Post-Transitional Narratives and Cultural Expression in South Africa and Nigeria, 2000-2010

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How to cite this thesis

Surname, Initial(s). (2012) Title of the thesis or dissertation. PhD. (Chemistry)/ M.Sc. (Physics)/ M.A. (Philosophy)/M.Com. (Finance) etc. [Unpublished]: University of Johannesburg. Retrieved from: https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Index?site_name=Research%20Output (Accessed: Date). POST-TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVES AND CULTURAL EXPRESSION IN SOUTH AFRICA AND NIGERIA, 2000-2010

Aghogho Akpome

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree

D. Litt. et Phil. in ENGLISH

in the

Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG

Supervisor: Professor Ronit Frenkel

May 2016

DECLARATION

I, Aghogho Akpome, hereby declare that this thesis titled, “Post-Transitional Narratives and Cultural Expression in South Africa and Nigeria, 2000-2010” is my own work. All the sources used and quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of a complete reference list, and the thesis has not been submitted at any university for degree purposes.

Signature: Date: 19 May, 2016 Aghogho Akpome

i DEDICATION

To the glory of God and the advancement of knowledge for better societies. And to the memories of my late father, Samson H. Akpome, and uncle, Duke E. O. Akpome.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful, firstly, to the Almighty God for the divine grace that enabled me pursue and complete this project. I prayed, many times, for staying power, for the ability to concentrate, to devote myself to the work, to remain motivated and focused. I found myself buffeted on several occasions, and I realized that without divine support, this project would be abandoned. I am glad to say God heard my prayers: Oghene wo kobiruo! I am grateful to my family members, my Christian brethren, my friends, and my colleagues. I count myself blessed to have so many good people around me. Without their constant encouragement, this would not have been possible. At the great risk of leaving out some names unintentionally, I wish to mention:  My dear wife, Rita, and our adorable children, Oghenovo, Oghenetega, Oghenenyerhovwo, and Eguonoghene. I know that the few gifts I brought home during the holidays are grossly insufficient to compensate for the sacrifices you made throughout the years. Thank you for loving me. I owe you forever.  My mother, Mary Agnes Akpome and my sisters – Omamomo, Efemena, and Oro; and my brothers – Ufuoma, Ejovwokoghene, Iruoghene, Oghenerukewe, and Patrick. Thank you.  Prof Ronit Frenkel, my supervisor for believing in my abilities and for the all-important roles she played throughout the course;  Other members of staff and colleagues at the Department of English, University of Johannesburg; especially Prof Craig MacKenzie, Prof Karen Schezinger, Dr Jane Starfield, Dr Sikhumbuzo Mngadi, Dr Bridget Grogan, and Dr Rebecca Fasselt. I thank you very much Rebecca for lending me that old Lenovo laptop after mine was stolen (along with three years of notes and my back-up USB stick) in downtown Johannesburg on the Eve of Easter Sunday, 2015. You saved a life! I would like to make special mention of Mrs Nicole Moore who was the first person I met at the department upon my first visit in June 2009. The collegiality of the members of the department made a huge difference during my long stay there. God bless you all.  The brethren at St. Luke’s Anglican Cathedral, Sapele; especially Sir Robert Esiri, Dame Josephine Omagba, Ven. Benjamin Efevwerha, Ven. Nelson Emebeyo, the late Ven.

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Oyovwe Okpara, Mr G. U. Oyibo, Mrs Ejuren-Odeh, for and on behalf of others too numerous to mention. Your extravagant goodwill and the generous gifts you gave to me and members of my immediate family strengthened me during the years I spent on this course.  The brethren at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Overcomers Parish, Brixton, Johannesburg; especially Pastor Leon Ikediashi and his amiable wife, Maureen; Pastor Jimi, Ayo and Masechaba, Emeka, Kazeem and Fati; Blessing, Esther, Seun, Thembi, and all the others. I love you all.  I have been encouraged (and sometimes terrified!) by how highly my abilities have been regarded by my many dear friends including Kayode Ikujenya, Ruese Udoro, Moses Ighedo, Lawrence Ekpetubu,‘Big Jo’ Akpome, Ese Eruoghororere, Cletus Atariata, Alex Amurunoghotse, Pamela Esiri. Thank you too, Abubakar Abdulkadir, Henry Gwaza, Yinka Adedoja, Femi Adeagbo, Edwin Etieyibo, Ama Monday, Bros Olu, Julius Osayi, Augustine Amos, the Ogbonnaya family (‘Chief’, Uzor, Ebuka, Chuks), Rexwhite Enakrire, Kehinde Owolabi, Nurudeen Aderibigbe, and all the members of the various Nigerian communities in Johannesburg and KwaDlangezwa.  Thanks to my mentors, Prof Godwin Oboh (‘Owainor’) and Joseph Eghwrudjakpor (‘Pajo’) who have been constant sources of encouragement over the years.  I am grateful for the bursaries provided to me by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg and the UJ Alumni Network, and for the financial gifts I received from friends and family members throughout the period of this course.  My former colleagues at the Writing Centres at the University of Johannesburg and at Wits School of Education were part of a stimulating environment that contributed in no small measure to the successful completion of this work. Thanks to Laura Dison, Navan Govender, Emmanuel Sibomana, Hilaire Habyarimana, Epimaque Niyibizi, Kgopotso Khumalo, Honore Fokwa-Mbamwi, Kabinga Shabanza, Sandy Kane, Rustin Schutte, Sandra Ayuk, Noel Dube and all the others.  I thank Chris McWade, Allan Muller, Rebecca Fasselt and Michelle Nel for taking time to read through some of my drafts and for offering priceless suggestions for improvement.

 A summary of the rationale and scope of this study was presented at the 2015 African Literature Association (ALA) conference held at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where I received helpful comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Prof Craig MacKenzie who provided for my attendance at that conference, and who has been a constant reference over the years.  Some of the ideas in chapter four are discussed in my article on Bitter Fruit which appeared in Africa Spectrum, 48 (2), 2013.  Parts of chapter three appeared in Africa Insight, 44 (1), 2014. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

ABSTRACT

This study examines patterns and discontinuities in the cultural and literary articulation of nationalism and public memory across transitional periods in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Nigeria after the return to democracy in 1999. The selected South African texts are: Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit (2001); Niell Blomkamp’s feature film District 9 (2009); and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009). The Nigeria texts are: In the Shadow of a Saint (2000), a biography of the late Ken Saro- Wiwa written by his son, Ken Wiwa; Helon Habila’s novel Measuring Time (2007); and the controversial BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos (2010). These texts, from three different genres, are interrogated for the ways in which they represent social identity, history, and nationhood in the changing contexts of on-going socio-political transition. The analyses foreground critical features of the evolving cultural history of the respective countries, both of which are representative of highly contested postcolonial spaces. The study reveals important intertextual relationships between what is theorized herein as post-dictatorship Nigerian writing and post-TRC South African literature. With particular regard to the two sites under focus, the study makes evident the ways in which narrative contributes to the shaping of the social imagination, especially in a post-conflict, transitional setting (see Ndebele, 1998; Andrews and McGuire, 2016), and how it is invariably implicated in legitimizing the truth claims upon which existing social categories are reinforced and new ones founded (see Moon, 2008). The first chapter provides a background to so-called ‘third-generation’ Nigerian writing and ‘post-transitional’ South African literature, which are theorized respectively as ‘post-military dictatorship’ (or post-dictatorship) and ‘post-TRC’ in chapter two. Each of the next three chapters presents a dialogic reading of one Nigerian and one South African text. The (auto)biographical texts In the Shadow of a Saint and Native Nostalgia are discussed in chapter three, with a focus on literary historiography and the texts’ portrayal of changing social categories. Chapter four explores the perspectives of the marginal protagonists in the novels Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit, while chapter five interrogates the films Welcome to Lagos and District 9 for their representation of slum urbanism as a key feature of contemporary transition in each country and in Africa at large. The final chapter foregrounds the salient features of post-dictatorship and post-TRC writing as

vi revealed by the texts. It also draws out the convergences and divergences in the overall depiction of national transition as a means of foregrounding the specific ways in which narrative is involved in the (re)invention of national culture.

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TIMELINE OF SOME MAJOR POLITICAL EVENTS IN NIGERIA: 1861-2011

1861 Britain annexes Lagos and makes it a crown colony

1884 Oil Rivers Protectorate formed from territories in the Niger Delta area

1885 Berlin Conference; British interest in Southern Nigeria is recognized by European powers

1893 The Niger Coast Protectorate is formed from territories in southwestern Nigeria and the former Oil Rivers Protectorate

1900 Protectorate of Southern Nigeria formed from the amalgamation of the Niger Coast Protectorate and territories chartered by the Royal Niger Company; Protectorate of Northern Nigeria also formed from territories of the conquered Sokoto Caliphate in the northwest and Borno Empire in the northeast.

1906 Lagos Colony joined to Southern Protectorate

1912 Indirect Rule instituted

1914 Northern and Southern Nigeria amalgamated

1954 Three regions formed – Eastern, Western, and Northern dominated by people from the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa /Fulani ethnic groups respectively

1956 First discoveries of commercial quantities of crude oil at Oloibiri and Afam in the Niger Delta area of the Eastern Region

1960 Independence is gained and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a northerner becomes prime minister

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1966 *January 15: A bloody military coup led by mostly Igbo-speaking officers from the Eastern Region deposes the government. Balewa is assassinated and General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, becomes head of state

*July 29: A bloody counter-coup led by northern officers deposes Aguiyi- Ironsi’s government; Aguiyi-Ironsi is assassinated. General Yakubu Gowon, a northern Christian, becomes head of state

1967 Ethnic tensions in the North claim the lives of thousands of mostly Igbo people leading to mass migration of Igbo people to the Eastern Region

*30 May: General Ojukwu, the Igbo military governor of the Eastern Region declares the region as the independent republic of Biafra; Civil war begins

1970 *15 January: Biafra surrenders; civil war ends

1975 *29 January: General Gowon is deposed in a bloodless coup and General Muritala Mohammed, a northerner, becomes head of state

1976 *13 February: General Mohammed is assassinated in an attempted coup; General Olusegun Obasanjo, his deputy, a Yoruba, becomes head of state

1979 Shehu Shagari, a northern politician becomes president after elections

1983 *31 December: Shagari is deposed in a bloodless coup and General Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner, becomes head of state

1985 *27 August: Buhari is overthrown in bloodless coup and General Ibrahim Babangida, a northerner, takes power

1986 *5 March: General Mamman Vatsa from the North is executed for a secret abortive coup

1990 *18 April: Major Gideon Orkar, from the area called the ‘Middle Belt’ which is to the south of Northern Nigeria, leads an unsuccessful coup attempt; he and his co-plotters are executed

1993 *12 June: General elections are held, Yoruba businessman, MKO Abiola is believed to be leading in the polls, but the election was annulled by General Babangida

*26 August: Babangida steps down, forms an Interim National Government, headed by Yoruba businessman, Ernest Shonekan

*17 November: General Sani Abacha, the northern army chief, forces Shonekan to resign, dissolves the government and becomes head of state

1995 Former head of state, General Obasanjo and others are arrested for planning a secret coup

*10 November: Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others are executed

1998 *8 June: Abacha dies of a heart attack and General Abdulsalam Abubakar becomes head of state

1999 *May 29: General Obasanjo is sworn in as civilian president after elections

2003 Obasanjo wins re-election

2006 *16 May: Obasanjo’s attempt to run for a third term fails as the National Assembly votes against amending the constitution for that purpose

2007 Umaru Musa Yar’Adua becomes president after general elections

2009 *5 May: Yar’Adua is pronounced dead from protracted illness; his vice, Goodluck Jonathan takes over as acting president

2011 Jonathan wins elections and begins four-year term

2015 Former dictator, Mohammadu Buhari wins general election and becomes president

TIMELINE OF SOME MAJOR POLITICAL EVENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA: 1843-2010

1843 Britain annexes Natal makes it a Colony

1848 Orange Free State republic is formed

1852 The Transvaal Boer Republic is formed

1871 Rich diamond deposits discovered in Kimberley

1872 Cape Colony granted responsible government status by British Crown

1877 Transvaal Boer Republic is annexed by Britain

1879 Anglo-Zulu war

1880 First Anglo-Boer War begins

1880 First Anglo-Boer war ends with Boer victory

1883 Paul Kruger becomes president of the Boer South African Republic

1886 Gold is discovered in Johannesburg

1888 De Beers Consolidated Mines is established in Kimberley

1899 Second Anglo-Boer War begins

1902 Second Anglo-Boer War ends with the Treaty of Vereeniging

1909 South Africa Act 1909 consolidates the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State into an independent Dominion of the British Crown

1910 The Union of South Africa is established with General Louis Both as the first president

1912 The Native National Congress, the forerunner to the African National Congress (ANC), is formed

1913 The Union parliament enacts the Natives’ Land Act which reserves 90% of South African land for the white minorities and lays the groundwork for institutionalized racial segregation

1914 The Afrikaaner-dominated National Party is formed with General Barry Hertzog as leader

1924 The National Party comes to power in a coalition with the Labour Party

1948 The National Party wins an absolute majority in the election, marking the official beginning of apartheid

1950 Major apartheid laws enacted including the Group Areas Act, Population Registration Act and the Immorality Act

1952 The ANC launches its defiance campaign; Albert Luthuli is elected president of the ANC with Nelson Mandela as his deputy

1953 The Separate Amenities Act and Bantu Education Act are enacted

1955 The Freedom Charter is drawn up by an anti-apartheid coalition

1958 Hendrik Verwoerd becomes prime minister; ‘Grand Apartheid’ begins

1960 The Union of South Africa comes to an end with a referendum of white voters

1960 Sharpeville Massacre; the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups are banned; a state of emergency is declared

1964 The Rivonia Trial ends; Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders are sentenced to jail for life

1966 UN Resolution 202 declares apartheid a crime against humanity

1970 The Homeland Citizens Act establishing reserves for natives is enacted

1974 UN General Assembly suspends South Africa

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1976 The Soweto Uprising

1983 The United Democratic Front (UDF) is formed as an umbrella anti-apartheid organization

1985 Protesters are massacred in Langa and nationwide civil unrest intensifies

1989 FW De Klerk becomes prime minister

1990 The ANC and other anti-apartheid groups are unbanned; Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners are released

1991 Major apartheid legislations are repealed and negotiations for an end to apartheid begins with CODESA

1994 First non-racial elections are held; Nelson Mandela becomes president

1996 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is established

1998 The TRC ends its public hearings

1999 Thabo Mbeki becomes president after the ANC wins second general elections

2004 Thabo Mbeki is sworn in for a second term

2007 Fractious ANC elective conference in Polokwane where Jacob Zuma defeats Mbeki for ANC presidency

2008 Bloody xenophobic riots leave 62 dead and many injured and displaced

2009 Thabo Mbeki recalled; his deputy, Kgalema Motlante assumes presidency; Jacob Zuma becomes president after ANC wins general elections; there is marked increase in violent ‘service-delivery-protests’ across the country;

2010 South Africa hosts a successful football World Cup but threats of xenophobic violence return after the tournament

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Declaration i

2 Dedication ii

3 Acknowledgements iv

4 Abstract vi

5 Timeline of major political events in Nigeria: 1861-2011 viii

6 Timeline of major political events in South Africa: 1843-2010 xi

7 Table of contents xiv

8 Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing Transition in Nigeria and South Africa, 2000-2010 Introduction 1

(Re)Conceptualizing ‘third-generation’ and ‘post-transitional’ writing 8

9 Chapter 2: Narrating Transition in Nigeria and South Africa, 2000-2010: Theoretical Considerations Introduction 14

Reconceptualizing transition: National histories, moments, movements, and 16 contexts 10 Chapter 3: Literary Historiography in Ken Wiwa’s In The Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia

Introduction: Socio-political background to the narratives 36

Historical revision and counter-discourse 45

Social differences and the (re)construction of national consciousness 59

11 Chapter 4: Marginal Voices in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

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Introduction 79

The role of child and youth protagonists in Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit 85

Critique of ‘paterfamilias authority’ and emergent social and political orders 98

12 Chapter 5: Depicting Urbanization and Social Underclasses in Welcome to Lagos and District 9

Introduction 117

Theoretical considerations: The postcolonial slum and the imagery of 121 abjection Lagos is a country: Conflating slum, city, and nation in Welcome to Lagos 130

Zones of indistinction in District 9 141

Late capitalism, urbanization, and cultures of economic survivalism 157

13 Conclusion: The Narrative (Re)Invention of National Culture 164

Notes 175

Works cited 183

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: WRITING TRANSITION IN NIGERIA AND SOUTH AFRICA, 2000-2010

Background

This study explores the trajectory of recent (2000-2010) literature in Nigeria and South Africa following crucial socio-political developments – after Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, and in South Africa, after the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency and the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The texts produced during the period under consideration are significant for the ways in which they reflect how these societies deal with recent socio-political transitions in cultural ways. This is particularly important as Nigeria and South Africa are highly representative of contested spaces in the postcolonial world in general, and in Africa in particular. Both have also been frequently described as Africa’s ‘literary giants’ (see Dunton, 2012; Fasselt, 2015; Edoro, 2015) for at least two ostensible reasons. First, both have thriving local literary industries that are relatively much larger than those of other African countries. Secondly, writers from these two countries have tended to dominate news of African writing for several decades, most notably by winning numerous prestigious literary prizes both within and outside the continent. More importantly for the dialogic reading of recent texts from both countries offered in this study is the eminent place that Nigeria and South Africa occupy (individually and together) in the various ways in which Africa is imagined, both within and outside the continent. A key premise of this study is that the evolving cultural archives of both sites invariably reflect a domain populated by historiographical and representational resources and practices that resonate across both sites, and that together extend our understanding of contemporary African realities. These possible resonances are explored in this study using an analytical framework that incorporates notions of culture criticism, postcolonial theory, transnationalism, as well as intertextuality. The study examines patterns and discontinuities in the cultural and literary articulation of nationalism and public memory in both countries as narrativized in six texts that have been selected from across different genres. The South African texts under

1 discussion are: Jacob Dlamini’s autobiographical Native Nostalgia (2009); Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit (2001); and Niell Blomkamp’s award-winning feature science- fiction thriller film District 9 (2009). The texts from Nigeria are: In the Shadow of a Saint (2000), the biography of slain Ken Saro-Wiwa written by his son Ken Wiwa; Helon Habila’s novel Measuring Time (2007); and the controversial BBC documentary series Welcome to Lagos (2010). Although the writers of these texts come from diverse backgrounds, they are not necessarily representative of their country’s social spectrum. Indeed, the texts are not selected on the basis of the demographic spread of their authors but in view of the fact that they provide scope for a productive investigation into the literary trends and thematic concerns that simultaneously characterize and reflect socio-political transition during the period under consideration. In this way, they represent a significant social, cultural and political period in each country. Collectively, they offer valuable insight into how official discourses of national reconciliation in both countries are problematized, contested, or reinforced through the ways in which national history and social identity is (re)imagined and portrayed. One of the key ways in which this insight is provided is the way the texts simultaneously open and fill cultural spaces with the voices of women, children, ‘ordinary’ people (including immigrants, for example) that are often obscured, ignored or elided (by design or not) in dominant narratives. The period under consideration is significant, as it marks a series of critical social changes in both countries. While the most conspicuous of these changes are the momentous regime changes of 1999, the transitions under consideration include those which became manifest from that year until the present time. The choice of the ten-year period ending in 2010 thus serves the purpose of research convenience for the selection of texts, and is not meant to suggest that the transitions investigated are limited to the year 2010. Following the important socio-political contexts that marked the turn of the 21st century, the growing literature on South Africa’s transition has continued to reveal increasing pluralism and divisiveness in the way writers imagine and represent the nation and the identities of its people. In their theorization of ‘post-transitional’ South African literature, Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie (2010: 1, 5) argue that the period of, roughly, 2000 to 2010 witnessed “a new wave of writing” which demonstrated that “the

South African literary and cultural landscape is changing, with a different relationship to the past” (emphasis added). The significance of the period is also registered in a special issue of the journal, Current Writing, which is thematically titled “Beyond 2000: South African Literature Today”. In his introduction to this collection of essays, Michael Chapman (2009: 1-2) makes the point that

[i]f 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’ (emphasis added).

By the time South Africa marked the 20th anniversary of its democracy in 2014, disturbing socio-political trends emerged to unsettle the idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ and challenge the official narrative of reconciliation that was the hallmark of the TRC. These include more frequent unrest (epitomized by the 2012 ‘Marikana Massacre’),1 increasingly violent ‘service delivery’ protests, growing economic inequalities, xenophobia, as well as fissures within the liberation fraternity in general, and the ruling party in particular. In the case of Nigeria, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence from Great Britain. 2 Three years earlier, when the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo ended, the country celebrated its first successful transition between consecutive civilian regimes since independence. And in 2014, when this study started, Nigeria marked the centenary of the amalgamation of the former previously separate Muslim-dominated northern and largely Christian southern protectorates (as well as the independent Colony of Lagos) as a single political entity. These socio-political watersheds continue to reverberate in current imaginings of the nation in both South Africa and Nigeria. In the case of Nigeria, the ‘North versus South’ dichotomy remains politically and culturally salient to literary portrayals of nationhood. So also have the memory and legacy of long periods of military rule, endemic ethnic rivalries, including, of course, the Biafran War (1967–70). Following the 1995 hanging of Ken Saro- Wiwa – a writer and minority rights campaigner – by the military dictator Sani Abacha, agitation in the Niger Delta over the inequitable distribution of oil wealth has intensified, further unsettling the idea of the nation, despite the return to democracy in 1999. The impact on Nigerian literary production and cultural articulation has been unmistakable. In

3 two oft-cited essays, Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton have noted the growing significance of Nigeria’s ‘third generation’ of writers, who thematize recent socio-cultural concerns, and whose works “exhibit distinctive features, in terms of scope of characterization, thematic and formal characteristics” (2008: viii). In the case of South Africa, the memory of apartheid, engagement with racial differences, and interest in the role of space or place in the negotiation of identity continue to be reflected in (re)constructions of contemporary South African nationhood (see Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010; Chapman, 2009; Chapman and Lenta, 2011). Yet, narrative does not only reflect cultural changes; it is also able to shape the social imagination, especially in a transitional setting (see Ndebele, 1998). Accordingly, it is invariably implicated in legitimizing the truth claims upon which existing social categories are reinforced and new ones founded (see Moon, 2008). It is therefore imperative to subject the increasingly diverse and contested accounts of transition to continual critical scrutiny. This is done in this study by examining how representational strategies are used to reflect the socio-cultural underpinnings of literary expression in both Nigeria and South Africa. By uncovering how these two highly representative African societies deal with conflict and its aftermath in cultural forms, the study hopes to enhance our understanding of contemporary cultural production in Africa. In terms of this connection, it is germane to reiterate the importance of the choice of Nigeria and South Africa as the focus of comparison. One useful way of highlighting this is through reference to the two films included in this study, Welcome to Lagos and District 9, which pay attention, respectively, to Lagos and Johannesburg. As the analyses of these films in chapter five of the study demonstrate, both cities possess immense metonymic purchase in terms of the dominant discursive representations, not only of their individual national societies, but also of the continent as a whole. This can be understood in two inter-related ways. Firstly, both cities are critical sites of contemporary urbanization, modernization, and globalization in the postcolonial world, and secondly, they feature as ubiquitous icons within dominant national, regional, and continental imaginaries. Both cities have become increasingly popular as the setting and/or subject of an increasing range of critical and creative works that explore experiences and realities in Africa in particular, and the global South in general.3 In the introduction to

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008), Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall argue that “Johannesburg is the premier African metropolis, the symbol par excellence of the ‘African modern’” (1). Sarah Nuttall (2004: 740) demonstrated earlier that the city “has emerged as the primary site for the creation of the social imaginary in much of” the recent fiction from southern Africa (emphasis added). Jonathan Haynes (2007) and Ayo Kehinde (2007) make similar observations about Lagos, especially regarding its deployment in the Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, and in recent fiction. Concerning Lagos, Robert Kaplan (2000: 15) also argues that dominant discursive portrayals of Lagos render the city as “the cliché par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction”.4 It goes without saying therefore that dominant perceptions and depictions of contemporary Africa are constituted significantly by images, narratives, tropes, memories, and experiences originating from, and associated with Nigeria and South Africa. This is not to make hasty suggestions about facile parallels between two countries with significantly different socio-political trajectories. Rather, it is to draw attention to the ways in which the texts under study enable inquiry into the possible transnational and intertextual linkages in cultural expression from both countries on the one hand, and how they may gesture to a larger ‘African intertext’ of figurative resources on the other. A significant attempt to shed light on these possible linkages has been provided by Rebecca Fasselt (2015: 23), who rightly observes the “sorely lacking dialogue” between literatures from the two countries regarded as the “powerhouses of African fiction”. Such a dialogue is offered in her exploration of how postcolonial leadership and power are thematized in Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (2008) and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2003). Fasselt notes the different trajectories of literary expression in Nigeria and South Africa which reflect their different histories, and highlights how several recent post-apartheid texts articulate the sense of disillusion that was a distinct feature of post-independence novels from other African countries. Using Achille Mbembe’s (2001) theory of power in postcolonial contexts, she provides a comparative reading of Langa’s and Habila’s novels to foreground how “their reflections on postcolonial leadership unsettle the boundaries of national literatures and invoke a sense of continental connectivity” (2015: 23). Citing Evan Mwangi (2009), Fasselt observes, furthermore, that such connectivity is best understood within the kaleidoscopic socio-political contexts

(“intense globalization”, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and postmodernist) of Langa’s, and Habila’s literary praxis. In this regard, the poststructuralist notion of intertextuality becomes helpful in understanding both the rationale and analytical framework of this study. When she coined the term, Julia Kristeva (1980: 68) used intertextuality to indicate “the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into history”. Ever since that time, the term has been deployed in different ways to connote the fluid set of complex relationships between texts, writers, and contexts of textual production (see Irwin, 2004; Worton and Still, 1990).5 It is in the latter regard that intertextuality becomes useful as one of the analytical lenses for this study’s exploration of probable links between texts from Nigeria and South Africa across different genres.6 Jonathan Culler’s (2004 [1976]) poststructuralist definition of the term emphasizes how different texts and writers simultaneously make recourse to a shared discursive space in an egalitarian way. This indicates the presence of an extensive semiotic domain and “an intersubjective body of knowledge” which together influence the conditions of possibility of new works (Culler, 2004 [1976]: 171) in the given discursive domain. In this formulation, texts that populate an intertextual domain invariably generate, appropriate, and reflect resonant ‘fragments’, ‘remnants’, and ‘traces’ of discursive resources and subject matter in terms of historical record, ideological slant, and representational praxis. In The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (2001), Abiola F. Irele attempts to outline the general features of the intersubjective repository that may link literatures from Nigeria and South Africa. He traces the development of modern African literature from its roots in the predominant oral traditions of the pre-colonial era, and as a distinct academic discipline from the 1950s, as well as its growing visibility in the Western academic establishment. The key essay in this collection, according to Harry Garuba (2003: 145), is one on the role of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which, over the decades, has come to occupy pole position within the canon of African cultural expression:

Apart from simply being a literary text, it is made to bear the burden of providing documentary evidence for anthropological studies and sociological speculations, corralled to perform other functions in histories of colonialism and decolonization and, in general, being made the representative text of the African response to European colonialism and modernity.

Although Garuba’s immediate concern in this regard is to highlight the disadvantages of the “‘hypercanonization’” (145) of this particular novel, his analysis reveals the value, in terms of interpretive practices at least, of understanding how an ostensible ‘African intertext’ contributes to the ways in which the continent is imagined in different domains.7 Incidentally, another African author who has been identified with a similarly powerful influence on “latter day African thinking and literature”, and with a “reach across … the Americas, Europe, and Asia” is South Africa’s Ezekiel Mphahlele (Times Media Group, 2008: n. p.). Okwui Enwezor’s (2003: 57-82) notion of “the postcolonial constellation” can be understood in a related sense. Enwezor uses the term to describe the relationships between art, culture, and history in formerly colonized spaces in the era of post-imperial globalization. He argues that current global geopolitical configurations, which tend to totalize cultures and spaces, “define the postcolonial matrix that shapes the ethics of subjectivity and creativity today” (57). This means that cultural and artistic production in these parts of the world are generally influenced by a particular set of largely similar factors, a situation that facilitates productive interrogation of possible resonances and discontinuities across individual national societies like Nigeria and South Africa. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to make evident the specific ways in which the selected narratives portray the construction, reconstruction, deconstruction, and naturalization of social, political and cultural subjects within the context of national transition. At issue are the ways in which narrative reflects the cultural and political frameworks of “how meanings of difference are produced, organized, and regulated through power, and the effects of these meanings on socio-political arrangements” (Dhamoon, 2009: 2). In this regard, the study investigates the figurative choices that dominate the representation of social identity and how these indicate, in Frederic Jameson’s (1981: 19) sense, the often opaque socio-political influences on cultural expression. The study is also interested in the selection and use of public memory or history in national debates. At issue here are the ways in which texts critique or advance competing versions

7 of national history canvassed in the public sphere, and how this may reflect contemporary transition. In addition, the study contributes to on-going efforts to codify the distinctive literary traditions represented by the growing body of writing from Nigeria and South Africa since the turn of the twenty-first century. This corpus of works, which is tentatively and loosely designated as ‘third generation’ and ‘post-transitional’ respectively, is theorized in this study as post-military dictatorship (or post-dictatorship) Nigerian, and post-TRC South African cultural expression. Appropriately, therefore, the inquiry begins with a short survey of literary and cultural articulation from 2000 to 2010 in the two countries under discussion with particular attention to the categories of ‘third-generation’ Nigerian writing, as well as post-apartheid, transitional, post-transitional and post-TRC South African writing in English. This will be set, necessarily, against the backdrop of literary production and socio-political developments leading up to and during the period under consideration.

