though”’ (265). Until the end of the work this doctor maintains that the decision of Jonny and ‘Sizwe’ to use a pseudonym (mainly to protect the identity of a relative of the latter who is HIV-positive) is an irredeemable misstep: ‘I think it will ruin your book’, he remarks: ‘Disclosure is linked to acceptance of your reality. If your book perpetuates secrets it becomes part of that mystic kind of mentality

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that is so damaging: the mentality of witchcraft’ (317). The doctor’s words crystallise what becomes the major intellectual challenge of the book: its attempt to run together, and give credence to, both scientific and cultural understandings of the epidemic – an ambition that drew the most pointed critiques from those commentators who felt that one or the other had been unduly privileged. * Three-Letter Plague was widely reviewed when it appeared, both within South Africa and abroad. Released in the United States as Sizwe’s Test amid substantial publicity, it marked a moment in Steinberg’s career when he himself was becoming a kind of broker of local meanings to a global audience perplexed by the South African AIDS tragedy and why the epidemic had been so ‘uniquely terrible’ in this region (Three-Letter Plague 90). Amid the largely positive notices, there were two dissenting notes sounded, one by Adam Hochschild in The New York Times, the other by Jacob Dlamini in the South African press. Hochschild faulted Steinberg for not condemning Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS dissidence more strongly: to offer only ‘a perfunctory few pages on this topic’ and ‘play down Mbeki’s stubborn obscurantism’ was a ‘serious flaw’ (‘Death March’, online). Yet this, I think, is to miss the studied way that the work refuses the predictable (and channel-closing) languages of blame and censure. In Lusikisiki, the president’s opinions on the epidemic are hardly those of a lone heretic; by contrast, we hear them refracted and echoed throughout the book in more colloquial or sensationalist registers. Even as it charts a particular medical intervention, Three-Letter Plague also tells the larger, culturally embedded story of how ordinary South Africans must reckon with the tragic historical timing of a new democracy cursed by a disease that cut to the heart of intimacy, erotic pleasure and childbirth. What should have been be a celebratory act of bringing forth of new life within a new nation became instead a vector of death, ‘a contamination that elides the boundary between the physical and the moral’ (Three-Letter Plague 301), and a domain in which male sexuality was placed under acute question. As in the most charged and volatile scenes in Midlands, the deep story here is that of black families seeking to sustain themselves – socially, economically, biologically – in a place where so much had been done to destroy this. Memories of colonial sterilisation programmes, unethical medical experimentation and the apartheid biological weapons programme hover behind many conversations. The immersion into the region’s folk wisdom about HIV/AIDS reveals that Mbeki was hardly alone in discerning some kind of malign conspiracy or externally directed ‘plot’. For Reuter, antiretrovirals are the most important health care intervention in fifty years; for Mbeki they are part of ‘a package of racial and pharmacological poison’ (91) that framed Africa as a source of pathology and promiscuity, as somewhere to be rescued from itself

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via an evangelical medical crusade. Yet as in Gevisser’s The Dream Deferred and Fassin’s When Bodies Remember (two books that Steinberg pays tribute to in his bibliography as standing above all the rest), Three-Letter Plague is able to perform the important intellectual work of sketching the intimate enmity between these two divergent ‘progressive’ positions, a fraught partnership of state and non-state actors who have their roots in similar politics but now find themselves at odds: ‘Hermann is an African-born white Marxist, Mbeki a black third-world nationalist. In another era, they would have been allies’ (91). In Ithanga and Lusikisiki, the notion of a veiled conspiracy against black aspiration takes on more sinister and lurid forms. Sizwe’s interest in and watchfulness of Reuter, we gradually learn, is partly due to a rumour in the district that the doctor’s needles and pills have been spreading the virus rather than combatting it, and that HIV/AIDS might be a plot to decimate black South Africa and return a white minority to power. ‘The needle that penetrates African skin has never been a neutral technology’, Steinberg writes, tracing an ambiguous and unsettled history of medicine and politics in rural Pondoland: ‘It is an image that has always been hungry for meaning’ (150). And just as Steinberg regrets some of his outbursts to Sizwe, so Sizwe regrets having shared these local suspicions about Western medicine with the author: ‘I have told you a black people’s secret. I am sorry I have told you that’ (139). As such, the narrative shape that seems promised when Jonny and Sizwe embark on a journey of mutual discovery can hardly emerge as one of unalloyed progress towards treatment and self-care. The pull towards this more optimistic plot is constantly frustrated by the corrosive paradox at the heart of the book. That is: any move towards the ‘positive’ outcome of Sizwe coming to believe in the need for testing, openness and advocacy is concurrently experienced by him as a kind of partial humiliation for his own community, its healers and its knowledge systems. Through its triangulated narrative structure, the book registers sharply divergent responses to the clinics full of emaciated and desperately ill people. For Reuter, those who seem so close to death are his ‘favourite’ patients because the effect of antiretrovirals will be so dramatic on them (265). The majority will be returned to health, and this will convince others of the drugs’ efficacy: ‘And people see that power. There is no hiding in these villages’ (265). Yet for Sizwe, such scenes are simultaneously ‘a cultural defeat, a belittlement of his world’ (217). ‘In question in these encounters’, Steinberg continues, ‘was the integrity of the local knowledge that had been bequeathed to him’: ‘The matter at stake was one of pride and humiliation. He knew that twentieth-century South Africa had gutted his world, leaving it without roads or lights or clinics, or decent jobs. Perhaps he also wondered whether it had left his world without wisdom’ (216). The forensic and unrelenting way in which the narrative treats its ‘interpreter-subject’ at such moments perhaps accounts for some of the unease

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voiced in Dlamini’s lengthy and complex response to the work. His review recognises the book’s importance but seems disquieted by the ethnographic shadow hanging over the project, even if he never seems quite able to put his finger on what exactly is the matter. He cites Jonathan Fabian’s influential critique of modern anthropology as being premised on the ‘denial of coevalness’, a discipline in which interpreter and subject have often been constructed as occupying different temporalities – the ‘here and now’ of modernity versus the ‘there and then’ of tradition – and wonders if Steinberg is truly able to see both himself and ‘Sizwe’ as inhabiting the same plane of experience: Magadla’s refusal to have his blood tested may be totally incomprehensible to Steinberg on ‘scientific’ grounds but it makes sense as a political gesture. […] Magadla fears a positive result would strip him of his wealth and deny his offspring (including his healthy first-born son) the legacy he is trying to build for them. This is not a man wallowing in the ‘there and then’ of traditional ignorance but a savvy businessman making calculations. (‘False Concept’ 13)

These insights, however, are hardly beyond the awareness of the text; indeed this is largely the argument that the work is making, rather than its refutation. What lurks behind Dlamini’s unease, perhaps, are rather the ‘unknown unknowns’: the less quantifiable small cues of phrasing, scenic construction and tonality through which this unequal relationship manifests itself. Increasingly, Sizwe figures himself as a kind of traitor to his community, as someone ‘bartering his privacy’, and selling cultural information that should not be for sale: problems that are duly folded back into the narrative discourse and aired in a series of uncomfortable exchanges. In one of the late scenes in the work that (like the conversation with Elias Sithole in Midlands) reverberates backwards through what we have read, Reuter confesses to Steinberg his deeper misgivings about ‘Sizwe’: ‘Whenever a white person goes to that village, they come back talking about him. First it was a photographer, then an anthropologist, then you. They come back and talk about him and the stories he tells are so striking’ (318). In this counter-variation on the theme of privacy and disclosure, it is now precisely Sizwe’s willingness to talk that seems problematic; since what kind of person, Reuter complains, ‘pours his life out the first time he meets people’: ‘Do you know of this man at Ithanga who is scared of his shop being attacked? If you’re really scared you wouldn’t pour it out to any white person who comes past. White people are distrusted. I didn’t like that. I like people when one doesn’t see what bothers them on a daily basis’ (318). It is a striking inversion of his own earlier insistence on disclosure and openness, one that leaves Steinberg feeling ‘wounded on Sizwe’s behalf. Hermann’s musings were awfully close to Sizwe’s most jaundiced thoughts about himself ’ (318). This last interview with Reuter also imbues the non-fictional text with the spectre

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of (to return to the ‘autobiography’ of Dugmore Boetie) a large-scale literary con, one that plays in the shadows of the anthropological. Their dual journey, in other words, is less and less able to deny the ‘denial of coevalness’ than was initially hoped, even despite the book’s self-awareness, and the bold series of modulations with which it closes. As one narrative arc (the journey towards openness and health) undermines or unravels the other (the move towards greater intimacy and discursive equality between Jonny and Sizwe), the text is confronted with a problem of unfinishability. The latter’s ongoing reluctance to test generates a crisis in the plotting of the work, and one that eventually reroutes its whole genre signature. To comprehend Sizwe’s refusal, Steinberg is compelled to reach into his own history of HIV/AIDS testing, stigma and shame: an element that had been there all along, idly noted ‘like the humming of an electrical appliance’, but is now drawn directly into the main narrative. (288). The elements of the EuroAmerican AIDS memoir that had been latent within the work – the invocation of Cameron’s book, the allusion to the practice of outing – finally surface explicitly as Steinberg evokes his experiences of HIV tests as a young man, first as a student at Wits University and then later at Oxford. In each, the matter of his patient confidentiality is bungled by a health care practitioner, triggering experiences of anger, self-loathing and the ‘internalised opprobrium’ that he comes to understand as ‘the architecture of shame’ (293). In these pages of autobiography, he examines his feelings of humiliation and self-disgust when testing as a sexually adventurous young man, and articulates how such experiences effected a disabling collapse of private and public censure. At the roots of shame ‘lie myriad watching, judging eyes that look at one and see a disgusting and gluttonous figure. They are the eyes of others, but one has internalised them. They are strangers’ eyes whose watchfulness is nonetheless experienced in secret on the inside’ (293). Expanding into a register that could even be described as autoethnography, the narrator carefully unpacks the psychic operations of stigma at a time when AIDS was spoken of as a ‘gay plague’: ‘The meanness that had been cast at me was utterly indistinguishable from, was indeed entirely parasitic upon, the meanness I felt towards myself ’ (296). His and Sizwe’s respective histories of anxiety, Steinberg suggests, ‘might resemble each other in the way the chins and noses of relatives do’: ‘That the faces are related to one another is as clear as the fact that they are also very different’ (288). The result is an equivalence sketched between narrator and subject, but not one premised on any easily assumed universalism. The humanist register with which the work closes is a negatively defined one, articulated through a comparable experience of shame, routed through the commonality but also opacity of the physical body. Shame and anxiety are invoked as shared physiological experiences; but also as powerfully local and inflected with cultural data that

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can never be fully articulated. The figure of ‘Sizwe’ (which we now learn is a pseudonym) recedes from analytic view, suspended uneasily between two different kinds of plot. The first concerns his guilt at succeeding in the zero-sum economy of a village where this success would seem to be taking away from the others, a place where testing risks opening him up to the machinations of those he lives amongst, and poisoning his future. The second is an idea of an external conspiracy directed by white power against black aspiration, and idea that he never entirely abandons, partly because, Steinberg suggests, it is psychologically less arduous to live by. ‘He wants to do good with those pills’, is his final verdict on the departing Reuter: ‘He is not part of the plot. He doesn’t even know about it’ (320). Like many of Steinberg’s books, Three-Letter Plague ends in a kind of suspension, poised between an interminably harmful past and cautiously hopeful future. Pinioned between anachronistic and emergent languages of social understanding, his œuvre repeatedly dramatises how the transaction of narrative non-fiction in a place like South Africa may never quite be able to escape the script of pre-determined cultural types, or the epistemic damage caused by a racialised history of knowledge-making. For all its remarkable depth, detail and synthesis of research, his South African triptych remains haunted by the tableau of credulous researcher and narrative con artist locked in a selffulfilling embrace. Or vice versa: by the image of a narrator as ‘a kind of confidence man’, dealing too intimately and overpoweringly in the lives of others, the latter seduced by a quality of attention and analysis that will always partly demean him. Analytic confidence, its power, its privilege and its problems; confidentiality and its limits; the games of confidence that play out between author, writer and subject in the work of ambitious non-fiction – the word continues to generate the spectrum through which these non-fictions make their meanings. Even as the topicality of their immediate subjects subsides, they remain compelling and unresolved as narrative constructions: delicately balanced structures of trust and artifice through which a restless current of intellectual energy continues to circulate. Pulling away from the central trio who have occupied the book, the epilogue to Three-Letter Plague settles, rather surprisingly, on some of the most minor, peripheral characters. Sizwe does decide to test, but when he does so, it is another party that he informs: ‘When he needed finally to confront the prospect of dirt in his blood, it was to the bird-watchers he turned, people whose place in his world is so unheralded and strange as to be ghostly’. (326) The ‘accident of their social and physical distance’, becomes an enabling factor here, and in the closing pages the narrative steps still further back from the fraught and sometimes claustrophobic intimacies that we have been party to. The final lines invoke work the benign blankness of lay health care worker Kate Marrandi, a Jehovah’s Witness whose deflection of all personal questions and

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total refusal to talk about her emotional life (the narrator speculates) had been crucial to her work as a healer. MaMarrandi had ‘filed away at herself until she was no longer of and in her world – no sexual history, nothing to rival, nothing to envy, nothing to reflect shame and hostility back at you’ (326). At a further remove, she might also be read as the image of the ideal non-fiction narrator: an impossible image, to be sure, but one that has come to temper the sometimes overbearing self-reflexiveness of Steinberg’s earlier work: ‘Perhaps Kate and the bird-watchers are a model of the place the missing men might dare enter to be treated; a place sufficiently detached from the thick of the world to have become absolutely safe; a place where one might find the means to stay alive’ (326).

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On 17 August 2015, the annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture was held at the Great Hall of the University of the Witwatersrand. Themed around ‘Race: Lived Experiences and Contemporary Conversations’, it was made up of two presentations which marked a generational break with the speakers of previous years.1 The first was by Panashe Chigumadzi, a student, activist and novelist who dealt with the experience of so-called ‘Coconuts’: young, relatively privileged black South Africans who are (so the self-mocking, semi-endearing term implies) white on the inside as a result of having attended schools that were either state-funded ‘former Model C’ (i.e. once whites-only) or private. ‘We all know what a Coconut is, don’t we? It’s a person who speaks like this’, she remarked, drawing laughter from the audience at the start of an address that spliced together autobiography, personal interviews and critical theory from Du Bois to Malcolm X to chart a psychic journey from accommodation and assimilation to militancy and activism (‘Of Coconuts’, online).2 As members of the ‘born free’ generation onto which a fantasy of a colour-blind, post-race South Africa had been projected, ‘we were’, she continued, ‘a conduit for the country’s absolution from the real work of reconciliation’; but instead of becoming ‘the trusted go-betweens between black and white, we are turning to conceptions of blackness and mobilising anger at the very concept of the Rainbow Nation.’ The second half of the event began with Sisonke Msimang, a versatile social commentator, essayist and (as of 2017) the author of the widely praised memoir Always Another Country. She delivered her reflections on the politics and possibilities of inter-racial friendship in South Africa in collaboration with poet, 1 Previous speakers included: Frene Ginwala (2009), Zwelinzima Vavi (2010), Kgalema Motlanthe (2011), Dikgang Moseneke (2012), Trevor Manuel (2013) and Irvin Jim (2014): members of a previous generation of anti-apartheid and trade union activists, and most of them at one point part of an ANC-led political establishment. 2 Texts of the lectures can be found at the Wits Journalism website of the University of Witwatersrand. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. An adapted version of Chigumadzi’s lecture appeared on The Guardian website (‘Why I Call Myself a “Coconut”’); an edited version of Msimang’s lecture is included in Walsh and Soske Ties that Bind; but in both cases I have adhered to the original formats/scripts of the public event.

