Twenty years ago, when I first came to South Africa, I worked at an advice center called the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) on Jeppe Street in downtown Johannesburg. This was around the time of the first democratic elections, but before post-apartheid labor law reform began in 1995. Every early morning, long queues and quiet clusters of workers waited outside the door. We would serve some 50 workers a day. If a worker was a member of a union, we would send her back to her union to resolve her issues. The paralegals accompanied workers to what were then known as industrial councils to sit framed by polished wood and to argue for their protections. If the worker did not fall within an industrial council, the advice office would phone the employer to negotiate the basic conditions laid out in a wage determination, or fill out the paperwork for the Unemployment Insurance Fund, or tick the boxes detailing the body parts lost or injured for occupational health benefits. It was through working at this advice center for three-and-a-half years that I realized how mutually constitutive precarious labor and regulation were.

In 2012, I returned to another worker advice center, the Casual Worker Advice Office (CWAO) in Germiston. It was set up specifically to assist casual, contingent, and contract workers. In the period between the IAS and the CWAO, South Africa has undergone two decades of democracy with labor law reform a primary lineament of expanded protection and participation (Adler and Webster 2000; Webster and Von Holdt 2005). Indeed, employment has been definitive of the ANC's (African National Congress) imagination of social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa (Barchiesi 2011).

Yet while labor reforms extended the definition of employee to many workers previously not covered, it also structured labor protections around a set of normative assumptions about who that worker was: ‘a male, permanent, full-time, long-term employee with employment benefits (medical aid and pension fund) working at one fixed workplace where formal representation by a nationally organized union is available’ (Page-Shipp 2003: 11; see also Kenny 2009; Theron 2005). Many precarious workers did not fit into this model. Moreover, basic protections that did apply were simply de facto subverted by employers or not pursued by unions.

This is not a study of postapartheid South African literature. Rather, it is study in that vast field of writing. I do not believe a coherent a study of this dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus is possible, short of the encyclopaedic method (a curated series of topics written by many different writers, or alphabetical listings). Such a ‘companion’ approach remains the default option, and it is duly taken by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, along with their 41 fellow contributors to The Cambridge History of South African Literature, and by Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie in The Columbia Guide to South African Literature since 1945. And still, as these compilers might themselves acknowledge, there will be significant gaps. This book, in contrast to such works of general coverage, proposes a way of examining the distinctive features of South African literature after apartheid. Put differently, it delineates certain through-lines that characterise postapartheid writing. Although these lines are, in my view, prominent and important, they remain a partial set of concerns. This relation of single study to corpus may be viewed via the analogy of a hologram. Take this angle of view, and the shape emerges thus; tilt the hologram surface, or change your own angle of looking, and the object under view suddenly looks quite different. All the shapes brought into view, in their provisional wholeness, have validity – call them alternative manifestations of the complexity of the entity under examination. Such an approach allows the making of bold conceptual propositions without resorting to the fixity, and the closure, of all-consuming metanarratives. It means that in advancing a theory about the corpus of work under scrutiny, or more accurately within that body of work as a whole, one's conceptual model is acknowledged as partial (e.g. Shaun Viljoen, Richard Rive: A Partial Biography). Like Viljoen, one acknowledges, in addition, one's own partiality too: this is my reading of things, or my reading. Other readings are possible, indeed necessary. Please join the party. Write your own study. But for a moment, consider this one. Perhaps it will influence your own perspective on the field we share, though from different angles of view. This book, then, in full awareness of the risks inherent in such an undertaking, proposes a set of related ideas as a way of conceptualising certain emphases, perhaps, in South African literature after apartheid.

The move from apartheid to postapartheid in the early to mid-1990s is momentous not only for the more obvious reasons, but also because it roughly coincides with globalisation and the rapid growth of digital media. The sprawl of the new media has coincided with new emphases in data consumption: visual salience, speed, brevity, and the predominance of surface over depth. Actuality, often in seemingly raw and semi-processed form, rides high in this environment, whereas older forms of ‘deep’ literature, and expectations of close reading, fare less well. In addition, the relatively passive media consumers of earlier generations have morphed into interactive media agents: screen readers and content makers – ‘writers’ of an entirely new kind – who consume and also produce media in quantum loops (Surette 14).