(Re)Conceptualizing ‘third generation’ and ‘post-transitional’ writing

In “The Question of a National Literature for Nigeria”, Joanna Sullivan (2001: 71-85) problematizes the idea, or lack thereof, of a distinct corpus of writing that can be correctly identified as Nigerian national literature. She argues that “[i]t is highly contestable whether a Nigerian national character can be said to exist, or whether the nation has a singular ideology. What then become the defining criteria for a literature of a nation-in-the- making?” (74). She also rejects as unrealistic Chinua Achebe’s (1975: 56) suggestion that for a work to be admitted as part of the national literature it must take “the whole nation as its province”. Her conclusion, with which this study aligns, is that:

All texts must be considered, no matter what their language of origin, as contributing toward building the national character and ideology. As Nigeria continues its search for self-definition and nationhood, only the combined literatures of its disparate citizens, taken as a whole, can ultimately reflect the national character. (88)

This means that, in this study, the terms Nigerian literature and South African literature refer to works originating from, and focusing on, Nigeria and South Africa (respectively) either as a whole or in part (see also De Kock, 2005). The disjunctive context of anti-

8 colonial activism provided the backdrop of Nigeria’s, and indeed much of Africa’s, earliest literatures in European languages. As Adesanmi and Dunton (2005: 14) point out, the delineation of Nigerian writing into ‘generations’ is part of a critical tradition of periodizing African literature as a whole. This, they note further, is itself derived, in a sense, from Western critical practices whereby literary periods are associated with particular historical and socio-political trends.8 But whereas the Western practice reflects influences and conditions that are more or less national (for example, Italian and Russian futurism, French surrealism), those underpinning the periodization of African literature into ‘generations’ seem to be overwhelmingly continental in their purview. Needless to say, this approach results more or less in the totalization of social and political contexts of cultural expression across the hugely diverse parts of the continent. Yet it also reflects the strong resonances between the different national literary practices, a situation that invites close critical scrutiny. Adesanmi and Dunton (2008: 15-16) have argued that the most distinctive feature that sets third-generation texts apart from those of the so-called first and second generations is the absence of a more-or-less rooted, totalizing and over-determining historical “traditionalist centre” around which narrative point of view, thematization, language, and structure are orientated. This, they say, allows third-generation texts

much more expansive creative space, fluid plot[s], faster-paced narrative[s], and language shorn of the domestication-impulse of the first and second generation writers. Setting is almost always urban and ambience is equally euromodernist.

This view is echoed by Hamish Dalley (2013) in his exploration of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). Yet, Dalley argues that the spatio-temporal frameworks of third-generation Nigerian literature are ambivalent and inconsistent with the “national-generational approach” that underpins how they are currently described:

As its juxtaposition of signifiers implies, the label “Third Generation Nigerian Literature” welds territorial and historical registers. It groups literary works on the basis of their putative affiliation to a nation-state and their location in a historical narrative beginning with foundational figures and proceeding through stages. (Dalley, 2013: 16)

For a more nuanced understanding of current Nigerian writing, he proposes that greater attention be paid to “the entanglement of times and territories that constitute it” (33). This resonates, interestingly, with Ronit Frenkel’s (2013) reading of ‘post-transitional’ South African literatures as palimpsests in which layers of transitional experiences, discourses, temporalities, and spatialities are bounded narratively. It is therefore possible that a comparison of ‘third-generation’ and ‘post-transitional’ literary practices may reveal possible intertextual connections between the two and yield enhanced understanding of both in interesting and innovative ways. The texts selected for this study are not only workable examples of the literary patterns and phenomena under focus, they also yield themselves to productive comparisons between current writing in Nigeria and South Africa. In these ways, they facilitate the attempt of this study to contribute to the ongoing effort to theorize more firmly, the emerging corpora that are still problematically designated as ‘post-transitional’ South African literature and ‘third-generation’ Nigerian writing respectively. Delineating what constitutes South African literature and providing accounts (whether limited or comprehensive) of the works and writers that make up this corpus is a thriving critical enterprise.9 Leon de Kock (2005: 69-83) has provocatively addressed questions of what should constitute the category of a national South African literature in the aftermath of apartheid. He argues that such a category must transcend the “normative” and assumed limits of works written in English and those which are in “global consumption” in order to embrace the numerous literary and historical traditions of the country’s diverse population. De Kock highlights – like Sullivan (2001) in regard to Nigerian literature – the constructed nature of South African nationalism both in the democratic present and in the apartheid past. He thus describes contemporary South African literature as a site of “simultaneous cultural convergence and divergence, where a representational seam is the paradox qualifying any attempt to imagine organicism or unity” (De Kock, 2005, 74). This concise survey provides a useful backdrop for understanding the ongoing critical effort to codify current South African writing as an emergent literary dispensation which has so far been variously characterized in such terms as “post post-apartheid” (Chapman, 2009: 1), ‘second transition’,10 “a third phase of transition” (Doxtader, 2001: 23), ‘post-transitional’ (Samuelson, 2008; Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) and ‘after

10 postcoloniality’ (West-Pavlov, 2015).11 This subject is the focus of the chapter to follow, in which I explore the discursive construction of national history and transition, especially in South Africa. I discuss the idea of post-transitional South African literature in detail and link this to the theorization of third-generation Nigerian literature. Highlighting the limits of these terms, and exploring the conceptualization of transition and national histories, I propose that the corpus of contemporary literature in Nigeria and South Africa may be more accurately termed ‘post-dictatorship’ and ‘post-TRC’ respectively. The next three chapters provide detailed textual analyses. In exploring the narrative choices that dominate the representation and historicization of social change in these texts, it is important to recall Frederic Jameson’s (1981) arguments about the social and political symbolisms underpinning cultural expression. It is in this regard that Kim Fortun (2009) and James Clifford (1986) argue that close attention be paid to the discursive practices involved in the writing of cultural accounts. Fortun (2009: ix) observes that textual inscriptions function within “a wider symbolic, discursive and political economic context”, while Clifford (1986: 2, 7, original emphasis) argues that culture is invariably “composed of seriously contested codes and representations” that are “inherently partial – committed and incomplete”. The close reading undertaken in the chapters to follow therefore deploy relevant theories that facilitate the unmasking of the cultural and political frameworks of the discursive construction of social difference. Chapter three, titled “Literary Historiography in Ken Wiwa’s In The Shadow of a Saint (2001) and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009)”, offers a dialogic analysis of the selected (auto)biographical texts. The discussion focuses on the ways in which each text thematizes national history in counter-hegemonic ways, as well as how they (re)construct identity in the context of transition. In regard to Wiwa’s text, the chapter focuses on his depiction of Ogoni ethnic nationalism within his account of a problematic post- independence Nigerian nationhood. Wiwa’s vigorous delineation of ethnic differences in Nigeria is in contrast to Dlamini’s marginalization of ethnic and racial consciousness in Native Nostalgia. However, Dlamini emphasizes class differences and the role of space and place in his reconstruction of post-TRC black South African identity. I use the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ to connote a range of meanings – metaphorical, cartographical, and otherwise – that reflect textual and philosophical conceptualizations of topography,

11 landscape, as well as geographical and social environments (see Weigel, 2009). Although I mostly use the terms together in the course of this study, it is important to point out the nuanced differences that exist between them. In “Space and Spatiality in theory”, Peter Merriman et al. (2012: 4) observe that some disciplines

prefer to operationalize seemingly more encultured and embodied concepts, such as place, environment, landscape, region and locale, in their studies than the seemingly more abstract concept of space, but it is precisely the multiplicitous and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality – as abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute – which lends the concept a powerful functionality that appeals to many geographers and thinkers in the social sciences and humanities.

Chapter four is titled “Marginal Voices in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001)”. It analyses the two novels in terms of the delineation of, and the perspectives offered by, marginal characters, especially their child and youth protagonists. The chapter also examines the critique of emerging national political elites and national cultures under the charge of an older generation of characters caught in the throes of the multiple twilight zones that symbolize the disorienting effects of socio-political transition. Although these novels are not nationalist in outlook, their analysis incorporates influential ideas on novelistic representations of nation and nationhood (Anderson, 1983; Brennan, 1990; Culler, 1999; Bhabha, 1990; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). In exploring the texts’ delineation of child and youth protagonists, the chapter draws on, among other things, theorizations of the postcolonial bildungsroman (Amoko, 2009; Okuyade, 2009; Vásquez, 2002), as well as Christopher Ouma’s (2009) study on the narrative construction of childhood in opposition to paterfamilias authority figures in recent Nigerian writing. Chapter five is titled “Depicting Urbanization and Social Underclasses in Welcome to Lagos (2010) and District 9 (2009).” It analyses the two selected films, paying attention to their representation of contemporary urbanization as a trope of socio-political transition. The discussion focuses on the symbolism of the city, the slum, as well as the slum dweller as metonyms in each film’s allegorical portrayal of the socio-economic conditions of the countries as a whole. Furthermore, the chapter explores the role of globalized capitalism and the modern state in producing what Giorgio Agamben (1998) has famously theorized as ‘bare life’, ‘zones of indistinction’, and ‘states of exception’ in regard to the dire socio-

12 economic conditions of the majority of citizens in the countries under consideration. The analysis draws on scholarship on postcolonial global cities (Sassen, 2005; Dawson and Edwards, 2004; Nuttall, 2004; Nuttall and Mbembe, 2008) in addition to studies on the symbolisms of the image of filth and abjection (Nel, 2012; Lincoln, 2008, Harrow, 2013). The final chapter, “Conclusion: The Narrative (Re)Invention of National Culture” foregrounds the convergences and divergences in the representation of national transition and social subjectivization. This chapter makes evident some of the specific ways in which narratives are involved in the (re)invention of culture, and how they are invariably implicated in the (re)construction of socio-political structures within contested transitional spaces (Dhamoon, 2009; Moon, 2008). The chapter also highlights the intertextual connections between the post-dictatorship and post-TRC corpora of which the selected texts are representative.

CHAPTER TWO

NARRATING TRANSITION IN NIGERIA AND SOUTH AFRICA, 2000-2010: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Introduction

Since approximately 2009, critics have been enthusiastically engaged in theorizing the corpus of literature coming out of South Africa. In this regard, the need to move beyond relatively expansive and imprecise categorizations such as ‘post-apartheid’ and ‘transition’ has been highlighted (Samuelson, 2009; Chapman, 2008; Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010; Moonsamy, 2014; Bystrom, 2016). The objective has largely been to identify and codify the possible influences, effects, and features of cultural articulation within the peculiar social, economic, cultural, and political contexts of the post-1994 dispensation. While the recent developments in the South African literary scene are associated with the country’s movement from a repressive political system to one of greater social freedoms, the situation in Nigeria is associated, ironically, with the intensification of social repression during the years of military dictatorship from 1984 to 1999. Accordingly, considerable critical effort has similarly focused on codifying the salient features of Nigerian literature of this important period. The discussion in this chapter brings the parallel conceptualizations of recent literary production in the two domains into revealing and much needed dialogue while sketching the overarching conceptual framework of this study. I begin by examining the delineations of supposedly distinct literary periods since the late 1980s when official apartheid began to give way (see Chapman, 2009; De Kock, 2005). I focus extensively on the idea of ‘the post-transitional’ (Samuelson, 2008: Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010), and link it to the critical tradition of periodizing Nigerian literary production into three ‘generations’. Pointing out the limitations of these approaches, I argue for a different way of conceptualizing and delineating transition in the criticism of recent Nigerian and South African literature. In this regard, I foreground the profoundly disjunctive, kaleidoscopic, and rapid nature of social changes in post-colonial Africa during periods of contemporary modernization – which, in this study, covers periods of European colonization, decolonization, and (post)modern globalization. I argue that, for this reason, contemporary

African literatures (much more than literatures from the western world for example) may be generally understood as literatures of transition. Against this overarching framework, several distinct transitions can be delineated, using more precise terms such as, I propose, ‘post-TRC’12 and ‘post-military dictatorship’ in regard to the current corpora of South African and Nigerian literatures respectively. Post- TRC and post-military dictatorship are therefore used in this study to gesture to the specific transitions (or transitional moments and contexts) that are demonstrably influenced by the TRC and military dictatorship respectively. For post-TRC, the specific transitional moments and contexts under consideration are dominated by changing attitudes to, and declining pre-occupation with the TRC. In the case of ‘post-dictatorship’ Nigerian writing, the prefix indicates textual practices that reflect responses to, and critique of, the lingering legacies of decades of military dictatorship. It is necessary at this juncture to make the very important caveat that the ‘post’ in ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’13 is not meant to serve as a strict marker of temporality or as an indication that the effects of the TRC and military dictatorship have ceased. Indeed, the problems inherent in the prefix need to be understood in similar ways as have been argued in regard to ‘postcolonial/post-colonial’ (see, for example, Appiah, 1991; Young, 2001).14 Simon Gikandi (2006: 97) highlights the “inability to periodize and historicize the colonial experience” as the inherent limitation of the term ‘postcolonial’. One of the most prominent arguments in this debate is offered in Anne McClintock’s (1992) essay aptly titled “Pitfalls of the term ‘Post-Colonialism’”. In this essay, McClintock summarizes the major weaknesses of the term in relation to the overt theoretical objectives of postcolonial theory in general:

[T]he term “post-colonialism” is haunted by the very figure of linear “development” that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, the term “post-colonialism” marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from “the pre-colonial,” to “the colonial,” to “the post-colonial” – an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of “development”. … Metaphorically poised on the border between old and new, end and beginning, the term heralds the end of a world era, but within the same trope of linear progress that animated that era. If “post-colonial” theory has sought to challenge the grand march of western historicism with its entourage of binaries (self-other, metropolis-colony, centre-periphery, etc), the term “postcolonialism” nonetheless re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/ post-colonial. . . . The “post-colonial” scene occurs in an entranced suspension of history as if the definitive events have preceded us and are not now in the making (McClintock, 1992: 85-86, original emphasis).

Although similar arguments can be advanced against ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’, it is important to highlight a critical difference between these neologisms and the terms they seek to replace. This can be best clarified in regard to post-TRC. The shift from ‘post-transitional’ to ‘post-TRC’ proposed in this study is in specific regard to my argument that the overarching notion of ‘transition’ should be unhinged from referents that apparently set transition within fixed temporal points. Thus, while the temporal boundaries connoted by ‘post-transition’ problematically relate to transition as a whole, those suggested by ‘post-TRC’ relate only to the specific transitional moments and contexts associated with the TRC. In this way, as I argue in greater detail in the section to follow, these neologisms (despite their own obvious limitations) still hold the potential of obviating some of the main flaws associated with ‘post-transitional’ and ‘third-generation’.

Reconceptualizing transition: National histories, moments, movements, and contexts

The term ‘post-transitional’ is used commonly in the domains of political studies and development studies. It is often used in reference to countries undergoing, or that have undergone, the democratization of national political systems and the consequent or accompanying transformation of their national economies to the free market system from the late 1980s onwards (see Valenzuela, 1990, Bezemer, 2011). In this connection, ‘countries in transition’ refer to countries where totalitarian regimes (usually one-party socialist states and military dictatorships) became substituted by popular democracy mostly in the period leading to, and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of the countries in this broad category were part of the defunct Soviet Union and are in Central and Eastern Europe. Others that meet this description include South American countries like Brazil and Chile, and of course South Africa (see Hujo, 2014).15 There is also the related term, ‘transitional justice’, which refers to the scholarly field focusing on peculiar juridical systems instituted in certain societies after periods and instances of mass violence (Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena, 2006). The concept of transitional justice found political and juridical expression mainly through several iconic national truth commissions.16 Arguably, the most notable of these, as least in Africa, was South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established in 1996 shortly after the inauguration of democracy. The committee’s work, especially its dramatic public 16 hearings and controversial amnesty programme, is an extremely significant moment in the country’s transition towards reconciliation and an official national vision that was famously described by Desmond Tutu as a “rainbow nation” (Manzo, 1996: 71). In this regard, the TRC has inspired a plethora of literary works, both fictional and non-fictional, exemplifying what Njabulo Ndebele (1998: 20) called the country’s “movement from oppression to expression”. It is in these ways and for these reasons that the TRC represents a key historical, political, social, and cultural node in the post-apartheid dispensation, as well as an inescapable point of reference in the delineation of contemporary South African literary production. The earliest traceable use of the term, ‘post-transitional’ in respect of a putatively distinct South African literary tradition is by Meg Samuelson (2008: 130-137). Although she does not explicitly link the term to contexts outside literary criticism, it can be assumed that such a connection is implied with regard to South Africa’s democratization and economic liberalization since the late 1990s. Samuelson mentions “[what] we might call ‘post-transitional’ writing” (132) during her discussion of the emerging features of South African cultural expression in the period following the inauguration of constitutional democracy. Although the term is reiterated a few times in this particular article, Samuelson does not offer a formal and comprehensive theorization of what it actually denotes. This task is taken up by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie (2010: 1-10) in “Conceptualizing ‘Post-transitional’ South African Literature in English”, in which they also curate different propositions on the distinctive features of South African literary production in the rough ten-year period from about 2000. They label this corpus ‘post-transitional literature’, and describe it as a

new wave of writing, which is often unfettered to the past in the way that much apartheid writing was, but may still reconsider it in new ways. Equally, it may ignore it altogether. Other features include politically incorrect humour and incisive satire, and the mixing of genres with zest and freedom. All of this often renders nugatory traditional markers like nationality, race or ethnicity. (1)

The texts identified by Frenkel and MacKenzie demonstrate “extraordinary range and diversity” in both thematic and formal ways, and are authored by “a new generation of writers” from a wide range of backgrounds. The most salient thematic features of this corpus relate to the various ways in which texts offer revised approaches in relation to

17 categories such as “race, history, and space/place” (2010: 2). Although these characteristics are not necessarily unique to the dispensation under consideration, Frenkel and MacKenzie note that they are “dominant” to the point that “the hallmarks of apartheid-era literature – ‘protest-style writing’, literary realism, moral earnestness, the dominance of race, predictability – have largely been swept aside …” (2). On the basis of these features, Frenkel and MacKenzie argue for the recognition of South African literary works produced post-2000 as a distinct corpus under the tag of “post-transitional” literature. As is characteristic of such classificatory projects, Frenkel and MacKenzie express awareness of the overt and latent limitations of the term. The first and most obvious issue is the term’s temporal denotation of, and reference to “something occurring after a period of change”:

The term ‘post-transitional’ is certainly not without its problems. It is, and is not, a temporal marker, as it does refer to something moving but does not claim that the issues involved in the transition have been resolved. As a referent it cannot but highlight the passage of time that has passed since South Africa’s transition into a democracy, yet it also points to the period before and after this formal transition as an unbounded period and discourse. The term ‘post-transitional’ can be read in much the same way as the term ‘post-feminist’, with its attendant conceptual shifts that do not necessarily imply that the ideals of feminism have been attained and are now to be taken for granted. (4)

Further clarification on this point is provided by Ashraf Jamal’s (2010: 15) description of the ‘post’ in ‘post-transitional’ as a signifier, not of “a negation or a surpassing”, but of “a zone of activity” (original emphasis).17 By this formulation, post-transitionality emerges as “Janus-faced, [since] one transitional experience is already present in another in some form, but as a signifier, it can be situated in, rather than bounded by, a timeframe” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010: 4). Frenkel (2013: 25-44) builds on these ideas in her exploration of three novels – Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001), Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006), and Ceridwen Dovey’s Blood Kin (2007). Describing Mpe’s novel as a formative text of the transitional period and the two others as post-transitional, she argues that “the post-transitional can be read as a palimpsestic” portrayal of multiple layers of temporality, space, and discursive acts. The value of such a reading is reflected in the increasing deployment of the term, ‘post-transitional’ by critics who focus on South African cultural expression in the period following the transition to democracy (see, for example, Rastogi, 2011; Moonsamy, 2013,

2014; Fasselt, 2015; Propst, 2015). The term has been applied to texts that were produced during the period under consideration in this study (i.e. 2000 – 2010) as well as those deemed to be influenced by or to reflect the distinctive social, cultural and political conditions of this period. While the notion of post-transitionality is a very useful analytical tool, its limitations have been made evident. In his contribution to the special issue of English Studies in Africa in which Frenkel and MacKenzie’s theory appears, Chris Thurman (2010: 91-103) contests the validity of the “post-transitional” literature on several grounds. His main point is that South Africa’s transition from apartheid is a process that is still in progress and one whose outcome remains unknown:

How can there be such a thing as ‘post-transitional literature’ (which would imply that we have completed a transition)? Aren’t we still in a process of transition from apartheid to something else? What is that something else? We have done away with legally enforced segregation, but we certainly cannot claim to be ‘beyond’ apartheid. Ongoing social, racial and economic divisions are evidence that even terms such as ‘post-apartheid South Africa’ are problematic. (91)

He also challenges the suitability of the category of ‘post-apartheid’ literature. In this regard, Thurman cites Ivan Vladislavić’s argument that whereas his own work is often labelled as ‘post-apartheid’, the term is premised on a “false division” between the apartheid past and the democratic present. According to Vladislavić, “history doesn’t work like that; no matter how spectacular the transitions and changes are, it doesn’t fall into neat compartments and chapters. And certainly, in one’s lived experience, it’s a much greyer, more muddled process” (quoted in Thurman, 2010: 91). Thurman also disputes the features that Frenkel and MacKenzie claim to be distinctively post-transitional. Interrogating the deployment of allegory in selected ‘pre-transitional’ and ‘post-transitional’ texts, Thurman argues that there are not enough differences in the reading, writing, and living contexts of the two supposedly discrete periods (i.e. transitional and post-transitional) to justify the idea of post-transitional South African literature.18 Michael Titlestad’s (2010: 118-121) reservations about the idea of a post- transitional South African literary tradition are more equivocal than Thurman’s. Titlestad cautions that the term is premature, and that in spite of its analytical worth, “it might never pertain in the ways in which” its inventors “seek to make it mean” (121) since critics do not

(and cannot) yet approach the still growing corpus from the required distance that allows for greater objectivity and accuracy. Nedine Moonsamy (2014: 2) argues in the same vein, contending that the ‘post’ in ‘post-transitional’ expresses an untimely “illusion of escape [that] is somewhat premature” given that discursive and imaginative strategies remain in flux. She interrogates a range of texts published between 2002 and 2006 for the ways in which they are “symptomatic of a national imaginary grappling with the very elusiveness of a ‘post-transitional’ South Africa, and which now makes its accommodations through the conceptual frameworks of nostalgia” (2). David Medalie (2010: 35-44) takes this point further in “The Uses of Nostalgia”. Noting that engagement with the past is a dominant practice within current writing, he argues that this “may be understood as a form of nostalgia, and that it may even be pertinent to characterize it as a literature of nostalgia” (36). Medalie’s point resonates with Moonsamy’s (2014: 23) description of contemporary South African literature in terms of “nostalgia contretemps”. This means, according to her, that current experiences of nostalgia in the country’s imaginary are influenced by notions of the future which functions as “an organising temporality for nostalgia”. Eric Worby and Shireen Ally (2013: 457) also attest to the growing recourse to nostalgia in current writing. They identify “a new genre of ‘struggle nostalgia’” consisting of an increasing number of memoirs by senior post- apartheid government leaders who were former anti-apartheid activists.19 This notwithstanding, Medalie resists the urge to provide a definitive taxonomy or characterization for current South African writing, and chooses rather to subsume it within the broad category of ‘post-apartheid’ while at the same time highlighting the continued purchase of the past:

South African literature of the post-apartheid period is difficult to categorise. It is both diverse and encumbered with sameness, profound and glib, predictable and unpredictable, linguistically ambitious and linguistically drab. Making generalizations about it is problematic and attempting to trace all its moods and manifestations is an impossible (and perhaps even pointless) task. But what one can say is that, if one looks at the most significant literary texts of the last seventeen years, what is central to most of them is a preoccupation with the relationship between the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present. They seem unable to engage the present without summoning the past.

Following Thurman (2010), Titlestad (2010), and Moonsamy (2014), I argue that the description of current South African literary expression as ‘post-transitional’ needs to be

20 reconsidered in spite of the apparent usefulness of the term. In addition to the reservations adumbrated in the foregoing paragraphs, I outline the need for a reappraisal of contemporary South African literary expression based on a close examination of how contemporary South African history and transition are discursively framed. Whether intended or not, projects of periodization invariably reflect debatable perceptions of continuities and discontinuities – whether of form, content, context, ideological slant, or all of these – over timeframes that are equally debatable. Lawrence Besserman (2013 [1976]: 20) makes this point when he observes that differing systems of chronology and reckonings of time are an “essential component of the problematics of periodization”. Thus, the delineation of a new or discrete national epoch reflects, first and foremost particular conceptions of national history, as well as how the interrelated but distinct notions of transition, change, and transformation are understood in a given national context. It is instructive, for instance, that Frenkel and MacKenzie (2010: 4) seem limited to the few post-1994 years in their conception of transition when they argue that “the transitional period, understood as inextricable from the spectacle of the TRC, ha[d] begin to wane” by the mid-2000s. This view of transition reflects a prevailing conception of recent South African history in binary terms in which the apartheid past is neatly separated from the democratic present by a dividing line commonly called ‘the transition’. This is foregrounded in Samuelson’s (2008) article, revealingly titled, “Walking Through the Door and Inhabiting the House: South African Literary Culture and Criticism after the Transition” (emphasis added). Within the article, she offers the following analogy:

In 1996, Ingrid de Kok evocatively described the transitional moment as one of ‘Standing in the Doorway’. Arrested on this threshold, literature of the transition stood transfixed, ‘with a creased Janus face, vigilant of the past, watchful of the future’ (5), she observed. Writing also in that swinging-door moment of 1996, Njabulo Ndebele addressed the need to restore national domiciles in the wake of the ‘loss of homes [and the] demise of intimacy’ (‘Home’ 29) that had occurred under apartheid’s wrenching displacements and estrangements. Approaching the state of South African literary culture and criticism after the transition, I evoke De Kok’s image and Ndebele’s concerns in order to start thinking toward what it might mean to move beyond the liminal threshold moment of transition: to walk through that door and inhabit the house of a new national culture. (2010: 130; emphasis added)

In this formulation, transition is defined – intentionally or otherwise – in strict temporal terms as ‘event’ and ‘moment’. It is more often than not expressed in terms of singularity, and narrowed down as ‘the transition’: a socio-political moment constitutive of the

21 watershed events of the early 1990s that led up to the inauguration of constitutional democracy in 1994. For example, Sarah Lincoln (2008: 194) makes reference to “the transition from apartheid during the early 1990s”, and Martha Evans (2012) actually limits the timeframe to 1990-1994 in her study titled, “Transmitting the Transition: Media Events and Post-Apartheid South African National Identity”. Anne Reef (2005: 257) refers to the period around which Desmond Tutu coined the term ‘rainbow nation’ as “the beginning of [South African] transition” while Lucy Graham (2012: 16) speaks of “the post-apartheid transition” or “the transition to black governance”. For her part, Kerry Bystrom (2016: 4, 156) speaks of “the extended transition” to refer to “the first 15 years of democracy”. A more nuanced but equally problematical view is provided by Leon de Kock (2015). De Kock’s (2015: 55) acknowledgment that recent South African writing needs to be understood in the context of “mashed up temporalities”, is however contradicted by his reference to “pre-transition literature” ostensibly to signify texts produced prior to the politically charged period of the early 1990s. In these ways, the transition from apartheid has been invariably perceived and represented, whether intentionally or not, in both popular and official discourses as something that has passed or is already completed. Although this is clearly not the case, such a problematical reading becomes automatically projected onto, and reinforced by, the derived notion of ‘post-transitionality’ that compromises the efficacy of the latter term. In these ways, the transition from apartheid has been invariably perceived and represented – whether intentionally or not – in both popular and official discourses as something that has passed or is already completed. And indeed while Frenkel and MacKenzie’s argue that the ‘post’ in post-transition should be understood as signifying “a zone of activity and discourse” rather than a temporal marker that ring-fences the period labelled ‘transition’, they also state that the post- transitional can also “be situated in … a timeframe” (4, emphasis added). It is impossible therefore to separate post-transitionality from the discursive idea of ‘the transition’ as little more than a set of discrete fleeting past events. Such an understanding consequently renders the post-transitional as a short-lived moment on a linear historical timeline calibrated into what Aristotle described as “‘quantified and ...precise fleeting instants’” (quoted in Lorenz, 2010: 76). The fleeting nature of such calibrations is reflected, for instance, by such notions as ‘post post-apartheid’ (Chapman, 2009) and ‘second transition’ (ANC, 2012).20 It is

22 further highlighted by the division of texts produced five years apart (2001 and 2006) into post-apartheid and post-transitional respectively by Frenkel (2013). It is probably more productive, I suggest, to reconsider the contemporary transition to democracy in South Africa (and indeed in the postcolonial world in general) within a broader historical and socio-political framework that includes anti-colonialism, decolonization, postcolonial nation-building, and social change. This highlights the peculiar intergenerational contexts of late modernity and postmodernity as well as contemporary globalization21 and the numerous conflicts characterizing post-colonial social change within which modern African nation-states are evolving (see Nwakanma, 2008; Kohn and McBride, 2011). This means that changes within specific spatial and temporal boundaries are never self-contained and must be understood within wider macroscopic contexts (see Appadurai, 1990; Inglehart, 1997; Lincoln, 2009). It means, furthermore, that such changes need to be explored in view of what Adrian Little (2014: 68) describes in terms of “complex temporality”, which is:

a residual factor in conflictual societies because the full ramifications of conflict are never wholly played out. There isn’t an end point at which we can say that historical events or practices have run their course and no longer influence evolving social and political relations. Because conflicts are alive, they are constantly being reiterated, renegotiated and reconstituted and thus their impact on social and political structures is continual.

Little’s immediate focus is on the ways in which enduring conflicts impact transformation in transitional societies. Yet, his observations apply well to the present discussion of transition in formerly colonized societies where social, political, cultural, and economic changes have invariably been of a strongly disjunctive character. It is significant also to note that especially during the upheavals of colonization and decolonization, some of these transitions have radically and permanently altered modes of expression, knowledge production, education, as well as the social, political, and economic contexts of cultural articulation. The result is that, in these sites, narrative subject and object, as well as contexts of production, circulation, and reception have remained in constant flux. As such, narrative representations are characterized by ambiguity and indeterminacy. It is in this sense therefore, that the modern literatures of African societies may be understood, I suggest, as predominantly artefacts of transition in addition to whatever else they may also be.

This is illustrated quite powerfully in thematizations of identity formation, place, history, and displacement in some key postcolonial texts. For example, many of Salman Rushide’s novels, especially Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1985), textualize the cultural, spatial, historical, and indeterminate social realities that define his major narrative subjects as moving targets. This instability has also been linked to Rushdie’s personal history, which is reflected in his in subtle ways in his fiction:

I am conscious of shifts in my writing. There has always been a tug-of-war in me between “there” and “here,” the pull of roots and of the road. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I’ve come down on the side of those who by preference, nature, or circumstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging – I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East – is my artistic country now. (quoted in Schurer, 2004:17; original emphasis)

Similarly, Ronit Frenkel (2008a: 149-150) makes these observations about Achmat Dangor’s identity and his fiction:

[Dangor] is listed as a South African Indian writer in Rajendra Chetty’s collection South African Indian Writings in English (2002) and he appears in an Annotated Bibliography of Friction in English from the Indian Subcontinent … However, Dennis-Constant Martin references Dangor as a “coloured” writer. Characters in his fiction are similarly ambiguously situated; for example Christopher Hope describes the protagonist in Kafka’s Curse as both an “Indian boy” and a “richly mixed Asain, Javanese and Dutch boy from the townships” (27). Phil Nel describes the same character as being part of a family that is “both coloured and Muslim with roots that are Indian, Malaysian and Dutch”.