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actor and theatre-maker Lebogang Mashile, who performed extracts from a range of literary works, many of them drawn from the archive of South African non-fiction. These included the prison memories of Helen Joseph and Lilian Ngoyi (leaders of the 1956 Women’s March against the pass laws); memoir, autofiction and essays by Rian Malan, Sindiwe Magona and Nadine Gordimer; Njabulo Ndebele’s reflections on race and intimacy in Fine Lines from the Box; Xolela Mangcu’s media columns about the University of Cape Town as it debated what to do with a statue of Cecil Rhodes. Operating at the cusp of old and new non-fictional forms, this methodology of ‘documentary theatre’ was chosen, Msimang commented, ‘because I wanted us to remember that we have already written many, many important things about race and justice and humanity in this country’, and also because here in South Africa ‘fact is often stranger and more poignant than fiction’ (‘With Friends Like These’, online). What followed was a searching, multimodal enquiry into whether anything like a just friendship between ‘black’ and ‘white’ could be achieved within a context of persistent structural and racialised inequality. Even while returning to the archive, Msimang reflected on a breach within leftist and progressive thinking: a turning away from the tenets of non-racialism that had underpinned so much of the ANC-led liberation Struggle (Ruth First’s legacy included) as well as the first decade of post-apartheid reconstruction. Given that ‘so much unintentional damage was done by our country’s first iteration of reconciliation – what I refer to as Reconciliation 1.0’, she extended the invitation to develop the ‘upgrade’ in a metaphor blending the ethical and the digital: We have the opportunity to develop a new more honest code – call it the open source version. For all you activists here, who insist on speaking out and not making it easy: you are indeed at the forefront of designing the upgrade and I salute you. (‘With Friends Like These’, online)

A new more honest code: this event and this phrase represent just one of many possible starting points for tracing emergent, re-designed forms of selfexpression and truth-telling during a moment of deep political, economic and epistemic ferment. 2015 marked the year in which a deep scepticism about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction went mainstream in South African literary, intellectual and media culture. The debunking, demystifying impulse that we have seen coded into various non-fictions within this book became, one might say, the norm within many forms of public discussion. Yet if this makes it sound like a continuation of what came before, some have framed the last few years as a moment of definitive rupture, even of incipient revolution. In this version, the twenty years since the advent of democracy have seen the onset of an uncompromising, expressionist, non-negotiable politics from a new generation no longer willing to wait for ‘transformation’, and

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speaking instead in terms of a total breach with the modalities of ‘negotiated settlement’. In its place come a cultural tactics of anger, impatience, disruption, refusal and shutdown – whether of parliament, the State of the Nation address, the national highway or the university – in order to arrest the status quo of the present. ‘To stop it’, in the words of academic and education activist LeighAnn Naidoo, who spoke at the subsequent Ruth First lecture of 2016: ‘To not allow it to continue to get away with itself for one more single moment’: And when the status quo of the present is shut down the task – and these have been the moments of greatest genius in the student movement – is to open the door into another time. It is difficult to work on the future while the present continues apace. There has to be a measure of shut down in whatever form, for the future to be called. (‘Hallucinations’, online)

In the years that marked the beginning of #RhodesMustFall (RMF), #FeesMustFall (FMF) and associated movements at South African universities – an evolving wave of activism calling for ‘free decolonised education’; more Black academic staff and women in senior positions; radical curriculum change and an end to outsourced labour on campuses – the pouring out of intimate and often painful personal histories has formed a major part of this charged cultural process, and one that opens up a set of inter-generational tensions within the left.3 What is at stake in the marked turn towards personal narrative within the activist moment that has enveloped South African universities, and the country more generally? What strands make up this claim to a new, more honest code? How are its sincerities or authenticities codified? What is new about it, and how does it reference or refuse previous styles of South African life writing? And, to raise a question with meta-critical implications for this chapter: to what extent should it even be analysed and critiqued? Several commentators and student formations have demanded that those used to assuming critical

3 For some of the various archives, sites and spaces that collect student/activist testimony see: the 2015 edition of the Johannesburg Workshop of Theory and Criticism Salon, guest edited by the Rhodes Must Fall Writing and Education Subcommittees; the student-written chapters of Booysen ed., Fees Must Fall; the online footage of the Mass Assembly held at the University of Cape Town on 25 March 2015 (‘Cry for Transformation’, online); the ‘diaries of the Wits Fallists’ collected in Chinguno et al., Rioting and Writing; Ameera Conrad’s workshopped play The Fall (2017); the special 2017 issue of the journal Agenda (Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell eds., ‘Feminisms and Women’s Resistance’); the 2017 pamphlet Publica[c]tion, ed. Naidoo, Gamedze and Magano, which is available for free download online via Amazon, with contributions from student activists and staff from over twenty campuses across South Africa.

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authority should rather remain silent and listen, so as to accord discursive and institutional space to those who have long been denied it.4 If Naidoo’s is a sympathetic, even utopian account of the moment, others on the left have voiced misgivings with an activist imaginary saturated with affect, offence and personal injury – one that assumes an inviolable authority and seeks to operate beyond the realm of critical engagement. A ‘type of autobiographical and at times self-indulgent “petit bourgeois” discourse has replaced structural analysis’, writes Achille Mbembe in a piece (to which I will return) questioning the ‘narcissistic investments’ of contemporary identity politics: ‘Personal feelings now suffice’ (‘The State’, online). These are some of the torsions running through this final chapter, which reads across a range of memory work and personally inflected critical essays by writers like Chigumadzi, Thabo Jijana and Malaika wa Azania (born Mahlatsi). The latter’s ironically named Memoirs of a Born Free (2014) provides the rest of my title, and hints at the uneasy dialectic of self-assertion and selfnegation that plays across these contemporary autobiographies. In them runs a tension between the desire for an ‘upgrade’ of truth-telling and the limited or degraded vocabularies of social understanding that they must reckon with and operate within. An impulse towards positive assertion and ‘self-care’ – autobiographical expression as restitutive and therapeutic – must contend with a range of powerfully negative registers: of Afro-pessimism and fatalism, or even nihilism and social death. These works are read in dialogue with the nonfictions of an older generation of intellectuals, activists and social commentators like Msimang and Mbembe. In different registers, they undertake the careful work of calibrating their responses to an activist rhetoric of urgency, intransigence and racial separatism, seeking out a mode of narrative-critical thinking adequate to the moment. Like any account of up-to-the-minute cultural production, this runs the risk of operating close to the event horizon of the present. It must also reckon with a twenty-first-century context in which the autobiographical act, ‘more than a literary convention, has become a cultural activity’ (Nuttall and Michael 298), and one now dispersed across a bewildering range of forums, registers, devices and operating systems. In its play on the idea of an open-sourced code, Msimang’s programming metaphor begs the question of what happens to the cultural aura of ‘life writing’, ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ as these increasingly 4 In August 2015, a 35-minute documentary titled ‘Luister’ (‘Listen’ in Afrikaans), which chronicled the experience of 32 black students at Stellenbosch University and their views on its controversial language policy, went viral. The rector of the university, Wim de Villiers, was asked to appear before a parliamentary committee on higher education as a result, while the hashtag #luister collected further testimony on social media (see Nicolson, ‘Stellenbosch’).

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anachronistic terms morph into something other: as they migrate away from the printed book and towards the screens, threads and algorithms of an online world, and one that ‘only serves as an amplifier of every single moment, event and accident’ (Mbembe, ‘State’). To fully trace these digital synapses and circuits of meaning as they flash up in a moment of danger, and opportunity, is hardly possible in the sequential and measured medium of academic prose. In many ways, this centrifugal, dispersive world of digital debate and activism marks the limit of a project such as my own, with its main focus on the format of the printed book.5 But I want to stay with the actual and virtual versions of the Ruth First event a while longer, since these open onto the racial, gendered and inter-generational fault lines where a new wave of autobiographical expressions are finding and fashioning their meanings.

Problems of articulation Panashe Chigumadzi revisits schooldays and re-reads Disgrace

‘Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place – this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port.’ In a 2008 lecture titled ‘Speaking in Tongues’, novelist and essayist Zadie Smith opens with a comic, self-reflexive gambit similar to that used by Panashe Chigumadzi. ‘Voice adaption’, Smith goes on, was once considered ‘the original British sin’, something to be monitored and censured as a marker of inappropriate social mobility or even class betrayal (‘Speaking in Tongues’, online). Nonetheless, her talk at the New York Public Library, coming at the beginning of the Obama era, unfolds largely within an expansively humanist and optimistic register. Recalling her own upbringing in multi-racial north London – ‘a big, colourful, working-class sea’ whereas Cambridge and the literary world are merely ‘a puddle’ and ‘almost univocal’ – Smith moves to a reading of Dreams from My Father. She tracks how the incoming US president is able to switch between different registers as the occasion demands, both as a speechmaker and a surprisingly skilled autobiographer (with, Smith comments, a novelist’s ear for dialogue, particularly as Obama navigates the identity politics of his college days). The talk ends with the ‘audacious hope’ that the addition of 5 For emerging scholarhip on student activism and the digital in South Africa, see for example: Tanja Bosch, who traces the use of social networking sites to facilitate ‘countermemory’ and ‘develop a new biography of citizenship which is characterised by more individualised forms of activism’ (‘Twitter Activism and Youth’ 221); and also the chapter ‘Documenting the Revolution’ in Booysen ed., Fees Must Fall.

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new voices does not have to mean the effacement or disavowal of the old; and that Obama’s vocal flexibility – his ability to connect with different constituencies via different speech acts – should be read as a sign of political strength and synthesis rather than a dilution of Black struggle. As evidence, that is, of a complex personal sensibility rather than a sign of political duplicity. ‘We all know what a Coconut is, don’t we? It’s a person who speaks like this’ – Chigumadzi’s sending up of her own voice, by contrast, sounds out a different, more intransigent cultural predicament. Caught between an unaware and patronising South African whiteness (the refrain ‘You speak so well’, often directed at ex-Model C students) and the fraudulent cultural nationalism of a Zuma administration that mocked the critical eloquence of ‘clever blacks’ as non-African, her work operates from a more fraught space.6 It is a terrain of articulation where the very power and prowess of one’s own speech acts – of one’s own ‘voice’ in all the literal and figurative dimensions of that term – risk being markers of their own undoing. The matter of speech, lexicon and accent reinstalls a socio-economic distance from the actual, material conditions of those who are repeatedly summoned in activist discourse as ‘the black body’: the South African poor who bear the brunt of the country’s appalling statistics on poverty, inequality, unemployment, crime, spatial injustice and sexual violence. ‘There was the devastating vulnerability of the black bodies for all to see’, writes Msimang in her memoir Always Another Country, evoking the aftermath of the 2012 Marikana massacre: ‘They lay strewn – arms and legs akimbo in heartbreaking stillness – and if you didn’t see them it was because you chose to look away’ (290). In the wake of Marikana, she goes on, ‘living in South Africa is like living in a haunted house. There are ghosts everywhere and they seem to be gathering force’ (290). While Smith’s address operates in the global anticipation of an Obama presidency, Chigumadzi speaks in the wake of its disappointments. She addresses a moment following the white nationalist backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump, and in mind of the lethal police actions which gave rise to #BlackLivesMatter in the United States and #RememberMarikana in South Africa. While Smith wishfully evokes an additive, syncretic poetics of identity, Chigumadzi trusts to a stubborn set of dichotomies in trying to navigate the simultaneous pressures of race, class and gender in the lives of the ‘born free’ generation, shapes for thinking which often run together African and African American vocabularies of struggle. 6 Zuma’s remarks were made (in Zulu) during a speech to traditional leaders in Parliament, while responding to critiques of a controversial Traditional Courts Bill in November 2012. The president scolded black South Africans ‘who become too clever’, saying that ‘they become the most eloquent in criticising themselves about their own traditions and everything’ (‘Zuma Scolds Clever Blacks’, online).

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Within the language of Black Consciousness, she remarked, the ‘Coconuts’ might be seen as ‘non-Whites’ at best, or else carriers of a particularly South African form of Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’: forced by white racism ‘to see themselves as part of the great black excluded’, and yet also as cultural assets due to their ‘proximity to whiteness’. At worst, might they be regarded as sellouts, ‘Uncle Toms’ or even the ‘House Negroes’ ridiculed by Malcolm X in his 1963 ‘Address to the Grass Roots’? ‘Ouch’, she went on: ‘I don’t entirely agree’: ‘Instead, I use the term to simply refer to an experience of socialisation into what my fellow Coconut Eusebius McKaiser has termed “white grammar”’ by virtue of having had a former Model C or private school education’. This, she went on, ‘is how you would know that, for example, a “sarmie” is a sandwich or that “bru” or “oke” are white-speak for “mfwethu”’. Terms of endearment, in other words, have also become markers of estrangement. In his introduction to an edited collection of autobiographical essays, Categories of Persons, Njabulo Ndebele writes that ‘There is a kind of fatal intimacy taking place in the mouth of public life’ (xi).7 Reading Askari in an earlier chapter, we saw how Jacob Dlamini repurposes the idea to understand the shocking closeness of torturer and captive at Vlakplaas (and more broadly the intimate enmities that made up the phenomenon of political collaboration). In her work, Chigumadzi reads the idea into a different space: the far more subtle, mundane and apparently ‘harmless’ encounters and speech acts which constitute an unchanged and unjust social scene. As with the autobiographical acts of many student-activists, such memory work begins from what academic and activist Nomalanga Mkhize calls ‘the grammar of the particular’: it is the micro-details of inter-personal relations and social rituals that provide the starting point for analysis (‘Academic Argot Stifles Narrative’ 1). In this sense, Chigumadzi argues, it is precisely those ‘who have borne witness to and experienced the very intimate details of whiteness in all its mundane manifestations’ that are best poised to refuse and repudiate it. To 7 Ndebele derives the metaphor from an essay by Antjie Krog, ‘Shards, Memory, and the Mileage of Myth’, which ‘enlists a fascinating epigraph’ to explore the mixture of compulsion and denial enmeshed in matters of historical and metaphysical guilt: ‘German memory was like a big tongue which kept touching on a painful tooth’ (quoted in Jones and Dlamini, Categories of Persons xi). The collection takes its title from the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa: ‘Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken’. It is a passage that crystallises the fundamental paradox of the post-transitional decades, and one that all the works in this chapter are engaged with at some level: how the project of equity and redress must rely on some form of categorisation; but how to take due cognizance of such historically produced categories without remaining trapped in the mind of apartheid, or what Ndebele calls ‘the politics of the blunt instrument’ (xii).

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be a ‘radical Coconut’ in the tradition of Du Bois, Tiyo Soga, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe is then to be a double agent or ‘a Trojan horse of sorts’: to recoup precisely such uncomfortable intimacies and proximities into a critical force. ‘It is an experiment gone wrong’, in the words of Anele Nzimande, one of several ‘fellow Coconuts’ who had been interviewed for the project: Because you wanted to create robots who are compliant, who keep the machinery working, the same sort of knowledge production, [but now you have] people challenging what you taught them, no interest in reproducing and want to dismantle it entirely. There is something amazing about that. (quoted in ‘Of Coconuts’, online)

In a series of essays, Chigumadzi undertakes the complex psychic, political and indeed socio-linguistic work of ‘dismantling’ the grammar of socialisation and co-option. In a long and challenging piece for the Johannesburg Review of Books, she evokes her schooldays, sifting the memories of class trips, parties, sleep-overs, hairstyles, off-hand remarks, turns of phrase and mispronunciations for the way these gave the lie to a fragile consensus of multi-racialism within a stubbornly unchanged landscape. Twice a week she would make the sixty-kilometre journey from Polokwane to a boarding school in the Magoebaskloof valley, at the tip of the northern Drakensberg: ‘no longer the RDPdotted dry Limpopo bushveld, but a land of hiking trails, nurseries, pubs, lodges and bed-and-breakfasts’ (‘Rights of Conquest’, online). These different altitudes are not simply juxtaposed, but also threaded into the essay as underwriting different modes of perception and socialisation: ‘When you take this trip, you begin to understand spatial apartheid’. The first movements of the essay trace a history of anti-colonial resistance by the Tlou under King Makgoba (for whom the valley is named), and the displacement of the VhaVhenda people by the Voortrekkers: regional histories absent from the school curriculum, lying unspoken beneath the awkward discussions of books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Things Fall Apart (in which the teacher reassured the class that ‘they didn’t need to remember the characters’ names’). All of this is set against the background of the ‘land issue’ in neighbouring Zimbabwe (where the writer was born, and where her 2015 novel Sweet Medicine is set): ‘It is into this cauldron of silences that our multiracial group of “born frees” was dropped’. At the heart of the piece is an exploration of the intense discomfort of being made to read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as a matric (final-year) set-work, and this at a moment when the author had not yet developed the vocabulary to voice her antipathy and misgivings at the way the text was taught: ‘There were many questions I knew I had, but was unable to face directly’. Along with a coming of age story, the essay then charts (and realises in its very writing) another

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narrative: the delayed account of a coming to critical consciousness, the evolution of a language to articulate what had previously been unnameable. As an 18-year-old, Chigumadzi found herself writing an unconvincing school essay about David Lurie’s ‘catharsis’. Eight years later, in the recursive, reflective time of the new essay, she returns to Disgrace and refracts Coetzee’s œuvre through entirely different webs of signification, holding in mind the injunction in the famous last line of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which she rephrases as: ‘O my body, always make of me a woman who questions!’ So what, her essay asks, does the book have to say about the body of a black woman in South Africa? ‘Or, if we try another way: What questions does my body, the body of a black woman in South Africa, ask of David’s story?’ Here she riffs off Zoë Wicomb’s 2000 novel, David’s Story, about a former ANC intelligence agent, David Dirkse. Classified as ‘Coloured’ in apartheid nomenclature, he is ‘searching for his place in the soon-to-be inaugurated New South African by investigating his Khoi and Griqua ancestry’ (‘Rights of Conquest’, online). ‘David’s story started at the Cape with Eva/Krotöa’, Wicomb’s wry narrator comments, ‘the first Khoi woman in the Dutch castle, the only section I have left out’ (1). Chigumadzi quotes this sentence, and suggests that it might just as well be applied to Coetzee’s protagonist. As such, she interweaves David’s Story and the story of David Lurie, returning to the colonial contact zone to ask what might have been submerged by the exclusive focus on Coetzee’s male protagonist in the way that she was taught Disgrace. Holding in mind a long history of sexual violence and slavery in the Cape Colony, she traces the submerged narrative of Lurie’s belief in his right to the ‘Coloured’ body: his domineering and coercive encounters with the ‘exotic’ sex worker Soraya and his student Melanie: ‘Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core’, we read via the unreliably unreliable filter of the novel’s third-person narration (24–25). In flipping ‘David’s story’ and concentrating on the fate of black women at the hands of white men in South Africa, the essay then establishes a counter-voice to the myth of the ‘swart gevaar’ (‘black peril’) within which the experience of reading Disgrace at school had been implicated.8 And in a telling moment, Chigumadzi excavates yet another David’s story: the 1910 8 See Lucy Graham, State of Peril, for a carefully historicised account of how Coetzee’s novel both invokes and critiques the ‘black peril’ narrative of sexual violence – what the novelist refers to as ‘the ne plus ultra of colonial horror fantasies’ – by placing it in an unstable counterpoint with what Sol Plaatje called the ‘white peril’: ‘the hidden sexual exploitation of black women by white men that has existed for centuries’ (Graham 140). In this sense, it pre-empts Chigumadzi’s approach while perhaps offering a more sympathetic final verdict: ‘The novel may, as Spivak notes, “be relentless in keeping the focalization confined to David Lurie’, but the responsibility for an imaginative exploration that opens up space for alternative points of view is thus left with the reader’ (157).