As if to corroborate these trends, in which the ‘real’ and the actual are pushed, publishing in South Africa, especially in the postapartheid period, has seen nonfiction increasingly outsell genre as well as literary fiction. In addition, several high-calibre South African writers, among them Van Niekerk, Krog and Malan, have observed that postapartheid conditions are such that nonfiction appears to be a far more serviceable mode of writing than fiction, as noted earlier. This stands in contrast to the apartheid period, when realist fiction in the Gordimer ‘history from the inside’ mode, and metafictional fabulation with a focus on ethical agency, in the manner of JM Coetzee, were paramount. The conjunction of the new media, as a ‘glocal’ digital emporium and a dominant site of reading and writing, on the one hand, and a trend towards nonfiction, on the other, underlie a sea-change in South African writing (a necessarily larger category than ‘literature’). These shifts in modes of writing and forms of address, and in audience, medium and reach, have produced a transformed space of literary production, one that is modelled to a lesser or greater extent on the continuous, looping ‘content’ (a blend of fact and commentary) of the new media. It is as if ‘writing’, including the ascendant category frequently referred to as creative or literary nonfiction, cannot but align itself with the energy, form and flow of the new media in the information age, of which it is an integral part. This is a site where practitioners have, to some degree, abandoned the academic cloisters and joined the 24/7 media wrap.

If it is fair to claim that nonfiction writing has garnered attention to the point where it seems to have eclipsed fictive forms, one cannot but wonder what the retort of fiction might be to such a situation. As noted in Chapter 1, Antjie Krog has stated, ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-Fiction’ 5), while Marlene van Niekerk has been quoted as saying that Altbeker's Fruit of a Poisoned Tree ‘almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country’. What underlies assertions such as theirs is the sense that the sheer scale of postapartheid's failure to deliver on its promises – and the need to document this perceived condition – has edged out imaginative or fictive writing as the country's leading form of literary intermediation. For a long period in South Africa's literary history, fictive forms prevailed as the locus of ultimate literary value, as suggested by the Nobel awards achieved by Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. Many authors have, in their own way, imagined a brave new future, but in the face of a ‘neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (O'Brien 3; Pechey 153), and a postapartheid public sphere widely perceived to be pathologised and felonious, where does ‘invention’ go? The imperative for writers, as we have observed, is more often found to be the exploration of actual, material conditions, and in so doing to establish the veracity of perceptions that emerge under conditions in which South Africans, according to Rian Malan, continue to occupy separate ‘kingdoms of consciousness’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-fiction’ 16). Recall, also, Steinberg's metaphor of ‘coordinating between deaf people’. In the face of an event such as Marikana, for example, what is more urgent – ‘reimagining’ the event, or finding out the deliberately obscured facts behind this catastrophe? What, indeed, is left for the imagination? And yet, despite the sense that one simply cannot ‘make this shit up’, as Twidle subtitles his essay on nonfiction, it is precisely because this ‘shit’ is so egregious that a crucial question begs to be asked: how might fiction respond to such conditions, and what form might this response take?

If Tsehloane's ‘end of history’ thesis about postapartheid literary culture is at all accurate, in the sense that writers embody in their works a ‘yearning for a different society’ but see such a hope as ‘futile’ (81), then the task of detection seems ever more urgent: what went wrong, and how was the early-transition plot, with its tropes of springtime and rainbows, of reconciliation and renaissance, so conclusively lost? Postapartheid South African writing in the 2000s enters what might be described as a forensic phase, following on from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; however, there is no single line of development in the various tropes and modes of diagnosis. Whether phantasmagorically or factually spun, in neo-noir thrillers or nonfiction accounts of a sick social ‘underbelly’, the tales in the later postapartheid phase have forfeited any innocence they may have laid claim to in the earlier, prelapsarian phase. A broader look at this collective act of diagnosis, a kind of collective biopsy on the ailing body of the ‘new’ South Africa, therefore seems apposite.

Neo-Noir 1: Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood

One of the most potent fictional treatments of a social condition perceived to be in an advanced stage of ill health is to be found in the work of thriller-writer Roger Smith, particularly his densely (over)plotted first two books, Mixed Blood (2009) and Wake Up Dead (2010). Despite its Byzantine plot, Mixed Blood is a strong thriller debut. It examines the devastation wrought by apartheid upon the people of

Cape Town – especially the large ‘coloured’ sector – and works it into a neo-noir style; noir itself is both a style in which excruciation is narrated with cool, worldly aplomb, and a mode in which, according to Foster Hirsch, ‘middle-class citizens [are] unexpectedly invaded by or lured into crime’ (13). Indeed, Smith's method is to create, in even in the most prosaic elements of literary style, settings that are saturated with the imminence of catastrophe and death, stricken with signs of disease and invasively contagious. And, as per the noir formula, the middle class, not to mention the extremely well-to-do, get sucked into a criminal culture despite their best efforts to remain separate from it. It is as if the actual material world of postapartheid conspires in the spreading of a murderous contagion.