Another revealing example of how postcolonial writing captures the socio-political disjunctures of postmodern and postcolonial realities may be found in the changes in Chinua Achebe’s fiction, especially between his fourth and fifth novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) respectively. Whereas in the former novel, military intervention in Nigeria’s national politics is portrayed as a corrective development, the reverse is the case in Anthills of the Savannah (see Adeoti, 2003b). This thematic shift highlights the fact that relatively short periods of time (in this case the two decades between the publication of these two novels) can often represent dramatic social, political change in the postcolonial world such that there is almost always the need for new categories and modes of representation. Since the early stages of colonization, social, political, cultural, economic, and sometimes ecological changes, have occurred in dizzying

24 and kaleidoscopic fashion. As a result of civil wars, ethnic conflict, and regime changes, peoples’ identities (ethnic, regional, national) and modes of life could change back and forth within a few years. Between 1967 and 1970 for example, someone living in south-eastern Nigeria moved from being Nigerian to Biafran and back to Nigerian. In the case of South Africa, the years between the late 1980s and 1994 witnessed some of the most dramatic political changes in the country’s recent history resulting in still morphing socio-political re-configurations. Significantly, the ending of apartheid coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union and reverberated some of the key effects on those changes in the global arena. Needless to say, these changes are accompanied by still morphing shifts in representational and narratological preferences. All of these emphasize the inherently transitional character of postcoloniality (including late postcoloniality) in general, as well as the need to interrogate the ways in which transition is constituted and portrayed in narrative form. Contemporary transition in Africa is thus conceived in this study as a series of changes (or individual transitions/transitional moments) encompassing the almost infinite set of events, moments, movements, and changes stretching back to the early modern period. These different transitions, such as those marked in South Africa by the TRC and in Nigeria by the end of military dictatorship, may be understood, I argue, to be intergenerational and multidimensional. Furthermore, their interrelationships with social change and transformation may not necessarily be teleological. This realization may have the potential to shift our understanding of transition beyond those more familiar periods and events marked by dramatic and spectacular22 developments such as liberation struggles and the official institutionalization of independence. It is in this sense that the ‘post-TRC’ neologism demonstrates potential as a helpful tool in the criticism of recent South African literature. It resonates with Russ West-Pavlov’s (2015:4) analysis of two recent novels,23 which according to him, articulate “an emergent sense of a non-teleological ‘minor narrative’” of social change in the current time.24 It is important to note that ‘post-TRC’ does not refer to a set of features different from those that have been associated with the ‘post-transitional’. It is important, furthermore, to state that both terms similarly and inevitably suggest linear timeframes – whether intentionally or not, and whether fixed or flexible. What is crucially different

25 however, is that post-TRC is conceived as being markedly – perhaps inherently – transitional while the notion of post-transitionality suggests, whether intentionally or not, distance or movement away from transition. Therefore, whereas Frenkel and MacKenzie (2010: 4) claim that “the transitional period … ha[d] begun to wane” in the mid-2000s, it can be argued that it was engagement with the TRC that had begun to change in this period. More specifically, what had begun to wane was the apparent obsession with the TRC’s drama, silences, and perceived shortcomings that had dominated the country’s cultural landscape since its formal close in 1998 (Ndebele, 1998; Graham, 2009). In other words, the significant thematic shifts in writing from around 2000 identified by Frenkel and MacKenzie can rather be understood as changing attitudes towards the TRC, rather than being about a shift from concerns about transition in general. These changes in attitude are highlighted in close reading of the three South African texts provided in the chapters to follow. Yet, as has been noted, ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ are not without problems, not least of which is their problematic temporal prefix much like postcolonial/post-colonial. Another issue is the fact that the TRC and the ending of military dictatorship are themselves dramatic and specific historical moments. For these reasons, the terms have the unintended potential of being construed as notions that ‘freeze’ temporality in the way that is argued against here in relation to dominant discursive ideas of national transition. To resolve this seeming contradiction, it is important, on the one hand, to clarify the critical difference between ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ as they are conceived in this study vis-à-vis the notion of national transition. On the other hand, it is important to highlight how transition is related to the two neologisms in this discussion. While ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ refer to the lingering legacies of two specific dominant transitional moments on cultural expression, ‘transition’ is conceptualized as the overarching, complicated, and non-linear temporal frame within, and against which the former may be analysed. In this way, ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ offer practical advantages over the respective notions of ‘post-transitional’ and ‘third-generation’ writing. They do so by enabling a more surgical exploration of what Homi Bhabha (1994: 147-148) theorizes as the ‘pedagogical’ versus the ‘performative’ time of the nation in his exploration of the

26 referential ambivalences and conceptual slippages which complicate discussions of historicity and temporality, and that characterize

the tension between signifiying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign. The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in a tradition of the people . . . encapsulated in a succession of historical moments that represents an eternity produced by self-generation.

Bhabha’s valuable formulation illustrate the ways in which ‘post-TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ help us to think through these complexities by facilitating the difficult but necessary function of periodization and historicization while ensuring that we do not lose sight of wider temporal processes. Replacing ‘post-transitional’ with ‘post-TRC’ for instance, therefore unhinges the idea of transitionality from the confining frames of linear time yet allowing us to zero-in on and historicize the specific transitional moments and contexts dominated by the TRC. These tensions and slippages become evident in the close reading of texts in subsequent chapters of this study where precise historicization becomes both inevitable and necessary for analytical convenience and clarity. This explains the inevitable recourse to dates, periods, and terminologies (like ‘future’) which, on the face of it, echo the problematic logic of linear time. The reconceptualization of transition offered here requires an accompanying reconsideration of the relationships between past, present, and future in cultural production and criticism in particular, and in South African national discourse in general. This is important in providing a proper context for understanding how the relationship between post-TRC, transition, and South African social imaginaries are conceived in this study. The euphoria that attended the spectacular events leading up to, and immediately following 1994 found expression, partly, in the tendency to create as much distance as possible from apartheid and its defining features. But this optimism has since been tempered by discontent over disturbing socio-political trends that Sarah Nuttall and Liz McGregor (2009) trace to the period around 2007. Accordingly, ‘the transition’ has been subjected to intense scrutiny in recent years. As a response to the seemingly aporetic character of a post-apartheid present in which the features of the presumed past remain poignant, the ruling party has suggested

27 that the country requires a “second transition” (African National Congress, 2012). To Adam Habib (2013), the current paradoxes indicate that the anti-apartheid revolution was merely “suspended” in 1994. Furthermore, some commentators have spoken of the transition as “incomplete” (Cilliers, 2015) or “permanent” (Titlestad, 2010; Prono, 2010), while others have altogether rejected the idea that conditions were actually better under apartheid than in the current era of democracy (see Flanagan, 2004). An especially nuanced perspective is offered by Achille Mbembe’s (2012: n.p.) observation that

what was hailed in the 1990s as ‘the South African miracle’ may now be properly characterised as a stalemate. One of the main tensions in South African politics and culture today is the realization that there is something unresolved in the constitutional democratic settlement that suspended the “revolution” in 1994 but did not erase apartheid from the social, economic and mental landscape. This settlement led neither to final victory nor to crippling defeat for any of the protagonists in the historical drama. Rather, South Africa entered a historical interval. It is still caught in this interval, between an intractable present and an irrecoverable past; between things that are no longer and things that are not yet. This is the stalemate many would now like to end.

The ostensible difficulty in coming to terms with present conditions highlights an important feature of the post-apartheid national imaginary, namely the eagerness to create as much distance as possible between the ‘new’ South Africa and apartheid. The anxiety to break from apartheid is expressed in the construction of a national history in which whatever is associated with apartheid falls almost automatically into the past, while only the aspirations and ideals promised by democracy are admitted into the domain of the present. In this way, apartheid (plus its socio-economic features and increasingly fluid discursive connotations) becomes the over-determining sign of the South Africa past. Similarly, especially in the early post-1994 period, specific threshold events and moments such as those of 1994 have been discursively packaged as, and conflated with, the changes and transformations that are promised and envisaged such that the event has become conceived as the instantiation of the promise. These discursive tendencies can be understood in the context of Chris Lorenz’s (2010: 70) discussion of the conceptualization of contemporary history as “the process of nation formation”, and of time as “linear, irreversible and teleological”. Lorenz draws on Francois Hartog’s notion of the ‘regime of historicity’, which, in one sense, relates to “the way in which a society considers its past and deals with it”:

Following Koselleck, Hartog signalizes a transition from the ‘classical regime of historicity’ – captured by Cicero’s formula historia magistra vitae, with the past being exemplary for the present and the future – to the ‘modern’ regime of historicity around 1800. Instead of the past being authoritative for the present in the form of practical exempla, after the French Revolution, the future became the point of orientation – in the form of a telos in the making, especially ‘the nation-state’ in the making – and therefore national history is intrinsically connected with the idea of a ‘special mission’ of each nation resulting in its ‘special path’ in history. This way of viewing history became possible only after history was no longer seen as a collection of stories about the past and after history had been ‘objectified ‘ into a real process with an origin and a telos of its own. (75; original emphases)25

The sense of a specific national telos probably conditions discursive responses to the aporia presented by the enduring legacies of apartheid in the new democratic era, and results in constant recourse to the future. A good example is a line from a recent article in Rethinking History journal: “South Africa is now living its better future” (Coullie, 2013: 201; emphasis added). As Moonsamy (2013: 11) argues:

The South African democratic state, born anew in 1994 as a nation that sought transformation, marks a temporal break with its own past. This implies a national construct that does not extend out of the past but, instead, seeks distance from it. One notes the over-emphasis on the future as a temporal locale in order to construct a national rhetoric, or rather, a rhetoric of nation, for it is out of the promised ideals of the democratic future that the South African nation arises.

It is perhaps possible that the idea of post-transitionality also betrays this “over-emphasis on the future” even if current critical practices are not necessarily nationalist in their orientation. As has been noted, the major challenge to these discursive constructs is the stubborn presence of the features of apartheid (i.e. the putative past) in what has already been declared ‘new’ (the present). Indeed, both proponents of post-transitionality and those who express reservations about it point to the fact that one of the defining features of current practices and contexts of cultural expression in South Africa is their evident preoccupation and resonance with ‘the past’. If indeed the defining features of the so-called past remain so strongly evident in the here and now, how past, then, is that past? This invites questions, not only about the idea of post-transitionality, but more fundamentally, about the validity of the presumed differences implied by the binary categories of past and present (or old and new) in constructions of postcolonial national histories. Given the limitations of this study in terms of discipline, method, and scope, a comprehensive response to these questions is not possible here. Yet, in rethinking the notion of national transition for the specific purpose of codifying recent literatures in

Africa, it is helpful to return to Lorenz’s study on the relationships between time and history, and the links between the three facile dimensions of linear time:

Because time is conceived as a continuum of fleeting moments – or in other words, as a flux or a flow of discrete points – time is destructive of the here and now, as it ‘passes by’ and ‘carries’ it ‘away’, just like a flowing river carries away everything it contains. ‘Fleeting’ time by itself creates distance between the present and the past, by the very act of ‘flowing’. Therefore Herodotus justifies his writing of Histories with the stated intention ‘that time may not erase men’s undertakings’. Given the destructive or erasive character of ‘flowing’ time, both history and memory are always threatened by time. ‘It is the destructive character of time which Histories wishes to combat, thereby confirming the essentially ahistorical nature of the ancient concept of time’. (2010: 77, original emphasis)

While Lorenz’s immediate concern is how the perceived movement of time endangers memory, his observation that fleeting (linear) time “creates distance between the present and the past” highlights the fact that the presumed difference between the past and present is ideologically constructed. This notion of presumed difference underlines the problematical conception of transition as movement and distance between different sets of socio-political conditions. It fails to recognize the entanglement of temporalities in postcolonial contexts which Mbembe (2001: 99) theorizes as “multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another and envelope one another” (see also West-Pavlov, 2013). There is a sense in which dominant representations of recent South African history can be understood in this way. The fact that apartheid remains etched in the country’s “social, economic and mental landscape” (Mbembe, 2012: n.p.) in spite of significant changes in political structures, and in defiance of the strong promise of democracy testifies to the continuing durability of what has been prematurely declared to have passed. Indeed, the discursive relegation of apartheid (if understood broadly as a set of macrocosmic structural contexts and living conditions rather than as a merely formal political doctrine) to the past can then be understood as a discursive response to its irreconcilability to imaginings of the ‘new South Africa’. What this means is that when we speak of South African’s recent past – in regard to peoples’ lived social, political and economic experiences – we may also speaking more or less of the present, given that some of the major conditions which defined apartheid endure into the democratic present. This is of course not to suggest that South Africa has been in a state of stasis or to downplay the ongoing changes – both dramatic and otherwise – that continue to define the county’s

30 contemporary transition. Rather, it reinforces the point that social change is a gradual and kaleidoscopic process that does not necessarily proceed along linear and teleological pathways, neither does it always result in radical transformations. Expectations of seemingly instantaneous and sweeping changes in the early post- apartheid years resonate with the predominant thematic orientation of early post- independence writing in much of Africa. The unbridled socio-political optimism of the late 1950s and early 1960s when over twenty African countries attained independence found expression in the national discourse of those countries as well as in the literature of that time. Neil Lazurus (1990: ix) sums it up in this way:

In common with other progressive intellectuals in the immediate postcolonial era, radical African writers tended drastically to overvalue the emancipatory significance of independence. One consequence was that, as their hopes were punctured in the years following decolonization (as they invariably were), a rhetoric of disillusion began to replace the earlier utopian rhetoric in their work; it emerged as fatalism or despair or anger or in the accusation that postcolonial leaders had betrayed the “African revolution”.

The shift from a rhetoric of euphoria to that of disillusion in much of African writing became more manifest from the late 1960s and 1970s26 when social, economic, and political conditions assumed a predominantly negative turn in most parts of the continent following waves of social fissures, coups and civil wars. Perhaps the most iconic text that dramatizes this shift and the key moments, movements, and contexts associated with it in the specific case of Nigeria is A Man of the People in which Chinua Achebe parodies the country’s post-independence political elite. The novel was published in 1966 just before the country’s first violent coup which was quickly followed by a counter-coup, bloody ethnic clashes, and the attempted secession of a region that led, less than a year later, to the fratricidal Biafran War of 1967-70. Many African countries, including Nigeria and South Africa, have been part of what political scientists call the Third Wave of Democracy whose beginning is traced to 1974.27 Since that year, many countries in different parts of the world have been experiencing significant political transition towards popular democracy (Huntington, 1991). While some features of democracy have taken root in these countries, it has been observed that much of the expected transformations are yet to materialize (Rakner, Menocal, and Fritz, 2007). This is due in part to specific local dynamics, as well as global occurrences and trends that

31 undermine the broad socio-economic objectives of democratic consolidation – institutional robustness, national stability, social justice, economic prosperity, and equality (see Lust, 2011, Diamond, 2003). Cultural texts from many parts of Africa have tended to illustrate the fluidity of sensitivities and destabilization of received notions of individual and social belonging associated with the post-modern milieu (Appadurai, 2006a). As this study shows, these trends can be identified in Nigerian and South African cultural articulation during the period under consideration (i.e. 2000-2010). In general therefore, there has been a marked shift in tone in the national narratives of these countries. The rhetoric of euphoria and promise that marked the event of decolonization has been replaced, at the turn of the century, by a range of less sanguine dispositions (namely, scepticism, cautious optimism, disillusion) that are markedly non- celebratory and ambivalent. The shift from “postcolonial expectation [to] postmodern disillusionment” (Lincoln, 2008: 4) is especially evident when literary expression from Nigeria and South Africa are read in dialogue as is done in this study. This is so in spite of the different historical trajectories and socio-political peculiarities of the two countries. In the case of Nigeria, there has been a well-documented tradition of literatures and discourses of post-independence disillusionment since the late 1960s (see Kehinde, 2004). For South Africa, however, the decline in celebratory imaginings of nationalism has been traced to political turmoil from 2007 onwards (Sarah Nuttall and Liz McGregor, 2009; Fasselt, 2015). These demonstrable shifts enable productive inquiry into the possible intertextual links between literatures from both countries. I will now examine, in some detail, the ways in which the so-called ‘third generation’ of Nigerian literature is conceptualized, firstly by Adesanmi and Dunton (2005, 2008). Adesanmi and Dunton are guided by the following; notions of temporality associated with postcoloniality, location, institutional factors, historical and socio-political contexts, thematic and formalistic orientation, as well as migration. In terms of temporality, they settle on writers born after 1960 and locate the origins of the generation within the decade between 1985 and 1995 as that period “saw the emergence and the domestic consolidation of the generation” (2005: 8). They identify the literary and media circles in the university towns of Ibadan, Nsukka, and Lagos as the initial centres of exchange and production under the aegis of such institutions as the universities, media (through the Arts

32 sections of major newspapers) and the prestigious Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). They also note that many of those who are currently leading members of the group have migrated to Europe and America. One possible effect of this, they argue, is that this corpus, like those before it, may have been “hijacked” by the Western literary establishment (2008: ix). Interestingly, the migration of a significant number of ‘third generation’ writers to the West illustrates the dialectic between prevailing socio-political conditions and cultural expression in Nigeria. The harsh economic climate of the 1990s expedited the decline of the local publishing industry while writers were often hounded by repressive security agents of repressive military regimes. This caused many writers to emigrate. Ironically therefore, the blossoming of this group of writers can be traced to the same conditions which sought to constrain them. While it is evident that migration and multiple subjectivities is a recurring theme among this group of writers, Brenda Cooper (2008) has argued that their profuse use of tropes of tradition reflects a commitment to material ethnic culture demonstrated by the older generations of writers. She analyses the first two novels of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as her point of departure, highlighting Adichie’s perceived valorization of Igbo culture and identity through liberal use of Igbo language, as well as the vigorous representation of various cultural artefacts. Madhu Krishnan (2013: 73) argues similarly. She observes that although contemporary African writing highlights variableness and fluidity in the (re)construction of the idea of nation, writers nonetheless demonstrate national “belonging and commitment” and often offer “new vision[s] nationhood” in their works. An exploration of how these new or alternative visions are articulated in and reflected by changing literary developments as well as within increasingly fluid cultural, ideological, and spatio-temporal contexts becomes an ever worthwhile venture. This is particularly so for those critics and commentators interested in the possible correspondences, links, and correlations between historical, social, cultural and political transformations and their reflection in various forms of cultural production particularly in the literary domains in African societies (see Ezeliora, 2007). In this regard, Chidi Amuta’s (1989: 77) “dialectical theory of African literature” becomes relevant to a significant degree, especially his arguments regarding “the incontrovertible socio-historical

33 determination of African literature in general”. A significant stylistic feature, especially among novels, is their use of the bildungsroman, as well as female, child and youth protagonists to provide expanded and nuanced views of Nigeria’s socio-political disjunctions and current socio-cultural change (Adesanmi and Dunton, 2008; Nwakanma, 2008; Fasan, 2010; Hron, 2008: 28). Regarding their thematic inclinations, Adesanmi and Dunton (2005: 15) observe that the writers of this period are

born into the scopic regime of the postcolonial and the postmodern, an order of knowledge in which questions of subjecthood and agency are not only massively overdetermined by the politics of identity in a multicultural and transnational frame but in which the tropes of Otherness and subalternity are being remapped by questioning erstwhile totalities such as history, nation, gender, and their representative symbologies.

These valuable descriptions notwithstanding, the concept of ‘generation’ is weakened by its temporal indeterminacy, highlighted by Obi Nwakanma’s (2008: 1) reference to “three to four movements, or generations” of Nigerian literature. This recalls Heather Hewett’s (2005) observation that the concept is inherently fraught and sometimes misleading. As Harry Garuba (2005: 51) argues, terms associated with temporal markers often

mask the constructedness of the category we devise for framing our understanding of it and the time- lines we draw to mark it. For, once time-lines are drawn and writers and writing are placed within them, the intuitive clarity of the lines blur, as writers who should be within the period by the nature of their preoccupations and styles fall outside and others within very clearly pronounce their unbelonging in their work.

He adds that the “ambiguity heightens when writers said to belong to one generation are still active and producing work two or three generations after the one to which they are said to belong” (52). He thus argues that literary periods are more useful as “markers of general trends” that are “open-ended” (52), and reversible, and that highlight the description rather than demarcation of the works under consideration. This supports my suggestion of the term ‘post-dictatorship’ literature to describe the Nigerian texts under consideration in this study as well as the larger body of current Nigerian writing with which these selected texts are resonant and fairly representative. Post-military dictatorship is meant to signify the dominant socio-political contexts with which the production, reception, and criticism of these texts are most demonstrably linked. As with ‘post-TRC’, the post in post-military

34 dictatorship (or post-dictatorship) is to be understood as a maker of context and not of moment or event. Therefore, post-dictatorship Nigerian writing, as it is conceived here, does not necessarily signify a temporal category or teleological condition after the actual periods of military rule in Nigeria even though the immediate focus of this study is the post-1999 period. Instead, it gestures to a ‘zone of activity’ (to borrow Ashraf Jamal’s [2010: 15] helpful term), as well as the contexts of production and reception strongly influenced by, and reflective of military dictatorship and its legacies. The texts that ordinarily fall within this ambit therefore share many of the features of ‘third generation’ writing (see Adesanmi and Dunton, 2005; 2008). Yet, there are several texts and writers outside the ‘third generation’ that also display post-dictatorship features also (see Adeoti, 2003b). Among these would be some of the Biafran war texts of the 1970s and 1980s as well as Chinua Achebe’s last novel, Anthills of the Savannah, which deals with military dictatorship in a fictive post-independence West African nation. This is an important clarification to make given that throughout the decades, military rule has been interspersed with periods of civilian rule.28 It is important to point out also that the term ‘post-dictatorship’ (like post-apartheid) does not connote the radical transformation of socio-political conditions in Nigeria following the return to civilian rule in 1999. On the contrary, realities in the post-dictatorship years so far reveal what Etim Frank and William Ukpere (2012: 285) call “an overt display of ‘militarized political culture’”. This is thematized in interesting ways in the three texts under consideration.

CHAPTER THREE

LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY IN KEN WIWA’S IN THE SHADOW OF A SAINT AND JACOB DLAMINI’S NATIVE NOSTALGIA

Introduction: Socio-political background to the narratives

In this chapter, I explore the peculiar ways in which Ken Wiwa and Jacob Dlamini deploy the genre of life-writing to foreground some of the salient social and political features of the contemporary transitions in Nigeria and South Africa respectively. I explore the historiographical and representational focus of the respective narratives, and highlight how both writers provide largely revisionist and counter-hegemonic accounts that aim to subvert official accounts of their respective national histories. In the Shadow of a Saint (2001) explores post-independence and post-dictatorship Nigeria from what can be called a peripheral socio-political point of view. The narrative offers the perspective of the minority Ogoni ethnic group from which Wiwa and his late activist father, Ken Saro-Wiwa29 hail. Wiwa portrays a deeply fragmented national body politic that comprises multiple margins and oppositional subjectivities. With a strong subtextual inclination towards ethnic nationalism, his vision for Nigeria’s post-dictatorship future is pessimistic. For its part, Native Nostalgia (2009) provides a nostalgic account of Dlamini’s childhood in a township during apartheid. The nostalgic narrative mode constitutes the major approach to his exploration of recent South African history. His nostalgia for the past, partly inspired by a strong sense of disenchantment with the present and trepidation for the future all co-exist in an uneasy, nervous tension that emerges as his dominant impression of South Africa’s ongoing transition. Both texts therefore approach the transitional postcolonial nation-state with greater scepticism than the majority of leading texts that are classified respectively among the so- called first and second generations of writing (in regard to Nigeria), and post-apartheid literature (in regard to South Africa) respectively. This is especially so in regard to those texts belonging to the early post-independence and immediate post-liberation oeuvres. At the same time, Wiwa and Dlamini deploy different discursive strategies in their spirited attempts to (de)construct or (de)legitimate specific subjectivities and strands of historical narrative. Their scepticism towards received notions of nation and social identity is also

36 reflected in other Nigerian and South African texts that are contemporaneous with In the Shadow of a Saint and Native Nostalgia (Krishnan, 2013; Dalley, 2013; Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010). Yet, there are significant instances where each author returns, as it were, to familiar intertexts – discourses, themes, discursive practices – and spatio-temporal sites in ways that complicate the relationships between post-independence/post-liberation and post-2000 writing. The texts also problematize presumed differences between recent Nigerian and South African writing while shedding light on their changing socio-political contexts (see Culler, 1976 [2004]; Irele, 2001; Enwezor, 2003). Wiwa’s project of national rehistoricization is woven into his autobiography and the biography of his father who had championed the cause of the Ogoni. Saro-Wiwa had led an eventful campaign against environmental degradation and underdevelopment in the oil-rich Niger Delta region as a whole, and in Ogoniland in particular, under the aegis of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). In revisiting Saro-Wiwa’s life and struggles, the son undertakes a self-conscious reconstruction of Nigerian history in which he attempts to draw attention to his father’s multiple leadership roles as intellectual, writer, environmentalist, businessman, and nationalist. Through these intertwining historical narratives, Wiwa textualizes the social, political, and economic conditions that defined Nigeria’s protracted military dictatorships and the circumstances in which the country’s recent transition to democracy has proceeded. Moreover, in narrating the difficult relationship between father and son, as well as the son’s eventual reconciliation with, and adoption of his father’s political ideals, the text becomes a powerful narrative tool that facilitates self-representation in personal and collective terms. The narrative thus provides Wiwa with scope to (re)negotiate his identity at several levels – filial, genealogical, ethnic, and national. Wiwa’s representation of an Ogoni perspective on contemporary Nigerian nationalism is marked by a highly reflexive meditation on some of the psychological dynamics involved in the narrative construction of ethnic consciousness, namely selective amnesia, resistance to hegemonic discourses, and historical elision. For his part, Jacob Dlamini presents a highly self-reflexive autobiographical account of South Africa’s liberation struggle. He adopts a narrative mode – “reflexive nostalgia” – that enables him to recall the period of apartheid in provocatively fond ways

37 yet without disavowing the horrors of the time or absolving its perpetrators. In this way, he does not “collapse memory into trauma” (Nostalgia, 111) as many post-liberation narratives tend to do (Corrigall, 2014). Dlamini’s project is founded largely on the grounds that, as he argues, black South Africans were able to lead normal lives during apartheid and that different people experienced racial segregation and oppression in different ways. I suggest that his revision of official accounts of black life under apartheid and his exploration of the significant social differences within black communities serve to deconstruct the political dominance of the political classes in general, and the ruling ANC in particular. In addition, Dlamini provides an elaborate description of the township of Katlehong, portraying it as a spatial embodiment, not only of his fond childhood memories but also as the site where some of his key subjectivities are formed. In this way, the narrative reveals the enduring salience of place and space30 in (re)constructions of individual and social identity in contemporary South Africa while echoing prior texts and debates on the spatial dimensions of the operations of, and resistance to, apartheid. Noteworthy examples of such works include the township musicals and plays of Gibson Kente31 as well as Es’kia Mphahlele’s influential autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), a compelling account of growing up in the township of Marabastad near Pretoria. Mphahlele discusses what he calls “the irrepressible attachment to ancestral space” in explaining his controversial return to South Africa under apartheid after twenty years in exile (Mphahlele, 1984: 11). Importantly for this study, the enduring significance of space to identity (re)construction in South Africa represents a useful point of departure for understanding the linkages between post-dictatorship Nigerian and post-TRC South African literatures in general, and the two texts discussed in this chapter in particular. The attention to space and place in both Wiwa’s and Dlamini’s texts recalls Achille Mbembe’s (2002: 266) observation in “African Modes of Self-Writing” that

there is no identity without territoriality, that is the vivid consciousness of having a place and being master of it, whether by birth, because one has conquered it, or because one has settled there and it is now part of self-representations. The territoriality par excellence is locality, that is, home, the small space and inherited estate where direct, proximate relationships are reinforced by membership in a common genealogy, in the same matrix, real or supposed, which serves as the foundation for the civic space.

For Dlamini, the intimate spaces of Katlehong embody his memories of community and socio-political order, while the spaces of Ogoniland operate in a different way for Wiwa. In the latter case, space is produced and mapped as the author’s homeland (see Schama, 1995): its mineral wealth is represented as the providential source of sustenance of the Ogoni and a cornerstone of their self-definition. The preservation of this endowment is therefore at the heart of their drive for self-determination. The land (with its mineral endowment) is also portrayed as a critical site of contested ownership. It is a battleground for oppressed locals and a totalitarian state depicted as the agent of an exploitative global capitalist system. The historical revisionism represented by both Wiwa and Dlamini is similarly counter-hegemonic. Both texts attack the truth claims and historicist foundations of official narratives of reconciliation upon which, each argues, skewed political and economic hegemonies are sustained. Towards this end, each text delineates personal and group identities using narrative techniques that highlight social differences – notably those of ethnicity in the case of Wiwa, and socio-economic class in the case of Dlamini. They thus engage – overtly and covertly – in the simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction of contemporary Nigerian and South African identities. These portrayals can be understood in terms of their respective visions of nationhood in the post-dictatorship and post-TRC contexts respectively.32 In both texts, the representation of nation is marked by a rhetoric of uncertainty and ambivalence, which manifests in In the Shadow of a Saint as a strong sense of pessimism and, in Native Nostalgia, as one of nervous anxiety. While literature abounds on the creative oeuvre and political activism of the martyred Ken Saro-Wiwa, commentary on his son’s tribute to him remains largely limited. These are the relatively few reviews focusing on the text’s portrayal of a difficult filial relationship (Gerhart, 2002; Flannery, 2003). Yet, the book, which won the North American Hurston/Wright Legacy award upon its publication in 2001, has also been recognized, together with a documentary film of the same title, as well as media campaigns over Saro-Wiwa’s killing, as a form of political expression (Osunibi, 2008). Similarly, Native Nostalgia has been identified as a form of socio-political critique that enables, in Ross Truscott’s (2009) view, “novel insights into the social and political conditions to which the writing of [South African] history is subject”. It was published to

39 positive critical reception in 2009, winning the 2010 University of Johannesburg prize (debut category) for creative writing in English. In the official award citation, Craig MacKenzie (2010) describes Dlamini’s narrative as “part-history, part-memoir, [and] part- polemic” that subverts grand narratives of black township life under apartheid.33 According to Eusebius McKaiser (2009), Native Nostalgia “humani[z]es” township life and registers the often ignored “complex agencies” of ordinary black people. In this regard, the text portrays how black people lived ordinary lives in spite of the disruptive social and political arrangements of institutional apartheid. Dlamini thus seeks to re-inscribe, as Njabulo Ndebele (1998) might put it, ‘the ordinary’34 into the expanding national imaginary while at the same time highlighting the limitations of dominant versions of history. And while it is indeed possible to argue that the text can be read in terms of its apparent depiction of the ‘ordinary’ as focus of an alternative and counter-hegemonic historical project, such an argument is outside the scope and interests of this study. In the discussion to follow, I analyse the two (auto)biographical texts with a focus on the discursive representation of history by each and their portrayal of morphing social categories within contexts of significant social changes. This is not a simple comparative analysis but an investigation of the key features of, and possible intertextual links between, transitional cultural expression from Nigeria and South Africa as important socio-political sites. Wiwa’s narrative thematizes, among other things, the discursive negotiation of ethnic and national identity during Nigeria’s periods of post-independence and post-dictatorship transition. I interrogate how socio-political subjects from peripheral sites of nationalist expression – in this case Ogoniland in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta – are positioned within dominant national narratives. I also examine the ways in which the author uses public memory in (re)imagining Nigerian history and Ogoni identity. As Wiwa claims to speak on behalf of the Ogonis, the text testifies to the growing deployment of life-writing for articulating the concerns and experiences of marginalized subjects such as ethnic minorities and immigrants (see Eakin, 2004; Moore-Gilbert, 2009). For his part, Dlamini’s account of recent South African history seeks to debunk dominant narratives (of the liberation struggle) that tend to valorize the official liberation movement and the ruling ANC. In so doing, it draws attention to the critical role of narrative in political processes and in the (re)construction of social categories during times

40 of significant national transition. These issues are highlighted in my examination of Dlamini’s project of rehistoricization and how it seeks to renegotiate black South African subjectivities through its focus on the township and on social differences among the country’s black majority. The discussion begins with a short survey of the ways in which the genre of postcolonial life-writing functions as a fitting narrative mode for the apparent ideological and historiographical orientations of both texts.35 This survey is situated within a postcolonial framework, as well as within the specific post-dictatorship and post-TRC contexts of Nigerian and South African cultural expression. Most Nigerian texts that are described as either first, second, or third generation are works of fiction that are often read for their imaginative commentary on socio-political realities. However, there are several examples of non-fictional life-writing that also provide incisive explorations of prevailing socio-political issues, using remarkable stylistic and formal features. Gbemisola Adeoti (2003a: 5) has observed that “[t]he genre of life narrative has an enduring history and it occupies a significant space in modern Nigerian literature”. He suggests that texts belonging to this genre should be considered alongside those from other genres with which they are in a “dialogic relationship” (15). Through the peculiar formal and discursive techniques offered by the genre, many Nigerian writers have appropriated life-writing as an outlet for socio-political contestation, a feature that is especially identifiable in postcolonial writing.36 In this regard, Hitesh B. Joshi (2011: n.p.) argues that

postcolonial autobiographies are often written to portray the author as a representative of his cultural group … or as the embodiment of a new nation’s struggle to come into being and its establishment of a cultural and ideological identity.