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adventure novel Prester John by colonial administrator John Buchan. Set in the very Magoebaskloof where she attended boarding school, it tells of a young Scotsman, David Crawfurd, who (in her summary) ‘valiantly fights against the resistance led by John Laputa, a Zulu minister, who has taken the title of the legendary Christian king of Ethiopia, Prester John’. Braiding together such different narratives via a kind of literary and historical ‘punning’, her piece is also able to register allusive and associative modes of sense-making: those partial, personal or chance identifications that cannot easily be accommodated in more disciplined forms, but which covertly structure so much thinking. Contra to the dismissals of personal narrative as a self-indulgent (or petit bourgeois) reflex that undermines larger social analysis, this discursive essay infuses the autobiographical into the critical in an intellectually productive way. It is able to log the distance between the first encounter and subsequent return to a literary work. As such it joins those forms of creative criticism that record the process of living with (or through) a cultural text for an extended period of time; that do not attempt an even-handed survey but instead operate via registers of the remembered fragment, via the overwritten or revealingly excessive response. In this sense, the personal or semi-personal essay is a mode able to work with mistakes and misreadings: to track the slow correction of the errors under which the self has laboured for so long. Such reflective agility and recalibration is less available to the disciplined scholarship that must summarise and abstract its full argument in advance; that is less able to depart from its own knowingness or acknowledge the moment of first encounter – of not (yet) knowing. It is worth pausing here to note how Disgrace (which we have seen both Steinberg and Chigumadzi read, or possibly misread, in service of their own non-fictional projects) might be seen as a limit text for literary interpretation in South Africa. Its complex and uneven reception history might be seen as indexing a process by which cultural authority and energy ebbs from a certain ‘high’ strain of literary fiction towards a new premium placed on ‘honesty’, ‘true confessions’ and personal affect within the public sphere (all those modes of self-expression that Coetzee was so sceptical of as a critic, but which have now broken through into a new currency and validity). In a previous chapter I suggested that one approach to understanding the literary in literary non-fiction might be to trace what is risked in a narrative: to gauge the degree to which a work opens itself to misreading as it traverses the epistemic gulfs of post-apartheid or post-transitional South Africa. Widely lauded transnationally, but regarded much more coolly at ‘home’, Disgrace is a work that was always likely to be betrayed by the moment into which it emerged. Its experiment in narrative indeterminacy always risked betraying itself, leaking beyond the world of the text to stain the author. Chigumadzi never levels any direct accusation at Coetzee the novelist; but for many

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twenty-first-century readers in South Africa (some of my students among them), Lurie’s knowingness, bigotry and blind spots come retroactively to taint his creator (who might have suspected that they would) in a cultural scene less and less willing to allow any separation between author and protagonist, any breach of the autobiographical pact, or any departure from a performance of narrative sincerity. And so while the autobiographical-critical imperative of the ‘new more honest code’ might access important and dormant forms of expressivity, it also risks reducing the interpretive space in which unsettling fictions like Disgrace and David’s Story can resonate and make their meanings. There is, after all, a particular reason why Wicomb’s narrator decides to leave out the story she does, and it is worth quoting the lines that follow: David’s story started at the Cape with Eva/Krotöa, the first Khoi woman in the Dutch castle, the only section I have left out. He eventually agreed to that but was adamant about including a piece on Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus placed on display in Europe. One cannot write nowadays, he said, without a little monograph on Baartman; it would be like excluding history itself. (David’s Story 1)

Wicomb, in other words, is dealing ironically with public uses of the colonial past at a moment in which Krotöa-Eva and Baartman risked becoming token figures, or even over-used rhetorical gestures, within the cultural politics of the 1990s. The unreliable amanuensis in Wicomb’s novel ‘leaves out’ these all too usable pasts. Instead, a very different, disturbing narrative continually threatens to surface: David Dirkse’s adulterous affair during his exile in ANC training camps with a woman subsequently subjected to torture by the liberation movement as a possible informer. What has by now become something of a cultural cliché is exchanged for a subject that is still barely voiced (and a something that Thabo Mbeki’s ANC refused to countenance during the TRC process). That is: in the world of the novel, Wicomb’s narrator ironises the obligatory rhetorical gesture of invoking Krotöa-Eva (‘it would be like excluding history itself ’) because it risks obscuring a more proximate and less usable past: a history of violence and misogyny within the military training camps of the ANC in exile (and more generally, the prevalence of an authoritarian and masculinist ethos across all of South Africa’s political cultures). This satiric, ambivalent strain is a part of David’s Story that is in turn ‘left out’ by Chigumadzi: a narrative strand perhaps too risky to broach in a discussion of Disgrace and decolonisation. Yet as we will see in the following sections, it is a matter tentatively taken up by other memoirs as they seek a mode of articulation both anti-racist and feminist, and as they reckon with the diverse forms of misogyny that their life and work has exposed them to.

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‘The most intimate thing’ Untold labour, unfriending and the uses of anger

The grammar of the particular, the ordinary, the seemingly mundane – such registers were also at the heart of Msimang’s and Mashile’s Ruth First presentation, which sought to show that ‘intimacy and racism are not exclusive’, refracting this idea through a range of literary, social and digital spaces (‘With Friends Like These’, online). If the classroom and educational institutions more generally are one site for tracing such intimate estrangements, then another recurring trope in the new activist autobiography is the suburban home and the question of ‘domestic service’: a ‘fact’ of South African middle-class life that has been left almost entirely untouched within the country’s political transition. The TRC, Msimang remarked, should have investigated the domestic labour system; in the absence of this, she turns to a series of literary investigations, drawing on passages by Sindiwe Magona and Rian Malan that were performed by Mashile. In Magona’s short story collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991), the character of Stella, a domestic worker, tells of her refusal to wash the underwear of her employer. As it appears in the transcript, or rather, script of the lecture: LEBO:  PUTS ON APRON (PANTY WILL BE ON ARMCHAIR ALREADY) WALKS TOWARDS THE ARMCHAIR AND BEGINS TO POLISH IT WITH THE PANTY/DUST-CLOTH

There swimming afloat in that water of hers was her panty…she’d left it there for me to wash.

[…]

What do you mean what did I do? I did not go to school for nothing. I found a pen in her bookshelf and found a piece of paper and wrote her a note too. ‘Medem’, I said in the note, ‘Please excuse me but I did not think anyone can ask another person to wash their panty. I was taught that a panty is the most intimate thing...my mother told me no one else should even see my panty. I really don’t see how I can be asked to wash someone else’s panty.’



That was the end of that panty nonsense.



Lines delivered as both Lebo and Sisonke laugh.

Moving between lecture and performance, criss-crossing from fiction to memoir, the documentary theatre approach brings to the surface affective dimensions of experience that would not be possible within the decorum and intellectual discipline of a more formal event. In performance, the passage above plays across a range of registers – social satire, self-mockery, accent,

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nonsense and absurdity – as it crosses the different modes of being demanded of the narrator. The domestic worker, like the Coconut, is a figure schooled in the ways of a divided society: a ‘trusted go-between’ now betraying such trust in important ways, and letting slip the most intimate things. In turning to Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart (and in the wake of a notorious incident of white students humiliating black cleaning staff at the University of the Free State), Msimang asks why rituals of white male bonding have often involved the mockery or denigration of black servants, most often women. She lifts out his lacerating account of sleeping with a domestic worker, a violation of the Immorality Act intended to bolster both his adolescent ego and his antiapartheid credentials: LEBO:   I tapped an iron door and the black woman opened it, wearing a satin nightgown.

The room smelled of all the things I associated with servants – red floor polish, putu, and Lifebuoy soap. Even her bed was waist-high on bricks to thwart the tokoloshe. I took off my clothes and clambered onto it and then I was in her arms, overpowered by the smell of her, and terrified, utterly terrified. I couldn’t talk to her because we had few words in common. I didn’t know what to do. I recoiled at the thought of French-kissing her, but I did it anyway because I was a social democrat and I did not want to insult her. And then I pulled up the nightie and instants later it was over. I rolled off and asked, ‘Was I good? Am I big enough?’



She said yes.



She was very kind.

SISONKE AND LEBO:  This is why we cannot yet be friends.

It is a horribly compelling scene, and one in which the ‘right’ reaction is by no means clear. Malan’s embarrassing, treacherous, almost gratuitously frank account of a deluded younger self is re-animated by two women of colour. LEBO WILL WALK AND COME CLOSE TO SISONKE TO USE HER AS A PRO, the ‘stage directions’ read: AS THE BLACK WOMAN WHOM HE SNEAKS TO VISIT. But is it invoked as symptom or diagnosis of a cultural pathology? Msimang simply confines herself to saying: ‘I wonder if her version of this story would be punctuated with laughter or with tears?’ Yet it is worth noting that My Traitor’s Heart – decried as racist by many in the South African liberal literary establishment on publication – is a book that has been taken up by a number of radical Black thinkers in recent years.9 9 In the 2015 Vintage re-issue of My Traitor’s Heart, the author provides, by way of introduction, ‘An Interview of Rian Malan, by Rian Malan’ which describes the ‘campaign’

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Chigumadzi returns to the scene above in a piece for the New York Review of Books (written in the wake of a controversial Dove body wash commercial), tracing the contradictory intimacy that is encoded in the recurring signifier of ‘Lifebuoy soap’ in South African writing. As a legacy of the colonial project that required properly disciplined bodies via the promotion of ‘modern’ hygiene, the brand that Malan mentions, she writes, ‘became an institution in black households, and many older black people would recall the long-running advertising slogan “After a hard day’s work, Lifebuoy smells nice”’ (‘Soap’, online). The essay opens into a reflection on the history of ‘black bodies’ labouring in white homes, involved in the most fundamental roles of family life – mothering, cleaning, feeding – yet also symbolically controlled and fended off by an ideology embedded in commodities as banal as soap. Andile Mngxitama also returns to Malan in a review of Anton Harber’s Diepsloot (2011), lambasting this measured history of a Johannesburg informal settlement as part of a post-1994 genre which reflects no more than ‘anthropological forays into black townships to give the reading public a sense of “how the other half lives”’ (‘Whose Story?’, online). He holds it up against ‘the cutting-edge narrative power’ of My Traitor’s Heart: ‘While reading [Diepsloot], I often longed for Malan’s rawness and unusual imagination’. Preferring the compromised and libidinal excesses of the latter’s memoir to the journalistic caution and humanist sense of mission in Harber, the review expands into a critique of the long-standing ‘anti-black racism’ ostensibly embedded in such exercises in ‘history from below’. In doing so it channels another notorious moment of excess and insult from the canon of South African non-fiction: Lewis Nkosi’s 1965 suggestion (in ‘Fiction by Black South Africans’) that novelists should perhaps stop writing fiction until after apartheid: ‘His advice came against the backdrop of the aesthetically atrocious black fi ­ ction that never rose above the actual drama of black life under oppression. Perhaps it is time to apply Nkosi’s advice to white non-fiction writers who transgress into the black condition’ (‘Whose Story?’). Clearly, the lecture of 2015 in the Wits Great Hall (and the debates surrounding it) marked a very different cultural moment from that which saw the same venue packed for the launch of Mark Gevisser’s exhaustive psychobiography of Thabo Mbeki in 2007. Representing a turn away from the textured, waged against the book and its global success by the local literary establishment. This ‘reached a crescendo’ at the 1991 Alan Paton award dinner, in which the work, tipped to win, was instead ‘banished to outer darkness’ by newspaper editor and host Ken Owen, ‘who denounced both book and author as irredeemably racist in his speech from the podium’. This was a result (in Malan’s telling) of his having violated literary decorum and smashed ‘[t]he rules that forbade honesty in discussions of race. The rules of civilised white people’ (xiii). Hence the critique of ‘civility’ and ‘respectability politics’ that has informed some parts of the student movements.

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collaborative projects of social history, life writing and painstaking cultural translation that produced so many lauded South African non-fiction texts over the last decades, the new code both demands far stricter limits on subject positions, and yet also privileges a range of unabashedly expressionist registers. It is a moment that works with (in Sianne Ngai’s phrase) ‘ugly feelings’: irritation, vulgarity, the disruptive, uncivil, scatological, self-abasing and disgusted; it finds an echo in the kind of confessive autobiography that seeks to set aside all self-censorship and say the worst. At the same time, this moment of so-called newness and rupture in many ways reprises episodes from the South African past. It reanimates a long-running binary in southern African cultural theory in which a claim to unvarnished truth-telling is opposed to ideas of aesthetic mediation: ‘a strong inclination towards a kind of “representational literalism” that sought to weld signifier to referent’ (De Kock, ‘Splice of Life’ 82). It partly reactivates the ‘rhetoric of urgency’ that characterised many debates around the function of culture as a tool for conscientising and mobilising during the Struggle (Bethlehem 373), the kind of urgency captured in the post-1976 slogan ‘Liberation Before Education’, which mandated the boycott and destruction of a dysfunctional and under-funded education system for black South Africans in the 1980s. And yet in the post-transitional present, such uncompromising rhetoric is now channelled towards more intimate spaces and inter-subjective encounters. What, Msimang’s talk went on to explore, did this new/old moment of urgency and frankness mean for the complexities of inter-personal relations among so-called friends? What had happened to the venerable idea of crossracial friendship as a tool for anti-racist struggles? Here again the talk looked back – to the literary archive, and to Aristotle – but also forward: to the platforms of social media, those ‘crude personal essay machines’ (Shields, Reality Hunger 93) and relentless quantifiers of online connectedness, where the question of ‘friends’ took on still other valences. Msimang quoted the reflections of Sekoetlane Phamodi, following his decision to delete all his white contacts on Facebook: As I trawled through profile after profile and album after album, piecing together both my real and Facebook life narratives and where my ‘friends’ fit into it, I started to notice a disturbing pattern. A vast majority of my ‘friends’ were white. And, for an overwhelming majority of these, I was one of a handful of Blacks in their social circles. Wait, what? … In every friends list and every photo album, I found myself playing a bittersweet game of ‘spot the Black.’ Our mutual friends were almost always lily white. The social events were lily white. And the status updates and posts were well punctuated with whiteness. I began to turn this over and over in my mind. How was it that in a country where more than 80% of the population was Black,

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I found myself the sole or one of a handful of Blacks in a lily-white list, party or picture frame? How was it that in a country where more than 80% of the population was Black, my white ‘friends’ had, if at all, so few Black meaningful friends? (quoted in ‘With Friends Like These’)

In a paradox that has played out globally (and which reached a kind of apotheosis in the election of Donald Trump), the much-vaunted connectedness promised by the world’s most popular social media platform has revealed, and most likely contributed to, a deep sense of polarisation and social fragmentation. In Phamodi’s case, the metrics provided by social media – its objective, obsessive plot of links and clicks – made visible the structural asymmetries around cross-racial friendship that continue to shape the post-apartheid social scene. A user, in other words, can quite blatantly ‘see’ those imbalances that might previously have remained hidden. As such, Msimang reframed what might have at first seemed to be a sentimental matter – can we be friends? – as a way of reading the relation between individual desire and larger, more structural modes of social relation: ‘For the white South African, who is surrounded by millions of black potential “friends”, the implied question in Aristotle’s framing of the relationship between friendship and justice is, “Are you just?’ (‘With Friends Like These’, online). More broadly, Phamodi’s reflection joins what is by now a labyrinthine set of debates around digital platforms and their ever-evolving tools for scripting the self. What exactly are the relations between real and online ‘life narratives’ that Phamodi refers to, and does such a distinction still hold any analytic purchase? Should those online algorithms that select for outrage and absolutism – that reward the emphatic rather than the nuanced – be taken as workable models of how people live and interact offline? Is this the kind of data that can or should be taken up as evidence in serious cultural debates; but then again, where do such debates now happen if not online? Msimang went on to consider the glimpses into the country’s political unconscious that such social media threads have revealed: posts about job promotions by young black South Africans being met with vitriolic outpourings about affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment from supposed (white) ‘friends’. Such symptoms of an underlying ‘well of white rage’, she remarked, reaffirm the problem of authentic intimacy in a situation where ‘Our gains are seen as their losses’. And inevitably the Ruth First event not only analysed such modes of digital relation and reproach, but swiftly became implicated in them. The lecture-performance was swiftly refracted across media websites, Twitter, Facebook pages, comment threads, op-eds, letters to the editor, video feeds and audio feeds. Mostly this was a positive response to the power and unflinchingness of the speakers, their ideas amplified by an online audience receptive to the ideas of raw affect, emotion and anger embedded in the presentations.

