CHRISTINE MATZKE

Girls with Guts Writing a South African Thriller —Angela Makholwa in Conversation

N A RECENT ARTICLE ON THE CRIME WRITER WESSEL EBERSOHN, Geoff Davis writes that detective fiction “has rarely been considered a major genre in South African literature,” with regard neither to its critical I 1 reception nor to its place in the nation’s literary history. However, crime fiction has always existed at the edges of literary production in , waiting to be read, enjoyed, and ‘investigated’; from the early stories of Arthur Maimane in Drum Magazine in the 1950s to crime writers ‘proper’ during the years, Ebersohn and James McClure; from South Africa’s best-selling ‘export’, the Afrikaans-writing Deon Meyer, to countless texts that borrow elements from the genre.2 Indeed, when informally enquir- ing about contemporary crime novels in South Africa in 2003, the short-story writer and novelist Ivan Vladislavic replied: “Come to think of it, most South African literature is about crime.”3

1 Geoffrey V. Davis, “Political Loyalites and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind: The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn,” in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fic- tion from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke & Susanne Mühleisen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): 182. 2 For a brief overview of South African crime fiction, see Mike Nicol, “South Afri- can News from Mike Nicol,” http://www.thrillerwriters.org/2008/09/south-african- news-from-mike-nicol.html, and Mike Nicol, “Guest Blogger Mike Nicol of Crime Beat (South Africa), Saturday, November 22, 2008,” http://detectivesbeyondborders .blogspot.com/2008/11 /guest-blogger-mike-nicol-of-crime-beat.html; see also “Who’s Who of South African Crime Writing,” http://crimebeat.book.co.za/whos-who-of- south-african-crime-writing/ (all accessed 3 December 2008). 3 Personal conversation with the author at Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2003. 112 CHRISTINE MATZKE 

There is no doubt that crime fiction has been burgeoning in the ‘new’ South Africa, but particularly so in recent years. The reasons given are vari- ous, but all are equally compelling. In a 2006 radio interview, Deon Meyer reasoned that

it would have been totally impossible to write a book about policemen or former policemen in the old South Africa under the apartheid regime. What Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk did for me personally was they freed up police detective heroes and private eyes so that one can write about them. I don’t think it is possible to have a protagonist in a police state as a hero.4

Others elsewhere have argued in a similar vein, considering crime novels a particularly “democratic” genre, “produced on any large scale only in demo- cracies; dramatizing, under the bright cloak of entertainment, many of the pre- cious rights and privileges that have set the dwellers in constitutional lands apart from the less fortunate.”5 But there are also other viewpoints coming from contemporary South Africa. Barbara Erasmus, for example, a journalist and co-founder of the Cape-based Crime Beat blog, an exciting new online forum for South African crime-fiction aficionados, notes that “Crime has overtaken colour as a headline-grabber in South African newspapers – and the same trend can be detected in local literature.”6 She also expresses a certain tiredness of “apartheid and transformation literature,” which explains her own interest in the genre. Whatever reasons individual readers or writers might put forward, the fact is that crime fiction in all its multi-dimensionality has brought many new South African voices to the fore, one of whom is Angela Makholwa. A young professional with her own PR agency in , Makholwa published her first novel, Red Ink, in 2007 and is currently working on her third. Red

4 NPR Radio, “Deon Meyer: Probing South Africa in Crime Fiction,” Weekend Edition (Saturday, 27 May 2006), http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer .html?action =1&t=1&islist=false&id=5435833&m=5435834 (accessed 4 November 2008). 5 Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941; New York: Biblo & Tannen, new enlarged ed. 1968): 313. For a more detailed discussion of how Haycraft’s argument has been taken up, see Katja Meintel, Im Auge des Gesetzes: Kriminalromane aus dem frankophonen Afrika südlich der Sahara – Gattungskonventionen und Gewaltlegitimation (Aachen: Shaker, 2008): 3–7. 6 Barbara Erasmus, “Greetings and welcome to the Crime Beat blog!” (4 August 2007), http://book.co.za/bookchat/topic.php?id=1461 (accessed 4 November 2008).