Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock

to define a ‘good’ person in the ‘new South Africa’ is, likewise, urgently at issue in Meyer’s novel. By creating a single primary focus of public attention – a riveting road chase – Meyer succeeds in focusing the attention of three sets of readership (his South African readers, his sizeable international audience, and the imagined general-public consumers of media in the world that the novel represents) upon a critical question: is Tiny Mpayipheli a bad guy or a good guy, a hero or a villain? Is he virtuous or villainous within the redefined terms of the new dispensation? How far do we allow for ‘difference’ in the parameters of the new constitutional democracy? A ‘good citizen’ is a category that is under erasure, as Chipkin demonstrates (100); so it is, too, in the ‘infant democracy’ depicted in Meyer’s novel. It is a question on which the fate of the country hangs, because if postapartheid South Africa gets this definition wrong, or badly skewed towards renewed injustice and ‘bad’ difference, then the newborn dispensation might just emerge from transition as a beastly adult. The stakes are high.

      The political importance of this moral fixing of the notion ‘good citizen’ cannot be overestimated. Such ‘fixing’ – in the sense of stabilising as well as correcting – implies a discursive re-territorialising of the new South Africa, underpinned by consensus. It is therefore no surprise that Meyer addresses the difficulties of ethical compass-setting. He achieves a high degree of narrative concentration by launching his protagonist Mpayipheli on a movie-style motorcycle chase from Cape Town to northern Botswana. By using a plot-heavy thriller model, Meyer succeeds in achieving what very often eludes more discursive fictional modes in South African writing: he revivifies the drama – in the form of a big-screen sense of plot and colourful characters – as he narrates the story of postapartheid political change.

       A Frankenstein or a Robin Hood?

      Meyer’s Mpayipheli, figured perhaps a little romantically as being in touch with ‘the voices of his ancestors – Phalo and Rharhabe, Ngqika and Maqoma, the great Xhosa chiefs, his bloodline, source, and refuge’ (Heart of the Hunter 3) – reluctantly agrees to help a former struggle comrade, Johnny Kleintjes, who is being held hostage by unknown parties in Lusaka following an intelligence sting. Mpayipheli is tasked with delivering a mobile hard drive supposedly containing sensitive information to Lusaka, where a group of obscure transnational kidnappers are based; his aim is to secure a compatriot’s freedom. Mpayipheli is reluctant to undertake the assignment – he has bought a plot of land in his ancestral Xhosaland (Eastern Cape), to which he hopes to return with his beloved Miriam and her son. He feels compelled to nurture and re-educate the boy as a man of the people. Mpayipheli is keen to close down the bad parts of his history, to live pure and straight, but the past hauls him in for one (seemingly) last settling of scores. He ‘owes’ his comrade Kleintjes an unspecified ‘struggle’ debt, and Mpayipheli is nothing if not a man of his word. He books a flight from Cape Town to the Zambian capital, thinking he will sort out the business quickly. Unknown to him, though, various warring South African intelligence agencies are trailing him – they also don’t quite know what’s going on, and they want the information that Mpayipheli is carrying so they can find out. When agents try to apprehend him at Cape Town International Airport, he reveals his extraordinary physical prowess by staging an unlikely escape, exiting the airport and eventually ‘borrowing’ a BMW 1200GS motorcycle from his place of work, a Motorrad dealership in the Cape Town CBD.

      Mpayipheli, accustomed to riding a 200cc Honda Benly, finds himself having to adapt to the brutish power of the BMW, almost wiping himself out as he makes his way onto the N1, the road that leads north, to Botswana and Zimbabwe, and beyond that, Lusaka. He knows that the combined forces of the SA Police Service, the SA National Defence Force, various arms of the postapartheid intelligence services as well as an elite reaction unit will soon be hunting him down. They do this with helicopters, satellite surveillance, roadblocks, and an arsenal of arms fit to kill a battalion of soldiers, let alone a solo fugitive on a motorbike. When Cape Times reporter Allison Healy gets wind of the story, the stage is set for a media spectacle that concentrates the attention of significant portions of the new nation on a dramatic chase, and what it represents.