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‘Racism and intimacy are not mutually exclusive’; ‘White people have never known what to do with black people’s feelings’; ‘All the #blackgirlmagic in the world is wrapped up between these two women right now’. These were some of the retweeted lines from the evening, collected under a hashtag in which the militant Communist, feminist and author of the prison book 117 Days was transformed into #ruthfirst. Some celebrated the imagery of three women of colour taking over the podium from, and speaking back to, two powerful men – Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib and Anton Harber, director of the Wits Institute for Journalism, who introduced the ‘Fellows’ (and whose mispronunciation of ‘Pinochet’ Chigumadzi’s name was duly noted). Others remarked how the format of the public lecture had been reimagined: less a undirectional address than an intimate and responsive interaction with an audience not content to sit in silence, but (as one can hear in the online recording) ready to react, affirm, disagree or (as happened during question time) disrupt. The event also found itself trending when a member of the audience ‘took the mic and wondered why we are honouring a white person, and not black Struggle heroes, and while saying this added words to the effect of F*CK WHITE PEOPLE!’ This is the account given by the moderator of the panel, ‘fellow Coconut’ Eusebius McKaiser, who intervened, asked for the microphone to be switched off, and was subsequently criticised (by Chigumadzi and others) for ‘policing Black anger’. ‘Some tweeted that they had struggled to sleep’, wrote the academic, author and talk radio host in response to such criticisms, ‘grappling with the gravest injustice since apartheid ended, that of McKaiser threatening to eject a man for grabbing a mic to share with us his hatred of all white people in delicious f***-ing glory. I was characterised by one person on Twitter as someone “trained in the management of black slaves”’ (“F*** WHITES” Olympiad’, online). Writing at much greater length and in rawer terms than his usual media columns, McKaiser grappled with the role, registers and importance of anger in contemporary anti-racist activism while strongly repudiating hate speech, arguing that they were entirely ‘distinct emotional responses’. He also got personal, lambasting ‘the naivety of people who think that the more anti-white they sound, the more they must surely be the Black Consciousness real deal’, and scorned the ‘brand new revolutionaries’ using hate speech to elevate their status ‘in an imagined ranking of degrees of black radicalism’. Yet in doing so, he also acknowledged the intensity and aggression of his own tone: ‘It is because discussion about race is inherently personal. It is deeply personal and being told, as a black person, that you’re some kind of House Negro trained to manage Field Negroes speaking out of turn, hurts’. ‘What’, he went on to ask, ‘should we make of all this pain and anger and a callous competition to be the most self-righteous?’ (online).

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The event, in other words, was not only a theorisation of, but also a test case for, the matter of introducing raw emotion, anger and insult into intellectual forums. Beginning with the sardonic but insistent use of terms like ‘Coconut’ or ‘House Negro’, there is a deliberate and uneasy juxtaposition of insult and intellect: an unstable mixture of the satirical crudity (or cruelty) of the terms used and the abstruse jargon of critical theory used to elaborate and accommodate them.10 It was one of many occasions over the last years within the South African academy that showed up how an imperative to speak out across a wider range of public platforms has run in tension with an impulse to disrupt or withdraw from such forums altogether (even when they were host to celebrated progressive intellectuals).11 To repudiate intellectual spaces (like an eminent memorial lecture) that might themselves be seen as spaces of co-optation or collaboration; to violate norms of decorum and impose a shutdown of all current university spaces and practices until certain truths have been spoken and certain demands met – a tactic that would dominate the student protests in the year to follow. In 2016, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, the keynote speaker at the subsequent Ruth First event, addressed herself squarely to theme of that year’s lecture, ‘Violence and Rage’. She quoted the poet and activist Audre Lorde – ‘Anger is loaded with information and energy’, and should be seen as a ‘liberating and strengthening act of clarification’ when expressed in the service of a vision of a just future. She urged her audience to listen to the words of Noam Chomsky on the protests of 1968, ‘the last time students shook the world’: ‘It would be superficial, and even rather childish, to be so mesmerised by occasional absurdities of formulation or offensive acts as to fail to see the great significance of the issues that have been raised and that lie beneath the tumult’ (quoted in ‘Hallucinations’ online). She suggested the tactic of shutting down certain spaces was necessary to disrupt the functioning of a cynical and ‘changeless’ present that could not conceive of alternatives; that such disruption served to force a conception of a different future, of different temporalities, into the political imaginary (‘Hallucinations’, online). In a piece that first appeared on his (very active) Facebook wall, social theorist Achille Mbembe (based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic 10 In the 2016 Ruth First lecture, Lwandile Fikeni mounted a defence of the ‘Fuck White People’ intervention as ‘a highly aestheticised form of critiquing South Africa’s social ordering’. See ‘Ruth First Fellows Deconstruct the Youth, Violence and Rage’ on the Wits Journalism website, http://witsvuvuzela.com/2016/08/18/ruth-first-fellows-deconstruct-youth-violence-and-rage/. Accessed 1 October 2018. 11 Some other examples of disrupted or contested events would include the panel on The University and its Worlds with Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe at the University of the Western Cape (26 May 2016) and a lecture by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, moderated by Xolela Mangcu at the University of Cape Town (3 March 2017).

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Research) sounded a different note. ‘Hard questions’ needed to be asked, questions that might, he suggested, ‘mistakenly be construed as contemptuous’ by those who had lapsed into a false binary of critical thought versus direct action (‘The State’, online). Why was current political discourse ‘saturated by narratives of personal identity as pain, suffering and victimhood’? And what to make of the claim that such autobiographical expressions should be taken as non-negotiable, as over-riding all other concerns, and beyond the challenge of rational discourse or even language itself?12 While Naidoo privileges a poetics of solidarity and political expediency, Mbembe reaffirms a mode of criticality and vigilance that is less willing to write off violence, symbolic or otherwise, as ‘occasional absurdity’.13 While she sees the scrambling of temporalities brought on by the student shutdowns as a crucial way of forcing newness and futurity into discourse, for him there was something disabling about collapsing different historical moments into each other, and this at a moment when the full archive of past struggles is instantly available, its lexicons and icons arrayed (via the world memory of the Internet) on the same flattened digital plane: The age of urgency is also an age when new wounded bodies erupt and undertake to actually occupy spaces they used to simply haunt. They are now piling up, swearing and cursing, speaking with excrements, asking to be heard. They speak in allegories and analogies – the ‘colony’, the ‘plantation’, the ‘house Negro’, the ‘field Negro’, blurring all boundaries, embracing confusion, mixing times and spaces, at the risk of anachronism. They are claiming all kinds of rights – the right to violence; the right to disrupt and jam that which is parading as normal; the right to insult, intimidate and bully those who do not agree with them; the right to be angry, enraged; the right to go to war in the hope of recovering what was lost through conquest; the

12 In a lengthy response to Mbembe’s piece, T. O. Molefe countered that such autobiographical acts were not inward looking or narcissistic: they had a specific target – ‘the people and institutions that have for centuries used every trick in the book to remain numb or otherwise unmoved by black pain’ – and a particular rhetorical function, and as such should be left to run their course without challenge or derailment by outsiders: ‘It is these people and institutions to whom black rage says you cannot understand, you never have and never will, I am tired of explaining myself to you, so it’s best that you sit silently when I am talking about my experiences instead of distracting me and my people from this important work. It is disingenuous to say these expressions are being directed inwards or to the world at large’ (quoted on ‘UCT Rhodes Must Fall’ Facebook page, 23 September 2015. Accessed 1 February 2018). 13 For example, on his Facebook account Mbembe denounced the firebombing of the Vice Chancellor Max Price’s office at the University of Cape Town on 16 February 2016, at a time when this event was barely mentioned by ‘progressive’ academic forums.

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right to hate, to wreak vengeance, to smash something, it doesn’t matter what, as long as it looks ‘white’.

Mbembe’s turn to such intellectual ‘status updates’ during the RMF and FMF moments (with all the fire that they drew from student radicals who regarded these as disloyal, out of touch or reactionary) marks a breach with the synoptic and sometimes mandarin tone of his earlier work on, for example, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’. The exigencies of the Johannesburg moment seem to compel a different mode of address: a kind of live theory that emerges as a more combative and vulnerable thinking in-the-event; that risks being seen as a betrayal by those whom it addresses (but has the cultural brio to push on regardless). In either case, it joins other critical engagements here – by Chigumadzi, Msimang, McKaiser – in which a charged sense of occasion calls for a reaching beyond disciplinary norms, customary platforms or established personal styles. Each of these moments, that is, deserves as much attention for its non-fictive occasion, tactics and aesthetics as for its message. Mbembe ends his reflections with a searching set of questions in a psychoanalytic register: ‘Why are we invested in turning whiteness, pain and suffering into such erotogenic objects? Could it be that the concentration of our libido on whiteness, pain and suffering is after all typical of the narcissistic investments so privileged by this neoliberal age?’ Here is the more vexing theoretical quandary that opens up in reading the new code demanded by activist testimony. Directness and ‘honesty’ notwithstanding, we are perhaps (in a more psychoanalytic paradigm) the least reliable source of information about ourselves: subjects caught up in a messy tangle of transference relations and misapprehensions, trying to navigate a mixture of individual and social desires now coded into, or coded by, the technologies of digital capitalism. Mbembe floats the idea that the discourse of fracture, injury and victimisation which informs current radical politics in the academy – the constant splitting and fetishising of difference – carries with it an investment in the privatised logic of neoliberalism, with all its digital tools and templates for customising, refining, commodifying and broadcasting the self. Rather than envisioning a future, he goes on, this risks a divisive, retrospective politics that tends towards self-enclosure and the unravelling of any common cause. Against the circulation of second-hand tropes borrowed from elsewhere, he sounds a humanist note in calling for anticipatory politics, an ethics of becoming-with-others (his emphasis) that will be needed ‘if one form of damaged life is not simply to be replaced by another’ (‘The State’, online). It is with these ideas in mind that I turn to some conventional (i.e. bookshaped) autobiographies of recent years, holding in mind the mixture of selfassertion and self-doubt that winds itself through these memoirs, and the tension between solidarity and criticality that comes in reading them.

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Spectators of our own demise Confidence and insecurity in Memoirs of a Born Free and Nobody’s Business

Published exactly two decades since South Africa’s first democratic elections, both Mahlatsi’s Memoirs of a Born Free and Jijana’s Nobody’s Business are c­ oming-of-age narratives that write themselves out of working-class South African backgrounds. In doing so, they address a somewhat different socioeconomic (and linguistic) predicament from that of the so-called ‘Coconuts’, and carry a different kind of representational burden. ‘As someone who has often been told that she is “not like the other black people” and that I “speak so well”’, writes Chigumadzi in her review of Memoirs, ‘I welcome the fact that the much-feted bornfrees [sic] have a new face and a new voice. One that is articulate, but yet remains “unpalatable”. One that does not mince her words. One that does not have that “accent”’ (‘Memoirs of Bornfree’, online). The question of how prose might carry an ‘accent’ – or what this might result in when transmuted from voice to page – is an intriguing one to hold in mind in trying to gauge to what extent South African English (the standardised language of governance, business, policy – and trade non-fiction) can register or honour the range of vernaculars that it exists among. ‘Institutionalised racism’, writes Mahlatsi in her introduction, ‘is when a black child’s intelligence is measured by how well they can articulate in English when a white child’s intelligence is not measured by how well they can articulate in Sesotho or isiXhosa’ (6). In one sense, both memoirs are accented mainly by a township, or small town, education – in the widest sense of the word – rather than by what Mahlatsi calls the ‘unfortunate “privilege”’ of former Model-C schooling, glib multi-racialism and the ‘vulgar opulence’ of suburban life (5, 70). In Nobody’s Business, we learn that Jijana achieved the only university-entrance pass at his village school ‘which had no library or computer lab, only broken windows and a collapsed ceiling. Only twenty per cent of our class of 2005 passed at all’ (30). Memoirs records the shock of moving from a township school to a suburban primary, but this is largely framed as an intransigent ‘Refusal to assimilate to whiteness’ (as one of the summary chapter titles puts it). Contra to the rhetoric of middle-class campus activism (and its investments in critical race theory) that is questioned by Mbembe, ‘whiteness’ is not a site of compulsive return in these life-narratives. Instead it is something de-centred, easily dismissed or simply peripheral as the stories investigate the internal dynamics of, respectively, political activism in Soweto and the minibus taxi industry of the Eastern Cape. They are, in this sense, more representative of the experience of the majority of young South Africans. For all these similarities, however, these are very different, in some ways diametrically opposed, exercises in life writing. They sharpen a sense of the tension between cardinal self-assurance and almost fatalistic insecurity in the autobiographical act.

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Mahlatsi’s account of her frustrated search for ‘a political home’ within various radical, socialist and Black Consciousness formations is framed as an outspoken and urgent letter to the elders of the African National Congress: My name is Malaika Lesego Samora Mahlatsi. I was born twenty-two years ago in the now-dilapidated Meadowlands Community Clinic on a rainy morning on 19 October. It was my mother’s twentieth birthday on that day. Her name is Dipuo Mahlatsi and, until just over a decade ago, she had dedicated her life to serving you: the ANC. Like me, she was born in the historical township of Soweto at a time when children could not have a childhood. (9)

It works with a mode of unapologetic self-assertion and directness; the emblematic importance of the writer’s psychic and political journey is in no doubt, relayed in a flatly chronological account of events into which a ‘you’ is sometimes dropped like an afterthought, reminding the reader that it is ostensibly the ruling party which is the primary addressee. The intimate web of first, second and third person here (narrator, ruling party, parent) is emblematic of how the book’s questions of ideological commitment are read across into domestic and inter-generational spaces: it is a meditation on the political ‘family’ in both a literal and larger metaphoric sense. From the very first lines of the acknowledgements, where the author pays tribute to her parents Dipuo ‘Stalin’ Mahlatsi and Mike ‘Gaddafi’ Maile, the reader is inducted into a world in which discourses of anti-bourgeois radicalism and revolution are, in a sense, part of family tradition. Its self-advertised break with political elders is simultaneously framed as a kind of continuity, the unfolding of a recognisable political reflex, and a necessary social task. The expulsion of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema from the ruling party in 2012 and the formation of his new political bloc the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) provides one of the major narrative shapes lying behind the memoir (an event that is in turn compared to the militant young Nelson Mandela’s challenge to party elders in the 1940s). Such archetypal moments of inter-generational rupture lie behind the autobiographical narrative as it attempts to work out patterns of continuity and breach with the project of liberation. Mahlatsi’s expulsion from the EFF in turn, which ends the book, will reprise the dynamics and dysfunctions of the political family – but in ways that test the brisk honesty of a memoir that has no time for childhood, or the contradictory truths of psychoanalysis. The label ‘born free’ is dismissed early on as ‘a problematic definition architected by those who want to keep our people blinded about the real face of the effects of colonialism and apartheid’ (4). Nonetheless, the canny title still capitalises on this media shorthand, while the paratexts (from a variety of luminaries including then Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and musician-activist Simphiwe Dana) position the author as part of a vanguard of

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‘young black female intellectuals emerging to stake a claim in serious national discourse’ (Motlanthe’s words on the back cover). Packaged as both state of the nation report and manifesto from a spokeswoman of the new generation, it has duly been taken up as largely what its title says it is within reviews and global publishing deals. By contrast, Jijana’s elegy for his father, a taxi driver gunned down in 2003 in the town of Peddie, is a book of false starts, fragments and almost paralysing introspection. Framed by its publisher as an exercise in true crime – a ‘searing first-person investigation’ into an unsolved murder (back cover) – it reads as something entirely other: a recursive memoir about male grieving that must work through a great deal of insecurity about how its story should be told, or even if it is worth telling at all. In one sense, the ‘business’ of the title is the minibus taxi industry, for decades a violent legacy of the outgoing apartheid regime’s policies of deregulation and destabilisation. In 1987, the draconian legislation that had severely limited black-owned vehicles on South African roads since the 1930s was revoked almost overnight. ‘They deregulated it without ever regulating it’, in the words of one taxi operator; permits were handed out ‘like confetti’, ‘like Valentine’s Day cards in February’ (cited in Dugard, ‘Low Intensity War’ 10). Throughout the first decade of democratic South Africa, ‘taxi violence’ (and sometimes ‘taxi wars’) simmered beneath the discourse of negotiation, reconstruction and reconciliation: reminders of an on-going failure to redress the spatial illogic of the apartheid city.14 In the 1990s, the iconic Toyota HiAces that had once been defiant symbols of transport for the people by the people during anti-apartheid bus boycotts came to represent something other: the limited reach of the new state in providing security or regulating capital accumulation; the continuation and normalisation of a kind of lawlessness at the heart of daily life. ‘Once the taxi associations were up and running’, writes Jijana, ‘they took the role of informal self-regulators. And many used exploitation and coercion to build lucrative empires-cum-protection rackets’ (130). It was a clash between rival organisations – the Border-King William’s Town Taxi Association Bata (Bhikita) and Border Alliance Taxi Association (Bata) – that claimed the life of his father in 2003. The story of the South African minibus taxi industry is an epic social drama, but one that has yet to find expression in a major work of narrative or investigative non-fiction. For while Nobody’s Business seems to promise just this kind of social exposé, the title pulls away from the ostensible subject and 14 In Cape Town, the name of the Congress of Democratic Taxi Associations (Codeta), formed in 1992, mimicked the negotiations that began in 1991 at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa).