This research took the form of many late nights grappling with texts, everything from social network theory to studies on urban space and planning to philosophy. What it produced is fairly unique, part of a growing genre known as documentary theatre. I have taken verbatim the words of people such as Sindiwe Magona, Njabulo Ndebele, Dennis Brutus, Zama Ndlovu, Sekoatlane Phamodi, and many other South Africans who are thinking publically about the problems South Africa faces and the dreams we must embrace, and I have asked Lebo Mashile, one of our country's most important contemporary poets, to perform them in order to make them visual.

I chose this methodology because I wanted us to remember that we have already written many, many important things about race and justice and humanity in this country. I also chose the documentary theatre genre because here in South Africa fact is often stranger and more poignant than fiction. In this context, performing real words on a stage forces us to confront their importance and it moves us beyond business as usual.

Lastly, I chose this genre because I wanted to signal that there is a new generation of contemporary thinkers: people such as Milisuthando Bongela, Danielle Bowler, T. O. Molefe, and others who are cited here, whose words are as much a window into this country's collective soul as those of Gordimer or Coetzee or Paton.

Now that the season of realpolitik is upon us and the rainbow myth is receding we must ask ourselves whether we still need a framework of reconciliation that presupposes friendship across the races as an important and useful barometer of the health of the nation.

Some will argue that the question of friendship is frivolous. They will say we must be more concerned with matters of politics and economics than of emotion, and that we don't need to be friends; we simply need not to interfere with one another's destinies. Others will insist that we must indeed be friends. They will wring their hands and argue that to abandon the idea of friendship is to abandon an important national ideal and perhaps to abandon a peaceful future.

In South Africa, it is not uncommon to hear families say that their domestic worker is a ‘friend of the family’ or even ‘like family’. While some employers strive to pay their ‘domestics’ a fairer wage, involve themselves in financing their laborers’ healthcare costs, and funding children's educations, most domestics are paid the minimal accepted daily rate of R100. Sometimes, the payment includes R10–R20, to buy a cheap lunch and transport money back to the township. The obvious socioeconomic power imbalances between the ‘madams’ and ‘maids’ of South Africa limit claims purporting to incorporate laborers into family structures. Yet, despite this, the language used to describe voluntary social contracts that determine the bonds of friendship, and the less voluntary — but obligatory — social contracts between family members is invoked in order to frame this unequal relationship.

Irma du Plessis (2011: 46) argues that domestic work, because of its ‘close affinity to the family’, operates as a ‘foundational unit in everyday and scholarly understandings of both “nation” and “society”’. Moreover, given the level of intimacy such laborers have in maintaining the architecture of white families, domestic work ‘may be understood not only as a contemporary social practice, that is, a lawful and regulated albeit imperfect and incomplete form of employment, but also as a central feature of what may be termed the apartheid social imaginary, an implicit social understanding of the way in which things stand between fellow citizens’. Taking into consideration the ‘extent to and the manner in which domestic work and the relationship between domestic workers, domestic employers and their respective families surface in the public domain in contemporary South Africa’, it is no wonder that this type of labor, and the laborers who carry it out, are ‘deeply inscribed with social meanings which are powerful in the present’.

The domestic spaces in which the boundaries of this unequal relationship are negotiated are also the location in which contemporary fears regarding the other — a ‘domesticated’ other who is invited into one's intimate spaces as a necessary component of maintaining one's exclusive domestic arena — are magnified.

Frank B. Wilderson III is considered one of the key thinkers developing the theoretical tradition of Afro-pessimism. Afro-pessimism connects the work of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, and others, building on certain readings of Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson, and Joy James. One of the decisive critical moves made by Afro-pessimists is to take the Black out of the space of a subjective, epistemological, or cultural identity, and into the realm of accumulation, fungibility, and ontology (Hartman 1997), defined by the three constituent components of slavery: social death, natal alienation, and general dishonour (Patterson 1985).

Afro-pessimists draw into question the historic development of the Human, and what that development has meant for the creation of the Black as non-Human. Wilderson (2010: 12) argues that Blackness is, ‘an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a labourer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity’. In this way, the socially dead, fungible Slave is a necessary relationality for the construction of the Human. That this relationship is both fundamentally destructive and necessary for the construction of liberated (mainly White) subjects is a fascinating and disturbing backdrop for a discussion of race and friendship. As Wilderson (2010: 22) writes, ‘the circulation of Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile and progressive moments in history (as in the French, English, and American revolutions), produces dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on the Black, and more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of human liberation in any era heretofore’. Afro-pessimism is not a politics, but it does point to the need for a new kind of politics beyond Fanon's ‘end of the world’: a complete revolution of what currently exists.