      In line with the idea that reporters and detectives traverse social shadow-zones on behalf of the citizenry, and send back dispatches on ‘what’s going on out there’, Healy’s reporting, along with other media reports, pitted against statements by the state, signals a fierce public-sphere contestation over how best to understand and interpret the events on the ground regarding Mpayipheli. The big question is how to ‘read’ him and his actions – is he a Frankenstein of the struggle, as the government media communiqués suggest, or a Robin Hood, as many civil subjects begin to think during the course of the story? Before long, reporter Healy is not only updating her reports on a daily basis in the Cape Times as she forges ahead in her work of detection, she is also being interviewed on national TV about her discoveries. The Mpayipheli affair becomes a media fanfare, and a test case to boot: who is more truthful, and more ‘good’, in this sapling democracy – the government’s agents or the individual that these agents are hunting down? The resolution of this question carries an enormous burden of meaning for the health and longevity of the democracy: if Mpayipheli does turn out to be a Robin Hood, then why is the state so intent on crushing him, and others like him? Can the new government be trusted? If Mpayipheli is essentially an upstanding citizen, then what is being hidden from sight, and why? What is on the hard drive he is carrying with him? And how important are the consequences of such hiding?

      These questions were especially important in the first decade of the transition period, when South Africa still loomed large in the global imaginary as a singular case of constitutional, democratic success among developing nations, a political ‘miracle’. As German scholar Jörn Rüsen pleaded at a Witwatersrand University colloquium in 1998 called ‘Living Difference’, ‘[i]t is imperative for us that you [the democratic transition] succeed!’²⁴ He was reminding sceptical South African delegates how much was at stake, not only for South Africa, but also for the very possibility of constitutional democracy in the postcolonies of the world. Among the colloquium discussants at that event was Nancy Fraser, who is wont to question the relevance of Habermas’s theory of public-sphere deliberation, framed as it is within Westphalian-state or ‘national’ contexts, as well as Benedict Anderson’s notion of nationally constituted ‘imagined communities’. Fraser argues that these notions are no longer valid in a globalising, post-and transnational context (11–13). South Africa, one might argue, was caught amidships in this period, between the stern of an inchoate national identity and the bow of globalisation, the point at which the country was navigating the swells of oceanic global interconnectedness.

      On the one hand, the very existence of broad media contestation in South Africa might have suggested to Meyer’s readers that a democratic public sphere is – or was, at that time – on a sound footing; the novel is set in the early 2000s, several years before the looming threat of the Protection of State Information Bill, or ‘Secrecy Bill’. Such public-sphere contestation might suggest that Fraser’s sense of a sequestered national public sphere is premature in the case of South Africa. Meyer is one of the few crime writers who, at least in his earlier novels, of which Heart of the Hunter is a good example, evinces optimism about the new democracy and its prospects for robust health – though he is correspondingly hard on the old white renegades who continue to crawl out of the woodwork in new-era knavery. At the same time, however, the underlying forces in Meyer’s story, the very factors precipitating ‘plot loss’ among the state’s functionaries – namely the CIA and transnational agents at work in the novel’s ‘sting’, alongside a covert intelligence scam inside the South African security establishment – are mostly beyond the nation-state’s control and even awareness. This suggests that Fraser’s theory of nation-states losing the luxury of an efficacious, bounded public sphere might be half-right after all. In Meyer’s novel, as in many demonstrable real-world incidents in postapartheid South Africa, the state itself is too often in the dark about what exactly is going on for comfort; this is especially so in strategic instances, both with regard to external undercurrents and internally, where its own operatives are often indisputably at war with one other, as each week’s news stories tend to suggest. The state, like its citizens, seems to have lost the plot, and to save face