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moves increasingly into more private registers. Whereas Memoirs of a Born Free assumes the right to an intimate address with national and political figures from the activist crucible of Soweto, questions of ANC or EFF intrigues are far distant from Jijana’s story, set in a province where the strongest electoral support for the ruling party has for decades co-existed with high levels of poverty and state neglect. The ‘you’ addressed in Nobody’s Business is self rather than other: quite literally given that halfway through the book is a chapter in which the author undertakes a Q&A with himself. Having been an ‘unsympathetic reader’ of memoirs, believing them to be ‘the pity party of illness survivors or the province of braggarts, whose success in life afforded them such an indulgence’ (86), Jijana writes that it was only through this ‘kind of interior monologue between myself and my internal critic’ that he worked up the confidence to undertake the book: Why do you want to write about your father’s death? To shed light on taxi violence in South Africa. Is that your only reason? Well, maybe not entirely. I also want to share a meditation on how black men grieve. Why do you want to write about this? Because it took me over five years to even be able to mention that I had lost my father, never mind to acknowledge my pain and allow myself to mourn. […] I felt such a deep reluctance to share such personal information. In five years, you never so much mentioned your father’s death? Not even to a friend, a relative, a girlfriend? Never. How is that possible? That is what I am trying to understand. (86–7)

The exchange captures the circling movement of the memoir: the way its attempt at the linear plotting of a thriller is constantly unravelled and deferred. ‘My father was a taxi driver. He was murdered’ (27) – this journalistic opener only arrives in chapter four, emerging during a news-writing class in which students are asked to name a traumatic event in their lives. These were, Jijana writes, ‘the most difficult nine words ever to roll off my tongue’ (35); and instead of a propulsive beginning, they become a cyclical refrain in the work. It is less the murder that drives the book’s plot than a different, more intimate kind of mystery: to what extent can we understand the life of a parent? Here Jijana turns to a classic non-fictional meditation on the family as a site of hard-to-reconcile currents of anger and affection, intimacy and estrangement:

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On the bus home after class one afternoon in 2008, I was absorbed in James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son when a line in his book struck me like a hammer blow: ‘I had not known my father very well.’ […] Something softened in me. Baldwin was opening a door, showing me that a man could speak frankly about his innermost feelings. (35)

Also compelled by the way that Baldwin’s famous essay deals with religiosity, Nobody’s Business begins to trace Jijana’s father’s early life: a man who had turned to the church to escape the excesses of his youth, but who nonetheless remained stalked by violence throughout the 1990s as he navigated spells of unemployment and the complex politics of the taxi industry. The journalistic sections of the memoir dramatise the author’s use of the 2000 Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to obtain dockets and documents related to his father’s death – ‘a watershed piece of legislation in post-apartheid South Africa’, Jijana remarks, ‘which I find almost as impressive as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ (142). Here he is met with bureaucratic obstruction from authorities, and an apparent unawareness of the King William’s Town police about their having to comply with the new legislation. As in the literary investigations of Dlamini and Steinberg, the work of critical non-fiction shows up the misalignment between progressive legislative frameworks and ingrained cultures of reaction, secrecy and obfuscation: the often remarked dissonance between South Africa as constitutional ideal and social body. Yet the more revealing documents, and those that most compel the author’s imagination, are the diaries and jottings by his father that Jijana finds, ‘written in capital letters, and mostly in English, reminiscent of the way he liked to pepper his speech with English words while delivering testimony at church’ (80). The attention paid to them is characteristic of a text that finally trades less in journalistic information than in speculative and private traces: Under 1 January he wrote: Perfect principles Love rejoice Ignorant intelligence Amazing grace Disarm the enemy Fellowship is a key note You can’t into 2 CAMPS I was starving spiritually It’s a little difficult to speculate kusenzima ukutyabeka izityholo [it is hard to know who is guilty]

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As a private archive that was never intended for publication, it is one in which ‘misspellings and grammatical errors abound’ (80); but it is treated tenderly by its reader, who works with such discontinuous, cryptic litanies to access something of his father’s personal and spiritual transformation, even as the flattened, inscrutable English phrases point to an interiority that might never properly be available via this language. As the author reads, or over-reads, the meagre entries of his father’s diaries, the act of recuperating an intimate other is simultaneously undermined by a linguistic distance. At a further remove, the memoir’s insistence on the right to grief as a private act, rather than ‘communal property’ (20), is haunted by the frankness of its own commemoration: ‘a dread of risking my father’s name and reputation, causing him a second death by memoir, if you will’ (93). * In contrast to Jijana’s registers of bewilderment and vulnerable self-esteem – ‘We understand so little of what is happening to us at any given moment’ (85) – Memoirs of a Born Free adopts what at first seems a uniformly confident and undoubting voice: ‘I had learned to master the art of writing essays over the years and it was easy for me’, writes Mahlatsi of her schooldays, deploying the word less as Baldwinian exercise in anguished self-reflection than a pedagogical exercise duly mastered: ‘I had excellent command of the English language as a result of my extensive reading’ (93). Her language skills also become a means of sustaining herself as she operates a business selling pre-written assignments to students, a way of keeping herself at school during a period of instability and financial stress in her family life. Nonetheless, within the book there is a submerged narrative of depression, familial feuding and psychic struggle that occasionally surfaces, troubling the forward momentum of this activist bildungsroman. In the author’s final year at school, her mother is hospitalised within a psychiatric ward for severe depression, while Mahlatsi herself undergoes a breakdown that introduces a rare note of perplexity: ‘No one had any idea what my problem was. I had no idea myself. We were all spectators of Malaika’s demise and none of us knew what to do’ (104). Overcoming her scepticism, the narrator attends therapy, but the text still struggles to maintain any distinction between personal suffering and collective pain, or to accept the concept of depression that might separate her from the lives of other members of her generation: ‘What I had to face was what many other children in the township faced. I felt that I had no right to want an easier life than they had’ (106). Against the advice of her therapist – who suggests that her patient abandon the pose of constant toughness as an unhealthy psychic posture, and points to Malaika’s mother’s struggles with mental illness as a caution – the memoir

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continues to operate within a self-consciously ‘strong’ activist voice. It is one that assumes self-assertiveness as a necessary personal gesture: a performance of invulnerability needed to withstand difficult dynamics of political in-fighting and secret intrigues within the work of male-dominated activism, as well as the reactionary elements that surface within the black community. When the narrator helps to organise an anti-Afrophobia march in the wake of the 2008 xenophobic attacks in Johannesburg, the memoir intersects with the violent and vigilantist elements of the world that Jijana writes of. In central Johannesburg, Mahlatsi and her comrades are apprehended, interrogated and nearly assaulted by members of the taxi industry who ‘accused us of wanting to turn the country into a haven for “foreigners” […] responsible for escalating crime levels and unemployment’ (124). Considering the ‘magnitude of resentment’ that the experience reveals, she remarks: ‘That was one of the first of many moments in my life where I learned that it is going to be a very long walk to mental freedom for our people’ (125). Her repurposing of Mandela’s famous metaphor suggests the terrains that many of the non-fictions in my book have explored: the uneven, untimely and diversely subjective processes of psychic change and resistance that are not in step with official timescales or metaphors of societal transformation. These are works premised on the idea that the death of apartheid and the coming of democracy, to return to Njabulo Ndebele’s powerful formulation, should be seen as ‘a social process not an event’ (Fine Lines 93). Towards the end of the work, a note of brittleness and unreliability begins to build as Memoirs records the author’s expulsion from one political formation after another: the radical Black Consciousness group Blackwash (for whom Mahlatsi helps to edit the journal New Frank Talk), its offshoot the September National Imbizo, and finally the EFF itself. While the latter organisation at first seems to be the ‘political home’ (158) that the narrator has long been searching for, she soon finds that her work as a communications officer is being tampered with – her ideologically disciplined press statements ‘transformed into something decorated with insults and puerile ranting divorced from substance’ (160) – as her name is dragged into the feuding between the EFF and Zuma’s ANC. Following a long and censorious letter (reprinted in full in the memoir) to Comrade Julius, she finds herself locked out of all the organisation’s social media accounts, with only a terse explanation from Malema: ‘The email was very brief but the point it made was very clear: “You must never talk to me like you are talking to a schoolboy…”’ (163). The feminist claim to equality in the memoir, one could say, runs into persistent dynamics of patronage and patriarchy – and the question of appropriate modes of address within a complex and fractious political family.

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The memoir ends on a partly rueful note: the narrator’s apologetic emails to Malema go unanswered while she watches the dramatic resurgence of youth activism that he has engineered: the township, the taxis and the streets begin filling up with the EFF’s red berets. Having lost touch with its own framing as a letter for much of the narrative, the memoir’s closing paragraphs round on ‘you’ once more in an attempt to maintain a stake in this moment of militancy and activism: ‘I was part of the generation that has witnessed the end of our people being oppressed and trapped by the false belief that they owed their eternal gratitude to you, and that there would be none brave enough to take you on’ (167). Finally, Memoirs of a Born Free stages the tension between a necessary selfassertiveness (as political tool or posture) and a limiting self-importance (as autobiographical method). If Nobody’s Business is consumed by the problems of articulation, Memoirs articulates its author’s various problem (generally with others) with little hesitation or second-guessing. And so even while taking increasing radicalism as its subject, it is in some ways bound up in the formal conservatism of memoir as a medium when it trusts entirely to its own honesty. It is a variation on a deep theme that has run through the chapters in my book: the double-helix of an autobiographical code where the imperatives of witness, testimony and clarity meet more sceptical, psychoanalytic and opaque dimensions of the narrating self.

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The extracurriculum

10

In the opening lines of The Loss Library (2011), Ivan Vladislavić explains the concept underlying this short work: ‘These notes deal with unsettled accounts. They concern stories I imagined but could not write, or started to write but could not finish. Most were drafted to some point before being put aside, but a few went no further than a line or two in a notebook’ (7). ‘Mouse Drawing’, for example, tells of a writing residency in Stuttgart where the author wakes up to find a mysterious sketch on his minimalist white table: ‘Some of the lines were faint and curly, others were emphatic, shooting off at angles like fragments of a graph’ (73). When he opens his laptop, the mystery dissolves in an instant: there is fragment of pencil lead lodged in the underside of the mouse; and so now he reconstructs how the previous night’s work has resulted in this unforeseen graphic: How many movements in three or four hours of work? I imagined my hand in the shadows, a manuscript beside the computer on a lily pad of light, the cursor wavering across the screen, blocking, dragging, deleting, inserting, cutting, pasting. Clicking on icons, dropping down menus. Do, undo, redo. In the chance drawing on the table top, every single thought and final action had been translated into a line. (75)

The fiction that (almost) resulted was to have been a Borges-like tale in which a writer begins to discern the secrets of the universe in such diagrams, and so sets himself to work in the dark to generate more: ‘His every creative act now excretes a secondary product’ (75). The image is true for The Loss Library as a whole. We are reading a non-fictional by-product that comes to stand in place of, but also encompasses and archives, all the unrealised ideas it describes. The draft of the original ‘Mouse Drawing’ vanishes in transit back to Johannesburg, along with all the other material from a year’s work. In the decade since, Vladislavić writes, he has forgotten exactly what else was lost. The books that mattered were replaced, ‘and I soon learned to live without the half-formed fictions and copies of correspondence. But “Mouse Drawing” will not rest. I hear it rustling now in the waste-paper basket. It wants to begin again’ (76). *

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I began this book with a found library: the cache of banned books that Njabulo Ndebele discovers as a boy. In struggling to end it – many hours of dragging, deleting, inserting, cutting, pasting, undoing and redoing – the loss library offered a way out: a brief account of the chapters that don’t appear here, the abandoned ideas and unrealised abstracts, the confident outlines promising more than could, in the end, be delivered. A longer section on Vladislavić’s work, for example, would have traced the experimental and conceptual forms of documentary that silently shape his œuvre. And then linked these to a longer genealogy of anti-realist non-fiction (if one can accept the oxymoron) that has been a submerged theme in this book: the curious but compelling strain of documentary practice that is not referential in any straightforward sense. Penny Siopis’s uncanny short film on Demetrios Tsafendas, Obscure White Messenger, which refuses any direct visual representation of its subject; Athol Fugard’s conflation of Greek myth with found text from the trial of John Harris the Station Bomber; the confidence tricks, both actual and meta-textual, of Dugmore Boetie’s hoax autobiography and other ‘non-political’ prison books; the performative, documentary theatre approach of Sisonke Msimang and Lebo Mashile which deconstructs the format of an eminent memorial lecture – these various experiments with truth ask for a richer, more supple account of non-fictional form. They gesture toward a documentary poetics able to access histories and structures of feeling not easily available to more literal or directly representational modes. Vladislavić is often viewed as chronicler of a changing Johannesburg (‘the Jo’burg guy’ as he ruefully puts it in an interview); but his writing is also shaped by any number of sly, half-submerged conceptual games. As the toggling between sketch and text in ‘Mouse Drawing’ suggests, his prose carries the sense of being governed by external grammars, rule-based processes and non-verbal logics. Photographs by David Goldblatt; the conceptual installations and concrete poetry of artist Willem Boshoff; the strict mathematical constraints of Raymond Queneau and OULIPO; the physical architecture of security walls, sculptures, highway interchanges, forgotten street furniture – these have all functioned as ‘narrative accelerators’ in different books: deep, DNA-like codes that determine the surface text via complex transformations, giving the prose its unexpected, often beguiling shapes. ‘Play is one of the great possibilities of art’, Vladislavić writes elsewhere in The Loss Library, quoting Donald Barthelme: the absence of play in a work of art is ‘the result of a lack of seriousness’ (33). At first glance, such practices might seem entirely self-referential: pointing only to themselves, rather than a wider social world. But in a country where, to quote Peter Abrahams, ‘Man’s life is controlled by pieces of paper’, and where (as the story of Tsafendas shows) ‘paper regimes’ have been used to catalogue and control people in such blatantly fictive ways, the exhaustive and

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often absurd processes of conceptual writing might offer a revealing lens on South African cultural history.1 Apartheid was nothing if not a Big Idea, writes Vladislavić in his monograph on Boshoff: The legal and bureaucratic contortions of the system often resembled a grotesque conceptual game. The doubling, trebling, quadrupling of institutions and facilities along racial lines, the obsessive categorisation by race in the law, the establishment of tinpot homelands, all these elaborations were so grandiose that it was scarcely necessary to comment on them, they simply needed to be framed. (44)

Many of the works that I have spent time with have turned on this kind of paradox: that apartheid (and its aftermaths) constituted ‘a fundamental denial of reality’ (Dlamini, Askari 107); whereas its fictions, though often patently ridiculous, had (and continue to have) ‘a devastating operational truth of their own’ (Gready 492). Reading back into the archive via works like Lewis Nkosi’s memoir Home and Exile (1965) and foreign correspondent Joseph Lelyveld’s Move Your Shadow (1986) – two non-fiction masterpieces that I really meant to get to – might have provided an opportunity to trace the deeper cultural consequences of this ‘spectacle of social absurdity’ (Ndebele, Rediscovery 33). My unrealised genealogy of avant-garde, experimental documents in South African literary history would have sifted for works which do not so much bear witness as embody or enter into ‘the almost deliberate waste of intellectual energy on trivialities’: Ndebele’s phrase for the surreal work of apartheid ideologues tasked with legislating every aspect of daily, psychic and erotic life – and a phrase which doubles as a good definition of conceptual writing (Rediscovery 33).2 For an image of this alternate lineage of ‘the documentary’, one can hold in mind Boshoff ’s ‘Verskanste Openbaring’ (Entrenched Revelation) from 1 I borrow the phrase ‘Paper Regimes’ from the title of a special issue of Kronos, edited by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie. She quotes Abrahams’s Tell Freedom in her introduction, reflecting also on Foucault’s notion of a ‘documentary state’ and James Scott’s influential idea that the central goal of the modern state was ‘to make society legible’ (12). In one of the contributions to the special issue, Zuleiga Adams considers the life of Tsafendas via the filing systems and paperwork of apartheid bureaucracy, exploring the kind of illegibility and illogic that his story exposed within the supposed modernist efficiency of the Verwoerdian state (‘Subversion’). 2 In their anthology Against Expression, Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin outline the criteria for selection: ‘Instead of the rhetoric of natural expression, individual style, or voice, the anthology sought impersonal procedure. Instead of psychological development or dramatic narrative, it sought systems of exhaustive logical extrapolation or permutation’ (xliii). Chris van Wyk’s famous poem ‘In Detention’, could be read via this idea of the literary work as an exercise in impersonal procedure and remorseless extrapolation.