Wole Soyinka’s 1972 prison memoir, The Man Died, and Elechi Amadi’s Biafra war memoir, Sunset in Biafra (1976) are good examples of such well-received (auto)biographical contributions to the growing corpus of contemporary Nigerian literature written during times of important political transitions. To this category may be added Wiwa’s as yet underexplored narrative, In the Shadow of a Saint, which was published in a more recent but equally significant time of socio-political change, and comes from a region that may be described as a peripheral site of nationalist expression.

Wiwa’s text exhibits the striking formal and thematic characteristics of post- dictatorship Nigerian writing in several ways. As a hybrid between biography and autobiography, it reads like a bildungsroman that maps the author’s psychological metamorphosis. It also charts the awakening of his political consciousness as a Nigerian on the one hand, and as a member of a marginalized minority ethnic group on the other. Another important characteristic of post-dictatorship writing (which is also highlighted in descriptions of third-generation literature) that can be identified in In the Shadow of a Saint is its exploration of the material and psychological frustrations of daily life in Nigeria under harsh military rule. This is quite an impressive narrative feat since Wiwa actually left Nigeria at the age of nine and only lived in the country for short periods between then and the time the book was written. In the case of Native Nostalgia, the author’s personal life story is carefully situated within South Africa’s national history. In this way, it highlights the key self-referential role (whether this self is individual or collective) of life-writing as “testimony” to noteworthy historical events and epochs of national significance (Eakin, 2004: 1, 5). It also foregrounds an important feature of postcolonial life narratives, namely, the ways in which individual and public subjectivities are profoundly intertwined in the construction of a historical sense of self (see Ngwenya, 2000; Coullie, Meyer, Ngwenya, and Olver, 2006; Moore-Gilbert, 2009; Walder, 2010). This point is emphasized in Gillian Whitlock’s (2015) introduction to Postcolonial Life Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation where she distinguishes between the canonical genre of autobiography and the more expansive and emergent tradition of life- writing. She observes that while the former now commonly refers to “a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western gendered male”, the latter embraces a range of self-referential literary practices with a more or less “collective subject” (3). In understanding the links between life narratives and national history, it is important to note that literary (re)historicization intersects with national discourses and prevailing political imperatives in significant ways. As John Breuilly (2009: 16) correctly observes, the construction and reconstruction of national histories are both politically contingent and inevitable:

Things do not remain static in nation-states. What were major concerns when the nation-state was formed get marginalized while new issues arise. For the USA from the 1770s until 1814 the principal conflict was with Britain. History framed in racial or ethnic, linguistic or cultural terms had nothing to offer in such a conflict. By the mid-19th century the situation had changed. Now such terms helped in the response to present conflicts and visions of the future, and therefore, tended to the construction of a different past.

It is thus necessary to provide a brief account of the historical and political contexts in Nigeria and South Africa within which the narratives are set. This will serve as a helpful background to the productive analysis of the ways in which the texts thematize contemporary nationalism. It is necessary in this regard to recall the specific contexts of military rule in Nigeria especially in regard to the brutal reign of Sani Abachi between 1993 and 1998. Internationally, Abacha is mostly remembered for the 1995 hanging of Ken Saro- Wiwa, an environmental and minority rights activist, politician and writer from the country’s troubled oil-rich Niger Delta. Saro-Wiwa had championed the cause of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) who were campaigning against the economic exploitation and environmental degradation of Ogoniland where oil prospecting had been going on since 1958. Under MOSOP, many Ogoni people carried out numerous protests against the military government and the multinational oil companies (mainly Shell) operating in the area. Some of these protests were brutally quelled and many protesters were killed. Also, there were violent splits within the leadership of the movement. When four MOSOP leaders and Ogoni elders were murdered in 1994, Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders were held in detention for many months before being eventually charged by the government before a military tribunal. After a hearing that was widely condemned as unfair, the nine leaders were sentenced to death and executed in 1995 despite the outcry from the international community. In In the Shadow of a Saint, Saro-Wiwa’s eldest son, Ken Wiwa, provides, among other things, an account of MOSOP’s struggle under his father’s leadership. He also describes life in Nigeria under military rule especially during Abacha’s dictatorship. Drawing heavily on Saro-Wiwa’s writing, this narrative details the foundation, motives, and constitution of MOSOP, as well as those of the Ogoni ethnic group within Nigeria. The book is also a memoir of the junior Wiwa and a biographical tribute to Saro-Wiwa. In pursuing these diverse missions, the author provides an insightful narrative of the Nigerian

43 nation at two crucial moments of transition. The first is the period of early independence up till the civil war (1967-1970) and its immediate aftermath, while the second covers the transition from military to civilian rule in the late 1990s. The historical and cultural accounts in Wiwa’s narrative are rendered from the marginal point of view of a leader of the minority Ogoni ethnic group. In these accounts, Wiwa portrays a deeply fragmented body politic characterized by multiple margins and oppositional subjectivities. With a strong subtextual inclination towards ethnic Ogoni identity and nationalism, his prognosis for Nigeria’s post-dictatorship future is decidedly pessimistic. Similarly, Jacob Dlamini provides an insightful critique of socio-political conditions during South Africa’s post-TRC transition in the mid-2000s. He does this as part of a multifaceted narrative mission which includes a quasi-autoethnographic account of his childhood in a township during apartheid. Dlamini’s nostalgia for the past, partly inspired by a strong sense of disenchantment with the present and trepidation for the future, all co-exist in an uneasy, nervous tension that emerges as his overriding impression of his country’s ongoing transition. The problematic social, political, and economic occurences around the time of the book’s publication in 2009 form the immediate historical backdrop to Native Nostalgia. Dlamini sets his narrative against an important moment of political transition, namely Jacob Zuma’s emergence as South Africa’s president following the ANC’s victory in the general elections of that year. This came on the back of Zuma’s defeat of former president, Thabo Mbeki for the position of ANC president at the party’s fractious elective conference in 2007 and Mbeki’s consequent recall and resignation in 2008. Timothy Kenny (2013: n.p.) argues that the developments surrounding the 2007 conference had

compromised the internal functioning of the ANC and … entrenched factionalism throughout the ranks of the ANC. It spawned the first breakaway faction of the ANC in post-apartheid South Africa, which went on to become the Congress of the People (COPE). It brought a disparate alliance of competing interests to power based on the shared objective of removing Mbeki, which meant that Zuma, once President, was beholden to all of them. The result of which has been the continued policy paralysis that has bedevilled the country.

The period also saw a dramatic rise in violent ‘service delivery’ protests, fissures within the ruling ANC and the political left, as well as increasing xenophobic attacks against mostly black and impoverished immigrants. It is the perceived deficiencies in governance signalled

44 by, or partly related to the political developments of the 2007-2009 period that Dlamini takes as his immediate point of departure. It may be argued that his fond account of his childhood under apartheid is held up, subtextually, in opposition to the disillusion with the present realities expressed by three individuals who are mentioned at the beginning of the narrative. Although Dlamini does express this explicitly, it is possible that these carefully selected individuals are meant, again in a subtextual way, as ostensible representatives of black South Africans who had lived through apartheid.37 Both Wiwa and Dlamini are therefore concerned with public perceptions of, and responses to recent social change and its dialectical relationship to national governance, as well as with individual and social consciousness. Each writer invokes history and represents mutating social subjectivities in ways that draw attention to contexts – historical, social and political – that resonate across the two countries. At the same time, the texts reveal important differences and similarities in the discursive features of post-dictatorship Nigerian and post-TRC South African literary expression.

Historical revision and counter-hegemonic discourse

In this section, I explore the rehistoricization represented in each text. I begin with Wiwa’s version of recent Nigerian history and his focus on the pre-independence period, the civil war (also known as the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70), as well as the emergence of crude oil as the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy. I examine what he chooses to silence and to emphasize in his narrative, and how his choices reflect on the text’s (re)construction of identity on the one hand, and its vision of contemporary Nigerian nationalism on the other. As is the case with most memoirs, Wiwa’s book narrates a psychological journey towards self-realization. The book’s sub-title (“a son’s journey to understand his father’s legacy”) highlights the key role of his relationship with his father in this regard. And as a tribute to his father who led a controversial political life, Wiwa declares that it is also his purpose is to

set the record straight about Ken Saro-Wiwa, to expose his critics and accuse his killers. I imagined that this book would be my contribution to the struggle – my opportunity to write the wrongs done to my father and to our people” (Shadow, xix).

In spite of the personal and genealogical orientation of the narrative, Wiwa admits that his story “is also a political statement” (xxii). This underscores the fact that the book has been recognized, together with a documentary film of the same title, as well as media campaigns over Saro-Wiwa’s killing, as forms of political expression (Osunibi, 2008). Wiwa draws heavily on his father’s extensive portfolio of writing – novels, poetry, memoirs, and essays – to recover and reconstruct Ken Saro-Wiwa’s experiences, ideas, passions and anxieties. His appropriation of his father’s ideas – through various means including copious quotations from several texts – also draws attention to the intertextual body of discursive practices, representational resources, thematic orientations that link the two writers and the writing traditions to which each belongs. He “implicitly [and] explicitly takes up [and] prolongs” (Culler, 2004 [1976]: 1381) those ideas and concerns that his father had laid out in an earlier period. This also demonstrates the profound influence – intellectual and narratological – of the father on the son, and on the text under consideration. It is a powerful example of how current post-dictatorship Nigerian writing dramatizes the influences of earlier literary ‘generations’ and traditions (Hewett, 2005; Adesanmi and Dunton, 2005; 2008). Furthermore, Wiwa highlights how he became not only aligned with, but committed to, his father’s political vision. In this way, he discharges an apparent burden of indebtedness to his father, who is the veritable “initiator” (Foucault, 1997: 141) of some of the key discourses that both animate and populate In the Shadow of a Saint. Unpacking Foucault’s idea of the “initiator of discourse”, Kwaku Larbi Korang (2011: viii) states that:

We might see an initiator of discourse as an Author of authors, a founding figure who by his/her inaugural authorial example delimits and potentiates a space of intellectual or cultural expression, authoritatively setting the terms by which others, henceforth dependent on his/her original endowment, could carry on a cognitive or creative tradition. In Foucault’s words, the “distinctive contribution [of these initiators] is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts”.

The narratives that comprise Wiwa’s re-historicization of Nigerian nationhood focus on the periods immediately before and after independence in 1960. There are also, expectedly, copious references to the mid-1990s when Abacha was in power. The latter period included the heydays of his father’s environmental and minority-rights activism. In terms of the actual narrative space taken up by explicit historical account and commentary, the text’s

46 historiographical scope is quite limited. Yet it is extremely significant, being foundational to, and bound up in, Wiwa’s overarching (re)construction of his and his father’s individual and social identities. This timeframe is also significant as it helps the reader to plumb specific ideological, social, and political contexts as well as Wiwa’s problematization of the post-1999 transition to democracy. The accounts I examine below provide Wiwa with a means of inserting his father – and himself by extension – into Nigeria’s national cultural archive in specific ways. The intellectual connections he highlights operate discursively to reassert and reinforce Saro- Wiwa’s ostensible intellectual role in Nigeria’s early independence history. In this way, the narrative becomes a means by which Wiwa seeks to legitimize Saro-Wiwa’s peculiar views of Nigerian and Ogoni nationalism. Such discursive strategies are a key feature of postcolonial life-writing as they often draw attention to the socio-political contestations and historical development of former colonies. Toyin Falola and Saheed Aderinto (2010) demonstrate this in their study of several biographical and autobiographical works of Nigerian nationalist activists and senior civil administrators in the periods of decolonization and early independence. In a related study of eight Indonesian autobiographies, C. W. Watson (2000) analyses how the authors, each of whom played important intellectual and political roles during Indonesia’s decolonization in the 1930s and 1940s represent the emergence of modern Indonesia. He uncovers the various historiographical and representational strategies by which these autobiographies are deployed by their authors to negotiate a sense of selfhood in tandem with a simultaneous conceptualization of what Indonesia meant to its citizens during those periods (2000: 2-3). One important way this is done, according to Watson, is the subtextual legitimation of the different ideas of the nation proposed by the different writers. He observes also how the younger writers tended to critique some of the intellectual foundations and truth claims of the older nationalists while alternately taking up and modifying certain narratives and discursive positions (5-6). Watson’s insights are applicable, in important ways, to In the Shadow of a Saint where Ken Wiwa’s historiographical project is metodically organized across the different chapters. Chapter titles are suggestive of patterns and symmetries, the most noteworthy being the first (“home”) and last chapters (“home . . . ”), as well as two chapters that share

47 the book’s title, “the shadow of a saint”. Historical accounts in the text include Wiwa’s earliest memories of growing up in his father’s household in Nigeria and moving to England at the age of nine. He writes of his experiences as a black pupil in an elite, white public school in England, and of the increasing estrangement between him and his father as he (the son) grew older. Within these accounts, he also narrates his father’s life story, tracing Saro-Wiwa’s genealogy and education, and describing his father’s rise to political and social prominence and wealth. In one of the five short sections of the Preface, Wiwa foregrounds the three historical issues that are central to the narrative: Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain in 1960; the controversies surrounding the country’s oil wealth; and the emergence of MOSOP in 1990 leading to his father’s eventual execution by Abacha in 1995. These form the backdrop to the sustained historical account in the second chapter which is actually dedicated to the early life of his father. Stating that Ken Saro-Wiwa was enrolled at the prestigious University of Ibadan in 1961, the author adds that “he walked onto a campus that was the hotbed of intellectual and political activity in the newly independent country” (Shadow, 19). He notes that Chinua Achebe graduated from Ibadan shortly before his father and that the two were part of the vibrant intellectual political activism of the 1960s that characterized new African and Caribbean nations as well as the American civil rights movement. After this, he moves on to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970 which, he says, “had a profound and lasting effect on the course of both my father’s life and Nigerian history. So much of this story hinges on that war.” (21). As background to the conflict, Wiwa provides a concise account of Nigerian history from the operations of the pre- colonial Niger River Trading Company until the time his father was sacked from the post- Civil war military administration. This summary contains such important dates, names, and events as the Berlin Treaty of 1884, the 1914 amalgamation of the former Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria into one administrative and political entity, as well as the attainment of independence in October 1960. In these portions of the narrative, Wiwa pays the most attention to the social, political and cultural character of the geo-political and cultural agglomerations designated as Northern and Southern Nigeria respectively. Using a pattern of representation and

48 historicization that highlights dissimilarities and discontinuities while silencing similarities and continuities (in terms of religion, landscape, culture, and indigenous social organization), Wiwa attempts to naturalize the political differences that have animated social conflicts in Nigeria since the pre-independence era. The ‘North’ and ‘South’ are ubiquitous throughout the text and are made to assume an almost ontological character. Wiwa reinforces this decades-old division by describing the ‘North’ and ‘South’ as being “very different in character and outlook” (22). He says the North is dominated by “the mainly Muslim Hausa-Fulani ethnic group … ruled by emirs who ran a feudal and nomadic community”, while “[m]any of the ethnic groups in southern Nigeria were fiercely democratic in character and tradition, and had long and proud histories.” (22). 38 He also points out that rivalry among elites from “the majority ethnic groups – the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the west and the Igbo in the east” (23) since pre-independence times sabotaged nation-building and culminated in the civil war. Wiwa shows that these differences go beyond the relatively ‘simple’ North-South and Hausa/Fulani-Yoruba-Igbo divisions. He suggests that the differences actually reflect a deeply fragmented body politic comprising “so many distinct and unrelated peoples with such different histories, religions, and temperaments” (23). If this sustained and deliberate reinforcement of fragmentation is considered together with another of the text’s key missions – i.e. the vigorous articulation of Ogoni ethnic national consciousness which is discussed subsequently – it becomes possible to read Wiwa’s representation of national and cultural identity in terms of discourses of ‘cultural racism’ (see ; Modood, 2000; Giroux and McLaren, 2014). In other words, the elaborate foregrounding of seemingly irreconcilable and primordial differences among Nigeria’s many cultural groups becomes a frame for the subsequent enunciation of a distinct Ogoni nationalism from which non- Ogonis are precluded. This discursive strategy illustrates Roger Brubaker’s (2009: 21) description of “ethnicity, race, and nationhood as a single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization, and political contestation”. It also resonates with Mbembe’s (2009: 264) problematization of the ways in which Africans imagine themselves in terms of race:

[T]the repertoires on the basis of which the imaginaires of race and the symbolism of blood are constituted have always been characterized by their extreme variety. At a level beyond that of the simple black/white opposition, other racial cleavages have always set Africans against each other.

There is a strong sense in which parts of Wiwa’s narrative are an example of the ‘extreme’ nature of the discursive repertoires by which kinship-based social identity is imagined within contemporary forms of cultural expression in Africa. It is instructive in this regard that Wiwa’s construction of social identity and difference within the contemporary Nigerian nation focuses largely on the presumed kinship ties that bind ethnic groups, as well as on notions of autochthony. Such essentialist ideas of self and community are expressed in the argument that the Nigerian nation is “an artificial construct” (Shadow, 21), an idea at the heart of the most vociferous sub-nationalist discourses in the country since the era of anti-colonial activism. These notions remain central to the upsurge in ethnic nationalist sentiment that followed the return to democracy in 1999.39 By invoking this argument, Wiwa’s narrative adopts problematical representational practices associated with the legitimation and naturalization of insular and oppositional ideas of social belonging. Moreover, it reveals a significant break from earlier (i.e. anti-colonial and post- independence) traditions of writing Nigerian nationalism by the so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ generations of writers. Those writers invariably portrayed the postcolonial nation- state as a potent unifier of its diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural constituencies. This is a crucial discontinuity that can be identified in a number of post-dictatorship works in which the credentials of the postcolonial nation-state are increasingly questioned. A noteworthy example is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) in which the author offers what she calls an “unapologetic Biafran” perspective on Nigerian nationalism that subverts official narratives of post-war national reconciliation (Adichie, 2008: 50). These discourses reflect the fiercely oppositional nature of identity construction in Nigeria and the ways in which social cleavages and differences have sometimes found expression in endemic and often violent conflict. Although these oppositions are played out in different social spheres – religion, party politics, for example – Wiwa’s focus is on the regional and ethnic fault lines of the pre-war period: “[The] Eastern [Region] was seen as the preserve of the Igbo, who used their influence as the majority ethnic group in the region to secure the best jobs. They

50 looked down on minority ethnic groups like the Ogoni . . .” (Shadow, 20). Ironically, the Igbos themselves complained of “discrimination and victimization by the Hausa and the Yoruba” (23) in a larger national context, which represents yet another dimension of polarity, namely that between the national centre and individual regions or ethnic groups. Such a centre-periphery dichotomy characterizes Wiwa’s subsequent portrayal of the relationship between the Nigerian state and the Niger Delta in general, and those between the state and “outlying regions, places like Ogoni” (47) in particular. This is also the case with the author’s account of the Eastern Region’s attempt to secede and establish the Republic of Biafra, resulting in, as he puts it, “the rest of the country [going] to war” with “the Igbo” (23). In these ways therefore, his historiographical approach has the effect of reinforcing his conception of social divisions along ethnic and regional fault lines. A similar effect – in terms of the reinforcement of certain social differences – is apparent in Native Nostalgia in which Dlamini’s nostalgic account of his childhood under apartheid is infused with multivalent thematic import. While operating as a form of self- expression (see Clingman, 1992), Dlamini’s quasi-autoethnography includes a self- conscious mission to foreground the social divisions that exist among black South Africans. This is to facilitate his stated objective of subverting official struggle discourses that tend to totalize black identities and experiences, and that sustain the hegemony of dominant anti- apartheid organizations such as the ANC. However, as the analysis in the paragraphs to follow reveal, Wiwa and Dlamini approach categories like class and ethnicity in strikingly divergent ways that problematize the differences of their possible thematic interests. Native Nostalgia exhibits some of the features that Frenkel and MacKenzie (2010) identify as important markers of the current literary tradition in South Africa. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the text’s marginalization of the TRC, a subject that dominates many texts of the period (Graham, 2009). In Native Nostalgia, the TRC is only mentioned twice, highlighting Frenkel and MacKenzie’s (2010: 4) observation that many works of this period demonstrate a “different approach to the past” including waning interest in the TRC. More noteworthy, perhaps, is that the book seems to have attracted more attention for its atypical approach to the country’s apartheid history. Dlamini’s unapologetic nostalgic recall of his childhood years under apartheid represents a provocative form of revisionist historicization that challenges the received ways in which the history of apartheid and the

51 liberation struggle has been constructed and circulated in South Africa. Dlamini states that it is his aim to demonstrate that during apartheid, the lives of black people were not overdetermined by the racist policies of the state. He argues that many black people found ways to lead ‘normal’ lives in spite of the dehumanizing socio- political contexts of apartheid. One of the most notable initial responses to the book is the stinging disapproval of Eric Miyeni, a columnist for a national daily, The Sowetan. Miyeni (2011) writes that he finds the book “so sickening [he] decided never to read it” because, in his view, the “only purpose it serves is to reduce white South Africa’s guilt over its past transgressions”. Similarly, Sandile Memela (2011), a blogger and senior government official at the time, accused Dlamini and four other black intellectuals for “rubbishing the gains of democracy and undermining black integrity [rather] than consolidating it.” This highlights another important way in which Native Nostalgia offers a different account of South Africa’s recent history: its distinct non-celebratory account of liberation and the ending of apartheid. Dlamini side-lines major individuals and events and focuses instead on the more or less banal daily rituals of ordinary black people living on the social and political margins. There is the conspicuous omission of several notable events and individuals including Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness Movement, the killing of Hector Pieterson, as well as the spectacular watershed events of 1976, 1990, and 1994. This historiographical method, according to Dlamini, focuses on “shattered fragments of memory” such as the personal anecdotes and reflections that populate Native Nostalgia. It is an approach that resonates with Njabulo Ndebele’s (1991) influential critique of the preoccupation with ‘the spectacular’ in apartheid-era writing. Noting that “the majority of black South Africans did not experience apartheid in its spectacular form” (Nostalgia,15), Dlamini explicitly decries continuing recourse to “the ‘politics of the spectacle’” in the form of post-TRC ‘service delivery protests’ (1). This marginalization of ‘spectacle’ can be understood as serving twin purposes – discursive and narratological. On the one hand, it reinforces, or is reinforced by, the author’s avowed objective of deconstructing the ostensibly exaggerated role of the liberation movement in the anti- apartheid struggle. At the same time, it enables readers to pay attention to the text’s account of the intricate social orders and communal networks that undergird the political agency of the common people, and that was central to the defeat of official apartheid.

This provides a useful point of departure for an analysis of the ways in which Dlamini’s narrative reflects, as I argue, what may be described as a post-TRC sensibility, marked by a strong sense of anxiety and disorientation over the country’s ongoing socio- political transition. In this regard, I examine how Dlamini emphasizes class, space and place, while at the same time marginalizing ethnicity and race in his reconstruction of contemporary black subjectivity. In doing so, I aim to make evident the ways in which the nostalgic rehistoricization offered in Native Nostalgia operates to subvert, as the author declares, the received master narratives of liberation that underpin the current political hegemony of the ruling ANC. I begin by examining Dlamini’s idiosyncratic memorialization based on “reflective nostalgia”, a notion he borrows from the Russian psychologist, Svetlana Boym (18). Native Nostalgia offers a compelling interrogation of the role of narrative in political processes and in the (re)construction of social categories in contemporary South Africa. Through polemics, ethnography, autobiography, and history, Dlamini critiques the dominant historical, cultural, and political narratives that have accompanied the transition to democracy. Furthermore, he seeks to subvert those discourses – predicated on what he calls “a corruption of black history” (21) – that sustains political and economic profiteering in the post-apartheid democratic dispensation. He argues that these discourses and narratives are based on

the fiction that black South Africans lived, suffered and struggled the same way against apartheid. This has allowed racial nativists to claim with impunity that if all blacks suffered the same way, then any black person can stand in for all blacks. It has made it all too easy for some to play the race card. It has also allowed a few black faces to get rich at the expense of the millions of blacks – all in the name of black economic empowerment and transformation, whatever that means. (21)

It is important in this respect to recall Xolela Mangcu’s (2011) observations of how public memory, power, and nation-building intersect. Mangcu argues that historical revisionism, which invariably involves selective inclusion and exclusion, often works to redefine the character of national identity by undermining and marginalizing certain socio-political discourses or constituencies. This highlights the important and evolving interrelationships between literary historicization, political contingency, and national discourse. While adopting a polygeneric40 discursive form, Native Nostalgia is narrated in

53 conventional prose and organized into conventional chapters. The introduction begins in the narrative present with three separate accounts from ordinary citizens living in small outlying towns and villages in three different provinces. The three represent slightly different generations and all lament, in different ways, the country’s current socio-political situation. At the same time, each person reflects on the pre-1994 period, and expresses nostalgia for the past, disaffection with the present, and anxiety for the future. They complain about what is perceived to be poor and corrupt governance, and the perceived lack of social order. They also make reference to the increasing cases of violence that characterizes mass political expression in the post-TRC years. These concerns serve as the author’s point of departure for his ensuing polemical engagement with topical themes of socio-political transition. Dlamini’s creative historiography involves relaying aspects of his personal life story alongside anecdotes of close family members and friends. This is accompanied by heavily reflexive theoretical analyses on historical, social, cultural and political processes. Dlamini also explores social diversity among black South Africans – especially in terms of class, origin, generation, and to a lesser extent, gender. Despite his claim in that he attaches no importance to his ethnicity (Nostalgia, 40-41), the text reveals that ethnic consciousness remains an important even if a relatively muted concern in the current South African social imagination. Dlamini goes on to demonstrate how these differences are reflected in the varied lived experiences of black people. This emerges as a key part of his attempt to highlight the complexities and textures of the history of black South Africans both during and after apartheid. The book begins with a short autobiographical note situating the author’s birth in 1973. This is placed in relation to some major world events of the time. More significantly, he situates these events within South Africa’s cultural history of the time by discussing the crucial role of the wireless radio receiver in enabling specific social practices and in shaping the political consciousness of black South Africans during apartheid. He also dwells on the failure of the SABC’s apartheid policies to promote divisive ethnic or ‘tribal’ subjectivities among blacks in spite of the establishment of separate stations (Radio Zulu, Radio Sotho, etc) for the different indigenous African languages. Dlamini’s interest in his township childhood, and his reference to the importance of

“local histories” (Nostalgia, 20) explains his historiographical focus on the period between 1949 when Katlehong was established, and the narrative present. It also explains the suitability of his choice of (auto)ethnographic narrative methods which resonate with Stephen Clingman’s (1981: 165) notion of “[h]istory from the inside”. Although the immediate subject of Clingman’s inquiry are works of fiction, it can be argued that Dlamini’s specific narrative strategies in Nostalgia equally dramatize Clingman’s point regarding “the ways in which historical process is registered as the subjective consciousness of individuals in society” (1981: 165). This, furthermore, echoes Dennis Walder’s (2004) recommendation of that a variety of narrative approaches needs to be employed for the successful recuperation of the buried or obscured histories of formerly colonized people. In terms of historical contextualization, a distinctive feature of Nostalgia is the author’s habit of juxtaposing his reflections on the past and his prognostications for the country’s future with analyses of the present. It is a narrative and discursive manoeuvre whereby the social and political conditions of the narrative present are constantly foregrounded in the text’s account of, and commentary on, selected historical moments. He justifies this in the Introduction by arguing that he identifies himself with people for whom

the past, the present and the future are not discrete wholes, with clear splits between them … [F]or whom the present is not the land of milk and honey, the past not one vast desert of doom and gloom, and the ancient past not one happy-go-lucky ear. For many, the past is a bit of this, the present a bit of that and the future hopefully a mix of this, that and more. (Nostalgia, 12)

One significant effect of this approach is that history and temporality are ultimately depicted in terms that are not necessarily unidirectional. Furthermore, the transition of South African society from apartheid to democracy can be seen as being portrayed, not in terms of grand or instantaneous transformations, but, as West-Pavlov (2015:4) puts it, “non-teleological ‘minor narrative[s]’ of liberation” over an expansive temporal frame (see also McClintock, 2007). This historiographical method is central to one of Dlamini’s core theses, namely that it is not illogical for black South Africans living in the current democratic dispensation to look back on their lives during apartheid with a sense of nostalgia. He acknowledges the irony in this argument, noting that, “for all its fixation with the past, [nostalgia] is essentially about the present. It is about present anxieties refracted