An African American, Wilderson lived in South Africa during the 1990s, where he was elected to the African National Congress (ANC), and became a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). He taught at the University of Witwatersrand, and also at Khanya College during that period. His memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid (2008) recounts his time in South Africa.

In retrospect, it was clear that his time at Ndaleni had been special. Abednego Dlamini was a student at the South African government's school for the training of African art teachers for two years,―1959 and 1960. He had come to Ndaleni after completing a teacher-training program at Mapumulo, where he had excelled in art and earned a recommendation that he pursue a specialist art teacher's course. At Ndaleni, Dlamini sculpted wood and studied art history; he developed a close relationship with his fellow students and their instructor, a white South African named Peter Bell. From Bell, Dlamini learned the technique of mixing bees’ wax with oil paint to ensure that his murals could endure the elements. Before leaving campus at the end of 1960, Dlamini erected a ladder in a covered breezeway and painted a riotously colored depiction of life at the Ndaleni art school. Four students tend to the wood-burning kiln in which art students fired their clay creations; behind them, a painter looks away from his easel to observe their labors. He is painting a landscape: a tree, a curved road, an open field. Moving left, the figures become indistinct. There are more than a dozen of them, swirling with energy: students read, they chat together, smiling, arms companionably draped over shoulders. They shake out large pieces of fabric (perhaps for batik?) and bend at work over a lathe. There are flowers, a blue sky, hills, and trees.

Twenty years later, Dlamini remembered his mural: ‘On entering the corridors you will observe long strips of mural painting, shimmering with harmonious and contrasting shades of colors in oils and beeswax. The medium of oil and beeswax was used by students under Mr Peter Bell.’ He was wistful. To think about Ndaleni was to be ‘revived artistically [by] the beauties my mind can carry and remember’. The impetus for Dlamini's remembrance was the apartheid government's decision to close the Ndaleni Art School in 1982. But in truth, he had long yearned for Ndaleni.

I have been hovering at the brink of this essay caught in a dizzying paradox. The editors’ invitation to contribute to this collection is a call to write about race and the politics of friendship in South Africa, or, as the title puts it, ‘the ties that bind’. Early on, I decided to adopt a new genre, to write a more autobiographically grounded essay than usual, but as I've sought to take up their invitation I've had to reckon with the fact that many of my most obviously interracial friendships depend on race remaining one of the unspoken and indeed unspeakable subjects. When in doubt one goes back to one's beginnings, and for me these are my too-quickly eroding mother-tongue chiShona, where kutamba naye means both to play and to dance together. What I am doing here is playing with ideas, ideas about friendship, the passage of time and yes, dancing.

As a Zimbabwean who now resides and holds citizenship in the U.S., my relation to South Africa is a transitory one, but I have often found that as a relative stranger, a sort of national poorer cousin, I have been free to speak more frankly about race with Zimbabwean friends in South Africa than at home. In this chapter I want to think about two related questions. The first concerns the silences upon which interracial friendships rest, and what might be gained and lost when such silences are breached. And the second concerns the relationship between place and friendship, a question that opens onto considering what it means to befriend another abroad, what the relationship between nostalgia and friendship might be, and how memory restructures the narratives of ‘home’ for diasporic subjects in ways that can productively and mutually unsettle fellow travelers. In other words, what happens when old friends meet, and speak frankly at last, and how can we make sense of the irreconcilable differences that give rise not to conflict so much as a recognition of structural antagonisms otherwise masked and mystified by the conviviality expected in schools, rehearsal spaces, apprenticeships, and other ideological state apparatuses. As the daughter of a white American mother and a black Zimbabwean father, the invitation to think about interracial friendship is necessarily confounding.

Few words have captured the hopes, expectations, and ethical claims of twentieth-century South African progressivism as has ‘nonracialism’. The concept is in fact remarkably apt to embrace a range of contending ideologies, from white liberalism to African nationalism, from socialism to capitalist developmentalism. The introduction to the first documentary collection on the topic, published at the dawn of the post-apartheid transition, proclaimed:

Looking back at the struggle's past, David Everatt (2009: 1) concurs that among the most consistent threads in the discourse of liberation in South Africa was a commitment to nonracialism. Much of the appeal of nonracialism has to do with how it blends an objective (a democracy with equal rights, opportunities, obligations, and responsibilities, regardless of race), a strategic vision leading to it (a movement that transcends racial divides by constituting the South African nation as the actor of popular and constitutional sovereignty), and the tactics translating that vision into practice (the alliance of organizations that, even when initially anchored to racial identities, sees them only as steps toward deracialized liberation) (see Gillespie 2010; Soske 2015).