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the 1980 concrete poetry collection KykAfrikaans. It is a page on which there appears the entire biblical text of Revelations (in Afrikaans), fed into an Olivetti typewriter again and again until it becomes a dark, illegible field of text. ‘The reader trying to retrieve meaning from this layered chaos’, writes Vladislavić, ‘is compelled to relive the moment of its disappearance’ (Willem Boshoff 26). The result is a document that is non-semantic, unreadable, unusable – but imbued with all kinds of possibilities for meaning-making. Extending these ideas of conceptual writing and serious play into a more contemporary or even Afro-futurist register, the other half of this unwritten chapter (titled ‘Uncreative writing’ or ‘Paper regimes’) would have entered the world of Chimurenga, the pan-African gazette founded by Ntone Edjabe. A Cameroonian who studied in Lagos and moved to South Africa in the 1990s, Edjabe has since the turn of the millennium (and together with many collaborators and co-conspirators) built a ramifying creative and critical project that extends across all kinds of analogue and digital platforms. The original Chimurenga magazine format has metamorphosed gradually into a ‘fake’ newspaper (The Chimurenga Chronic), while ‘solos’ (individual essays, articles, intellectual riffs from the project) have been excerpted and sold as chapbooks, or ‘Chimurenganyanas’.3 ‘We’re not frightened of text’, Edjabe remarked in an interview when I noted the sheer volume of writing that Chimurenga has put out, and the intellectual demands that it makes on a reader. Theoretically and conceptually dense, and largely resisting the need to explain, simplify or translate the continent and its diasporas for a foreign audience, the magazines (the wrong word for them) can come to resemble dense textbooks for some alternative, unofficial, avant-garde curriculum – one that is far beyond the reactive, postcolonial task of ‘writing back’ to or correcting Western notions of Africa; one that is playing a different kind of game altogether. The written component has simultaneously been linked to and amplified by online radio (PASS, the Pan-African Space Station), as well as a range of interventions, installations and improvisations throughout the continent and the world.4 In 2009, the Chimurenga Library was founded, ‘an online archive of pan-African, independent periodicals – living, extinct and, at times, fictional’ (Chimurenga Library 3). The launch involved a take-over of the Cape Town Central Library (once a British colonial drill hall) for a ‘Chimurenga Introspective’. Guided by the late pianist and composer Moses Molelekwa’s notion of ‘finding oneself ’, a collective of writers, visual artists and musicians devised a new cataloguing system (‘clearly subjective and affective’) for the library. Via 3 Njabulo Ndebele’s essay ‘Thinking of Brenda’, which I quoted in the preface, was one to be given this treatment. 4 In Africa in Stereo, Tsitsi Jaji provides one of the few academic responses to Chimurenga in her account of PASS and the question of ‘piracy’, musical and otherwise.

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handwritten baggage tags, superimposed signage and pop-up listening-posts, the idea was to invent ‘new categories that quietly encroach on the Central Library’s classification system’ (3). The Chimurenga Library catalogue includes categories like Apathy (A2), Defiance (D5), Et Cetera (E2), High prices (H2), Laughter (L2), Perversion (P4), Rats (R1), Small children (S5), TV (T2), Whiteness (W2) and Womanhood (W3), to name only a few. The secret, pan-African repository of books, CDs, liner notes and films ‘hiding’ within the stacks was then surfaced via these new codes, further elaborated by abstruse visualisations and the handdrawn, lo-fi aesthetic that has always been part of the Chimurenga project (and, paradoxically, has always made it seem more current than many strenuously contemporary art and design projects). In this analogue/digital library within a within a library, pages of sex scenes copied from a variety of African writers were suspended in the corridors. WikiAfrica sessions trained young participants in working with the open source platform with the aim of increasing Wikipedia entries uploaded from the continent.5 A number of ideas converge in this dialectic of libraries lost and found. Vladislavić’s work explores the possibilities of working serendipitously, and aleatorically, among the random and scattershot archives of the postcolony – sites where the very absence of any claim to completeness enables new forms of creativity. In the seriously playful installations and ‘extracurriculums’ of Chimurenga (with its motto drawn from Fela Kuti: who no know go know), existing collections are re-catalogued and joyously abstruse, alternative knowledge-systems invented to create new routes through the colonial edifices that stand at the centre of Africa’s cities. ‘Non-authoritative, collaborative and incomplete’, the Library is to be reimagined as ‘a laboratory for extended curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying and random perusal’ (‘Chimurenga Library’, online). Quite why this chapter never got written, I am not sure, since it was the one I was most looking forward to: a reframing and rerouting of the anachronistic concept ‘non-fiction’ into new and unpredictable spaces. Perhaps it 5 The Chimurenga Library project can be put in an interesting dialogue with the early twentieth-century, Indian Ocean print cultures that Isabel Hofmeyr traces in Gandhi’s Printing Press, in which she positions Gandhi as a ‘proto-Wikipedian’ and copy-left activist. In mind of David Shield’s argument against intellectual property regimes and the outdated textual economy of the West in Reality Hunger, she remarks that the ‘world of recycled text, impersonal writing, and reader-as-redactor has typified the experience of most “ordinary” print culture users. This is the textually demotic condition that has obtained throughout most of the world, especially in the third world or global south’ (160–61). As with Gandhi’s Indian Opinion, The Chimurenga Chronic has come to function as a ‘newspaper’ without any advertisements: i.e. less a newspaper to be discarded than an anthology to be circulated.

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was because the work of Vladislavić, Edjabe and Chimurenga is so critically aware and meta-reflexive, so adept and agile when compared to line-by-line academic explication, that it might be best left to itself (and predilections of the individual browser). As I remarked in my previous chapter, the platform migration of narrative non-fiction from printed codex into the circuits of the digital world marks the limit of a prose monograph like this. It cannot easily follow the kind of multi-platform relays of meaning-making that a project like Chimurenga and its avatars enable, the ‘database logic’ where cultural actors access networks and archives at different entry points and traverse them in entirely idiosyncratic ways. The iterative principle that underlies much academic research – the idea that if the enquiry were to be repeated by another actor, it would yield similar results (an axiom of scientific investigation that has been extended, rather shakily, to the humanities) – is rendered impossible, entirely and beautifully defunct. In the course of this book, I have circled back to how various non-fiction writers read (and misread) J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; such encounters were taken as kind of litmus test for what, or how, the literary novel comes to mean in the twenty-first century. In the Chimurenga Library, the approach was different again: the installation dis.grace by Stacy Hardy and François Naudé involved routing every word of the novel through Google Image Search. The result is a filmic document that quite literally effects a digital implosion or dispersal of the literary text.6 Part of the game, it would seem, is to invoke official notions of literary value, curriculum and canon formation even as these are gleefully resisted and eluded. ‘This classificatory system is entirely subjective’, warns a footnote in The Chimurenga Library’s A5 pamphlet, ‘as subjective as the one currently used at CT Central Library, any library. Don’t try it in class’ (Chimurenga Library 12). * Another cluster of texts and ideas in my loss library comes under the title ‘Daughters of struggle’. If the killings at Marikana in August 2012 shaped the early chapters of this book, then its latter stages have been marked by the death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on 2 April 2018, and the intense debates that followed over her life and legacy. For some younger South Africans, her passing marked a ‘New Dawn’: a moment in which the country would finally shuck 6 In the words of the creators: ‘It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image to create a new book, a visual text rewritten through the eyes of a global digital popular culture. It combines chance, play, bad taste, incomprehension, artifice, and a lack of truth to up-end the “disgraced” western literary parameters of “white male writing” […] while at the same time questioning the amnesia and historical self-invention of post-apartheid consumer society’ (‘dis.grace’, online).

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off the conciliatory rhetoric associated with various ‘fathers of the nation’ and move into a moment of radicalism and dramatic social change, one that positions the country’s high rates of sexual, homophobic and gender-based violence as a national emergency. Against this backdrop, I wanted to explore life writing by women in more detail, particularly the recent wave of radical Black feminist autobiography which reflects on inter-generational continuities and tensions within the political family, both literal and figurative. I touched on these questions in my previous chapter, but there is much more to be said. From Redi Tlhabi’s Khwezi (2017), an account of the life story of Fezekile Kuzwayo, who accused Jacob Zuma of rape at a time when Zuma was poised to take over as President of the country, to Panashe Chigumadzi’s reflection in These Bones Will Rise Again (2018) on the ‘coup that was not a coup’ that ousted Robert Mugabe but left intact a manipulative nationalism, the last few years have seen a number of works that critique, from Black women’s perspectives, various types of masculinist and patriarchal power. These are hybrids of reportage, memoir and social analysis which reckon in frank ways with southern Africa’s authoritarian and political cultures, whether of the ‘left’ or ‘right’ (an increasingly inadequate binary) while also having to distinguish their projects from predictably reactionary or racist critiques of Zuma’s ANC and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. The last year of the Zuma administration, 2017, saw the publication of Always Another Country by Sisonke Msimang and Reflecting Rogue by Pumla Dineo Gqola, self-described feminist texts in which two leading South African intellectuals reflect on their own formation. Msimang’s ‘memoir of exile and home’ is a coming-of-age story that in its early chapters evokes the experience of being the child of members of the ANC in exile. It traces a transnational itinerary ranging from Zambia to Kenya, Ethiopia, Canada, the United States and Australia as the author tries to calibrate her relation to the ‘other’ country around which her entire family life and upbringing had always revolved: ‘My sisters and I are freedom’s children, born into the ANC and nurtured within a revolutionary community whose sole purpose is to fight apartheid’ (2). Here, the title ‘Daughters of struggle’ would have accessed that sub-genre of ‘family biography’ and memoir by the children of activists – Gillian Slovo’s account of what it meant to grow up as the child of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in Every Secret Thing (1997); Lindiwe Hani’s account of Being Chris Hani’s Daughter (2017) – which could then have been placed in dialogue with a wider genre of memoirs by the children of famous political figures – Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a Saint (2000), for example, or Isabel Allende’s cluster of memoirs. The chapter could have taken up some of the threads present in Nadine Gordimer’s fictional ‘biography’ of Bram and Ilse Fischer, Burger’s Daughter, and also the complex psychodynamics of the political family glimpsed in texts ranging from Mark Gevisser’s The Dream Deferred to Malaika wa Azania’s Memoirs of a

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Born Free, in which inter-generational rupture is seen, paradoxically, as a kind of expected social duty. Gqola’s Reflecting Rogue is less a memoir than ‘a collection of experimental autobiographical essays’ (to quote the back cover), one warier of the temptations and pleasures of personal memory work, and infused with a more explicitly analytic mode of feminist thought and critical theory. In the afterword, she expresses a resistance to anything like conventional life-writing. To her publisher’s hopeful enquiries, ‘my response is always the same: “I will never write a memoir. A few autobiographical essays are as far as I will go”’ (209). Nonetheless, Gqola’s previous books do comprise a kind of coded intellectual autobiography. An enquiry into slave memory and the cultural aftermaths of the Cape colonial experience in What is Slavery to Me? (2010); a tribute to and meditation on the music and activism of Simphiwe Dana in A Renegade Called Simphiwe (2013); an urgent investigation into South Africa’s epidemic of sexual violence and its media representation in Rape: A South African Nightmare (winner of the Alan Paton award in 2016) – each of these influential non-fictions has doubled as chapters in a more personal narrative about the possibilities and limits of intellectual, creative and feminist labour in the South African academy. They refract different stages of (as one of the essay titles in Reflecting Rogue) puts it, ‘A Blackwoman’s journey through three South African universities’. It was when typing this last phrase into MS Word that I decided to abandon the half-written chapter, with the thought: how could I meaningfully respond to or adjudicate on such registers of experience? For much of this book, I have argued against limiting versions of identity or identitarian politics: those which position individuals as simply emblematic of the past, rather than complexly symptomatic of it (an attempt to disaggregate these strands underlay my reading of the Gordimer–Roberts controversy). I have also tried to question those forms of cultural policing which seek to decree, before the fact and often censoriously, who can write about what, and how. One of my main aims here has been to widen and make more interesting the debate about epistemic authority and non-fiction narrative. In reading across a series of risky non-fiction texts, I have hoped to show that there is far more to the question of documentary ethics than simply placing an author in a classificatory system that can look very much like a mirror image of apartheid categories. And furthermore, that those kinds of cultural intervention which self-consciously brandish (or wring hands over) their ‘subject position’ might in fact be less adequate responses to the challenge than those works which take up such crucial questions of representation in less explicit but more considered ways, routing them through a matrix of voice, style, plotting and narrative construction across the longue durée of a book.

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With all that said, my attempt to engage Black feminist life writing showed me that there are limits to what can be technically accomplished. In Jonny Steinberg’s work, we saw how complex non-fictions are constructed out of the unresolved, perhaps unbridgeable gulfs of post-apartheid South Africa; but in an interview, even he admits that he would have found it impossible to undertake such work at a later historical moment, when racial tensions have sharpened and been exploited by populist political formations, both nationally and globally. So there is undoubtedly a missing chapter here. It would have looked forward to a wave of critically and creatively intricate life writing and memory work by a new generation. It would also have looked back on a lineage of politicised women struggling to author their lives across the twentieth century – Ellen Kuzwayo, Emma Mashinini, Miriam Tlali – but also to a more politically elusive figure like Noni Jabavu, whose memoirs Drawn in Colour (1960) and The Ochre People (1963) make her, it is often claimed, ‘the first black South African woman autobiographer’ (Coullie et al. 24). That this chapter does not appear here is not because it is not crucial, but rather because I was simply not the person to write it. And because a new generation of multi-lingual scholars are doing it better than their teachers ever could, impatient with the jargons and orthodoxies that have been the default mode in the critical humanities in recent years. In her account of ‘Reading Noni Jabavu in 2017’, Athambile Masola (a PhD candidate working on the memoirs) describes discovering her writing ‘by what feels like a miracle’, and wonders about this compelling but awkward figure: What does it mean for Jabavu to leave South Africa in 1933 as a 13-year-old and move to Britain (with the help of ‘Oom’ Jan Smuts) to study further? What does it mean to be married to an upper-class Englishman as a black woman in the 1950s? What does it mean to work as a writer, BBC presenter and film technician at that time? What does it mean to come home to an apartheid South Africa in 1977 to discover you are a foreigner in the country you call home? (online)

Jabavu’s work, Masola goes on, is not significant because she’s one of ‘the firsts’; her work is relevant ‘because it continues to ask difficult questions about what it means to be human beyond the limitations and impositions of identity’: ‘Jabavu drifts in and out of the South African grand narrative of what it means to be a black woman anything’ (online). The language here shares with many of the works I have read in this book an impatience with the narrow frames of much public and online discussion; with the reflex that continually invokes history while having little sense of the strangeness of the past, its autonomy and resistance to the designs of the present. The non-fiction that I have been intrigued by ‘drifts in and out’ of thinking in terms of homogenised identities or (to quote the South African

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Constitution), ‘categories of persons’: aware of the need for this concept in the task of socio-economic redress, but also bridling against its psychic impositions and limitations. Such writing is open to, and makes itself vulnerable to, the awkward, unexpected and sometimes damaging intimacies of the South African story. It tests the possibilities of a reimagined, renovated and politically conscious humanism, an ‘ethics of becoming-with-others’, to return to Achille Mbembe’s phrase (‘The State’, online), that will be necessary to hold a space for in public discussion ‘if one form of damaged life is not simply to be replaced by another’. * There were several other unfinished or unrealised ideas. In a book titled Experiments with Truth, I could have spent more time with the complex and confounding figure of Mohandas Gandhi. In reading across several major biographical studies that have appeared over the last years, including Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul (2011), Isabel Hofmeyr’s Gandhi’s Printing Press (2013) and Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi before India (2013), I wanted to ‘get to the bottom’ of the question of the African Gandhi and racism, or at least to untangle and sift his many lives. But I soon realised the impossibility of this task, quailing before the immensity of his written output, and realising that this would need a book of its own. There was more to say on biography in general. I wanted to explore how the lives of South Africa’s two Nobel laureates in literature have been refracted into fictions like Patrick Flanery’s Absolution (itself partly a response to the Gordimer–Roberts affair) and J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime (in which the author preempts his own biographers J. C. Kannemeyer and David Attwell). But I found this kind of work immensely difficult. In writing on Roberts’s No Cold Kitchen and Gevisser’s The Dream Deferred, for example, I found myself having to trace how these lives are imaginatively plotted and produced, while at the same time needing to offer my own base-level account of the ‘real’ lives of Gordimer and Mbeki to which the biographies in question could be compared (Coetzee’s dismissive vision of checking the literary text against the ‘answer script’ of history does not easily go away). This double gesture might be one reason why writing about biography remains, as I suggested in chapter five, surprisingly undertheorised and unattempted in literary studies: because it requires an uncomfortable straddling of documentary and deconstructive modes. I was interested in the possibilities and pitfalls of collaborative life-writing glimpsed in Dugmore Boetie’s literary cons, and wanted to spend more time with works ranging from The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980), Elsa Joubert’s novelisation of the life of an unnamed domestic worker as nonfiction epic, to There Was this Goat (2009) by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. The latter is a hybrid of academic and journalistic prose