55 through the prism of the past” (Nostalgia, 16; emphasis added). On the face of it, the anxieties that animate Dlamini’s narrative mission relates, as he argues, to “the distorting master narrative that dominates the historiography of the struggle” (18). However, the text reveals that Dlamini is actually more concerned with the political economy of that master narrative and the ways in which it legitimates and sustains a certain social, political, and economic arrangement in post-apartheid and post-TRC contexts. The anxieties that he writes about, and which trigger his nostalgia, can thus be better understood in the context of his dissatisfaction with the post-TRC status quo. The text’s representation of disaffection with the country’s state of affairs reflects several undesirable material conditions. However, there is also a strong sense in which this disaffection is expressed as a psychological and/or psychic response to the disorientations associated with transition and socio-cultural dislocation. The material concerns, which tend to dominate the narrative, are invariably and unmistakably linked to the perceived misgovernance and failures of the ANC. One way of understanding the intellectual orientation of a key aspect of Dlamini’s rehistoricization therefore, is in counter-hegemonic terms, as it adopts a historiographical method with the potential to undermine the truth claims and discursive foundations that sustain the country’s current political calculus. This is exemplified most explicitly perhaps, in Dlamini’s argument that “the freedom of black South Africans did not come courtesy of a liberation movement. … Freedom was not sent to them in a gift box from Lusaka” (13). Through this obvious reference to the ANC,41 Dlamini seeks to give credit to ordinary South Africans, whose resilience and collective socio-political agency, he argues, played the most important part in the eventual defeat of apartheid. This is one of a series of references in which the narrative seeks to deconstruct the role of the official liberation movement in general, and the ANC in particular, in the making of a democratic South Africa. Borrowing ideas from Boym (2001), Dlamini describes his mode of rehistoricization as “reflective nostalgia”, a brand of nostalgia that balances affect and cognition, “longing and critical thinking” (Nostalgia, 18). This formulation, he argues, enables productive contemplation of the unsatisfactory status quo brought about both by material local conditions as well as the structural and psychological disorientations of modernity and globalization that operate on a wider, macrocosmic level. Confronted by

“sentiment[s] of loss and displacement” (Boym, quoted in Dlamini, 2009: 16) in an uncertain world “seemingly out of control”, as Dlamini (18) argues, people inevitably “yearn for [the] order” of bygone eras. Yet, as Dennis Walder (2010) notes, it is a form of yearning that is acutely self- aware of its own inherent complexities and contradictions. He explores the nexus between memory, politics and the discursive “representation of the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history” (2010: 2). Walder notes that, historically, nostalgia has emerged as a major cultural and narrative mode during important transitional socio-political moments including the fall of empire, the end of the world wars, as well as colonization and decolonization. He uses the notion of ‘postcolonial nostalgias’ to explore the cultural and psychological legacies of the extremely disjunctive dislocations that have attended postcolonial modernity. Walder argues that identity construction within the specific contexts of South Africa’s contemporary social transition is marked by “profound uncertainty and a struggle to remember and forgive as well as to forget” (ix). It is such unpredictability that provides the conditions for what Dlamini, in Native Nostalgia, to be a recall of, and yearning for, “the social orders and networks of solidarity” during apartheid, and for “the homes we have lost or might have lost” (Nostalgia, 17, 142). Peter Wagner (2012:163) compares this phenomenon to what happened during the contexts of increasing “individualization and globalization” from the 1970s onwards when many Europeans and North Americans expressed nostalgia for the relatively predictable periods of the 1950s and 1960s. It is however important to note that the experience of apartheid, on the face of it, is far less alluring than the prosperity which Europeans and North American had been tempted to remember. But this does not escape Dlamini, who strenuously emphasizes the fact that nostalgia may be expressed in different ways and may serve different discursive purposes. This is why, as he argues, he opts for a form of nostalgia that “lingers on ruins, [as well as] the patina of time and history” (Nostalgia, 17). These considerations are explored in David Medalie’s (2010) very useful essay on the different ways in which nostalgic recourse to the apartheid past functions in current South African literary practices. Written shortly after the release of Dlamini’s book, Medalie’s article only makes brief reference to Native Nostalgia.42 Medalie explains why

57 recourse to the apartheid past is an inevitable and necessary, albeit fraught, preoccupation of post-apartheid literary expression: a reality that must be understood in its complexity:

Backward glances are suspect because there is a possibility that they may be deemed a reactionary response to change. This is, of course, even more so when the past which provides the source of the nostalgia is apartheid South Africa. One should exercise caution, though, in not overlooking the many differences which are apparent within the backward glances which are discernible in the literature of the post-apartheid period. It is a tendency which has many purposes and assumes many forms.

Drawing on Canadian critic, Linda Hutcheon (2000), Medalie (2010: 36-37) distinguishes between “a sophisticated and trenchant form of nostalgia”, which explores nuanced links between the past and the present, from a “glib, unambitious” and uncritical form marked by facile references to the past (2010: 36-37). He argues that the latter category dominates the majority of post-apartheid writing. Although he does not engage in detail with Native Nostalgia, he identifies it, along with Anne Landman’s novel, The Rowing Lesson (2007) as examples of the former group. In view of its apparent dystopic connotations, Medalie (2012: 3) also argues in a later article that invoking the horrors of apartheid in current narratives seems “to be more likely to darken the present than to illuminate it”. Walder (2010: 17) alludes to this when he observes that, given the country’s peculiar history, recollections of its past “are likely to be ambivalent, if not contradictory and “turbulent”. This further highlights the controversial responses that nostalgic recuperations of apartheid history tend to evoke in the post-TRC dispensation. Judith Lütge Coullie (2013: 195-210) examines this issue in her interrogation of the “ethico-politico … implications” of private versus official uses and/or abuses of the apartheid cultural archive in Native Nostalgia. She concludes that Dlamini’s deployment of nostalgia to recuperate positive memories of his childhood, and as a “reasonable response to frustrated expectations and a deficient [post-apartheid] present” (205) represents ethical use of memory. Even so, Coullie observes that

In emphasising the remembered good, rather than past suffering, Dlamini perhaps does not exploit fully the ethical potential inherent in the latter: the recollection of affliction, Margalit (2002, 82) argues, is a first step on the road to repentance for wrongdoers (necessary so that they can distance themselves from past transgressions) and accords victims respect and acknowledgement of the wrongs suffered.

A different assessment of the uses of nostalgia in current South African national discourse is offered by Eric Worby and Shireen Ally (2013: 457-480) who explore the workings of memory in the TRC and the Apartheid Archive Project. They challenge the “conceptual alignment of nostalgia with memory (whether good or bad, accurate or false), and truth with testimony (whether honest or disingenuous, factual or fictitious) [459].” They also argue that dominant uses of nostalgia in current South African narratives, including Native Nostalgia, reflect “a symptom of being stuck in and out of time”, within a kind of “temporal loop” (459)”. Against this backdrop of the ethical and representational problematics associated with the effects of post-TRC nostalgia, Worby and Ally’s idea of the “temporal loop” most forcefully highlights the need for re-thinking national histories and transitions such as that offered in the preceding chapter of this study. I suggest that, while not without its contradictions and ironies, Dlamini’s constant juxtaposition and overlaying of the past, present, and future is a useful way of accounting for South Africa’s “multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another and envelope one another” (Mbembe, 2001: 99). These complicated temporalities represent a critical aspect of the ever-shifting contexts of postcolonial literary representations. And they may explain Dlamini’s recourse to a creative and idiosyncratic blend of narrative modes – polemic, memoir, (auto)biography – which are mediated by careful self-reflexion (Nostalgia, 18).43

Social differences and the (re)construction of national consciousness

I have shown in the foregoing section how Wiwa and Dlamini appropriate life-writing as a means of negotiating their own personal identities within the larger projects of rehistoricizing contemporary nationalism in Nigeria and South Africa. Kinship – filial, genealogical, and ethnic – appears to be Wiwa’s major concern and forms the background to his articulation of ethnic Ogoni nationalism and a sceptical vision of post-dictatorship Nigerian nationhood. Dlamini, for his part, pays more attention to socio-economic class, as well as space and place, while simultaneously de-emphasizing forms of social belonging that often rely on discourses of ontological essentialism, namely ethnicity, national origin, and race. Focusing on these categories, each writer vigorously outlines the scope and nature

59 of social divisions within their respective societies during the periods of transition under consideration. In spite of their particular biases however, it emerges that in both narratives, the construction, reconstruction, and legitimation of personal and social identity is influenced to varying degrees by all of the following concerns – space and place, kinship, as well as the material and psychic anxieties associated with what Fred Davis describes as the “longing for continuity in a fragmented world” (quoted in Nostalgia, 16). Against this background, I interrogate Wiwa’s espousal of Ogoni ethnicity in opposition to post-independence and post-dictatorship Nigerian nationalism and Dlamini’s representation of township subjectivity in his reconceptualization of post-apartheid and post-TRC black identities. In respect to Wiwa, I consider the portrayal of the Ogonis as a ‘doubly discriminated’ and marginalized minority (see Akpome, 2014). At the same time, I focus on Dlamini’s decision to privilege space and place, as well as socio-economic class, as the key social categories among black South Africans. The importance of ethnic identity to contemporary identify formation in Nigeria has been well recognized and is highlighted in Wiwa’s narrative. Eghosa Osaghae and Rotimi Suberu (2005: 8-9) have shown that:

Ethnicity is generally regarded as the most basic and politically salient identity in Nigeria. This claim is supported by the fact that both in competitive and non-competitive settings, Nigerians are more likely to define themselves in terms of their ethnic affinities than any other identity. … [T]his is not surprising, considering that ethnic formations are perhaps the most historically enduring behavioural units in the country, and were further reinforced by the colonial and post-colonial regimes.

This is why Wiwa argues that many Nigerians are “at best cynical and at worst indifferent” about the nation, and that “[m]ost see themselves as Ikwere, Ijaw, or Ogoni first” (Shadow, 219). In a way that forcefully illustrates Osaghae and Suberu’s (2005) claims, ethnicity emerges as Wiwa’s principal category of collective identity. Therefore, when he uses the phrase ‘our people’ (which occurs liberally in some parts of the narrative), it is often in reference to ‘Ogoni people’ rather than to Nigerians. A good example is found in these passages in which decries the environmental degradation of Ogoni land and the social discrimination suffered by Ogonis:

My father felt it was intolerable that the oil companies were reaping fantastic profits at the expense of our land and our people. He envisaged MOSOP as the vehicle to challenge those companies to clean up our environment, to compensate our people for the damage done, and force them to pay a fairer rent for the land. […] I had no idea that the incidence of oil spills in Ogoni was one of the highest recorded in the world. Our people had never stopped to consider that the pipelines that ran through our villages were responsible for polluting our environment. … Our people endured their situation silently, suffering the indignity and humiliation of wallowing in poverty in an oil-rick land. Our people had accepted their status as second-class citizens. (Nostalgia, 49--51)

Indeed, the category of nation is sometimes portrayed in opposition to that of ethnic group. Furthermore, Wiwa partly adopts a representational pattern whereby some characters are identified primarily by their ethnic affiliations. For example, the presumed winner of the abortive 1993 general elections is introduced to readers as “Chief Moshood Abiola, a billionaire Yoruba businessman” (91), while Abacha is once described “a Kanuri, a minority group in northern Nigeria” (92). Another example of this obsession with ethnicity is Wiwa’s observation that in naming the family business after their language Khana,44 his father had demonstrated a “philosophy and vision [that] extended from family to tribe” (27). Wiwa’s emphasis on ethnic identity is also manifest in his representation of the Nigeria-Biafra War. The strong ethnic orientation of the conflict has continued to spawn competing accounts (literary and otherwise) that often reflect the political positioning of different historical sources and commentators.45 Wiwa states, instructively, that his father

was one of the few Ogoni intellectuals and leaders to declare for Nigeria. He felt that the Ogoni had better prospects for economic development within Nigeria than in an Igbo-dominated Biafra. He had experienced enough discrimination at the hands of the Igbo to fear for our fortunes within a putative Biafra. (24)

Even though he adds that in spite of, or in addition to, ethnic differences, the war was “a battle for control of the vast and largely untapped oilfields of the Delta” (23-24),46 his historiographical and representational approach remains conditioned by the ethos of opposition. For this reason, the narrative can be read, in the terms set forth in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1991), as being positioned (whether intentionally or not) in response to competing ethnic and regional perspectives on Nigerian history and nationalism.

Wiwa’s rehistoricization of Nigerian nationhood becomes an opportunity to offer a compelling (re)construction of the history and identity of the Ogoni people and Ogoniland. This, of course, includes creating a place for himself within that history and within the collective subject position of a minority ethnic group. He provides an overarching depiction of Ogoni people and their land as being on the margins, both spatially and politically. Noting that Ogoniland is one of the country’s “outlying regions” on “the northeastern fringes of the Delta”, he draws attention to the fact that the people are “one of the smallest of the 250 ethnic groups in the Niger Delta” (Shadow, 47, 45-46; emphasis added). This is why Rob Nixon (1996: 39) calls them a “micro-minority” being fewer than a million members in a country of close to two hundred million people from hundreds of ethnic groups. This particular representational vocabulary is significant, as it exemplifies Wiwa’s dominant depiction of the Ogoni as a people who are social and political ‘Others’ at both the regional and national levels. Before MOSOP gained international prominence, some Ogoni people had expressed themselves politically under different platforms such as the now defunct Ogoni Central Union, formed in 1945, and the Ogoni State Representative Assembly, formed in 1950. Under MOSOP, the different Ogoni sub-cultural groups united into what is now considered to be a distinct ethnic group (Isumonah, 2004). Wiwa’s delineation of the Ogoni includes redolent descriptions of Ogoni topography and an emphasis on its mineral endowment in ways that illustrate the significance of space and place in nationalist constructs. Indeed, Wiwa’s painstaking description of Ogoniland reflects Simon Schama’s theorization, in his influential book, Landscape and Memory, of the ways in which topography is “mapped, elaborated, and enriched as homeland” (1995: 15). Drawing extensively, but not exclusively, on his father’s writings and record of activism, Wiwa elaborates on the economic, political, environmental, and cultural ramifications of the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of Ogoniland and its people. In doing this, he invokes the history of oil exploration in Nigeria, and the extensive ecological degradation and impoverishment suffered by the Ogoni. This narrative demonstrates how ethnic Ogonis living in Nigeria struggle against the twin legacies of colonialism and misrule by the country’s military regimes. It also highlights their economic exploitation at the hands of multinational oil companies such as the Dutch giant, Shell:

[T]he oil companies were reaping fantastic profits at the expense of our land and our people. . . . [My father] observed that Shell was not only flouting Nigeria’s environmental laws, but also paying lip service to its own commitment to a clean and safe environment. He accused Shell of hypocrisy and racism, pointing out that while the multinational used its record in Europe and North America to trumpet its commitment to the environment, it was operating to a very different standard in Ogoni. (Shadow, 49)

Wiwa also highlights the social discrimination suffered by Ogonis at the hands of their dominant ethnic neighbours in the old Eastern Region:

I was teased at primary school because I was an Ogoni. I used to flinch whenever my classmates taunted me with shouts of ‘Ogoni pior pior’. I did not know what the words meant, but I knew they were an insult and that they hurt. I grew up watching grown Ogoni men taunted by children in public. I was so ashamed of being an Ogoni that I used to beg my mother not to speak Khana in public. I didn’t know of any Ogoni man or woman who had ever done anything significant in Nigeria. People said that we were dirty, that we were cannibals. We were the wretched of the wretched of the earth, suffering under the yoke of our double discrimination as a minority within a minority. (Shadow, 51)

These narratives echo those in his father’s 1989 memoir of the civil war, On a Darkling Plain, excerpts of which appear in the text. Saro-Wiwa explains in that account how Ogonis were ridiculed by Igbos as “stupid people” (quoted in Shadow, 67). It is significant that such experiences are marginalized in the dominant accounts of the war (see Amadi, 1976). In this connection, Hugh Hodges (2009), commenting on some of the historical silences of Buchi Emecheta’s Biafran war novel, Destination Biafra (1984), notes that

[T]he Ogoni, the Ijaw, the Ikwerre and all the other small ethnic groups in the Niger Delta suffered attacks from both sides in the Biafra War precisely because of their minority ethnic identities. This is a piece of history that Destination Biafra tries to erase. (Hodges, 2009: 5)

Discrimination against minorities in Nigeria has its roots in the political and administrative structures of the late colonial and early post-independence political dispensation. The situation became aggravated following the introduction of regions in 1954, and until their dissolution in 1967 just before the war began. Peter Ekeh (1997: n.p.) explains, in this regard, that:

In the North, the Fulani, allied with the Hausa whom they had ruled for a century before the onset of British colonialism in 1903, dominated the affairs of the Region and persecuted the Tiv and several other minorities. In the east, the Igbo maltreated the Ibibio and other minorities. In the West, the Yoruba captured power and showed great hostilities towards the Urhobo and Benin especially.

During Wiwa’s childhood in the early post-war period, the Ogoni were part of the old Rivers state in which they remained a minority among bigger ethnic groups such as the Ijaw and Ikwerre. All of these groups had been minorities within the defunct Igbo- dominated Eastern Region. In this context, Wiwa’s description of the Ogoni as a ‘minority within a minority’ becomes revealing as is discussed here. This probably explains some of the notable historical silences in his overall representation of Nigeria and the Niger Delta sub-region. His historicization of oil exploration in Nigeria begins in 1958 when oil was discovered in Ogoniland, and not in the more frequently cited year of 1956, when oil was first discovered in the Ijaw community of Oloibiri. More telling is his decision to leave out, totally, Isacc Boro’s failed attempt to carve out a Niger Delta Republic from Nigeria in February 1996. This was Nigeria’s first secessionist effort, predating even Biafra. Alongside Saro-Wiwa, Boro remains the most iconic figure in the modern history of the struggle by the peoples of the Niger Delta for the control of oil resources. Wiwa also ignores the 1998 Kaiama Declaration and the founding of the Ijaw Youth Council, as well as what has been called the ‘Odi Massacre’ of 199947, all of which are critical episodes in the wider historical and political contexts of Wiwa’s own narrative. These silences, considered together with Wiwa’s particular representational choice, may be understood as deliberate narrative strategies that function in a significant way. They enable Wiwa to focus almost exclusively on Ogoni specificity, which also helps him, in turn, to foreground his Ogoni cultural heritage and subjectivities. Whether intentional or not, this has the effect of advancing the social, cultural, and political discourses of Ogoni nationalism. The articulation of ethnic nationalism has thus remained a key feature of national political discourse and has actually intensified in the period after the transition from military rule. It is a thriving discourse into which In the Shadow of a Saint has been self- consciously inserted. Reflecting on his personal journey in writing this book, Wiwa states that: “I have learned a great deal along the way, including the rather exciting discovery that you can set out to write a book and the book ends up writing you” (Shadow, xxiii). This is an important acknowledgement of the power of narrative and discursive representations of history and identity to condition people’s sense of self. It recalls Mark Freeman’s (1993:

28) argument that the “idea of self, as we have come to know it, and the idea of history are in fact mutually constitutive”. These ideas are echoed by D. P. McAdams (2008: 242-243) who contends that

the stories we construct to make sense of our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we were, are, and might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are, and might be in the social contexts of family, community, the workplace, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, and culture writ large. The self comes to terms with society through narrative identity.

In spite of the strong pan-Ogoni ethnic consciousness aroused by MOSOP, Isumonah (2004: 448-449) argues that the idea of a distinct Ogoni ethnicity is actually a by-product of colonialism and the responses of conscious elites to the political imperatives of Nigerian nationalism and its administrative ramifications:

Much of the initiative for the unprecedented solidarity of the Ogoni, which became unarguably pronounced in 1993 through a well-publicised mass rally, as it was in the early years of Ogoni identity formation, came from the Ogoni elite. Its diverse origins are primordial and, more, instrumental. It was created, first, from a historical union supported by objective features of contiguous territory, similar customs and traditions and life ways; and second, from a common group status forged through colonial stigmatization and administrative policies, ethnic associations and socio-economic conditions.

Mahmood Mamdani (2013; 105-106) elaborates on this point in his excellent study on the origins of contemporary politicized ‘tribal’ identities in Africa. Citing Yusuf Bala Usman’s (2000) critique of Nigeria’s current ethnic categories, Mamdani contends that “contemporary ethnic nationalities (including the now dominant Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) were actually created in the process of the formation of the colonial state in Nigeria”:

Usman critiqued fundamental dichotomies that represented the competition and conflict between North and South, ethnic nationalities, and Christians and Muslims as inevitable: “… before the coming into being of Nigeria, there was no ethnic nationality called ‘Hausa’, as was the case today. Instead, what we had were Kanawa, people of Kano; Katsinawa, people of Katsina: Zage-Zagi, people of Zazzau; Sakkatawa, people of Sokoto, etc. The same really applied to the Yoruba, who were identified as Egba, Oyo, Ekiti, Ijebu, etc.” All available records indicated that the word “Yoruba” (originally, “Yarriba”) was a Hausa language name for the people of the Alafinate of Oyo, first used by a seventeenth-century Katsina scholar, Dan Masani. (Mamdani, 2013: 105-106)

This resonates strongly with Wiwa’s own admission that at the time of writing his book, “what is and is not Ogoni is not clearly defined” and that there are “communities that claim to be Ogoni when it suits them and not when it doesn’t” (Shadow, 55). He acknowledges

65 the “power of myth” in the constant (re)articulation of identity as fundamentally instrumental in social and geopolitical (re)positioning (55). In this regard, he invokes André Brink’s comment that “the powerful act of appropriating the past through imaginative understanding – that is, through the devices of metaphor rather than through a ‘scientific objectivity’ which tries to mask its own uncertainties – is necessary for the sanity of the whole community” (55). There is an interesting irony in the ways in which Wiwa’s negotiation of ethnic consciousness intersects with the realities of his and his father’s class affiliations. In spite of the text’s compelling account of the oppression meted out to Ogonis by the Nigerian state, the fact remains that Saro-Wiwa was a member of the country’s privileged classes. From his own express admission, Wiwa grew up in an exclusive suburb. As a state commissioner, his father who had been educated at some of the country’s best institutions (Government College, Umuahia and the University of Ibadan) was a “well connected … power broker” who “enjoyed the privileges of office” and “a pampered lifestyle with servants” (34). In 1978, Wiwa’s family moved to England where they lived in a middle-class suburb in London and attended expensive private schools. His late younger brother who had attended the prestigious Eton College was identified in the local English press as the “son of a wealthy Nigerian businessman” (79). Furthermore, in 1993, Saro-Wiwa had personal access to Abacha himself when the latter had just assumed power initially (94). At this meeting, according to Wiwa, the general had offered his father the very coveted position of ‘oil minister’ in an attempt to compromise the Ogoni struggle. Saro-Wiwa also had business ties with a controversial Nigerian-Lebanese billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury, who was connected to Abacha and former US president, Bill Clinton (Emshwiller, 2008). Moreover, successful activism has drawn global attention and iconicity to the Wiwas such that the author’s claims to marginality become problematic. This recalls Michael G. Schatzberg’s (1988: 9) observation of the ways in which ethnicity, social class, and national identity construction often manifests as a “protean, contextual and intermittent phenomenon” characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. While Wiwa choses to foreground ethnicity and to marginalize socio-economic class, Dlamini’s does the reverse in Native Nostalgia, emphasizing class differences while

66 marginalizing ethnic and racial subjectivities. This can of course be explained by the differing contexts of the two narratives as well as the authors’s divergent political perspectives and interests. Whereas ethnicity and regionalism have been key aspects of Nigeria’s colonial experience, the case of South Africa is considerably different. The specific divide and rule tactics of British colonialism and the immense linguistic and cultural diversity of Nigeria contributed largely to the specific constellation of political situations in which ethnic differentiation has thrived (see Mamdani, 2013). Settler colonialism in South Africa, as well as the country’s history of early industrialization and urbanization, gave rise to significantly different processes of collective subject formation. In particular, violent displacement and extreme forms of exclusion under apartheid meant that space and place remain central to a sense of self especially among the black majority (see Dixon and Durrheim, 2004). Thus, while notions of cultural specificity are germane to Wiwa’s project of ethnic (sub)nationalism, space and place are ostensibly more important to Dlamini’s mission of (re)inscribing previously excluded subjects into the national cultural archive. In the subsection to follow, I examine the ways in which Dlamini’s historiographical project is accompanied by a sub-textual reconstruction and deconstruction of contemporary black South African social identity. I focus on how he privileges space and place as well as socio-economic class, while at the same time marginalizing ethnicity and race. I draw on Ronit Frenkel’s (2013) reading of post-2000 texts as palimpsests in which several layers of temporalities and transitional experiences are overlaid. This means that Dlamini’s specific representations of apartheid-era identities can be understood in a multi-temporal timeframe through which present and past realities are juxtaposed and through which they are simultaneously examined. If Moonsamy’s (2014) reading of contemporary texts as ‘nostalgia contretemps’ is taken into consideration, Dlamini’s depiction of black identity can be further understood, in terms of a commitment to the future, to indicate how he envisions (black) identity in South Africa in a post-TRC context. I begin with Dlamini’s representation of space and place and how he privileges these categories in his articulation of individual and collective identity. Despite pointing out that the “ground on which people lived and walked was founded not on official decrees but on relationships between neighbours” (Nostalgia, 45), Dlamini traces the roots of

Katlehong to the housing policies of apartheid rule. He historicizes townships, not only as a development that accompanied the growth of the market economy in post-World War II South Africa, but also in sociological terms, as an expression of “a deep sense of (white) dread … over black urbanization” (130).48 While admitting that the definition of townships is contested, Dlamini argues for the recognition of the agency of township dwellers, as well as the centrality of these complex urban formations, in contemporary South African political economy and history (109, 119, 121). In this regard, he invokes the argument that the township is “a highly syncretic urban formation that is integral to city life in South Africa and deeply embedded in the nation’s social imaginary and political consciousness” (Mbembe, Dlamini, Nsizwa and Khunou, 2004: 499). Yet, Dlamini downplays the fact that the township may also be defined in ambivalent terms as being simultaneously urban and peri-urban, and being “proximate to the city while at its margins” (499). Dlamini rejects what he deems to be condescending representations of the township that focus on its material inadequacies. Noting that these conditions are rooted in discriminatory economic and political policies, he argues instead that greater attention should be paid to the unique socio-cultural textures of the township such as the complexities of its social stratification. In this way, he challenges the discursive production of the township as a “space of otherness characterized by underdevelopment, poverty, unemployment, decay, and death” (Ellapen, 2007: 114). In contrast to such disparaging representations, Dlamini’s nostalgic and detailed recollections help to reconstruct the township’s “architectures of intimacy” (Jones, 2013: 28) that make it an enduring point of reference in negotiations of contemporary blackness, even for many members of the emergent black middle class who now live in the suburbs:

In suburbia one escapes surveillance by one’s neighbours and the financial expectations of extended family. Yet it is the township that provides encounters of companionship and affect so important to everyday life. … While, as numerous accounts of the apartheid township attest, conditions were overcrowded, impoverished and oppressive (see for example Mphahlele 1959; and Kuzwayo 1985) the ‘structure of feeling’ that Raymond Williams (1983: 19-21) allies with a communal sense of place was forged against apartheid’s impositions. Confines of space meant greater intimacy with neighbours, interdependence, shared playtime in the streets – forms of sociality fondly recalled by Chipkin’s (2012) interviewees. (Jones, 2013: 28)

Dlamini’s vigorous portrayal of the township in Native Nostalgia also functions to advance his mission to show that ordinary township dwellers deserve much more credit than the

68 official liberation movement for the successful struggle against apartheid. Several of the text’s references to resistance during the 1970s and 1980s can be understood in this way.49 The period leading up to, and following the Soweto Uprising of 1976, marks, according to Dlamini, “the beginning of the end of apartheid” (3) for some people. He therefore highlights the specific role of Katlehong during these times, adding that it was one of the first places, along with its “predecessor township, Dukathole” where resistance to the Bantu Education Act was staged in 1954 (Nostalgia, 90). In this way, Dlamini re-writes the township and its ‘ordinary’ residents into the liberation archive, ascribing to them greater social agency in general, and ownership of their personal and collective liberation from apartheid in particular. It is a discursive move that seeks to displace ‘the spectacular’ in order to centre the ‘ordinary’ within South Africa’s growing cultural archive (see Ndebele, 1998). The comprehensive representation of townships in general and Katlehong in particular, foregrounds the salience of space and place in Dlamini’s negotiation of individual and collective identity. The combination of vivid (auto)ethnography, lucid memoirs, and passionate polemic, makes it evident that the author places high premium on his township provenance. The first chapter begins with an account of his birth at Katlehong’s Natalspruit Hospital (Nostalgia, 25), one of the township’s most enduring landmarks. Dlamini recounts how, during apartheid, township folks passionately supported a white South African boxer from the East Rand (who he calls a “homeboy” [30]) against a black American opponent. Further, he identifies himself in several instances, in relation to the township. In this regard, he emphasizes the “role of memory in the production of space and time” (107) and argues that memories are always bound to “given places in a given time” (108). It can therefore be understood that his perception of self is strongly linked to the memories and consciousness of his growing up years in the specific spaces of the township. It is the “fond memories” (41) produced within the specific and intimate social and cultural spaces and relationships of Katlehong that are recalled in response to the anxieties associated with the post-TRC context in which the narrative is set, and which is marked by de-familiarizing and disorienting conditions. In her discussion of selfhood in Native Nostalgia, Megan Jones (2014) examines the centrality of the township in contemporary textualizations of blackness. She traces this

69 tradition in important texts like Esk’ia Mphahlele’s Down 2nd Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1986), noting how negotiations of selfhood in apartheid- era autobiographical writing was “tied to ideas about collective resistance and suffering that tended to erode differences playing out across class, gender or age” (Jones, 2014: 109). It is this tradition that Dlamini writes against in Native Nostalgia. Jones praises the formal, historiographical, and representational inventiveness that enables Dlamini to provide a negotiation of black subjectivity which unsettles “the homogenizing conventions” of prevailing textual traditions through attention “to the edgy tensions of the non-identical” (Jones, 2014: 121). She argues that in this way, the text constructs contemporary blackness through a flexible and productive negotiation of the links between space/place and identity while successfully resisting the urge to equate the one with the other. The depiction of class identity represents a central – and perhaps primary – objective of Native Nostalgia. It can also be understood, furthermore, as commentary on the controversies surrounding post-1994 political and economic empowerment policies targeted at black South Africans as an undifferentiated category. The argument has been made, in regard to Black Economic Empowerment, for instance, that the failure to differentiate between rich and economically disadvantaged black people has resulted in the programme being hijacked by politically connected individuals and groups (Papenfus, 2015). As Dlamini puts it, the false idea that

any black person can stand in for all blacks … has made it all too easy for some to play the race card. It has also allowed a few black faces to get rich at the expense of millions of blacks – all in the name of black economic empowerment and transformation, whatever that means (Nostalgia, 21).

