Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock

the social terrain, and the cause of a crime is sought within a chain of events in a dysfunctional polity.

      Of course, many shades of the palette will be evident as writers seek to depict an emerging order through the lens of what a community deems to be ‘criminal’, in line with Emile Durkheim’s credo that society learns to know itself by coming to understand the nature of its own criminal shadow. For Durkheim, crime – and more to the point, how people respond to its occurrence – provides a basis for the emergence of a normative consensus. ‘Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them,’ Durkheim wrote (103), and this continues to hold true more than a century later. The problem for South African writers on the cusp of the millennium, however, has often been the very equivocality – and contestation – of the line between legality and criminality, both in the civil and in the public sphere. The condition of ‘plot loss’ for such writers is acute: not only has the sociopolitical dispensation changed fundamentally, making what in the very recent past was illegal and unethical suddenly legal and right – and vice versa – but world politics, too, has undergone a disorienting transformation. In the 1990s, leading into the new millennium and beyond, two formerly discrete zones (‘home’ and the ‘outside’ world) began to play into each other, such that new levels of uncertainty bedevilled the general relief at having achieving a democratic consensus. In the wake of globalisation and its dramatic 1990s upsurge, the rules were rewritten across the transformed face of the world, especially for nations that had long defined themselves in relation to the antagonisms of the cold war. In addition, as Misha Glenny argues in McMafia, crime rapidly became a global network, creating new transnational alliances facilitated by globalisation.

      Deon Meyer takes precisely the disambiguation of the post-1990 condition as his implicit task, his subtext, in his novel Heart of the Hunter. Meyer’s hero in this tale, the muscled modern warrior, Thobela ‘Tiny’ Mpayipheli, embodies the intricate complexity of the postapartheid dispensation in several ways. Not only was Mpayipheli schooled in cold war conditions as an MK soldier trained in Eastern Europe under communist conditions; not only was he, too, ‘forgotten’ by the ruling party upon his return from exile; he was also ‘shopped’ by his political masters in the South African political underground to the eastern Europeans as a crack assassin, in return for political favours. Then, to make matters worse, this Xhosa ‘hunter-warrior’ – associated explicitly in the text with a long line of precolonial champions, including Phalo, Maqoma and Ngqika – is abandoned by the eastern Europeans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They had been using him as an unusually sharp cold-war assassin. Importantly, Meyer’s multi-layered ‘plot’ in this novel is built precisely upon the ruins of earlier socio-historical plots: (i) the ANC’s alliance with the USSR and the communist world, all of which imploded on the eve of liberation in South Africa; (ii) the promised economic ‘new deal’ in South Africa in the wake of what was supposed to be socialism’s moral victory on the world stage – a deal that failed to materialise; the committed foot soldier of the revolution comes home to nothing, neither glory nor compensation; (iii) the setting up of a working-class leadership in a socialist republic – yet another conspicuous failure of intention. All of these building blocks for what was long projected as a ‘good’ and ideologically virtuous new South Africa had been swept away. The ability to function like a sovereign state, or a relatively independent entity, at least, was being critically undermined by the late-capitalist world order, with its lack of respect for borders, in terms of money flows particularly. (Unsurprisingly, it was during this period that the ‘market-friendly’ macro-economic strategy Growth, Employment and Redistribution [GEAR], which emphasised tighter fiscal policy and the loosening of foreign exchange controls, was formulated.) Michael Allen’s searching political-economic enquiry, Globalization, Negotiation, and the Future of Transformation in South Africa, concludes (181–192) that the South African postapartheid state found itself between a rock and a very hard place indeed as global economic pressures increasingly set the agenda, especially for countries in the developing or ‘emerging’ world seeking to achieve economic growth.

       In search of the ‘virtuous’ postapartheid citizen

      Meanwhile, inside the ‘fragile, infant democracy’ (Heart of the Hunter 234) that Meyer’s novel maps, matters are correspondingly complicated. Gone is the old struggle order of good revolutionaries pitted against bad (mostly white) politicians, or commendable communists going up against exploitative Western capitalists. Now, in many instances, the government is at war with itself as certain alliance partners push to the left of an unstable centre and others, formerly rock-solid alliance partners, lurch to the right. Indeed, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ become increasingly unstable as ‘left’ easily becomes associated with a form of national socialism or fascism, evident in the case of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).²⁰ At the same time, as enacted in Heart of the Hunter, separately constituted intelligence agencies (combining the information regimes of the former liberation armies with those of the former South African Defence Force and South African Police) find themselves crossing swords. The collateral damage that results from such intergovernmental feuds includes ‘good’ people like the struggle hero Mpayipheli and Miriam, his new love.²¹ The ‘good’, as in ‘good people’, and how to define this in the ‘new South Africa’, ideologically speaking, was fast becoming a paradoxical category. And it is this blind spot about what exactly constitutes a ‘good citizen’, or a ‘reasonable person’ in legal parlance, to which crime writers, nonfiction authors and political analysts have repeatedly turned.²²

      Imaginative writers at work in this period²³ seem especially keen to probe the problem of the ‘virtuous’ individual – and the limits or pressures brought to bear in defining such virtue – as a litmus test for the health of the body politic at large. Where does one draw the line between legitimate cultural difference – a polymorphous ‘good’ – and less virtuous strains of difference? In a fragile ensemble of citizens aiming at a new democratic consensus, ‘bad’ difference seems to introduce a form of perversity. JM Coetzee probed the limit conditions of democratic consensus in his character David Lurie in Disgrace, and Gordimer in her examination of the trigger-finger character, Duncan Lingard, in The House Gun. Damon Galgut, in The Good Doctor, describes two doctors trying to do the ‘right thing’ in a rural hospital, against all political odds, asking the reader to weigh up their efforts (see Titlestad, ‘Allegories’). Mandla Langa, in The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, takes the delicate question of where to draw the line in political behaviour into a fictional African state, thereby broadening the postapartheid canvas to postcoloniality. Orford’s investigator, Clare Hart, persistently attempts to expose a criminality that is hidden behind a variety of faux-virtuous insulations. In Gallows Hill, Hart says at one stage that ‘[t]he collision of history and politics is complicated in Cape Town’ (60; but this is true also of Mpumalanga – where the action shifts later in the story – not to mention the rest of the country). ‘History’, in this novel, delivers the bones of long-dead slaves discovered in a mass grave; near the place where they are found, the site of a new commercial development on Cape Town’s ‘Gallows Hill’ (a public hanging site in the colonial era), lie the bones of a murdered Cape Town anti-apartheid activist from the 1980s. As the earth unveils unholy, improperly buried skeletons, pointing to the politically sanctioned evils of earlier layers of history (colonial rule, then apartheid), so the action of the novel in the postapartheid period reveals a new stratum of political crooks: wheelers and dealers who would rather throw cement over the bones of the indecently buried, and take a paycheck, than heed conscience. Orford’s novel takes one to the ‘scene of the crime’ in both a historical as well as a contemporaneous sense, and puts together an ensemble of citizens who contest, via their various vested interests, the question of value, of material enrichment and political advancement, on the one hand, and the remit of legal and ethical reckoning, on the other. Mzobe’s Young Blood, to offer another example, offers a reverse-angle view, from behind the scenes of what is taken to be ‘crime’, showing the precarious fate of a ‘good’ young man in Umlazi, Durban. This is a space where, as critic Wamuwi Mbao puts it, ‘the criminal and the respectable jostle at close quarters’ (‘Report Card’ n.p.). Mzobe’s hero, Sipho, is an essentially upstanding character whose blameless aspirations lead him into a ‘bad’ world, a zone