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which reflects on a ‘strange’ Truth Commission testimony that does not seem to fit paradigms of reconciliation and forgiveness: the story of an ‘unmentioned, incorrectly ID-ed, misspelt, incoherently testifying, translated and carelessly transcribed woman’ named Notrose Nobomvu Konile (4). I regret not having followed up on a comment from one of the anonymous readers of the manuscript, who suggested that the story of Tsafendas could be placed in dialogue with that of Thamsanqa Jantjie, the ‘fake sign language interpreter’ who appeared next to Barack Obama at the memorial service of Nelson Mandela in 2014. Here too was an outlier with a history of mental disturbance who somehow managed to find himself in such close proximity to power, delivering a message to the world that was meaningless but seemed also somehow intensely revealing of some deeper but inarticulable truths about the country and its political cultures. I wanted more of a sense of South Africa as seen from the rest of the continent. Here, Sisonke Msimang’s memoir Always Another Country would have been joined by Binyavanga Wainaina’s wonderfully disjointed autobiography One Day I Will Write About This Place (2007) and Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (2015), the story of a Somalian man navigating the dangers of growing xenophobia. Similar to, but also different from Steinberg’s work is Sean Christie’s Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard (2016), an account of a community of Tanzanian stowaways living beneath the highway overpasses near the docks in Cape Town. Moving out from under the sociological shadow of Steinberg’s works, it becomes more an account of an unlikely friendship between the author and Adam Bashili, one of the ‘Beach Boys’, and the journey that they make together to Dar es Salaam. As Billy Kahora writes on the back cover, it shows ‘the ancient and complex connections that exist within and beyond African borders in emotional, historical, cultural and metaphysical ways that others shirk from’. Finally, I imagined a chapter on the genre of the essay in South African literature, treated as a primary rather than secondary text; or even one on the academic monograph itself as its own kind of literary non-fiction. From Coetzee’s White Writing (1988) to Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims (2014), I have been drawn to a range of scholarly works which, like this one, try and fail to disguise a manifestly personal encounter as a disciplined piece of scholarship. In thinking about what it is that interests me about the diverse selection of non-fiction read over the course of this project, I have often returned to the small but mysterious prepositions that come after the verb write – writing up, writing down – and in particular that haunting and mysterious phrase that Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi and other autobiographers of the 1950s circle back to: what it means to ‘write yourself out of a situation’. At the time, a ‘situation’ was the ironic name given to those black South Africans, often

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educated at English mission schools, who could apply to the ‘Situation Vacant’ advertisements in white Johannesburg: the writer as alienated in-betweener in a divided society. This task of being a cultural broker between the ongoing apartness of southern African lives has reappeared in all kinds of guises; so too has the matter of the English language itself, and the question of to what extent this bland, flattened lingua franca of governance, business and trade non-fiction can register the impress of the social worlds it exists among and intercedes between. But there seems still more to it than that. ‘The whole literary enterprise was a compromise between several desperate drives and urges’, Mphahlele writes in one of his most powerful essays, ‘something even more profound than what is often referred to as “writing yourself out of a situation”’ (Es’kia 279). The non-fictions of South Africa’s transition emerge from, are written out of, a historically particular and often densely personal situation. Yet at the same time, they enact a reckoning in language with a bitter and compromised past, drawing its poison, writing it out.

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Bibliography and Further Reading

Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Adams, Zuleiga. ‘Demitrios Tsafendas and the Subversion of Apartheid’s Paper Regime.’ Kronos 40 (2014): 198–224. —. ‘Demitrios Tsafendas: Race, Madness and the Archive.’ PhD Diss. University of the Western Cape: 2011. Attree, Lizzy ed. Blood on the Page: Interviews with African Authors Writing About HIV/AIDS. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press, 2004. —, and David Attwell eds. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. —, and Rosemary Jolly eds. Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. Baderoon, Gabeba. The History of Intimacy. First edition. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2018. —. Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014. Bak, John S. and Bill Reynolds eds. Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Barnard, Rita. ‘Beyond Rivalry: Literature/History, Fiction/Non-Fiction’. Safundi 13.1–2 (2012): 1–4. —. ‘Coetzee’s Country Ways’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4:3 (1999): 384–94 —. ‘Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame.’ Safundi 13.1–2 (2012): 151–70. Barron, Chris. ‘Adrian Leftwich: Activist Who Turned. 1940–2013.’ Sunday Times. 14 Apr. 2013: 7. —. ‘The Obsessive Mr Roberts.’ Sunday Times. 3 Oct. 2004: 18. Begley, Adam. ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction No. 135.’ The Paris Review 128, Fall 1993. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/don-delillo-the-art-of-fiction-no135-don-delillo. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.

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Abrahams, Peter  vii, 9, 214, 215 n. 1 Achebe, Chinua  118 Achmat, Zackie  174 n. 7 AIDS see HIV/AIDS African National Congress (ANC)  18, 83, 86–7, 126, 129, 162, 208, 219 in exile 130, 134, 149, 195, 219 Mbeki-Zuma leadership contest (Polokwane)  101, 124–5 policy shift from RDP to GEAR  135 as political ‘family’  134, 206 nationalist historiography  21 n. 1 South African Native National Congress 7 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)  80, 86 Youth League (ANCYL)  206 ‘African Renaissance’  124, 136 African Resistance Movement (ARM)  14, 23, 47–70, 86, 87 n. 6 Africa South (magazine) vii Afrikaans (language and literature)  73–5, 78, 88, 151, 155, 216 Agamemnon 59 Alan Paton award (for non-fiction)  85, 142, 167, 197 n.9, 220 Alexievich, Svetlana  171 Algerian War of Independence (French Algerian War)  88 Allende, Isabel  219 Allende, Salvador  89 Althusser, Louis  148 Anglo American (corporation)  149 n.4 Angola 88 apartheid archives  43, 84 ‘Bantustans’  74, 149 n.4 censorship  76, 110 n. 10

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as ideology and political programme  26, 37, 50, 58, 73, 80, 91–2, 149 Immorality Act  30, 38, 39, 197 legislation, judiciary, trials and bureaucracy  26, 30, 51, 52 n. 4, 80, 84, 154, 215 lexicon, terminology  28, 29, 74–5 literary and cultural responses to  40, 41, 52, 76, 78, 87 police, Security Branch, death squads  47, 48, 51, 62, 81, 86, 157 prison writing see under life writing townships, forced removals, Group Areas Act, spatial segregation  28, 37, 57, 71–79, 164 n.2, 190, 192, 207 Arce, Luz  92–3 Argentina 92–3 Aristotle  10, 199 askaris  14, 80–83, 88, 93 Ashforth, Adam  144, 173 Madumo, 173, 175 Asmal, Kader  6, 104 Attwell, David  222 autobiography, theories of see under life writing Baartman, Sarah (Saartjie)  195 Baderoon, Gabeba  19, 223 Baldwin, James  209 Ballard, J. G.  31 Balzac, Honoré de  145 Bambatha Rebellion  18, 169 ‘Bantu Education’  21, 22, 73 Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC)  vii ‘Bantustans’ see under apartheid Barthelme, Donald  214 Bashili, Adam  223

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Behr, Mark  63–4 Benson, Mary  vii Beresford, David  58 Biko, Steve  2, 3, 19, 100, 101, 129, 154 n. 10, 192 I Write What I Like  2, 19 biography, theories of see under life writing Black Consciousness (BC)  100, 115, 120, 136, 154 n. 10, 191, 201, 206, 211 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)  136, 200 Black Lives Matter  190 Boetie, Dugmore  144, 181, 214, 222 Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost 152–8 Bophuthatswana 72 Borges, Jorge Luis  87, 94–5, 213 ‘born frees’, ‘born free’ generation  xi, 185, 190, 206 Boshoff, Willem  214, 215–6 Bosman, Herman Charles  154–6 Botswana 174 Boym, Svetlana  77 Bozzoli, Belinda  148 Breytenbach, Breyten  87, 144 True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist  87, 155–6 Broederbond  31, 149 n.4 Brooks, Van Wyck  13 Buchan, John  194 Butler, Judith  202 n. 11 Cambridge University  189 Cameron, Edwin  172, 174, 181 Cape Town, University of (UCT)   xiii, 25 n. 5, 63, 186 Capote, Truman  145 Cavafy (Kavafis), C. P.  35, 36–7 Chigumadzi, Panashe  viii, 1, 185, 188, 189–95, 204, 205, 219 Chile 88–93 Chimurenga (magazine, gazette, website) 216–18 Chomsky, Noam  202 Christie, Sean  223

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Classic, The (magazine) 152 Clytemnestra 59 ‘Coconuts’  185, 190–92, 205 Coetzee, J. M.  viii, x, 11, 66, 98, 106–7, 117, 172 n. 5 Boyhood  x, 66–7, 86, 98 n. 2 Disgrace  viii, 136–7, 161–4, 192–5, 218 Doubling the Point  viii, 68 Life and Times of Michael K  26, 32 ‘The Novel Today’  11–12, 23, 222 Summertime 222 White Writing 223 Youth  98 n. 2 Coltrane, John  73 communism, communist regimes and culture  5 n. 3, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 47, 59, 60, 77, 87, 111, 148, 201 East Germany (GDR)  77, 87 see also South African Communist Party (SACP) confession see life writing Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 171 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996)  191 n. 7, 221–2 Couzens, Tim  148 Cronin, Jeremy  22 dagga (cannabis)  78, 155 Dakar  124, 134 Dana, Simphiwe  206 Daniels, Eddie  55, 56 Dangor, Achmat  87 Dar es Salaam  223 decolonisation, decolonial theory  13, 20, 81, 101, 187, 195 De Kock, Eugene  4, 62, 81, 86 n. 5 DeLillo, Don  31, 32 n. 10, 34 Derrida, Jacques  81 De Villers, Wim  188 n. 4 Dhlomo, H. I. E.  18 Dhlomo, R. R. R.  160–61 diary, as form  15 n.8 Dick, Archie  viii Dickens, Charles  31, 145

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Didion, Joan  145 digital cultures see internet, digital and online cultures Dlamini, Jacob  viii, 1, 14, 48, 58, 62, 67, 99, 149, 178, 180, 209 Askari  48–50, 64 n. 8, 80–88, 92–6, 191, 215 Native Nostalgia  48, 71–9, 80, 85, 87, 163 ‘documentary theatre’  186, 196–200 Dorfman, Ariel  89 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  68, 98, 145, 155 n. 11, 145 Driver, C. J.  56–8, 60 Drum magazine and ‘Drum decade’  vii, 2, 10, 108–9, 154, 223–4 Dube, John Langalibalele  18 Du Bois, W. E. B.  vii, 185, 191, 192 Duncan, Patrick  58 Dutch East India Company (VOC)  15 n.8, 38 Eastern Cape  138, 149, 161, 172, 174, 205 Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)  206, 208, 211 Edjabe, Ntone  216, 218 Egypt 114 Eliot, T. S.  105 English (language)  6, 7, 16, 73, 76–7, 93–4, 147, 151, 189, 205, 209, 210, 224 Equiano, Olaudah  17 n.9 Erikson, Erik  98 essay as form  xii, 2–3, 5, 19, 63, 66, 70, 194, 210 Facebook see under internet, digital and online cultures facticity  85 n. 4 Fanon, Frantz  3, 19, 192, 193 Farlam Commission  94 ‘farm murders’  142, 159, 171 Fassie, Brenda  ix, 73 Fees Must Fall (FMF)  21, 187, 204 Feni, Dumile  98 Fikeni, Lwandile  202 n. 10

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243

First, Ruth  201, 219 First World War  7 Fischer, Bram  59, 112, 219 Fischer, Ilse  111–12, 219 Flanery, Patrick  87, 222 Fleming, Ian  85 Foucault, Michel  23, 29 Free State, Univesity of the  197 Freud, Sigmund  43, 99 Friedman, Steven  137 Fugard, Athol  58–9 Galassi, Jonathan  102, 106, 113 Gandhi, Mohandas K.  viii, 2, 16, 98, 222 An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth  2, 16–18, genre, hybrid genres, cross-genre reading  2–3, 5, 8–9, 12, 23, 33, 45, 55, 60, 61, 78, 133, 164 n. 2, 181 Gevisser, Mark  123–5 Lost and Found in Johannesburg 131 Portraits of Power  128, 150 n. 5, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred 10, 99–101, 121, 123–139, 179, 219, 222 Ghosh, Amitav  80 n. 2 Ginwala, Frene  185 n. 1 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla  1, 3, 4, 85 A Human Being Died that Night 3, 4, 62 Goldblatt, David  214 Gordimer, Nadine  viii, 10, 49, 58, 87, 100, 138, 186 Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black  118 n. 12 Burger’s Daughter 110 conflict with biographer (GordimerRoberts affair)  102–7,121, 130, 220 see also Roberts, Ronald Suresh The Essential Gesture 114 July’s People 114 The Late Bourgeois World  57, 60 The Lying Days 111 Not for Publication  107–9 Gqoba, William Wellington  18 Gqola, Pumla Dineo  13 Reflecting Rogue 219–20

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Gramsci, Antonio  viii, 130 Granta magazine  47, 61, 66, 160 Gray, Stephen  15, 152 n. 7, 155 n .11 Griqua peoples  193 Groote Schuur Hospital  35, 36, 40, 41 Grotowski, Jerzy  59 Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (GEAR)  135 Guha, Ramachandra  222 Gunther, Magnus  51 Habib, Adam  135, 201 Hani, Chris  219 Hani, Lindiwe  291 Harber, Anton  76 n. 1, 198, 201 Hardy, Stacy  218 Harlem Renaissance  vii Harrington, William  65 Harris, John  23, 51, 54, 56, 58–9, 214 Harris, Peter  85 Hesse, Hermann  57 Hirson, Denis  31 n. 9, 73–5, 78 historiography see literature and historiography ‘history from below’ see under social history History Workshop (University of the Witwatersrand) 148–52 HIV/AIDS  x, 132, 141 antiretrovirals, medicine and treatment activism  172, 174 n. 7, 174–8, 179–80, 181 dissidence and denialism  x, 14, 101, 121, 136–8, 161–2 literary and cultural responses to  142, 172–4, 181 politics of  137–8, 178–80 Hobhouse, Emily  18 Hofmeyr, Isabel  18, 148, 222 Huddleston, Trevor  vii, 107 Hughes, Langston  vii, 126 Hutchinson, Alfred, vii Ilange lase Natal 18 Imvo Zabantsundu 18 Indian Opinion  16, 18, 217 n. 5

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Information Scandal  11 internet, digital and online cultures  6, 11, 68, 166, 186–9, 199–202, 216–18 social media, Facebook, Twitter  11, 189 n. 4, 199–202, 203 n. 12, 211 Iraq War, second  60 n. 7, 119 Jabavu, John Tengo  18 Jabavu, Noni  vii, 221–2 Jacobson, Dan  24, 37 Jantjie, Thamsanqa  223 Jijana, Thabo  188 Nobody’s Business  205, 207–210, 211, 212 Jim, Irvin  185 n. 1 Johnson, Weldon  vii Joseph, Helen  186 Joubert, Elsa  222 Kahora, Billy  223 Kannemeyer, J. C.  222 Katlehong  71, 78 Kennedy, John F. (assassination of)  24, 31, 34 Key, Liza  27, 30, 42 Khaba, Fana (Khabzela)  173 Khoi peoples  193 Konile, Notrose Nobomvu  223 Kozain, Rustum  77–8 Krog, Antjie  x,1–3, 103–4, 147 n.2, 191, 222 Country of My Skull  x, 3, 103 Krueger, Anton  39, 40, 41 Kruger Park  113 Krotöa/Eva  193, 195 Kundera, Milan  61, 118 Kuti, Fela  217 Kuzwayo, Ellen  221 Kuzwayo, Fezekile  219 KwaZulu-Natal  141, 159, 169 Latin America  5 n. 3, 88–94 Lee, Hermione  97, 98 n. 2, 105 Leftwich, Adrian  14, 47–9, 51, 52–4, 55–6, 58, 87 n. 6, ‘I Gave the Names’  14, 47, 61–70, 82,

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Lehman, Daniel  9, 143 Lelyveld, Joseph  130, 215, 222 Lesotho 128 Lessing, Doris  103 n. 5 Le Vaillant, François  18 Levin, Adam  172 Lewin, Hugh  14, 48, 50, 54, 57, 87, 99 Bandiet  ix n. 1, 50–54, 87 Stones Against the Mirror  48, 50–56, 59, 60, 68–9, 86 liberalism  critiques of  19, 37, 60, 79, 100, 120, 121, 154 liberal humanism  7, 49, 139 as political formation or political philosophy  12, 17, 49, 130, 134 and literary / intellectual culture  9, 60, 109, 126, 150 n. 5, 154, 160, 161, 197 under apartheid  49 n. 5, 58, Liberal Party  51 Liberia 142 Life Esidimeni hearings  94 life writing, theories of  97 authorisation, ethics and representation  20, 103, 105–7, 109, 112–121, 129, 138–9, 143, 157–8, 161, 169–70, 179–80, 198, 209–10, 220–22 autobiography and memoir  xi, vii, 52, 62, 65–6, 70, 86, 93, 95, 97, 98, 146, 167–8, 181–2, 187–9, 194, 208, 212, 223–4 autobiographical act(s)  188, 191, 203 n. 12, 205 autobiographical essay  xii, 70, 191, 194, 220 see also essay as form autobiographical ‘I’  50, 52, 146, 167, 170 autobiographical pact  xii, 62, 154, 161, 163, 195 autoethnography 181 autobiographical novel, autofiction  172, 186 autrebiography  66, 86 bildungsroman 210