His mission to demonstrate the diversity of black South African life under apartheid, especially in economic terms, thus animates the text’s vigorous representation of social differences in Katlehong. It is important, once again, to foreground the fact that while the socio-economic divisions uncovered in this narrative are primarily those of the apartheid era, they may also be understood as reflective of present (i.e. post-TRC) realities in ways that are both symbolic and that refer to specific historical events. It is indeed instructive that most of the country’s current social dilemmas can be linked to the socio-economic inequalities that have continued to grow since 1994 (see Cilliers, 2015).

Dlamini devotes the fourth chapter of his narrative, aptly titled, ‘Class Warfare’, to his exploration of economic class differences among blacks during apartheid. Throughout the text, he highlights a strong consciousness of his own class identity as a child with the frequent use of the expression, ‘working class’ to describe his circumstances. He introduces his mother as “a 45-year-old working-class woman from Katlehong” (25), and describes her house, in which he grew up, as “a working-class home” (51). The term features prominently in his account of the spatial make-up of the township which had separate working-class and “middle-class sections”:

The difference in housing types made visible the class differences within Katlehong. In fact, a Katlehong resident named Joe Mashao told Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien: “It was possible to recognise poor people more clearly. Even today, you can recognise difference between the children of people from Nhalpo [neighbourhood] to those from Monaheng [neighbourhood]’” (52).

He also elaborates on the composition of the different classes and the conspicuous markers of class difference. The elite consisted largely of those with formal education and in formal employment – doctors, nurses, teachers, priests, government clerks, businesspeople. He notes how, as a schoolboy, it was easy for him to identify which economic class his mates belonged to not only by the obvious signs of material possessions; “looking at who wore shoes and who did not” (78), but also by the peculiar class cultures of the time. These included musical preferences and an interesting system by which children were named:

The kids with the African names, who happened to be the spawn of priests, doctors, nurses, teachers and government clerks, were literally in a class of their own, regardless of academic ability. They were members of our high society. Ama-high soss, we called them, top shayelas, children of amarespectables, izihlonishwa. … Their names marked them out. (78)

It is interesting that, while Dlamini demonstrates that social differences are as much a feature of the black community as are the more familiar racial divisions, he simultaneously downplays ethnic differences which were also a critical aspect of black life under apartheid (see Phadi and Ceruti, 2011).50 Indeed, the narrative’s sketchy account of ethnic identity paints a picture of inter-ethnic harmony. Dlamini argues that the attempt by the apartheid state to encourage divisive ethnic nationalism among black South Africans was, in effect, a failure. He states that, not only did the plan to use different language-specific radio stations for this purpose “not work” (Nostalgia, 33), it was in fact counter-productive. This was so

71 because, as he argues, the radio medium actually facilitated a “cross-ethnic … imagined community” (31) among blacks. He declares furthermore, that as an individual, he cares no more for his Zulu ethnic identity than he does for the fact that he is right-handed (40-41). He also describes the ethnic bantustans as “make-believe homelands” (47), noting that his ethnically mixed family and neighbourhood in Katlehong were “Babelic archipelago[es] [rather] than the ethnic islands desired and imagined by apartheid planners” (53). This representation of inter-ethnic harmony is a result of Dlamini’s apparent decision to downplay occurrences of serious ethnic antagonism such as the one that happened in Katlehong in May 1990. In this incident, seven students and a teacher were killed at Katlehong High School and resulted in a bloody war between rival taxi operators (Nostalgia, 133-134). The conflict involved a particular ethnic (Zulu versus Xhosa/Sotho) as well as political (ANC versus Inkatha) dimension, and posed a significant threat to the negotiations between the apartheid state and the liberation movement at the time. The clashes occurred in Katlehong and in the nearby township of Thokoza (both in Gauteng province) with similar battles in the KwaZulu-Natal province. These attracted keen international attention due to the high number of casualties involved (see Wren, 1990) and the fact that they posed a serious threat to ongoing democratic negotiations at the time. Similarly, Dlamini’s narrative seems to be deliberately silent about the noticeable ethnic undertones of the Jacob Zuma versus Thabo Mbeki contest for the ANC presidency in 2007 (see Butler, 2015). Another important issue that is marginalized is the problem of xenophobia, mentioned only once in the entire narrative. This is interesting because it is listed as one of the three concerns – “collective violence in service delivery protests, labour strikes and expressions of xenophobia (Nostalgia, 2) – being investigated in a research project that Dlamini mentions in his introduction. In fact, two of Dlamini’s three ‘witnesses’51 in the introduction come from townships where xenophobic violence had occurred. This was indeed not unconnected with the attacks of May 2008 which started in Alexandra township in Gauteng province and spread to five other provinces.52 During the attacks, which occurred over three weeks, sixty-two people were murdered, almost 700 were injured, and more than 100,000 were reportedly displaced (Polzer and Igglesden, 2009). At the height of the attacks, a Mozambican man, Ernesto Nhamuave was burnt alive in the township of

Ramaphosa (Tromp, 2015). Violence was also recorded in Katlehong where two people were reported to have been killed (Breen, n.d.). These attacks, have been described as “both a catastrophe and turning point” in the country’s history (Steinberg, 2008), leading some commentators to suggest that the country may have reached “the end of the dream years” (Nuttall and McGregor, 2009) of the post-liberation promise of social harmony.53 In Dlamini’s representation of social groups in the township, there are two instances where individuals are identified by nationality; a Malawian man and Swazi woman (Nostalgia, 53, 56). But the nationalities of other anonymous characters – “strangers”, “migrant workers”, and “itinerant Ndebele traders” – are not disclosed. Also, when one of Dlamini’s ‘witnesses’ in the introduction complained that “the problems of today started ‘with the influx of people’”, nationalities are not revealed. This is also the case when the author states that: “Our street [in Katlehong] was also a terrain of encounters between neighbours and strangers, mostly friendly, but sometimes violent, even deadly” (54). It is interesting that these ‘strangers’ and ‘outsiders’ are not identified as foreign nationals in the narrative. It is also interesting that despite his silence on xenophobia in this narrative, Dlamini himself did write about it a 2010 newspaper column where he reveals that xenophobia was indeed a serious problem in Katlehong:

Once, while hanging out at a traders’ market on the border of Katlehong and Vosloorus, I overheard a group of local women taunting a Mozambican man, telling him to go home. The women were in good spirits and the man, who seemed to know them shot back that many local women would starve if Mozambican men were to return to their home country. But there was no escaping the menace buried deep in the exchange. … The police were in on the plots. … I was not surprised. I had heard policemen express some of the worst xenophobia imaginable. (Dlamini, 2010: n.p.)

Therefore, while it remains unclear whether some of the encounters mentioned in the narrative are of a xenophobic nature, the text’s silence on the issue must be accounted a deliberate narrative decision whose purpose becomes a subject of speculation. One possible explanation would be that including such anti-social events and phenomena in the text would be detrimental to the author’s avowed mission to “recuperate a positive definition of townships” (Nostalgia, 112; emphasis added). Before concluding this discussion of Native Nostalgia, it is important to pay brief attention to the ways in which the text de-emphasizes racial subjectivity. Here, I do not

73 propose to offer a comprehensive discussion of the text’s representation of race. Rather, I intend to foreground, in passing, how the marginalization of racial identity contributes to the text’s effort to (re)construct contemporary South African identities. It emerges that, as Dlamini highlights the salience of history, socio-economic class, as well as space and place in his (re)imagining of post-TRC black identity, he simultaneously de-emphasizes those forms of social belonging that often rely on discourses of ontological essentialism, namely ethnicity, national origin, and race. In general, the text avoids any direct or sustained discussion of race but there are two oblique references to the issue which are particularly significant. The first is Dlamini’s account of the enthusiastic support that black boxing fans gave to a white South Africa boxer, Gerhardus Coetzee (from a neighbourhood close to Katlehong) against a black American opponent in 1983. The other is the discussion of the attitudes of black South Africans to Afrikaans in the seventh chapter which is provocatively titled, “The Language of Nostalgia” (135). In these two passages, Dlamini decides to broach the issue of race in an indirect way that allows him to avoid ‘race-talk’. One way to interpret the Coetzee story as a commentary on race relations, is that through it, Dlamini is suggesting that South Africans are able to relegate primordial racial proclivities in favour of social affinities forged through community and shared histories. His discussion on Afrikaans is probably subject to a greater range of interpretations, especially when one considers this particular passage:

I can’t say why Afrikaans should be the language of nostalgia. I can’t say I know why, of South Africa’s eleven official languages, Afrikaans should be the one in which our nostalgia … is expressed. Could it be that, in using Afrikaans to express our deep longing for the past, for the homes we have lost or might have lost, black South Africans might be forcing Afrikaans to speak of its origins in the kitchens or the slave quarters in the Cape? (Nostalgia, 142)

I suggest that his decision to provide more questions than statements, and to equivocate rather than to posit – to ‘speak through silence’, as it were – represents a creative attempt to deconstruct the assumptions of prevailing discourses of race without being ensnared himself. It is a strategy that, arguably, targets the foundations, and not just the content, of ‘race talk’. However it may be interpreted, it can be argued, that it is effective in this narrative, in a rhetorical sense, in complicating ‘race talk’ while allowing the writer to

74 privilege constructivist notions of social identity in the specific contexts of transitional South African society. It is possible to read Wiwa’s portrayal of inter-group relations in Nigeria in a similar way without losing sight of the different historical trajectories and socio-political dynamics of the two countries. In Wiwa’s narrative, there is indeed a more determined effort to depict the past through the prism of present realities. This applies in particular to the text’s vigorous representation of current social fissures that are traced to the perceived fundamental deficiencies of the nation’s colonial foundations. The ethnic and regional oppositions which define post-independence nationhood are not only overlaid – in a representational sense – on prior problems, but are shown by Wiwa to echo and reflect irreconcilable differences that are presumably inherent in the founding of the nation decades earlier. This thus underpins the sense of pessimism and determinism that mark his critique of the country’s efforts at democratic consolidation and post-dictatorship national reconciliation. It may also explain the ambivalent sense of national belonging expressed by the author. For example, while identifying the passionate nationwide support enjoyed by the national football team, as the country’s “only coherent expression of national identity” (Shadow, 218), Wiwa states that he understands why a cousin of his refused to support the team during the 1998 football World Cup. The cousin in question had been detained unjustly by security agents and had suffered in refugee camps in the neighbouring republic of Benin after fleeing Nigeria during Abacha’s reign of terror. Such experiences, according to Wiwa, reinforce the “cynical” and “indifferent” attitudes of citizens towards the nation, and explain why they would usually identify themselves first by ethnic affiliation, and only as “Nigerians second” (219). These perceptions are however not associated with periods of military rule alone, but extend significantly to the post-1999 era as is very evident in the narrative’s final two chapters. The first of these chapters is prefaced by an anonymous poem that uses the trope of movement and uncertainty to describe the writer’s return to Nigeria to bury his father in 2000 and to describe the country’s transition from military rule. It is worth reproducing here: “I walk between darkness and light/ the night of exile and the shining memory of home/ the land I knew is given up to strangers/ there in the sunshine do they feel my

75 shadow … ” (216). Also worth highlighting is Wiwa’s description of the post-independence ruling class whose stranglehold on the country accounts, in Wiwa’s view, for the country’s social, political, and economic difficulties:

Since gaining independence in 1960, Nigeria has been in the tight grip of a clique of religious leaders, traditional leaders; ruthless military despots; corrupt, grasping and nepotistic businessmen; greedy multinationals and influential foreigners. This untouchable elite of multi-millionaires and – billionaires, almost exclusively male, has profited from a system that falls somewhere between a feudal, conservative system of patronage and the unregulated opportunism of the Wild West. (Shadow, xv, emphasis added)

He is therefore strongly pessimistic about the post-1999 future, and actually states that he would be

surprised if we have seen the last military regime in Nigeria. For now, a civilian administration is seen as the most viable instrument for maintaining the balance of terror, keeping the uneasy peace between ethnic groups, protecting vested interests and their lucrative investments. (Shadow, 221).

He goes on to question the absence of proper mechanisms of restitution and reconciliation given the country’s peculiar histories of oppression and human rights violations, wondering how there can be “reconciliation without restitution”, and how people can be asked to “forgive and forget” (235). These heavy doubts summarize the distinctly pessimistic and cynical tenor of Wiwa’s assessment of Nigeria’s post-1999 transition from a brutal military regime to civilian rule. However, it is important to note that from 2006, Wiwa was involved in Nigeria’s national government as an aide to three successive presidents (Akubuiro, 2014).54 In a 2014 interview, his mood seems to have changed to one of cautious optimism. In response to a question on the impact of his and his father’s activism, he concedes that, compared to 1993, “the Niger Delta is [now] quite clearly front and center of the political debate in Nigeria” (Guernica, 2009) while insisting that the idea of Nigerian nationhood still needed to be interrogated and strengthened.55 But before offering these prognostications for Nigeria’s post-dictatorship future, Wiwa recounts his encounters with Zindzi Mandela, daughter of Nelson Mandela, Nkosinathi Biko, son of the late anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko as well as Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize winning Myanmar activist who is herself the daughter of a slain

76 activist. These encounters, the author explains, enabled him to come to terms with the conflicts between private concerns and public commitments, a recurring problematic of postcolonial subject formation (see Jameson, 1986). Wiwa’s attempt to situate his personal and social experiences within a broader context draws attention to the important parallels that may be drawn between portrayals of social change in these different, yet representative, socio-political sites. It also a fitting juncture at which Wiwa’s outlook on Nigeria’s post-dictatorship prospects may be compared with those articulated in Native Nostalgia. As noted earlier, one of the key features of Dlamini’s peculiar historiographical strategy of “reflective nostalgia” is the self-conscious juxtaposition of past, present, and future in his critique of South Africa’s transition. His focus on Katlehong and Johannesburg must also be understood, in part at least, in metonymic and allegorical ways, as Malcolm Corrigall (2014: 333) has also pointed out: “Although Dlamini is writing primarily about townships, his insights are actually applicable to different parts of the country, because, as he argues, townsips are “subject in some ways to the same local, national and international currents” that affect bigger, and more valorized places (Nostalgia, 45). The specific spaces of the township thus function as the dominant trope by which the narrative attempts to outline the currents of “fears, anxieties, hysteria and uncertainties” (Nostalgia, 70) besetting the country’s collective post-TRC psyche. The symbol of township rats and the idea of the necropolis (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2008) also reinforce the narrative’s articulation of “the fragility” (72) of South Africa’s still mutating social, political and cultural orders. The ways in which these anxieties are articulated through the medium of the novel, as well as how pessimism is mediated by plural possibilities and ambivalent post-TRC visions, is the key subject of the discussion in the chapter to follow.

CHAPTER FOUR

MARGINAL VOICES IN HELON HABILA’S MEASURING TIME AND ACHMAT DANGOR’S BITTER FRUIT

Introduction

There are several significant ways in which representations of transition in Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia can be read in dialogue to those in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. This study investigates the intertextual body of themes, styles, and figurative resources that link the texts within their individual national literatures on the one hand, and across the post- dictatorship Nigerian and post-TRC South African divides on the other. In the detailed analysis of the two novels situated in dialogue in this chapter, the resonances and discontinuities that describe these linkages are highlighted. These texts are read in conversation in two important ways, namely in their use of child and youth protagonists and the trope of the family, as well as through the thematization of space and place in the reconstruction of social identity. In this connection, both Habila and Dangor highlight transnationality in a way that recalls Hamish Dalley’s (2013) and Ronit Frenkel’s (2013) observations about the spatial entanglements involved in contemporary subjectivization in Nigeria and South Africa respectively. As discussed in chapter one, Dalley (2013: 16) argues that the spatio-temporal frameworks of third- generation Nigerian literature are ambivalent and inconsistent with the “national- generational approach” that underpins how they are currently described. For her part, Frenkel (2013) reads post-2000 South African literatures as narrative palimpsests of layers of transitional experiences, discourses, temporalities, and spatialities. In this regard, Habila’s and Dangor’s novels are different from In the Shadow of a Saint and Native Nostalgia where explorations of space focus more on the homeland. Mainly using child and youth protagonists, Habila and Dangor present marginal and nuanced perspectives on contemporary nationalism in Nigeria and South Africa respectively, displacing the adult, and mostly male viewpoints that have tended to dominate novelistic portrayals of postcolonial nationhood (see Hron, 2008). In comparison with Wiwa and Dlamini whose narratives also include elements of youth perspectives, Habila’s

78 and Dangor’s main protagonists are deployed in the construction of a more sustained and distinct generational subjectivity. In the two main sections that make up this chapter, I explore the different ways in which they critique emergent socio-political orders, as well as the varied visions of the future articulated through these youthful protagonists. In these ways, this study significantly expands scholarship on Habila’s acclaimed, yet underexplored novel. It also provides a reading of Dangor’s novel that brings it into relation, both narratologically and thematically, with the growing literature on Nigeria’s transition. In addition, the discussion of Measuring Time contributes to our understanding of post-independence and post-dictatorship Nigeria in ways that counter predominantly dystopian representations of West Africa. Gregory Claeys (2010: 109) identifies the main features of dystopian literature to be “feasible negative visions of social and political development, cast principally in fictional form”. These are articulated through pessimism about and disillusionment with nation-building in many African texts in the late post- independence period. The period was marked by the rise of totalitarian regimes, the proliferation of civil strife, and other forms of socio-political dysfunction. In 1995, M. Keith Booker (1995: 72) argued that there was a “dystopian turn” in African fiction from the mid-1980s onwards which he associated – in terms of narrative technique and form – with western literary influences on postcolonial writing. This tradition has apparently endured, albeit in different ways, to the current time. In this regard, Hari Kunzru (2007: n.p.) has noted that literary representations of West Africa since the early post-independence period has been marked by “a vein of pervasive hopelessness”. And according to Giulia D’Agostini (2013: n.p.), the region is often represented in literature as a zone of

perpetual emergency, where a progressively more vivid biopoliticisation of politics sanctions the reduction of the postcolonial (non-)citizen to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life” – a form of life that, exposed to sovereign violence, or caught in the sovereign ban, may be killed without committing homicide.

This study also offers a fresh perspective on the multifaceted themes of Bitter Fruit. This is important because commentary on the novel has, so far, focused on issues such as its critique of the TRC, national reconciliation (Quayson, 2005; Poyner, 2008; Gready, 2009; Akpome, 2013), memory and trauma (Miller, 2008; Frenkel, 2008b; Craps and Buelens,

2008; Strauss, 2008; Graham, 2009), as well as discussions of rape and female victims of apartheid (Sanders, 2002; Samuelson, 2004, 2010).56 I preface the analysis in this chapter with a brief exploration of two important issues in representations of nationhood, nationalism, and national consciousness as these themes apply to this study in general, and to the selected texts, in particular. First is the unique relationship between narrative – especially in the form of the novel – and the nation, a category that remains a dominant focus, not only of cultural historicization, but also of other discursive and artistic practices in the postcolonial and postmodern contexts of contemporary Africa. The next is the use of the trope of the biological family in such narratives to stand in for the idea of the nation as a social unit. Although Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit are not nationalist in outlook, they provide valuable insights into how the novel form contributes to the growing cultural archives of Nigeria and South Africa respectively, during the period under consideration. Following Benedict Anderson (1983), Timothy Brennan (1990:49) declared famously that “[i]t was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly- bordered jumble of languages and styles”. And in his excellent review of Imagined Communities, Jonathan D. Culler (1999: 20-39) identifies three elements of the novel that establish this narrative genre as a foremost discursive tool for promoting national consciousness; these are point of view, subject matter and readership. The most important of these, according to Culler, is the unlimited point of view offered by what Anderson calls “‘old-fashioned novels’” in which the narration consists of a set of “simultaneous events”, and “represents a bounded community to its readers” (23). Culler explains that:

Though many novels represent a society conceived as national, in Anderson’s account what is crucial to the role of fiction in the imagining of nations is not this representation but that the world evoked by the novel include events happening simultaneously, extend beyond the experience of particular individuals, and be conceived as geographically situated or bounded. This involves ‘homogeneous empty time’--so-called to highlight its difference from an earlier experience of time, the conception of events as instantiating a divine order which is not itself historical. But for thinking about novels (and about which novels do this and which don’t), it might be more pertinent to speak of novels that present ‘the space of a community.’ (24)

The historical and socio-political settings of Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit are unambiguously national. Mainly through allegorical and metonymic depictions of the

80 family, each novel maps the spaces, subjectivities, and temporalities of the ‘many, yet one’ of the nation in different ways. This recalls Homi Bhabha’s influential contributions to the theorization of the links between nation and narrative. In his introduction to Nation and Narration (1990), Bhabha argues, inter alia, that the concept of the modern nation-state is an ideological construct culminating from a combination of sustained discursive processes – both creative and non-creative. Foregrounding the central role of narrative in this regard, he traces the emergence of modern nations in the West to the convergence of political philosophy with “literary language”, suggesting, furthermore, that the nation is itself a narrative form with peculiar “textual strategies … sub-texts and figurative stratagems” (Bhabha, 1990: 1, 2). In exploring the portrayal of fluid and entangled subjectivities in Dangor’s and Habila’s novels, Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1991) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities proves useful. In this influential work, Balibar and Wallerstein provide an incisive philosophical exploration of the ways in which notions of race, class, and gender intersect with, and are expressed in, projects of nationalism. Particularly relevant to this study is Balibar’s argument that projects of racism and nationalism employ similar strategies of discrimination and social exclusion. He uses the expressions “the genealogical scheme” and “fictitious ethnicity” to refer to discriminatory socio-political arrangements and discursive practices that are underpinned by racist notions of kinship (Balibar, 2011: 2). He defines the latter as

the transformation of the idea, or the ideal of the nation into a representation of “natural” community (based either on race, or language, or both), and “generational connection” (suggesting in particular that the nation must find a mechanism, both institutional and imaginary, to transfer and reproduce at the political level the symbolic function that binds successive generations with one another, carrying identities and norms.

At issue in this study are the ways in which these arrangements are dramatized in relation to the depiction of the marginal social subjects which the selected texts focus on – children and youths, silenced victims of rape, township dwellers, ethnic and racial minorities as well as poor migrants. I now turn to the significance of the trope of the biological family in my discussion of Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit. The preponderance of this trope in narratives and discourses of the nation across different regions and literary traditions is well documented 81

(see Brennan, 1990; Bhabha, 1990; Boehmer, 1995). As Anne McClintock highlights (1993: 63, original emphasis):

Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. The term ‘nation' derives from ‘natio’: to be born. We speak of nations as ‘motherlands’ and ‘fatherlands’. Foreigners ‘adopt’ countries that are not their native homes, and are ‘naturalized' into the national family. We talk of the Family of Nations, of ‘homelands’ and ‘native’ lands. In Britain, immigration matters are dealt with at the Home Office; in the United States, the President and his wife are called the First Family. Winnie Mandela was, until her … fall from grace, honoured as South Africa’s ‘Mother of the Nation’. In this way, nations are symbolically figured as domestic genealogies.

With regard to the early novels of Achebe, for example, Elleke Boehmer (1995: 187) has shown that nationalist awareness is dramatized through his narrativization of “family and compound life”. While Habila’s and Dangor’s narratives and and their intellectual orientations are clearly different from Achebe’s, in their representation of Lamang’s family (in Measuring Time) and Silas’s family (in Bitter Fruit), the signifying links – in terms of the multidirectional synecdoche – between family and nation are powerfully evoked. The connection between the public sphere of the nation and the domestic relations of the respective families are highlighted by the specific history and politics within which their individual filial interactions are framed. This provides scope for exploring the ways in which the portrayal of the Lamang and Ali families may reflect national anxieties in general, and the problems of transition in particular. It also highlights how the breakdown of these families (and other families in each novel), as well as the different pathways undertaken by members of these families represent simultaneously dystopian and auspicious57 possibilities for Nigeria and South Africa. Measuring Time is in many ways a family story. It is the story of Mamo Lamang and his twin brother, LaMamo; of their father, Musa Lamang; and of the people of Keti, a fictional village in north-eastern Nigeria. The novel is also a story of life in Nigeria under various military dictatorships and civilian regimes, and of civil war and socio-political chaos in several post-independence West African nation-states during the 1980s and 1990s. It is a story of the processes of historicization with particular regard to the writing of African histories during and after colonization. At the surface level, the novel is the story of Mamo and LaMamo’s growth from when they are born just after the end of the Nigeria Civil War of 1967-70 to adulthood. In this way, it can be understood as an account of their

82 intellectual coming-of-age during a period of critical social, economic, cultural, and political upheavals. As all these stories are rendered predominantly through, and held together by Mamo, the novel is also, essentially, Mamo’s personal life story. It is the story of his childhood struggle with sickle-cell anaemia, a debilitating congenital disease that afflicts hundreds of thousands of young people especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean (see Caroline, 2015). Measuring Time also tells the story of the sharp contrasts between the lives of the twin brothers, Mamo and LaMamo.58 The former is an invalid, acutely despondent, despised by their father, and lacks a sense of purpose as a child, while the latter is healthy, good-looking, and is preferred by the father. Their different lives highlight the significance of individual choices and pathways in shaping personal and public destiny. In this regard, Toni Kan (2015: n.p.) has linked Habila’s choice of twins with the novel’s historiographical and allegorical project as an invocation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: “Measuring Time, is in many ways, Helon’s own Parallel Lives: Mamo and LaMamo, Lamang and his brother Ilya, Zara and her sister Rhoda as well as Keti and Nigeria”. For its part, Bitter Fruit tells the story of the gradual disintegration of the family of Silas Ali, a coloured former operative of the ANC’s underground armed group, Umkhonto we Sizwe also known as MK. The narrative is set in 1998 during the final stages of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (TRC). It begins when Silas, who works in the justice ministry as a liaison official to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), runs into François du Boise, a white former apartheid security police officer. Du Boise had raped Lydia, Silas’s wife, almost two decades previously because of Silas’s political activism. Silas relays his encounter with Du Boise to Lydia, and by so doing reignites the traumatic effect of the rape. The couple realize that they have been unable to come to terms with the incident and to deal with its memory. Towards the end of the story, the disintegration of their marriage and family becomes accelerated after Lydia has sex with a stranger at Silas’s fiftieth birthday party. As the relationship between Silas and Lydia deteriorates, they become estranged from their teenage son, Mikey, who learns from Lydia’s diary that he has been conceived during her rape. Mikey, who now insists on being called his proper name, Michael, joins a radical Muslim group59 which includes members of his surrogate father’s

83 family in “‘search for his roots’” (BF, 170). He then murders Du Boise in revenge for his mother’s rape. He also kills Johan Viljoen, the white father of his coloured teenage friend, Vinu because Viljoen has been sexually abusing Vinu. At the end of the story, Mikey is planning to escape from South Africa to India.

The role of child and youth protagonists in Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit

I analyse the representation of these families and their individual members beginning with the ways in which the subjectivities of the major child and youth protagonists are delineated, and how their perspectives on the principal themes of the novels are articulated. For Measuring Time, the characters under consideration are Mamo and LaMamo, as well as the two other prominent youthful characters – Asabar, a cousin of the twins, and Zara, Mamo’s lover. These four characters are examined for the ways in which they may typify the lived experiences and points of view of children and youths in relation to the changing social, cultural and political landscape of Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s. Their perceptions are also a valuable reflection on the post-1999 period during which the country returned to democracy after almost two decades of military dictatorship. Most importantly, their different life pathways serve as a trope for national transition in the post-independence and post-dictatorship periods. In regard to Bitter Fruit, the focus of this discussion is Mikey (who becomes Michael). I argue that his youthful and self-assured character is deployed as a symbolic alternative to the older generation of South Africans whose role in the country’s transitional socio-political order is questioned in the novel. Before turning to the texts proper, I begin with a summary of theoretical considerations on the narrative symbolism of childhood and youth and the evolving sub- genre of the postcolonial bildungsroman. In this regard, I draw on Christopher Ouma’s (2009) study of childhood in the novels of Adichie. Ouma argues that current Nigerian writing “is actually informed by the idea of childhood …. as ‘a set of ideas’ that engages, through alternative memory and the father figure, with what can be described as postmodern identities” (2009: 48). Similarly, Madelaine Hron (2008: 28) has demonstrated that child and youth protagonists perform a “nuanced and complex role” in contemporary Nigerian literature. 60 She argues further that such protagonists occupy “hybrid spaces” within postcolonial societies, a point that is important for this study’s interest in liminal, in-

84 between subjectivities such as those of adolescent protagonists who are in transition from childhood to adulthood. Such protagonists, Hron observes, are a “particularly apt vehicle” through which authors articulate novel perspectives on postcolonial nationhood in a variety of contexts including “multiculturalism, globalization, and international human rights”. For this reason, these characters are often used to question and deconstruct “overdetermined identity markers” (Krishnan, 2013: 73). As Ogaga Okuyade (2009) observes in “The Postcolonial African bildungsroman: Extending the Paradigm”, the resurgence of the bildungsroman genre is not limited to third generation Nigerian writing alone, but is also a key feature of contemporary African fiction. He proposes a version of the genre, namely the “Postcolonial African bildungsroman” to characterize the growing trend in contemporary African literature. Jack Kearney (2012) also provides a succinct and insightful account of postcolonial/African variants of the traditional bildungsroman. Importantly also, it is these kinds of protagonists and contexts of literary production that are most suited to the bildungsroman form adopted in the two novels under consideration and by an increasing number of recent Nigerian texts. As Apollo Amoko (2009: 200) observes, the postcolonial African bildungsroman emerged, like its European predecessor, during times of “radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously undermined, if not forever transformed”. Such was the condition of Nigeria and indeed West Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. In Nigeria, three brutal military regimes held sway from 1983 to 1998 while civil wars raged in Liberia (1989-1996 and 1999-2003) and Sierra Leone (1991-2002). These scenarios form the sub-regional historical and political backdrop to Measuring Time, and represent what the story’s young beleaguered protagonists have to contend with. The material conditions in South Africa during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century were markedly different. Yet, Dangor’s novel was also produced during and set within a period of heightened socio-political tension and controversy as the dramatic TRC hearings were about to close and Nelson Mandela’s presidency was ending. It is in this context that the transformation of Michael, the main child and youth protagonist in Bitter Fruit is explored. Returning to Ouma’s (2009: 48) point about childhood as “a set of ideas” that grapples with the role of fathers, it is instructive that Measuring Time is also a story of

Musa Lamang, the father of the twin protagonists, Mamo and LaMamo. Similarly, Bitter Fruit is also a story about Michael’s father, Silas Ali. While providing an account of the development of their major child and youth protagonists, the novels simultaneously represent an unmistakable critique of the generation of Nigerians and South Africans typified by the characters of Lamang and Silas respectively. Members of this generation are directly or indirectly linked to the societal problems that are thematized in each novel (see Kunzru, 2007 in regard to Measuring Time). This is important for understanding the novels as examples of the bildungsroman genre, which, as Amoko (2009: 200) has argued, “marks the death of the father as a symbol of stable, unquestioned, traditional authority”. Similarly, José S. F. Vásquez (2002: 87) notes that in the traditional bildungsroman, “the protagonist exhibits a profound disagreement with his family or society” that is often resolved at the end of the story. But this is often not the case in the African situation as Vásquez demonstrates in his study of Ben Okri’s, The Famished Road (1992). In Vásquez’s reading of that novel, the protagonist, Azaro is trapped between two seemingly contradictory cultures such that Azaro’s disagreement with his indigenous paternalistic culture remains unresolved at the end of the story. This is a significant link here to the synecdochic reading of nation and family offered in this chapter. In the traditional bildungsroman, this disagreement often triggers a journey away from home (often to other countries). Yet, it ends with the return to the home country, re-integration into the family and nation. Even though the narratives in Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit provide ample opportunities for transnational allegiances, the nation seems to be confirmed as primary locus in the protagonists’s final re-construction of subjectivity. While the protagonists of Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit do not demonstrate the kind of indecision and contradictory socio-cultural affiliation felt by Okri’s Azaro, their differences with the older generation remain unresolved. In the case of Measuring Time, the young protagonists reject the paternalistic and gerontocratic structures of their community and the twins remain deeply resentful of their negligent father. Similarly, but for different reasons, their cousin, Asabar rebels against his father, refuses to go to school, and ends up as a drug addict and thug. For her part, Zara resists pressure from her family to remain submissive to her abusive and philandering husband and divorces him. In Bitter Fruit, the child and youth perspective is rendered almost entirely through Michael who is highly

86 indignant of the facetiousness of almost all the adults in his life: his parents, his lecturer, his rapist biological father, his father’s colleagues, and the incestuous father of his friend, Vinu. This leads him to despise Silas and to murder both Du Boise and Vinu’s father. In these ways, the protagonists dramatize some of the key features of postcolonial African versions of the traditional bildungsroman. Importantly also, both novels adopt specific methods of character delineation that are well-suited to their ostensible narrative missions. They can be considered, in narratological terms, among novels narrated in what Franz K. Stanzel (1984) calls the “figural” style. Manfred Jahn (2007: 96) explains what this means:

Because it focuses on a reflector’s mind, the figural style tends to avoid exposition of background information, it may restrict itself to recording a reflector’s stream of associative consciousness, and often it moves toward an interior moment of “epiphany” (revelation or recognition) rather than reaching a suspense-filled climax.

