Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock

issue of English Studies in Africa on post-transitional literature, Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie note the caveat issued by Michael Chapman on the ‘convenience’ and provisional nature of ‘phases of chronology’ such as ‘post-transitional’ and his own coinage, ‘post-postapartheid’ (3–4). In his essay ‘Conjectures on South African Literature’, Chapman writes as follows:

      If post-apartheid usually means after the unbannings of 1990, or after the first democratic elections of 1994, or in/after the transition, then beyond 2000 begins to mark a quantitative and qualitative shift from the immediate ‘post’ years of the 1990s to another ‘phase’. (1–2)

      The various descriptions used to typify this second phase, the time beyond the immediate transition of the 1990s, include Chapman’s ‘post-postapartheid’, Frenkel and MacKenzie’s ‘post-transitional’, and Loren Kruger’s ‘post-anti-apartheid’. For Kruger, writing in 2002, the solidarity of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa has waned because its chief antagonist, white supremacism, no longer enjoys official sanction. This ushers in ‘post-anti-apartheid – post-anti-apartheid because the moral conviction of and commitment to anti-apartheid solidarity have waned, while in their place has come postcolonial uneven development rather than radical social transformation’ (‘Black Atlantics’ 35). Kruger’s refinement of familiar terms usefully covers both a temporal and a conceptual shift: if the immediate years of transition were post-apartheid, with a strong emphasis on reckoning with the past, the 2000s roughly mark a period (‘post-transitional’, perhaps) in which many writers begin to conceive of themselves beyond the immediate aftermath of apartheid, and certainly free of the need to reckon with it.

      Regardless of how one conceives of the chronology of postapartheid, its temporality remains contradictory and complex, as Grant Farred argues in his introduction to a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled ‘After the Thrill is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa’. For Farred, temporality in postapartheid is necessarily doubled, rendering all ‘post’ descriptions internally ironic, encoding both the idea of a (virtuous, desired) teleology and its persistent rupture. Farred argues that

      [t]he propensity for the teleological, to think post-apartheid South Africa as the disarticulation (and possibly even evacuation of) and triumph over its apartheid predecessor, the narrative of ‘progress’ from a racist past to a nonracial present (and future), is a critical modality that has significant purchase in the post-1994 society. (‘The Not-Yet Counterpartisan’ 592)

      For Farred, the event of the nation’s first democratic elections ‘signals the “end” of one era and the beginning of a new, democratic one that aligns South Africa – almost half a century later – with a global post-1945 nomos’, although with the provisos ‘that past economic inequities, cultural differences, and racial tensions, to mention but three, would have a (powerful) residual life in the new, post-apartheid nomos’ (592). Farred continues:

      [T]he old illegitimacy has been replaced by a new, substanceless legitimacy, a formal equality that simply displaces social hierarchy from race into economics; the white/black distinction is transfigured into rich/poor, or ‘creditor/debtor’. There is already a tension inherent within the new legitimacy: the marking of epochal progress, from apartheid to post-apartheid, quickly showed itself to be less a march toward an ideal political future – let alone present – than a new democracy living in a double temporality. (592–593)

      Farred’s insights are on point, especially with regard to fractured or doubled temporalities and economic stasis. Other contributors to the South Atlantic Quarterly issue³⁶ are similarly coruscating about the notion that the transition has seen a transformation in material conditions after ten years of democracy. In particular, the new government’s adoption of neoliberal macro-economic policies that effectively maintain or worsen oppressive economic conditions, creating a present and a future that looks and feels like the apartheid past, is held up to scrutiny. For Farred, South Africa after 1994

      is a nation living with a dual orientation: it looks, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes discretely, to its past and its present; it has a historical vision that is alternately bifurcated and cyclopean – split in its visual outlook or too trained on a single moment. The new nomos of the South African earth is haunted by the old nomos; the old nomos is inveterately part of the new one, a source of concern, regret, and anger to some, a source merely of chagrin and inevitability to others. (594)

      Another way of describing such a double temporality is to adopt Hal Foster’s notion of a ‘future-anterior’.³⁷ In the ‘future-anterior’, a ‘will-have-been’ mode of seeing and feeling makes a mess of linear temporalities or easy assumptions about periods that are ‘post’ anything.

      Terms such as ‘postapartheid’ and, occasionally, ‘post-liberation’ and ‘post-transitional’ are used to cover the nominal understanding of literature that has succeeded South African writing during the time of apartheid, with the necessary conceptual caveats about the paradoxes of both ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’. One might argue that postapartheid pertains to the 1990s, and post-transition (or post-anti-apartheid) more accurately describes the 2000s, while post-postapartheid emerges around and after 2010. Although these designations may have merit, the internal dynamics of the literature, in my view, remain similar regardless. The foundational social significance of the transition, and its sceptical treatment in writing, remain on track throughout, although the entire period also yields up works that refuse any relation to transition and postapartheid, or to any ‘politics’ at all. That, too, should be seen as part of the new literature’s anti-exceptionalism, its newfound normality, allowing it to be anything it wants, if it so desires. Nevertheless, in its weightier instances it all too often returns to the moral fate of the country and its subjects after apartheid, as Coovadia does in his 2014 novel Tales of the Metric System.

      Transition, the putative mid-point of postapartheid culture, is frequently shown to be a paradoxical cross-temporal knot, an ateleological threshold replete with ambiguity. Michael Titlestad’s phrase ‘mezzanine ontology’³⁸ (‘Afterword’ 189) captures this sense as the incomplete transition leaves the country’s citizens ‘caught up in a world of contradictions and ironies’. For Titlestad, the mezzanine is the post-1994 version of Gramsci’s interregnum, or the ‘the historical moment when apartheid was dying-but-not-dead’ (as described by Thurman 181). Titlestad calls into question the ‘teleological rumbling forward’ he espies in the idea that authors should ‘put their shoulders to the wheel of history’; the lives of authors, as much as the subjects they write about, are ‘caught in-between’ the old and the new as they themselves face the ‘uncertainties of the future’ (188). In similar vein, Samuelson (‘Scripting Connections’ 116) argues that post-transition literature is ‘characterized more by its rearrangement than its abandonment of the chronotopes of South African literature and its expanding field of enquiry’.

      Postapartheid as a phase of events, an identifiable period, is, as Titlestad suggests, marked by routine indeterminacy, in which a ready-to-hand telos gets twisted out of shape and doubles back on itself. Dialectically, the conceptual nexus suggested by the term ‘transition’, including its wayward temporality and deep ambiguity, has proved useful in critiquing popular rainbow discourse. It has broadly served as a kind of grammar for contextualising contentious events, culminating in the corrupt crony-capitalist administration of Jacob Zuma, and the concomitant economic empowerment of party loyalists. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the country swings between extremes of optimism and disappointment. The events of 1994 were nothing less than epochal. Uniquely, more than 350 years of bloody contestation over land and resources, over power and ideology, seemed to be settled in a way that was acceptable to everyone, both inside and outside the country. A violent revolution was forestalled, disaster averted. There could be no doubting the historic shift, the switch to democracy. South African Air Force jets performing a fly-past at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as head of state in Pretoria on 10 May 1994 signalled the birth of a new South Africa, and people all over the world bore witness to an event that many had long believed impossible. The seeming loss of such a wondrous breakthrough, its gradual dismantling, and the subsequent critique and lamentations constitute a churn in which postapartheid and its subjects