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confession, confessive autobiography   xi-xii, 17 n. 10, 62, 65–7, 87, 156, 194 feminist autobiography  219–22 national allegory  3, 36, 44, 95 prison writing  viii-ix, 2, 17 n. 10, 53–4, 86, 154–8 Struggle memoir  2, 55, 60, 95, 156 biography  26, 33, 35, 38, 58, 84, 97–103, 110–112, 112–113, 125, 133, 138–9, 150 n. 5 fictional, semi-fictional or speculative  14, 23, 24, 79, 110–11, 128, 209, 219 family biography  206, 219 group biography  48 literary biography  97, 125–8, 138–9 ‘New Biography’  97 object biography  29 political biography  125–8, 138–9 roman à clef  56, 166 coinage and definition of  12 n.7, 97 psychoanalytic paradigms, psychobiography  xii, 43, 49, 65, 66, 95, 97–99, 126–8, 142, 143, 204, 206, 210, 212, 219 ‘useless lives’  14, 23, 24, 43, 48, 49, 95, 99 literary journalism, narrative journalism  3, 5 n. 1, 19, 89, 142, 144–7, 151, 159, 164–8, 168–72, 173, 198 ‘Gonzo’ journalism  145 journalistic ‘I’  146 New Journalism  2, 5 n. 3, 10, 145 see also Drum magazine and ‘Drum decade’ literature and historiography, theories and intersections of  33–35, 59, 87, 95, 101, 125 see also ‘unusable pasts’ Lorde, Audre  202 Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo)  26, 27 Lowell, Robert  105 Lusaka  124, 130 Lusikisiki  173, 174, 178, 179

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Luthuli, Albert  vii Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie  218 Madondo, Bongani  145 Mafeking (Mahikeng, Mafikeng)  7 Magadla, Sizwe  143 Magoebaskloof 194 Mahala, Siphiwo  172 Maharaj, Mac  129 Mailer, Norman  145 Maine, Kas  147–8, 150–52 Magona, Sindiwe  186, 196–7 Makgoba, King  192 Makgoba, Malegapuru  150 n. 5 Malan, Rian  x, 107, 145, 186, My Traitor’s Heart  x, 10, 197–8 Malcolm, Janet  12 n.7, 106, 142, 144–7, 167 Malcolm X  185, 191 Malema, Julius  206, 211–12 Mamdani, Mahmood  91–93, 125 n.3 Mandela, Nelson  viii, 2, 3, 21, 104, 127, 206, 211, 223 Long Walk to Freedom, viii, 2, 14, 17–18, 26 Manganyi, N. Chabani  97–99, 137 Mangcu, Xolela  129–30, 186, 202 n. 11 Mangope, Lucas  72 Mankahlana, Parks  136 Manong, Stanley  86 n. 5 Manuel, Trevor  185 n. 1 Marabastad viii Marikana massacre  21, 94, 190, 218 Market Theatre (Johannesburg)  90 Márquez, Gabriel García  89 Marx, Karl  125–6 Marxism, Marxist theory and historiography  12, 13, 93, 126, 133, 148, 177, 179 Mashile, Lebogang  viii, 186, 196–201, 214 Mashinini, Emma  221 Masilela, Ntongela  18 Massaquoi, Jacob  141, 142, 151 Mathebula, ‘Nongoloza’ (Jan Note)  148, 157 Matshikiza, John  31 n. 9, 44, 106–7

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Matshikiza, Todd  vii, 10 n.6 Mbeki, Epainette  132 Mbeki, Govan  127 Mbeki, Thabo  viii, 100–101, 104, 121, 123–39, 178–9, 195, 222 Mbembe, Achille  188, 202–4, 222 Mbewuleni  127, 132 McGregor, Liz  144, 173 Khabzela  173, 175 McKaiser, Eusebius  79, 135, 191, 201–2, 204 McEwan, Ian  60 n. 7 Mda, Zakes  103, 117, 172 n. 5 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 149, 174, 177 Memela, Sandile  76 memory, theories of  ix, xii n. 2, 13, 54, 71–5, 79, 151 literature and memory  35–6 personal and individual  25, 43, 54, 55, 68, 74 social and cultural memory  13, 33, 59, 84, 5 n. 3 nostalgia 71–79 Mfalapitsa, Tlhomedi  93–4 Miéville, China  60 n. 7. Mgqolozana, Thando  172 Mhlongo, Niq  172 minibus taxi industry, ‘taxi violence’  207–9, 211 Mitchell, Joseph  145 Miyeni, Eric  75 Mngxitama, Andile  76, 198 Model-C (whites only) schools, former  185, 190–91, 205 Modisane, Bloke  vii, x, 223 Blame Me on History  x, 2 n. 1, 154 Moeketsi, Kippie  73 Moele, Kgebetli  173 Mokaba, Peter  94 Molefe, T. O.  203 n. 12 Molelekwa, Moses  216 Moseneke, Dikgang  185 n. 1 Motlanthe, Kgalema  185 n. 1, 206 Moyana, T. T.  10 Moscow  124, 130, 132, 134

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Index

Mozambique  26, 27 Mpe, Phaswane  172 Mphahlele, Es’kia (previously Ezekiel)  vii-viii, ix, 97, 115, 116, 152, 224 Mpolweni, Nosisi  222 Msimang, Sisonke  viii, 1, 185, 188, 196–201, 204, 214 Always Another Country  185, 190, 219–20, 223 Mudimbe, V. Y.  15 Mugabe, Robert  219 Mutloatse, Mothobi  6, 18–19 Naidoo, Leigh-Ann  187, 188, 202–3 Naipaul, V. S.  104, 131 Nakasa, Nat  10 n. 10, 108, 152, 153 Nasson, Bill  148 National Library of South Africa (Cape Town) 28 National Union of South African Students (NUSAS)  63 National Party (NP)  26 Natives Land Act  6, 21 Nazis 88 Ndebele, Njabulo  vii, ix, xii, 1, 6, 10, 50, 211, 214, 216 n. 3 Fine Lines from the Box  vii, ix, xii, 20, 69, 186 Rediscovery of the Ordinary  11, 25 n.1 New Africa Movement  18 New Journalism see under literary journalism New Yorker, The  109–10, 113, 145 Ngcobo, Lauretta  164 n. 2 Ngoyi, Lilian  186 Ngwenya, Thengani  98 Nieftagodien, Noor  148 Nietzsche, Friedrich  xii Nxumalo, Henry  10 n.1, Nkadimeng, Thomas  151 Nkosi, Lewis  x, 2 n. 1, 10–11, 113, 198, 214, 223 Home and Exile  x, 10, 214 Nkrumah, Kwame  vii nostalgia see under memory

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novel, theories of the  xi, 9, 10–12, 34, 60, 110, 119, 145–7, 160–63, 166, 177, 193, 218 ‘non-fiction novel, ‘documentary novel’  145, 171 Number, the (prison gangs)  156–8 Obama, Barack  189–90, 223 O’Donnell, Guillermo  64 n. 8 online cultures see internet, digital and online cultures Orwell, George  17 Oswald, Lee Harvey  33 OULIPO 214 Owen, Ken  197 n. Oxford University  104, 181 Oz, Amos  117, 118 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)  21 Pan-African Space Station (PASS)  216 Paton, Alan  49, 160, 164 n. 2, 165 n.3 paratexts  7–8, 35, 194, 206 Peires, Jeff  148 PEN (South Africa), 115–6 Perec, Georges  74–5 Phamodi, Sekoetlane  199–200 Philip, John  18 Pinochet, Augusto  89 Phoenix settlement (Durban)  16 Plaatje, Solomon T.  2, 3 Native Life in South Africa  2, 6–8 Plomer, William  97 Plutarch 133 Pollsmoor Prison  155–158 Polokwane  124–5, 192 Poplak, Richard  145 Pondoland 141 Portugal  27, 88 post-transition (South Africa), ‘second transition’, post-transitional culture  xi, 95, 112, 121, 123, 137 post-TRC aesthetic, culture, narrative  xi, 4, 48, 55, 79, 83, 95–6, 124 n.2, 149 n.4 Pratt, David  25 Pringle, Thomas  18

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Pretoria Central prison  ix, 26, 52, 154 Price, Max  203 n. 13 prison writing see under life writing Progressive Federal Party (PFP)  134 Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) 209 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory see under life writing Putin, Vladimir  11 Queneau, Raymond  214 race critical race theory  205 cross-racialism, inter-racial relations and intimacies  viii, 50, 82–3, 108, 120, 130, 131, 137, 132, 148–9, 153, 181, 185–6, 191–2, 196–201, 222 racial essentialism  135, 149, 221 multi-racialism  viii, 189, 192, 205 non-racialism  115–16, 152, 186 post-racialism  108, 185 race, identity and representation  xi, 10, 15, 19, 75, 81, 104, 117, 126, 128, 137, 139, 143, 151, 170, 182–90, 197–8 n.9, 201, 221–2 racialised spaces, ‘racial frontier’  159–61, 175 racial separatism  188 racial solidarity  81, 166 racism, racialised discrimination, violence  28, 44, 92, 120, 137, 138, 149, 154 n. 10, 159, 178, 191, 196–8, 201, 205, 215, 222 see also apartheid Radebe, Gregory Sibusiso  81 Ratele, Kopano  222 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP)  135 representation (questions, theories and ethics of) see under life writing Rettig Commission (Chile)  90, 93 Reuter, Hermann  174, 177, 179, 182 Rhodes, Cecil  97, 186 Rhodes Must Fall (RMF)  187, 203 n. 13, 204

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Roberts, Ronald Suresh  57, 103–7, 131 No Cold Kitchen  10, 99–121, 125, 138–9, 222 Roth, Philip  10, 115 Rousseau, Jean Jacques  17 n.9 Roy, Arundhati  18 Rubinstein, Hilary  108 Ruperto, Miljohn  68–9 Rush, Norman  172 n. 5 Ruskin, John  viii Ruth First Memorial Lecture, 185, 187, 196–204 Sachs, Albie  55, 67 Said, Edward  19, 21, 104, 117, 118 Salinger, J. D.  105 Sampson, Anthony  108, 114, 116, 120 Sartre, Jean-Paul  87, 113 Schreiner, Olive  18 ‘second transition’ (South Africa)  see post-transition and post-TRC Second World War  28, 88 Sedibe, Glory (‘Mr X1’)  viii, 48, 49, 80–83, 84–88 Sekoto, Gerard  98 Serote, Mongane  87 Sesotho  151, 205 Setswana 7 Shakespeare, William  vii, ix n. 1, 7, 132–4 Coriolanus  viii, 132–4 Sharpeville massacre  21, 22, 23, 47, 108–9 Sher, Antony  39, 40, 41 Shields, David  6 n. 4 Reality Hunger  5–6, 146, 217 n. 5 Simon, Barney  152–3 Siopis, Penny  24, 39, 40–43, 45, 59, 214 Skeem (kwaito artist)  Slovo, Gillian  87, 219 Slovo, Joe  127, 219 Smith, Zadie  189 Sobukwe, Robert  192 social history, oral history, ‘history from below’  2, 15, 147–152, 169, 198 see also literature and historiography social media see under internet, digital and online cultures

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Index

Soga, Tiyo  18, 192 Sontag, Susan  110, 118 Sophiatown  107, 153, 154 n. 10 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) 72 South African Communist Party (SACP)  22, 60, 148 South African War (Anglo-Boer War)  6–7, 88 Soviet Union (USSR), Soviet culture  77 Soweto  21, 175, 205 Soweto Uprising (1976)  21, 51, 72, 89, 115, 148, 199 Soyinka, Wole  115 Staffrider (magazine)  11, 153 n. 8 Stanton, Hannah  vii State Archives (Pretoria)  25 ‘Station Bomb’ see John Harris Steinberg, Jonny  x, 1, 10, 12 n.7, 79, 137–8, 139, 141–58, 221 Little Liberia  141, 142, 143, 146 A Man of Good Hope  142, 143, 223 Midlands  10, 144, 159–72, 177 Notes from a Fractured Country 137–8, 161–3 The Number  10, 15, 144, 156–8 Three-Letter Plague  10, 144, 149, 161, 172–83 Stellenbosch University  64, 188 n. 4 Stimela 73 Strachan, Harold  51, 54 Strachey, Lytton  97 Stroessner, Alfredo  92 n. 7 Sunday Times (South Africa)  86, 102 Sussex University  124, 130, 132, 134, 137 Swaziland 85 Talese, Guy  145 Tambo, Oliver  127 ‘tapeworm’ see under Tsafendas, Demetrios Themba, Can  10 n.1 Thompson, E. P.  148 Thompson, Hunter S.  145 Tlali, Miriam  221 Tlhabi, Redi  86 n. 5, 219

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Tolstoy Farm (Johannesburg)  viii Tolstoy, Leo  145, 151 translation, literary and cultural  16, 37, 88, 92–94, 150 n. 5, 151, 158 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) 149 Trump, Donald  11, 190, 200 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)  ix, 89–93, 195, 209 amnesty  4, 56, 82, 83, 93 boundary between criminal and political 156–8 concepts and principles  4, 157 critiques of  52 n. 4. 91–2, 186, 196 hearings and submissions to  27, 30, 65, 82 Human Rights Violations committee 56 literary and cultural responses to  3–4, 30, 89, 104, 223 Final Report  4, 49, 83, 88–91 see also post-TRC aesthetic, culture, narrative Tsafendas, Demetrios (also Demitrios, Dimitri)  viii, 14, 21–45 life of  26–31 literary and artistic representations of  31–33, 35–45, 57, 214, 223 political beliefs of  28, 31, 44–5, 223 ‘tapeworm’ of  14, 25, 31, 39, 42–3 Tsafendakis, Michael (Michalis, father of Demetrios Tsafendas)  26 Tsala ea Batho 18 tuberculosis 137 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond  4, 88–90 Twala, Mwezi  86, 87 Twala, Sello Chico  73 Twitter see under internet, digital and online cultures Ukhozi FM  76 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) see under African National Congress unreliability, narrative  144, 154, 162, 164, 181 ‘unusable pasts’  13, 23, 44, 48–9, 95

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Van Niekerk, Marlene  32 Van Onselen, Charles  144, 148, 157 The Seed is Mine  15, 147–8, 150–52, 161 n. 1 The Small Matter of a Horse 148 Van Riebeeck, Jan  15 n.8, 32 Van Woerden, Henk  viii, 85, 99 A Mouthful of Glass  24, 27, 35–39, 42, 44 Van Wyk, Chris  31 n. 9, 215 n. 2 Van Zyl Slabbert, Frederik  134, 135 Vavi, Zwelinzima  185 n. 1 Verwoerd, Hendrik  viii, 14, 21, 23–6, 30, 31 n. 9, 32, 33, 37, 38, 44, 215 n. 1 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Circumstances of the Death of the Late Dr. the Honourable Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd 24, 27–31, 33–34, 36, 38, 44 VhaVenda 192 Vladislavić, Ivan  1, 9, 26, 213–16, 217–18 The Loss Library  12, 213, 214 Missing Persons 31 Portrait with Keys 9 Vlakplaas  81, 85, 93, 191 Vonnegut, Kurt  118 Voortrekkers 192 Vorster, John ‘B. J.’  33, 92 n. 7, Wa Azania (Mahlatsi), Malaika  188 Memoirs of a Born Free  188, 205–7, 210–12, 219–20 Wainaina, Binyavanga  223 Walsh, Rodolfo  89

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Warren Report 33–4 Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ  202 n. 11 Wentzel, Magadien  143, 157 Western Cape, University of the (UWC)  147, 150 White, Edmund  61 whiteness  19, 51, 104, 113, 167, 170, 180, 190–91, 199–201, 204, 205 Wicomb, Zoë  31 n. 9, 87, 117, 193, 195 David’s Story 193–5 Wikipedia 1 Williams, Amelia (mother of Demetrios Tsafendas) 26 Witwatersrand, University of the (Wits)  123, 148, 150 n. 5, 181, 185, 198, 201 Wiwa, Ken  219 Wolfe, Tom  10 n.1, 89, 145 Women’s March (1956)  186 Woolf, Virginia  9, 12 n. 7, 35, 97, 111, 125–6 xenophobia, xenophobic (Afrophobic) violence  142, 211, 223 Xhosa (language)  175, 205 York, University of  64 ZANU-PF 219 Zapiro (cartoonist)  123 Zimbabwe  81, 121, 132, 192 Zulu (language)  72–3, 76, 190 n. 6 Zuma, Jacob  21, 100, 124–5, 130, 190, 211, 219

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ISSN 2054–5673

Previously published Achebe & Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite  Terri Ochiagha, 2015 A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder  Grace A. Musila, 2015 Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa  Pim Higginson, 2017 Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/ Francophone Novel  Madhu Krishnan, 2018 Written under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa  Carli Coetzee, 2019

Forthcoming At the Crossroads: Nigerian Travel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English  Rebecca Jones, 2019 African Literature in the Digital Age: Class & Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya  Shola Adenekan, 2020 Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution  Ros Gray, 2020

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