Habila’s and Dangor’s focus on the consciousness – perceptions, thoughts, emotions, beliefs – of Mamo and Michael respectively thus facilitates the overall representation of the transformation of these protagonists. I now turn to a detailed close reading of Measuring Time to analyze the delineation of Mamo and LaMamo, as well as the two other major youthful characters, Asabar and Zara. The discussion focuses on the ways in which character development in this novel is used to explore contemporary socio-political changes in Nigeria. The way these characters develop from childhood to adulthood functions as the most powerful and evocative trope of transition in the story. On the one hand, their individual and collective metamorphoses can be read for their symbolic commentary on the changes in Keti. On the other, their development is read as representative of transformations in the wider national and sub- regional spheres for which the community of Keti serves as synecdoche. I suggest that the different trajectories of these characters’ lives represent different possibilities for the community and the nation. Through each of them, Habila highlights the ways in which public concerns are invariably inscribed in the private lives of postcolonial citizens. The analysis will focus in greater detail on the main protagonist Mamo than on the other characters due to the evident superiority of his role in the narrative. According to Anindyo Roy (2011: 5), the aforementioned link between the public

87 and personal is at the heart of the constant recourse to history, not only in earlier Nigerian writing but also in current literatures from the country. He argues that in Measuring Time, Habila recognizes “the multiplicity of histories” (2011: 5), and adopts an innovative form of realism in which (auto)biography is linked with history in ways that enable “writing the self into history” (23). With regard to the main characters of the novel, Habila’s idiosyncratic historiographical strategy (which relies on the biographical history of ordinary individuals) allows readers to contemplate the intersections between private lives and communal and by extension national life in terms of the extent to which the one may be imbricated in the other. In other words, the trajectory and fate of each character may be understood in the context of the tensions between individual choices versus the predetermining and circumscribing conditions associated with the history and destiny of the community at large. It has been argued in this regard that Achebe, for example, espouses the view that the fates of ordinary Africans are determined less by their individual circumstances and choices and more by the predetermining legacies of colonization (Irele, 1979; Opata, 1996). This view is supported by the preponderance of tragic figures in Achebe’s novels, and is reinforced by the following lines from Anthills of the Savannah:

“What must a people do to appease an embittered history?” …. The explanation of the tragedy of Chris and Ikem in terms of petty human calculation or personal accident had begun to give way in her throbbing mind to an altogether more plausible theory of premeditation. Were they not in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed in advance by an alienated history? (Achebe, 1987: 220)

Mamo and LaMamo become separated early in the story. Each takes a different life route even though they maintain a strong filial and psychological bond throughout the narrative. This separation can be understood as a particularly significant narrative strategy that enables Habila to decentre the point of view offered by the novel along two main narrative strands. The first is that of Mamo. The reader follows his experiences and perspectives on life in rural Keti where he remains (visiting the capital city occasionally) throughout the story. The other major perspective is offered through LaMamo. In contrast to Mamo, LaMamo’s experiences and views are rendered predominantly in the form of four letters addressed to his brother and written from the places where he wanders throughout the larger part of his life. He travels across west and North Africa – Chad, Libya, Mali, Liberia and Guinea – where he fights, first as a child soldier and later as an itinerant mercenary.

Thus, while the view of one protagonist is articulated from a position that is relatively fixed (in geographical terms), that of the other assumes a more mobile and transnational character. Each narrative strand, therefore, offers unique portrayals of a range of private, social, political, and cultural phenomena that help to enrich the reader’s understanding of the period and the region which the novel textualizes. Mamo, the older twin, is far more important to the story than his brother since it is through his consciousness that the overwhelming bulk of the narrative is focalized. The novel’s dominant themes are explored through the ways in which he “makes sense of the world” (Tenshak, 2014: 55). Mamo is diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia when he is only four years old and suffers constant spells of illness and despair throughout his childhood. Despised by his father, Mamo only survives by listening to stories told by his aunt and foster mother. He plans to run away from home with LaMamo and their cousin Asabar, but is prevented by ill-health. However, things improve as he grows older and as his intellect develops. At fourteen, he begins to write. And after dropping out of university – again due to ill-health – he becomes a history teacher and later, secretary to the traditional ruler. This is when he begins to write a biography of the ruler and the history of the community. It is from this book that most of the stories in the novel are excerpted. Through Mamo’s psychosocial metamorphosis, the significance of the “perspective, and agency of the child-hero” (Hron, 2008: 27; emphasis added) becomes foregrounded. He transforms from a sickly reclusive child, despised by his father and despairing for life, to a young adult who is a passionate lover, respected community figure, and enthusiastic intellectual. According to Ken J. Lipenga (2014: 176), Mamo’s transformation is connected to his role in the novel’s historiographical project:

Mamo’s re-storying of history can be read as an individually and socially enabling form of agency in Measuring Time. The constant reference to the appearance of [Mamo’s] book in the future highlights a form of agency that Mamo discovers through writing. This agency is first and foremost something that helps him to assert his self-worth, in the face of criticism from his father, which is sometimes directed at his frail body.

This helps to demonstrate how Mamo’s characterization functions in important narratological and discursive ways. According to Mamo, the stories Auntie Marina tells him “far into the moonlit night” saved him “from early death, [and] taught [him] how to

89 live with” his anaemic body (MT, 22, 21). Ironically, it is this sickness that provides the circumstances in which his mental faculties of observation and articulation are sharpened. As with most bildungsroman heroes, his reflexive disposition and frequent solitude affords him an analytical distance from society which facilitates the development of his intellectual faculties (see Slaughter, 2007). Mamo’s congenital disease can thus be understood as doubly symbolic – and probably teleological – representing both possibility and liability. In the first place, by preventing him from running away from home at sixteen, the disease saves him from LaMamo’s fate – the wandering, traumatic existence of a mercenary characterized by perpetual precarity (see Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2006). As an invalid, Mamo’s inability to pursue fulfilment in life through the more usual and recognizable avenues – physical work and sports, for example – means he has to explore alternative means. In other words, he has to live his life innovatively, and to find possibilities in his disability by turning inwards and tapping into his keen intellectual faculties as he is advised by Uncle Iliya (MT, 86). It is through this process that his character and role in the story develops. The importance of Mamo’s narrative role is foregrounded furthermore by the fact that he is especially discriminated against by his father due to his frail physical condition. This represents an important aspect of the social critique offered by the narrative as it draws attention to the ways in which disability functions as a trope for marginalization in post- dictatorship Nigerian society. It exemplifies Michael Oliver’s (1996: 22) influential definition of disability as “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.” Lamang’s disregard for Mamo, especially his practice of ensuring that Mamo stays on the edges in their family photographs also reflect Nicole Quakenbush’s (2008: 9) association of disability with “society’s unwillingness to accept or accommodate bodily/mental difference”. In Measuring Time, Lamang figures as an archetype of the patriarchal power structures that organize and reinforce social marginalization. Opposition to the oppressive and discriminatory nature of this system, and the male figures at their centre, as Ouma (2009) demonstrates, is a core aspect of the construction of childhood in several post-dictatorship Nigerian texts. Ouma (2009: 48) notes that the

90 majority of writers in the post-dictatorship era – including Habila – grew up under military dictatorships so that their memories of childhood reflect a distinct “post-military imagination”. Focusing on Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), he goes on to argue that, in the works of these writers,

the representation of childhood becomes a process of delegitimation that multiplies margins (Appiah 1992) and decentralises paterfamilias authority. The decentralisation of the father figure and the quest for a multiplicity of authorities and sources of identity makes this representation of childhood amenable to postmodern consciousness, to the spirit of anti-foundationalism. (49)

It is important to note, at this juncture, that, as a narrative subject, Mamo does not remain static throughout the story. Indeed, the child Mamo must be distinguished from the adult Mamo. While the former exists and operates from a distinctly marginal standpoint, the latter’s position is more complicated and fluid. As one of Keti’s elite, the adult Mamo is situated in the society’s centre of power and enjoys the privileges that accompany his social status. Yet, as someone who opposes the corrupt practices of the community’s principal political and traditional leaders, he operates on the margins of the centre (MT, 275-6). He actually finds himself conflicted by the obligation to write what would amount to a hagiography of the corrupt ruling class:

[H]e was brought face to face with the duplicity of his own position. His uncle had said to him, “I know they will feed you a bundle of lies. But I have no fear that you will write only the truth.” He knew that, were he to be honest to his heart, he’d right now put down his pen and walk out and never again return. But what of fame, he reminded himself, what of immortality? (MT, 275-6)

In terms of his status as narrative subject, Mamo thus moves from outsider as a child, to insider as an adult, and then to an in-between position as a dissenting community leader whose moral judgements are compromised by personal ambition. These shifts in position invest his point of view with an important mobile quality that is similar, but not identical to LaMamo’s.61 They also highlight the profoundly disjunctive nature of postcolonial transitions and the kaleidoscopic processes of subject formation in contemporary Africa. The fluidity of Mamo’s psychological orientation serve to further decentre and pluralize the novel’s overall perspective, dramatizing Michael Schatzberg’s (1988: 9) observation that identity construction and social affiliation remain “protean, contextual and intermittent phenomen[a]”. This process of transformation becomes the tonic that invigorates his frail

91 body and reverses the melancholy of his childhood:

Suddenly he was no longer the awkward, bumbling idiot his father had so mercilessly derided. He felt strong and unafraid, he had somehow outwitted his sickle-cell anemia, it had been over a year since he’d last fallen sick, and his odds of staying alive could only improve with each passing year. He felt like screaming out aloud, I am alive and I am useful and everything will work out fine! (196, original emphasis)

It is very instructive that in this critical moment of self-realization, Mamo recalls the psychological violence he had suffered at the hands of his father as a child, and expresses his newly found sense of worth in opposition to his father’s earlier abuse. This dramatizes Ouma’s (2009: 48)62 eloquent demonstration of the ways in which post-dictatorship childhood operates to “delimit and transcend the symbolic boundaries carved out by identification with the father figure” in the process of asserting personal agency and charting possibility. In an allegorical sense, Mamo’s congenital disease and the neglect of his irresponsible father represent the extremely difficult circumstances in which most West Africans lived in the 1980s and 1990s. These conditions, which Lipenga (2014: 16) describes as “disabling factors”, are understood to be a combination of the deep structural legacies of colonialism combined with the excesses of oppressive and inept political leaders such as Liberia’s late Samuel Doe and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha. Some of these dictators led their respective countries into protracted civil wars which resulted in millions of deaths, the spread of disease, widespread destruction of public infrastructure and institutions, abject poverty, high unemployment, and general socio-political dysfunction. Furthermore, large numbers of child soldiers were involved in the many civil wars that raged in the sub-region from the late 1980s until 2007.63 It was under these circumstances that many West Africans youths grew up during the mid to late 2000s when Measuring Time was first published. 64 And although the Nigerian civil war was fought earlier, the situation under military dictatorships between 1984 and 1999 was similarly dire. Mamo’s later metamorphosis and success is therefore symbolic and represents possibility in the face of disability, as well as hope in spite of legacies of social, economic, and political dysfunction. His transformation can also be understood as a form of prospective socio-political commitment that emphasizes the value

92 of self-reflexion as well as human and cultural capital to Africa’s future development. But, as noted earlier, Mamo represents only one of the several alternatives offered by the narrative. These are represented by the other youthful protagonists, notably LaMamo, who, in the words of Kunzru (2007: n.p.) represents “the possibilities of the road not taken, the path of action instead of contemplation”. During his time abroad as an itinerant soldier, LaMamo sends four letters to Mamo, each from a different country. These are strategically spread across the novel in order to blend Mamo’s epistolary accounts with Mamo’s more conventional narratives. This results in what Manfred Jahn (2007: 98) calls “collective focalisation,” a narratological strategy by which a “composite consciousness” (Ouma, 2011: 15) of complementary ideas and imaginaries are blended together. In this way, diverse perspectives become subtextually “combine[d] to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole” (Bakhtin, 1981: 261, 262; emphases added). As Bakhtin explains eloquently, the novel, as an artistic and discursive form, is a unified composite of a “diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised” (262). This blending of perspectives, in turn, enhances the overall polyvocality of Measuring Time, a key feature that supports Habila’s multifaceted thematic project. LaMamo’s first-hand reports of the tragedy and trauma of civil war in three West African countries supplements Mamo’s local experiences of socio-political dysfunction in the region during the 1980s and 1990s. The letters also map LaMamo’s psychological and intellectual maturation in a way that fits neatly into the novel’s wider plot and thematic mission. Very importantly also, it is through his story and letters (together with the flashback and relayed narrations provided by Uncle Iliya and Toma who fought in the Nigerian Civil War) that Habila depicts the tragic child soldier character that has become a recurring dystopian feature of recent African narratives (see Kearney, 2012). In Measuring Time, this is highlighted by the tragic death of LaMamo and also of Haruna who is the twins’s uncle. Haruna had fought in the Nigerian Civil War as a teenager and is presumed dead when he does not return home after several years. He, however, resurfaces in Keti as a destitute man who has lost his mind and commits suicide six months later. The misfortunes of Zara and Asabar also contribute to the dystopian possibilities suggested by the narrative. Zara loses her mind after several failed

93 relationships while Asabar becomes paralysed after many years as an alcoholic, drug-addict and political thug. Together, these three reflect another set of possibilities different from the promise represented by Mamo. The fact that only Mamo appears to have made a success out of life intensifies the dystopian orientation of the text. Moreover, it is instructive that the individual and collective misfortunes of these characters are linked via synechdoche to an oppressive and dysfunctional socio-political order. This is illustrated in the description of the “mass of angry-looking youths” who LaMamo leads in protest against the traditional ruler towards the end of the story:

Most of them didn’t know why they followed the one-eyed leader, but their minds were still fresh with images of yesterday’s police brutality; there was also the drought and the imminent famine, which added fuel to their anger, and they felt that anything was better than the frustration and the hopelessness of their existence. (MT, 347)

The experiences of these characters constitute a youthful perspective on contemporary Nigerian nationalism that is largely, although not entirely, dystopian. Through Mamo in particular, the narrative expresses the hope that an alternative and auspicious post- dictatorship Nigerian future is possible. An analogous reading of Bitter Fruit produces similar insight. The transformation of the main protagonist, Mikey who becomes Michael, symbolizes South Africa’s post-TRC possibilities. In particular, his self-assurance and agency can be understood as a symbolic alternative to the relative stasis and anxiousness demonstrated by Silas who sometimes typifies the country’s older generation. There is a sense in which Bitter Fruit can be read as a bildungsroman in regard to the delineation of the character of Michael. Though the story begins when Michael is already a teenager, the text uses extensive flashbacks to narrate his childhood. This enables the reader to follow his metamorphosis. As his parents’ marriage unravels, he gradually becomes estranged from them. Learning the true circumstances of his birth seems to mark the beginning of his transformation as it is after this event that he insists on being called by his proper name Michael rather than the childhood alias. Michael then embarks on a search for his ‘true’ identity among the Muslim family of Silas, and refuses to identify himself with his biological rapist father. Yet, he does not fully embrace his foster father, Silas, but is

94 indignant of Silas’s tendency towards pscychological disoriention. After Michael kills Du Boise, he prepares to escape to India where he plans to learn more about, and possibly convert to, Islam. Michael’s metamorphosis involves his transition from a child on the margins of the domestic world of his family to a young adult with agency; one who decides to use his initiative and to take action to shape his destiny. This is enabled by his intellect and powers of observation, as well as the turn of events that lead him to discover the violent circumstances of his birth. As an adult, Michael decides to retrace his identity and to avenge his mother’s rape and Vinu’s abuse. Towards these ends, he successfully deploys his sexual prowess in manipulative and instrumentalist ways, and later flirts with religion and the routes it might open to him. He is thus portrayed in stark contrast to his father Silas who can be understood as a possible archetype of South Africa’s older generation of the post-TRC period. In contrast to Michael’s self-assured character, Silas is portrayed as someone “whose whole sense of the future [is] made up of a series of anxieties” (BF, 179):

Michael observes Silas at his familiar post by the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of water, and staring myopically into the darkness. What does he see in that mirror of his own eyes? A life lived as best he can, and therefore wasted, by definition. Michael resists the surge of sympathy he feels for Silas, his father in name, his keeper, mentor of sorts. Every now and then, Silas gets this wild look in his eyes, a redeeming sense of yearning, a desire for something more than mere existence. (BF, 200)

There is a strong sense in which Michael’s transformation (beginning from the moment he learns that he is a child of rape) is held up as an alternative to Silas’s condition of “fragile stasis” (Mafe, 2013: 117), after Silas’s encounter with Du Boise and the distressing memory of his wife’s rape and his own humiliation. This is not to suggest, however, that Michael’s violent actions are to be read as a prescribed course of social action. Rather, they can be understood, together with the trajectories of other characters, in terms of plural and open-ended socio-political possibilities. It is significant that Michael’s coming of age – he is nineteen years old when the story begins – occurs during a period that is roughly coterminous with the twilight years of the Mandela presidency and the end of the TRC proceedings. There is therefore a strong sense in which his personal metamorphosis can be understood as an allegory of the country’s transition in the post-TRC dispensation. According to Diana Mafe (2013: 113-114), Michael is actually at the centre of the story as

“the figurative ‘bitter fruit’ and the character that upsets the carefully preserved yet artificial balance” of the still morphing and uncertain post-TRC socio-political order. The transformation of Michael is therefore another important layer of the palimpsest of coeval representations, allegories, tropes, and chronotopes by which Bitter Fruit dramatizes South Africa’s post-TRC condition. In similar ways, Habila’s four young characters, taken together, can be understood as a powerful figure of (West) African nations caught in the throes of post-independence transition. Mamo’s inherited anaemia can thus be read as a figure for the legacies of colonialism in postcolonial African nation-states. As Mamo was expected to die young, so too have the prospects of Nigeria’s continued existence as a unified nation been bleak since the Biafran war that broke out only seven years after independence.65 In spite of these themes of disillusionment however,66 Measuring Time, like Bitter Fruit, resists a dystopian ending through the promise represented by the unexpected and hard-fought survival of the main protagonist. It is important to note that the adolescent and youthful subjectivities of these characters are constructed within the frame of fractured sensitivities. These signify the psychological and socio-political turbulences that characterize postmodernization within a specific postcolonial context. It is significant, furthermore, that Habila, marginalizes more familiar categories of group identification (ethnicity and religion in particular) in order to focus on what it means to be a young person at a specific historical moment and within a specific social space. To do this, the narrator follows each protagonist from childhood to adulthood, paying painstaking attention to their thoughts, perceptions, aspirations, and frustrations. Bitter Fruit similarly focuses on Michael’s inner consciousness even though Dangor incorporates themes of racial and religious subjectivities in mapping Michael’s psychosocial development. In these ways, their character development is given central narrative and discursive importance. And through these particular narratological processes, childhood and youth identities become cast, not merely as tropes of transition, but also in ontological terms as distinct modes of being. This therefore forces us also to re-consider socio-political transition, not only in terms of fleeting movements between presumed origins and destinations, but as a state of being itself.

Finally for this part of the discussion, it is important that the distinct youthful subjectivities of these protagonists are constructed largely in opposition to the constraints imposed by their association with their parents. Each of them encounters similar psychosocial difficulties connected to the delinquencies of members of the older generation in general, and father figures in particular – biological and adoptive fathers, uncles, and husbands. This leads to the discussion of how the two novels dramatize the problematic roles of paterfamilias authority in the emergent transitional landscapes of Nigeria and South Africa.

Critique of ‘paterfamilias authority’ and emergent social and political orders

Ouma’s (2009: 54) insightful comment provides a valuable point of departure for the discussion in this section:

In Africa, the advent of colonialism foregrounded the discourse of the father, as colonialism itself wore a masculine and paternal face. In fact, continuities from colonial contexts have been drawn in postcolonial Africa by Achille Mbembe (2001). Mbembe examines how power is embodied by father figures whose presence is ubiquitous in postcolonial spaces. Mudimbe (1994) on the other hand has extensively dealt with the myth and reality of African identity, through the symbolic idea of “false fatherhood.” Other critics like Muponde (2005) as well as Muponde & Muchemwa (2007) have examined the notion of fathers, fatherhood and paternity in African literature, drawing attention to the continuing problematic of father figures in familial contexts represented in literature. As a result, the figure of the father has spawned a discourse that cuts across several levels; ethnic, national and continental.

There are interesting areas of similarity in the critique of social power structures and emergent political orders in Nigeria and South Africa as depicted in Measuring Time and Bitter Fruit respectively. This critique is presented predominantly through Mamo’s and Michael’s perceptions of, and relationships with the adults and older people around them who function, unmistakably, as archetypes of the ruling classes of their respective societies. Furthermore, both texts adopt similar strategies of realism, and deploy discursive techniques that are common in novelistic narrations of the nation (see Bhabha, 1990; Anderson, 1983). These devices include satire, allegory, representations of space, and those peculiar modes of literary historiography by which a distinct sense of nation is evoked. The depiction of Nigeria’s strongly paternalistic and gerontocratic power structures in Measuring Time is particularly satirical and allegorical. Habila’s realist fictionalization of the country’s political history relies extensively on historical realism. There are several

97 evident links between factuality and fiction in regard to Nigeria’s recent socio-political history especially those relating to processes and moments of political transition between military and civilian governments. Measuring Time can thus be understood as a historical novel whose key thematic missions involve the sustained recall of factual histories (see Lukács, 1962; Jameson, 1981). The analysis in this sub-section begins with the novel’s caricature of Lamang, Mamo’s and LaMamo’s father, as well as the male-dominated political and traditional elite which he represents. After initial successes, Lamang’s political and business fortunes decline; he then suffers a stroke and dies a pitiful invalid. The novel’s opening chapter, titled “King of Women” is devoted to his philandering ways as a younger man, and prefigures his ensuing portrayal as an irresponsible and self-obsessed individual usually surrounded by flirtatious women (MT, 88, 91). Also, he is portrayed as a man who “never took much interest in his children” so much so that the twins develop such hatred for him that they actually contemplate poisoning him (19, 24). As a father and husband therefore, Lamang is an unmitigated failure whose self-centredness is not confined to the domain of the family alone but extends to his role as a politician and public figure. In this way, he can be read as the quintessential figure of the postcolonial leader, and of the ways in which “the mouth, the belly, and the penis constitute the classic ingredients of commandement in the postcolony” (Mbembe, 2001: 126; original emphasis). His portrayal in this regard is bound up with the text’s overall depiction of recent Nigerian political history, democracy and party political cultures, military rule, and governance during the period under consideration. To highlight the unstable nature of Nigerian politics since independence, Habila makes repeated references to occasions when different military dictators organized dubious programmes of transition to democracy. Such programmes were often aborted or postponed. For example, before his overthrow in 1975, General Gowon (who became head of state after the July 1966 coup) abandoned the programme which would have resulted in handing over in 1976 while Babangida only left power on the back of nationwide protests following his unilateral annulment of the June 1993 elections. For his part, Abacha died in office while trying to transform himself into an unchallenged civilian president (see Falola and Aderinto, 2010). Even in the post-1999 democratic order, similar uncertainties and mistrust of the incumbent regimes remained. Towards the end of his second term as

98 president, Obasanjo launched an unsuccessful bid to amend the constitution to allow him contest for a third term, and Goodluck Jonathan’s postponement of the 2015 general elections by a month was initially perceived by the opposition as an attempt to scuttle the vote (This Day, 2015). A key aspect of the novel’s critique of military dictatorship is the portrayal of a few military officers. These include an unnamed military governor, a colonel, who is described as “an inveterate party animal” and his aide, who Mamo finds having sex with a prostitute in a public parking lot (MT, 287). In the chapter titled, “party people”, readers learn of a guesthouse in the community where senior military officers, traditional leaders, and local politicians host under-aged prostitutes at wild parties. Indeed, the country’s head of state had himself visited this guesthouse during a stopover at Keti several years before. This is very significant because the fictional “president” with the “gap-toothed smile” (242) in Mamo’s narrative is identical to Babangida, who insisted during his reign on being referred to as ‘president’ rather than the usual ‘head of state’. He is famous for his ‘gap-toothed smile’, which remains one of the more common ways he is described in both local and international reports (see Nsehe, 2011). The portrayal of these military rulers and their relations with members of the Keti community strongly recall Mbembe’s (2001) famous characterization of political leadership in postcolonial contexts. He argues that the relationship between ruler and subject in these societies is not necessarily marked by “resistance or … collaboration but can best be characterized as convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of commandement and its ‘subjects’ having to share the same living space” (2001: 104, original emphasis). The interactions between the rulers (represented by the military men and the local business and traditional elite) and the locals (typified here by the girls and prostitutes) can be read as a prefiguration of the conviviality and ‘sharing’ that describes relations between rulers and subjects in Keti. In this way, the novel dramatizes the complicities and contradictions that problematize post-independence totalitarianism. The novel also highlights the brutality and gross human rights violations that were hallmarks of Nigeria’s military dictatorships. These concerns are a major topos of third generation novels including notable texts like Habila’s own award-winning debut Waiting for an Angel (2002) and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Throughout Measuring Time,

99 government forces are shown to be involved in wanton acts of violence against hapless civilians. A particularly satirical depiction of this is provided in Mamo’s account of what was supposed to be a peace-keeping mission:

They could hear faraway gunshots: the police, keeping the peace. Near him a man … was talking about how the police had gone from house to house, beating whoever they found indiscriminately, untying the goats and chickens and throwing them into the back of their trucks, and all the time shooting into the air, keeping the peace. (MT, 330-31)

Another noteworthy episode is the killing of a politician by soldiers during a coup d’état which readers learn about in a conversation between Mamo and Zara (313). What is interesting about this specific account is that the killing is completely unrelated to the discussion between the characters at the time. Indeed, the statement seems to be forced into the text through authorial interjection. This recalls Kunzru’s (2007: n.p.) argument regarding perceived dropped plot lines in the story, and that the novel sometimes reads like “part of a larger project”, which may be understood in this case to be associated with themes of political violence and arbitrary forms of justice as features of military dictatorship in Nigeria. In “The Military in Nigeria’s Postcolonial Literature: An Overview”, Adeoti explores how these practices are traced, in some key post-military67 texts, to

the fundamentals of the military concept of justice and penology, which are not aimed at reformation but anchored on scapegoatism. The goal of martial justice is to eliminate forces threatening the establishment at the moment, using them to dissuade future traitors. Meanwhile, the tendency for miscarriage of justice is high with the arbitrariness that attends the investigation and trial of suspects. It deals with effects instead of digging deep down to the root of the crime. Consequently, the execution of coup plotters since 1976 has never stopped coups d’etat, just as violent robbery continues unabated in spite of public execution of armed robbers … . (2003b: 18; original emphasis)

It is in this context of the damaging impact of military rule that the failures of Nigerian democracy are caricatured:

From his room Mamo could hear the voices in the living room clearly, and now, after days of seeing [the politicians] arrive and leave, and hearing them debate, he could match some of the voices to their owners’ faces. There was the oily-voiced, equivocating Alhaji Danladi, who listened more than he spoke, and the clownish Emmanuel Dogo, who acted as secretary, and the shrill-voiced Gidado, who never seemed to have an original opinion but would always support and expand on whatever Danladi proposed. (MT, 87, emphases added)

