If culture serves as a “barometer of change” (cf. Vladislavić, Portrait 31), The Worlding of the South African Novel analyses literary responses to political transformation. The premise of the book develops out of an apparent paradox: that despite South Africa undergoing momentous political transition, little in the socio-economic reality has actually changed. The country has veered from racial to what Patrick Bond calls “class apartheid” (Elite 198): the “systemic underdevelopment and segregation of the oppressed majority, through structured economic, political, environmental, legal, medical and cultural practices largely organised or codified by Pretoria politicians and bureaucrats” (Elite 198). Capitalism was the driving force determining the development of racial segregation: the “racist logic” of apartheid, as Neville Alexander argues, was “to guarantee cheap black labour and the continued profitability of ‘maize and gold’” (Alexander 22).1 That it is predominantly Black South Africans who continue to make up the working classes gives a distinctly racial inflection to class relations today. (Niq Mhlongo voices many Black people’s belief that “there is no black middle class in South Africa, only poverty masked by graduation gowns and debts” [Mhlongo, Black Tax].) The changing demographics of segregation has in part been entrenched by the ANC’s about-turn from the radical Left to neoliberalism and a free market economy, in Alexander’s words, “the most startling reality South Africans have to deal with”: the shift towards “market fundamentalism, by people who still consider themselves to be ‘communists’ and ‘socialists’” (Alexander 2). The lifting of apartheid through the negotiated settlement between the Afrikaner National Party, the ANC and other oppositional groups like the South African Communist Party (SACP), coupled with the inauguration of the ANC-led Government of National Unity in 1994, paved the way for South Africa to be readmitted to a world platform (including world trade). Yet the social realities of millions of ordinary South Africans remain in crisis: housing, employment, access to basic amenities like water and electricity, land reform , the AIDS pandemic, an entrenched patriarchy, sexual violence and environmental justice are some of the key sites that trouble the national myths of rainbowism and South African exceptionalism (the illusion that South Africa, celebrated as now having the world’s most progressive constitution, has somehow averted its fledgling democracy from the fate of those other African countries that have fallen foul of the forces of neocolonialism and global capitalism [Lazarus, “South African” 611]). Always mindful of the ways in which aesthetic form “encompass[es] not only style and technique but a mutually transformative relationship with content” (Bahri 4), the present book is an attempt to engage with this reality as it has been animated in the contemporary South African novel over a twenty-year period, from approximately 1994 to 2014.
A series of neoliberal reform programmes were introduced under the leadership of the ANC to hasten the country’s path to the global market (of course, modern South Africa from colonial times was built on the back of capitalist enterprise with the tapping into natural resources like gold and diamonds). The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), from 1995; the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) from 1996; and the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), from 2005, replaced in 2010 under new President Jacob Zuma by the New Growth Path (NGP), were all promoted as aiming to eradicate poverty and unemployment by means of free trade. But these programmes, like the wider New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) instituted by Mbeki in 2001, were also “homegrown” forms of structural adjustment akin to the Washington Consensus—a raft of economic policies supported by institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the US treasury ostensibly to support developing countries out of economic crisis (Bond, Elite 1; 125; 229; Alexander 151) but that were to dig them further into crippling debt and dependency on imperialist powers. The “implicit premises” of NEPAD, for example, as Bond argues, were to “armtwist” developing countries into “deeper integration […] into the global financial system to promote economic growth and development” (Talk Left 77). Alongside Mbeki’s cornerstone of an African Renaissance, which was to promote African culture as well as develop a strong, agential African economy (Lazarus, “South African” 618), these policies were indicative of what Bond makes titular reference to as the “talk left, walk right” practices characterising Pretoria’s new, neoliberal elite.
How are these socio-economic realities registered in the South African novel? With the benefit of a degree of historical perspective, we no longer should worry, as many commentators did on the eve of democracy, about the South African novelist’s sense of purpose in the political-intellectual sphere within which they have a long and illustrious history. As South Africa emerged from apartheid, capturing the mood of the time, Rob Nixon in 1996 posed the conundrum that, with the end of apartheid, creative writers apparently “have gained key freedoms but lost, in the process, the very stresses that fuelled their creativity” (“Aftermaths” 64). National introspection during apartheid, which stocked the South African novel with the spectacular events of apartheid’s violent oppression, has given way to extroversion, to a global perspective, reflecting both the freedoms of which Nixon writes, and the impact on ordinary lives of the South African government wholeheartedly embracing a free market economy.
The novels analysed in this book, whilst not bypassing the broader sweep of history, implicitly test the ANC government’s macroeconomic policies through the depiction of what Bond calls the “micro-level experiences of daily life” (Bond, Elite 3) —something which fiction, in capturing the lived experience of the social reality, is ideally equipped to do. Whilst I am not trying to suggest that the selected novels necessarily convey an overt critique of the political status quo in the “new” South Africa, what I am arguing is that, in content and literary form, they engage in critically challenging and seemingly re-energised ways with the social realities of ordinariness in South Africa today. Whilst South Africa has a very singular history and has followed a singular path to political transition and national reconstruction, the social reality of its poorest communities is marked in ways not dissimilar to impoverished peoples across the world. In other words, the socio-economic outcomes of the South African transition are not exceptional. As my title to the introduction suggests, ordinariness as the banal oppression of apartheid that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was not equipped to tell becomes a political imperative in these works to reveal that the South African novelist continues to press against the idea of literary commitment that animated cultural debate during apartheid.
Here, we might pause to revisit Njabulo Ndebele’s famous critical injunction on the cultural sphere when he argued in 1986 that culture had been reduced to an “art of anticipated surfaces” (Rediscovery 19) under the pressures which apartheid’s spectacular violence rendered it, including creatively crippling and draconian censorship laws. Writers often, but not always, felt it their moral-political duty to challenge the apartheid state in their fiction; some challenged the sense of obligation under which this was seen to place them, whilst others questioned the kinds of culture such an environment produced. These debates are well known and have been copiously documented and discussed in a vigorous public sphere constituted by public forums and talks, writers’ groups like the historically liberal and largely white PEN South Africa2 and the more radical Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), whose founding president was Ndebele (cf. McDonald 204–6), and print media such as the Mail & Guardian, the Daily Maverick and GroundUp, and in South African-based political and literary journals like Staffrider (the last issue of which appeared in 1996), Drum, Johannesburg Review of Books, Transformation, Alternation, Current Writing and, retrospectively, in Scrutiny2, the first issue of which appeared in 1996. Needless to say, Nadine Gordimer’s questioning of “an orthodoxy of opposition” in social realist forms in her book, The Essential Gesture (1988), and Lewis Nkosi’s acerbic assessment of Black social realist fiction, which was, he claimed, nothing more than “journalistic fact parading as outrageously as imaginative literature” (Home and Exile 126), set the tone amongst those resisting the apparently inevitable aesthetic limitations that literary commitment risked producing. Much, too, has been said about the so-called bifurcation of Black social realism and white experimentalism (Pechey, “Post-Apartheid” 165), a cultural commonplace that critics like David Attwell and Michael Chapman, more circuitously, have once ag...