In times of global fascination with Occupy Wall Street and ‘prefigurative politics’ — in which social movements proclaim their purity on account of the consonance between their practices and the social regeneration they herald — one can see why the political capital of South African nonracialism has depreciated less than that of its putative originator, the African National Congress (ANC).

Writing in 1896, Olive Schreiner, arguably the most radical critic of imperial policy of her day, argued that a racial apocalypse could be averted only if South Africa's white population ruled the country in the spirit of friendship, ‘a course of stern unremitting justice is demanded from us towards the native … we [must] raise him & bind him to ourselves with indissoluble bonds of sympathy and gratitude’. By tying the responsibilities of colonial governance to the cultivation of an unbreakable emotional bond, Schreiner articulated a vision of friendship that served as both an instrument and outcome of the civilizing mission, replacing a precarious rule of violence with the cultivation of a ‘native’ subjectivity that was bound by affection and gratitude to the (former) colonial master. Strikingly, a similar rhetoric can be found in the writing of white South Africans ranging from the segregationist Jan Smuts to the liberal author and politician Alan Paton, from apartheid ideologues of the 1950s to the young nonconformist Patrick Duncan. In the 1930s and 1940s, a social scientific version of this language developed under the sponsorship of the European-Native Joint Councils movement and the South African Institute of Race Relations. Whether articulated as a civilizing mission, separate development, or racial equality, each of these projects made claims on the emotional life of the colonized, and envisioned its outcome as generating bonds of affection between black and white. A history of colonial power in South Africa must therefore incorporate a genealogy of the language and practices of friendship.

At the same time, friendship is often understood to transcend the sphere of politics. Circulating affections and desires create connections that are not easily mapped onto existing power relations. Friendship can crystallize almost instantly both practices that resist structures of oppression and those that enable them: intimacies and complicities. This volume explores friendship as a mode of liberal colonial power, while still holding on to possibilities for insurgent, transgressive, and subversive friendships. How did the (generally homosocial) framework of colonial friendship function to police other forms of desire and articulate the gender dynamics of white settler society?

The grape picker holds out

his hand full of fruit but turns

his face, the slight, unavailable cast

of his head his most precious possession.

The woman who cleans your house

all day is in the places you cannot be,

touches your sheets.

You hate

what is held back,

not known to you,

kept, stolen, enchanted.

I first met Lesego Rampolokeng at the beginning of the millennium, a turning point in the history of our country, a time of rapid change and radical uncertainty, but also one of tremendous excitement and infinite possibility. Everything was being questioned: race as well as social, political, religious, and cultural life. To my generation, the dream of a free South Africa provided a space for new possibilities, new audacities, transgressions, and a new quest for collective identity.

This was the South Africa that Rampolokeng and I, together with fellow South African authors Ivan Vladislavić, Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, and Nadine Botha were invited to represent at the 2003 Crossing Border Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands. We traveled as a group and in a very short period of time spontaneous friendships were forged — especially among the young writers. Sello and I spent many afternoons walking Den Haag's streets, discussing the themes that propelled our work — the volatile intersections between race, class, and gender that continued to fracture post-apartheid society, especially in Cape Town, whose cosmopolitan character was strangely echoed in our surrounds.

We also talked about our dreams for other forms of belonging, of new friends, queer utopias, and different communities. Sex and desire with their erotic drives had a great part in it. As did politics. As Sello (Duiker 2001: 381) wrote in The Quiet Violence of Dreams: ‘There comes a time when we must face who we are boldly, when we must listen to the music of our dreams and delight ourselves with courage as we grasp our destinies firmly in our hands.’

In our youth and bravado — our naivety — we were unwilling, and perhaps unable to listen to the words of caution coming from the older writers in the group — Vladislavić and Rampolokeng — whose complex reading of postapartheid South Africa undercut our fervor. We should have paid attention. A year later, both Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker were dead — Sello tragically by his own hand. Their deaths had a stark impact on me. On one hand I felt betrayed: what of our shared dreams? Our shared futures? On the other hand, I experienced an excruciating sense of loneliness, of being alone, as a writer, but also as a person.