100

Mamo’s perceptions of the adult Asabar68 who becomes the party’s youth leader and Lamang’s assistant are similarly satirical. The job of the semi-literate loafer, drunk, and drug-using Asabar, as far as Mamo is concerned, is to “daily drive around the village streets … in the party truck, its open back filled with the youth wing members, blaring the party song and campaign slogans from the speakers” (313). On other occasions, Asabar and members of the youth wing serve as the party’s thugs who intimidate political opponents and electoral officers, and participate in election rigging (203, 207). In ways that recall Achebe’s A Man of the People, the characters of Lamang and Asabar contribute to the picture of a brand of postcolonial democracy characterized by patrimonialism, gerrymandering, and a critical absence of distinct political ideologies. It also highlights the profoundly “personalist” and “clientelist” (Rotberg, 2004: 106, 220) character of the country’s post-independence political culture (see also Bratton and Van der Walle, 1997). Richard A. Joseph (2014 [1987]: 36) argues, in this connection, that although “there is a high ideological content to the exchanges between party enthusiasts and in published party programs”, in the mobilization of popular support, “ideology has usually been displaced in Nigeria by other considerations” notably ethnicity and religious affiliation (original emphasis). The social and political dysfunction resulting from the factors outlined above is compounded by a traditional and cultural establishment that is similarly portrayed as “paternalistic” and “clientelist” (Rotberg, 2004: 106, 220). This is made evident through the representation of the traditional leaders of Keti, notably the paramount chief, the Mai, and his vizier, the Waziri. Through these characters, and through Mamo’s role as secretary and biographer of the Mai, the novel provides extensive scope for a robust understanding of how the traditional system figures in his consciousness and psychosocial development as well as those of the children and youths of which he is representative. Both the Mai and the Waziri make a strongly negative impression on Mamo when he first meets them. Their “hollow and unconvincing” (MT, 148) response to Mamo’s and Iliya’s request to save the community school from being shut down reflects the community’s (and by extension the nation’s) leadership deficit. Furthermore, their alliance with the corrupt and oppressive government elicits Mamo’s contempt:

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Absently, [Mamo] thought how a few generations ago the Mais’ ancestors must have sat with Mr. Graves under the council trees, eagerly discussing how to increase the taxes on their poor subjects – instead of cars they’d have gone to that meeting on donkeys and horses and on foot. He had read of how mercilessly they had dealt with whoever was unable to pay his hut tax; tying him up in the hot harsh sun, without water or food, in front of his hut, his family, his children, so that the whole village would learn from his mistake. (MT, 275)

This view is reinforced by the views of a Liberian intellectual who LaMamo meets during the latter’s travels in that country. The political ideas of this man who LaMamo calls ‘professor’ dominates LaMamo’s very long third letter. There is therefore a sense in which the views ascribed to this character represent authorial commentary. The ‘professor’ blames the traditional gerontocratic system and “respect for elders” (159) for the lack of leadership accountability in contemporary African societies, an opinion echoed by Uncle Iliya. In these ways, the youthful sensitivities of the protagonists are deployed to subvert the duplicitous cultural codes and ideologies upon which oppressive and dysfunctional patriarchal power structures are founded. It is important at this point to recall Eric Hobsbawm’s (1983: 1) famous definition of culture in terms of “invented traditions”, which are “practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past”. The intellectual rebellion demonstrated by Mamo and LaMamo represent a narrative attempt to disrupt undesired continuities and fashion alternative codes of social, cultural, and political practice. An analogous narrative and representational strategy can be observed in Dangor’s portrayal of South Africa’s social and political leaders, typified by the major grown-up characters in Bitter Fruit. In the novel’s overall narrative scheme, the child Mikey plays a central role regarding the way these characters, especially Lydia and Silas, are perceived by the reader. Through Mikey’s ‘objective’ perceptions of his parents from the vantage position of a quiet, observant child, the reader is afforded a relatively expansive view of the Ali home. This perspective supplements the more subjective information provided through the thoughts of the two adults – Silas and Lydia – themselves, as well as those of the narrator. Mikey thus functions, narratologically speaking, in similar ways to LaMamo in Measuring Time, who “observes[s] from the sidelines” and is aptly described as “the silent listener to every conversation” in the home (MT, 69). The earliest indication of Mikey’s role in this regard is when Lydia is taken to hospital in the early part of the story. This

102 happens after she cut her feet dancing on broken glass following a charged conversation with Silas over Du Boise. It is through Mikey’s eyes that the reader fully understands how Lydia and Silas evade the probing questions of their family members:

As if prompted by Alec’s unspoken curiosity about the accident – ‘What really happened? Why don’t you tell us?’ his attitude implied – Silas said that it had been a freak accident. Lydia, freeing herself from Mikey’s limp embrace for a moment, nodded her head in agreement. They both looked evasive, as if trying to deny – even to themselves – that something dreadful had happened, something capable of precipitating such and accident. Mikey burrowed his head deep into his mother’s breasts, trying to hide the scornful look on his face. (BF, 25, original emphasis)

Mikey’s indignation at his parents’ evasiveness reflects his disapproval of the ways of adults in general. This can be read as an indication of Dangor’s critique of some of the social, cultural, and political practices of the emergent post-apartheid dispensation. Indeed, Mikey’s representations of adults in general and his parents in particular often function as parodies of the wider national socio-political orders. This emerges through the constant links that the narrative makes between his perception of adults and their actions in public. For instance, he connects his description of Silas’s temperament to his role as a TRC official: “My father the stoic, can’t tell you a thing when you look him in the eyes. And yet, there he is, dealing with the country’s problems, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable” (30). He also thinks of Silas’s romantic relations with Lydia as something that would follow a “businesslike approach [which] demands grand gestures, huge and overflowing bouquets [whose] imposing beauty [is] transient and superficial” (30). When Mireille begins to withdraw from him after she is sent to live in Canada, Mikey reads her attitude as a sign that “she has grown up, [and] acquired an adult’s sense of shame, the compulsion to confess, even if falsely, in order to obtain absolution” (41). His impressions of the facetiousness of adult behaviour in general is especially significant in that it echoes the text’s overall portrayal of the country’s project of socio-political transformation. This is made evident when the reader learns, ostensibly from the meditations of a senior government official, that the “nation [is] superficially well, as convention demanded” (229). As noted earlier, the trope of the family is one of the key narrative techniques employed in this novel. The portrayal of families (notably the Ali family) therefore functions as a metaphor for the country’s problematic and fragile post-TRC condition. The

103 location of the Ali home in the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Berea is significant in this regard. The reader is first introduced to Berea at the beginning of the story when Silas returns from his chance encounter with Du Boise. He goes to relax in the neighbourhood park with a “ragged lawn and fallen-down fence”:

Located on a busy intersection, it reminded him of those unexpected patches of green in the townships, where you could go without fuss. None of that ‘let’s go to the park’ kind of ceremony that people so quickly acquired when they moved to the suburbs. (BF, 9)

This is an oblique reflection on the gradual deterioration of public infrastructure in many urban and suburban areas in the post-apartheid period. The phenomenon has been explained as a partial consequence of a population explosion in cities since the relaxing of petty apartheid legislations from 1990 (see Schensul and Heller, 2010; Harrison, et al. 2014). Since then, public facilities and services that were originally built for a privileged few have had to support increasing numbers of people. At the same time, many of the newly installed municipal councils have struggled to maintain infrastructure, and are often perceived to be negligent, corrupt, or inefficient. The most glaring manifestations of these deficits in public amenities and services are of course the so-called ‘service delivery’ riots that have often turned deadly and have become iconographic of the public sphere since 2004 (Grant, 2014). From the early 1990s, the neighbourhood of Berea began to attract many new residents while a growing number of the older, more affluent ones moved away (Dube, 2009). The new residents included families like Silas’s from the country’s growing black middle class. But new residents also included low-income groups made up of internal migrants from rural areas in South Africa as well as immigrants from other parts of the world, mainly other parts of Africa and Asia. The influx of people coupled with a lack of the corresponding enhancement of amenities and services resulted in the gradual infrastructural decay that Silas observes in this scene, and that the presence of the vagrants highlights. It is also suggested elsewhere in the story that, at this time, the crime rate in the neighbourhood was on the rise such that metered taxi-cabs were reluctant to go there (BF, 133). These are the reasons why Kate playfully calls it a “ghetto” even while protesting to Julian that it is not necessarily a war zone (64). To return to the specific symbolism of the neighbourhood of Berea, it is instructive

104 that in spite of its infrastructural and social deficits, it is also portrayed as a suburb of middle-class families like Silas’s, and where township dwellers (such as Alec and Gracie) aspire to move. It is therefore unique in the sense that it is both a township and a suburb or neither: “[t]he township in the suburbs”, as an acquaintance of Michael calls it, “[w]here the township joins the suburbs” (28; 133-4). As such, Berea is positioned as a liminal meeting point between different social and economic groups and subjectivities. The juxtaposition of the middle-class Silas and the penniless vagrants in the same space brings into sharp relief the growing socio-economic inequalities that have become a distinct feature of post-apartheid South Africa. The neighbourhood thus constitutes a veritable crossroads for the many different ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures that traverse and inhabit it at a critical node of national transition. It is in this regard that the park’s (and Berea’s) location at a “busy intersection” becomes figuratively instructive for the novel’s representation of transition. In this way, the novel exhibits “a type of situated transnationalism where the local and the global exist as coeval discourses of signification” (Frenkel, 2013: 25). By paying attention to the flows, movements and circulations of people, resources, and imaginaries across national borders and within local spaces, Bitter Fruit – in ways that are similar to Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow for example – reveals heightened awareness of the globalized cultural milieu in its contemplation of post-apartheid subject formation. It does this in a way that is arguably more noticeable than in many of the key texts produced in the late 1990s and the immediate post-1994 period. This awareness probably accounts for Dangor’s deployment of multiple layers of spatial, epochal, and psychosocial tropes of in-between positionalities and fluid subjectivities to explore South Africa’s ongoing transition. While the familial domain of the Ali home and their Berea neighbourhood can be read as spatial metaphors, the character development of the individual family members have specific allegorical and metonymic import. Lydia transforms from a muted and frigid personality, the cause of which is not only the unspoken trauma of the rape which occurred half her lifetime before, but also from the psychological burdens of a problematic motherhood and marriage. At the end of the story, she recovers her sexuality, becomes financially self-reliant, and is driving away from her past. Silas reaches several turning

105 points in life during the story. His family falls apart just as he turns fifty. And as the public hearings of the TRC come to an end, his career is hanging in the balance due to the unlikelihood that he would retain his job in the incoming post-Mandela government. For his part, Mikey transforms from childhood and adolescence into adulthood, and develops agency in circumstances that are particularly dramatic. The way he uses his sexuality as an instrument of manipulative, yet non-invasive, power is one of the most striking aspects of his character development. There is a strong sense, therefore, in which the story can be read as a palimpsest of tropes that foreground ambivalence and uncertainty through its depiction of coinciding twilights and simultaneous endings and beginnings. The consequent nervous disorientation of characters is brought into sharp focus by Silas’s nostalgic recollections on one occasion, as well as his thoughts on the night of his fiftieth birthday:

Silas thinks of the past, increasingly summoning up happier times, times without this ambiguity he sees everywhere. In his home, in his office, in the country, in the grand scheme of things, in the religions of God and in the godlessness of politics, there is a growing area of grey, shadowy morality. He is a ‘progressive’, an epithet that distinguishes his generation from the older members of the liberation movement. He knows the value of being pragmatic, he welcomes the freedom ‘even to be wrong’, but it cuts him adrift, sometimes sending the needle of his personal compass into wild swings. The rule of law is no longer the keen knife-edge of all meaning, he is losing his ‘true-north’. […] Curiously, he had come to think of [the birthday celebration] as an ‘ordeal’. Somehow, the occasion had taken on a different meaning, it was more than a celebration, it was a farewell of sorts. This year was the last but one of the century; they were facing a twilight period, an interregnum between the old century and the new, between the first period of political hope and the new period of ‘managing the miracle’. (BF, 148, 227)

Silas’s thoughts echo Nadine Gordimer’s famous essay “Living in the Interregnum”, thus also pointing towards temporal continuities between South Africa’s supposed ‘past’ and the present. These thoughts are also recaptured more than a decade after the publication of Bitter Fruit by Achille Mbembe (2012: n.p.), who argues that after 1994 South Africa “entered a historical interval … between an intractable present and an irrecoverable past; between things that are no longer and things that are not yet”. Mbembe goes on to suggest that cultural expression during this period needs to extend the nation’s “aesthetic boundaries” by moving away from the “past”. The closing scenarios of Bitter Fruit can arguably be read in this sense in terms of their ambivalent suggestions of “new structures of intimacy” (Samuelson, 2008: 134), alliances and configurations that are simultaneously

106 dystopian and optimistic. In addition to the Ali family, the families of Silas’s colleagues, Julian and Kate as well as that of Mikey’s friend Vinu, also come apart during the course of the story. As a collective figure for the nation, the fate of these families may probably reflect the disintegration of South Africa’s then first family in 1996, which is thematized in Njabulo Ndebele’s novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003).69 It also amounts to an unmistakably pessimistic prognosis for the post-TRC era, and subverts the triumphal optimism of the transitional moment, as well as the romanticized idea of the post-apartheid rainbow nation. The dystopian outlook is reinforced by Lydia’s rejection of the TRC and the text’s overall representation of its “model of transitional justice as being too determined by a ‘forgive and forget’ approach that is inadequate as a means of providing reconciliation and [is] thus fundamentally flawed” (Akpome, 2013: 2). This is in addition to Michael’s cold-blooded murders of Du Boise and Viljoen as well as his apparent plan to join a radical Islamist group with terrorist inclinations. The futures envisaged by the text are also clouded by the uncertainties of the post-Mandela years which Silas describes with a strong sense of foreboding as “the inevitable future” (BF, 148). The nuanced critique of gender relations and heteronormative sexuality in Bitter Fruit deserves attention for the ways in which it contributes to Dangor’s thematization of social identity in a changing South Africa. This critique functions in several symbolic ways, one of which is associated with the more auspicious alternatives that the novel imagines for post-TRC South Africa. In this respect, the individual character trajectories of Lydia, Julian, Kate, and Mikey are instructive. So also are the ways in which sexuality is deployed as a powerful trope of psychosocial development, agency, and power relations in the narrative. In terms of the alternative futures suggested by these particular characters, Brenna Munro’s (2012) study of post-1994 South African nationalism and queer identity is instructive. She highlights the need for the recognition of queer narrative subjects in the complex social, political and economic matrix of post-TRC South Africa. More importantly for this study, she explores the representation of homosexuality and South African nationalism in the later works of J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, and observes that the

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figure of the gay person as a symbol of South Africa’s democratic modernity is, of course, a radical departure from the traditional familial iconography of nationhood – and it emerges from a history in which homosexuality has long been a deeply contested idea, bound up with the re-imaging of race, gender, and nation in the context of settler colonialism” (2012: viii)

Munro’s argument is instructive for the ways in which issues of gender and sexuality intersect in significant ways in Bitter Fruit. Although originally caused by rape, Lydia’s trauma is intensified by the worsening state of her relationship with Silas as well as the ways in which both he and her family effectively appropriate her trauma to serve their own cultural expectations:

I cannot speak to Silas, he makes my pain his tragedy. In any case, I know that he doesn’t want to speak about my being raped, he wants to suffer silently, wants me to be his accomplice in this act of denial. I also cannot speak to my mother or father. They too will want to take on my pain, make it theirs. If they suffer on my behalf, that will be penance enough, they believe. They will also demand of me a forgetful silence. Speaking about something heightens its reality, makes it unavoidable. This is not human nature, but the nature of “confession” that the Church has taught them. Confess your sins, even those committed against you – and is rape not a sin committed by both victim and perpetrator, at least according to man’s gospel? – but confess it once only. There true salvation is to be found. In saying the unsayable, and then holding your peace for ever. (115, emphases added)

Her reflections here summarize one of the text’s most stringent criticisms of the work of the TRC: “It is this prescribed closure, the ‘demand’ for a ‘forgetful silence’ – resulting in or amounting to the muzzling of utterance – which Lydia resists” aggressively (Akpome, 2013: 10). Her transformation in the narrative is thus constructed in response to conservative, and largely androcentric, political and cultural norms that constrain, marginalize or ignore the sensitivities of women. Her eventual decision to become financially independent and leave her family can thus be read cathartically, and understood within the idiom of liberationist discourses. Driving away from the sites and spaces of her traumas and former relationships with men, she cheerfully imagines a future in which “[t]ime and distance … will help to free her” of the “burdens” of marriage and motherhood (BF, 251). This leads to the important theme of social identity and the ways in which the characters position themselves in the morphing contexts of post-dictatorship Nigeria and post-TRC South Africa. To explore the Dangor’s narrative and rhetorical inclinations in this regard, it is instructive to remember that, like Measuring Time, the narrative presented in Bitter Fruit is highly self-reflexive (see Mwangi, 2009). As noted earlier, extensive tracts

108 of text are dedicated to the thoughts, recollections, and reflections of characters, while action and dialogue are relatively limited. Furthermore, the overwhelming bulk of the novel’s narrative material is focalized through the protagonists. In this way, the reader is able to track their psychological and emotional development and the ways in which this is used to thematize social belonging within the problematical contexts of transition. Habila’s focus on the child and youth subjectivities of his major characters is complemented by his decision to marginalize ethnicity, language, and religious affiliation as forms of identity. This is especially significant, given that these have been proven to be the most salient forms of belonging among Nigerians since the heydays of decolonization (see Ake, 1983; Usman, 2000; Osaghae and Suberu, 2005; Posner, 2005). In the first place, Habila makes his main characters ethnically anonymous by setting the story in a fictional community whose language is equally fictional. Both are named Keti, and reference to Keti as a language occurs only once in the novel (MT, 249). It is worthy of note that this fictional community is set within an actual geographical area inhabited by a minority group in the Kaltungo area of Gombe state in Nigeria.70 This is where Habila was born (Bayor, 2011) and where the Kilang Peak – which features in the story – is actually located (Adelberger, 1994). It is also important to note the way in which reference is made in the novel to Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups – the Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo. These references seem to be either perfunctory, or merely intended for the cartographical purpose of mapping the story’s geographical and cultural province. In other words, such expressions as “Hausa traders” (MT, 73, 144), “Fulani herdsmen” (17, 139, 144), “Igbo traders” (74), and “the land of the Yorubas” (271), as well references to major Nigerian cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Jos, Kano, Calabar, and Kaduna, function as iconic landmarks that help to assert the geographical domain of narrative action. Regional differences are represented similarly. Although the expression, ‘northeastern Nigeria’ is used repeatedly (MT, 49, 267), the politically-charged categories of Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria (or the ‘North’ and the ‘South’) only appear sparingly in the text (127, 267), and are apparently used without any demonstrable associations with particular social, political, or cultural subjectivities. This is in stark contrast to the oppositional ways in which these categories are deployed in In the Shadow of a Saint.

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By shunning already over-represented categories of identity, Habila creates representational room for other forms of contemporary identity, notably the category of youths, which is foregrounded in the text. In this way, the text draws attention to subjectivities that are less associated with rooted notions of ontology, and more with nomadic, postmodernist realities. Such sensitivities are forged and nurtured in a self- reflexive process of psychosocial development which involves transnational experiences as well as contemplations of memory, history, time, culture, and place/space. In effect therefore, Habila is more interested in exploring forms of identity which are shaped by, or rely on, innovative and “ambivalent spatio-temporal imaginaries” (Halley, 2013: 15) that transcend the familiar primordial notions of ethnicity, culture, religion, and region. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the text reflects the fluidities that characterize postmodernist subject formation. It is also engaged, whether consciously or not, in redefining post-independence and post-dictatorship subjectivities while at the same time delegitimizing and decentring previously dominant and highly politicized forms of identity. Whereas Habila depends largely on two main focalizers (Mamo, and to a lesser extent, LaMamo), Dangor disperses the narrative point of view in Bitter Fruit among four principal focalizers. These are the three protagonists, Silas, Lydia, and Mikey, as well as Kate Jessup, Silas’s bisexual friend and colleague. In addition to gaining valuable insight into the ways in which each of these characters negotiate their personal and group identities, this narrative arrangement allows the reader access to a range of perspectives on a changing society as a whole. These diverse points of view captured by the narrative include those of racial minorities, queer people, females, Muslims, and victims of rape. It is in this sense that Dangor’s specific choice of characters and the commentary they offer on South Africa’s transition become particularly revealing. A key feature of Dangor’s thematization of racial identities is the attention given to the anxiety of non-black characters over the material and psychological implications of their official racial status in the post-TRC scenario. Three examples are quite revealing. First, as the close of Mandela’s presidency draws near, Julian tells Silas and Kate that they might all soon be without jobs following rumours that the in-coming president would run an “[a]ll black” administration (BF, 207). He reminds Silas that: “You’re not really black, you know”. The second example involves Silas’s coloured sister, Gracie who lives with her

110 husband in an uncomfortable home in a township from which they want to move. Frustrated by their inability to sell the house at a good price because of its location, she compares the “twilight world” of the township to the “twilight zone” of being “between black and white, trying to be both and ending up as neither” (76). The third example is the inner battle Michael faces following the discovery of his real biological heritage:

The purpose of his visit, his ‘search for his roots’, seems pretentious to Michael now. He feels immersed in his family, these are his people, these dark-faced, hook-nosed hybrids; he longs to go and look in a mirror, seek confirmation of his desire to belong. Lydia must be wrong! How can Du Boise be his biological father? (BF, 170)

I propose two possible ways of interpreting Dangor’s seeming focus on mixed-race identity for the particular purpose of illuminating the disorienting uncertainties of transition. First, Gracie’s apparent concern about identification with a specific racial typology may be one of Dangor’s ways of drawing attention to the constructedness of apartheid’s racial classifications and of undermining their spurious ontological assumptions. Furthermore, it might indicate a more foundational critique of the slipperiness and unreliability of race as a basis of personal identity and social belonging. This can be understood in light of Dangor’s own declaration that “I am an African with Asian and Dutch blood in me, I don’t know what race I am, and I don’t care” (quoted in Prono, 2010: n.p.). The “race thinking” (Seekings, 2008: 4) of Dangor’s characters in Bitter Fruit may also represent a critique of the TRC’s “ironic neglect of issues of race given South Africa’s historical legacy of racial engineering” (Strauss, 2008: 52). In focusing exclusively on gross human rights violations perpetrated against individual victims, the TRC, as many commentators have noted, side-stepped the communal and racial dimensions of apartheid- era abuses (see Mamdani, 2002). Another explanation for the characters’ preoccupation with race, according to Gillian Gane (2008: 3), is simply that in the post-TRC dispensation, “race [still] matters”. Seekings (2008: 1) makes the debatable argument that:

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South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups. There has been little racial integration in residential areas, although schools provide an important opportunity for interracial interaction for middleclass children. Experimental and survey research provide little evidence of racism, however. Few people complain about racial discrimination, although many report everyday experiences that might be understood as discriminatory.

Some of these arguments are reflected in Gracie’s frustrations, Silas’s disorientation, and Julian’s doubts. Collectively, these characters foreground the tensions and perplexities attending the re-negotiation of hybrid and fluid identities during the uncertain changes of the post-TRC and post-Mandela period. Indeed, the novel’s reference to a ‘twilight zone’ of subjectivity can be read in terms of what has been described as the crisis of national identity formation in post-apartheid South Africa (see Booysen, 2007; Bornman, 2013). Another significant feature of the thematization of social identity in both texts is the role of space and place. As the analysis in the previous chapter shows, space and place are used prominently in both In the Shadow of a Saint and Native Nostalgia in the construction of local social affiliation. While Wiwa maps the mineral rich Ogoniland as homeland and as a spatial metaphor for the marginalization of ethnic Ogonis, Dlamini focuses on the familial spaces of Katlehong as a repository of his fond childhood memories. Habila and Dangor deploy space in a significantly different way to register the kinds of transnational connectivity which has been observed to be a key feature of current Nigerian and South African writing (Frenkel, 2013; Dalley, 2013; Krishnan, 2013). Habila invokes specifically African ‘elsewheres’71 as an important part of how the major characters in Measuring Time re-imagine the links between history, space, and belonging. This happens through extensive reference to a diversity of African imaginaries – places and histories – in at least five distinct ways. One of these is LaMamo’s travels across West Africa. Another is Uncle Iliya’s poetry collection which consists, interestingly, only of works from writers across the continent – “from Dennis Brutus to Wole Soyinka to Okot p’Bitek to Agostino Neto to Léopold Senghor to Kofi Awoonor to Christopher Okigbo” (MT, 99-100). The invocation of a specific transcontinental African imaginary also includes an imaginary tour of Africa during the Nigerian civil war by Uncle Harun and the late Nigerian/Biafran poet, Christopher Okigbo. The idea of solidarity is articulated by the fact that each of them was fighting on different sides at the time of the imaginary tour (MT,

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102). Another noteworthy way in which Habila invokes a transcontinental intertext is through Zara’s brief sojourn in South Africa to volunteer with a charity organisation working with AIDS orphans (270). There, she witnesses the inauguration of South Africa’s democracy. She sends Mamo a postcard of the event (260), and he re-imagines the moment while reflecting on critical episodes in the shared political history of different African peoples and communities. However, Bitter Fruit, is marked, in contradistinction, by the conspicuous absence of such a specific intra-continental connectivity. Instead, it is the Indian Ocean connections of the South African Muslim community that are invoked in Dangor’s novel with regard to shared histories, cultures, lived experiences, and identities. Indeed, the novel’s references to Africans from elsewhere on the continent are largely, although not entirely, negative. African characters (except the Mozambican João) are anonymous, and are mainly illegal immigrants, dubious individuals and poor (see BF, 133, 190, 239). Even João, who has sex with Lydia, is described in a way that can, arguably recalls colonial discourses of the exotic, over-sexualized Other (see Said, 1978). This seems to reinforce the largely negative ways in which black African migrants in general have been constructed in post-apartheid public and literary discourses (see Fasselt, 2014, 2015).72 Thus, while Habila’s novel seeks to inscribe local Nigerian imaginaries within a wider continental milieu, including a specific link with a democratic South Africa, Dangor’s text appears to reinforce national separateness and more insular modes of social re-imagination with particular regard to notions of nationality and continental Africa. This stark difference notwithstanding, the novels are similar in a highly significant sense as their narratives resist dystopian endings. This is in spite of the themes of socio- political uncertainty and disorder that pervades each text. In this way, they join other texts that participate in “the ongoing evolution of national commitment in African literatures” (Krishnan, 2013: 75). In Bitter Fruit, the hope for an auspicious South African future is articulated most powerfully by Lydia’s release from her psychologically stultifying union with Silas. Her transgressive affair with João, which brings her sexual pleasure for the first time in almost two decades, is symbolic of this release. It is reinforced furthermore by the car she purchases, described unsubtly by the narrator as “the real instrument of her

113 freedom” (BF, 242). Considering that Lydia functions partly as a gender metonym, her freedom can be understood as symbolic for oppressed women in particular, and voiceless South Africans in general. In the same vein, the “burden[some]” (251) relationships she leaves behind at the end of the story – all of which are with men – can be understood as reference to the androcentric social structures upon which the socio-political violence of the ‘old’ South Africa are founded. In spite of the tragic fates of the majority of its youthful characters, Measuring Time projects a cautious promise of hope not only through Mamo’s singular and symbolic success, but also through cultural renewal. To ensure that culture serves its purpose of sustaining society, Habila proposes constant critical reappraisal of cultural assumptions – both traditional and modern – as well as the rejection of anachronistic practices such as the use of tribal marks (MT, 98). Very importantly also, Habila argues for a rejection of the perceived dichotomy between tradition and modernity as Joseph R. Gusfield (1967: 351) famously argued in his seminal essay, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change”. Gusfield’s argument is echoed by Mamo’s realization that periods of change required cultural flexibility; “bending a little so as not to totally break” (MT, 382). In spite of his rejection of Keti’s patriarchal and gerontocratic structures, Mamo praises the people’s cultural dynamism, which, in his view, accounts for their survival through the turbulences of changing epochs. Reflecting on the ritualistic performance of the community’s historical play,

he suddenly realized why the people found [it] so intriguing year after year, something he had failed to see before. To them the play was not about Drinkwater and his ‘conquest’ of their culture by his culture, it was about their own survival. They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda, and, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. (381)

This realization, according to Frank Schulze-Engler (2013: 277), reflects Mamo’s embrace of the “complex entanglements of individuals”, cultures, and epochs that constitute the history of his community. Mamo’s distinctive historiographical project involves the overlaying of different spaces and historical periods in a way that complicates Habila’s

114 view of contemporary socio-political transition in Nigeria. This view resonates with Mbembe’s (1992: 99) description of postcolonial temporalities as “multiple durées made up of … swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another and envelope one another”. For his part, Dangor espouses a less complicated concept of post-TRC transition in South Africa which is evoked most powerfully in the way the story ends. That it ends with Lydia moving away from home, rather than arriving at any specific destination reinforces a sense of ambivalence and a drawn-out transition that is incompatible with the assumptions that underpin the notion of ity. This recalls Silas’s earlier-cited reflection on post-TRC South African transition, not as a fleeting moment or event, but as “an interregnum” between drawn-out periods and social contexts (BF, 227). To conclude this chapter, it is important to restate the importance of self-reflexivity in both authors’ exploration of the themes discussed above. It is indeed the key factor that simultaneously enables, and is enabled by, the transformation of the two key protagonists, Mamo and Michael. In Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009), Evan Maina Mwangi argues that this kind of self-reflexivity has, since the 1980s, been a key feature of African novels. This tradition of fiction, in Mwangi’s (2009: 1) view, has been “more preoccupied by writing back to themselves and other local texts to address emerging realities and to express the growing diversity of identities in Africa”. In engaging with these “emerging realities” and “growing diversities” that mark the transformations of the 1980s and beyond, African literature

is not primarily an art of ressentiment, reactively directing grudges and hostility at Europe as the cause of all African frustrations. Rather, it is an art of positive self-affirmation that is also not blind to internal causes of malaise within African societies. (2)

In drawing attention to the thoughts, perceptions, and experiences of the major characters who exist in liminal social, cultural, and political spaces, each novel provides a highly nuanced, complex, and expanded account of a society in transition. How such characters deepen an understanding of the transition is also revealing of the convergences and divergences that describe the relationship between post-dictatorship Nigerian and post-TRC South African fiction. Equally important is the analysis of the filmic thematizations of urbanization in Lagos and Johannesburg offered in the chapter to follow.

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CHAPTER FIVE

DEPICTING URBANIZATION AND SOCIAL UNDERCLASSES IN WELCOME TO LAGOS AND DISTRICT 9

Introduction

In this chapter, my analysis shifts to the films Welcome to Lagos (2010) and District 9 (2009). The audio-visual elements unique to the filmic genre supplement insight from the novels and memoirs in previous chapters. These texts from different genres thus combine to provide a robust and comprehensive – although not necessarily exhaustive – account of how textual inscriptions function within “a wider symbolic, discursive and political economic context” (Fortun, 2009: ix) which is at the heart of this study. This has the potential to enhance our understanding of the ways in which narrative as a whole reflects the cultural and political undergirding the production of difference and “the effects of these meanings on socio-political arrangements” (Dhamoon, 2009: 2). In this chapter, attention will be paid to the unique deployment of techniques of realism through the observational documentary sub-genre of Welcome to Lagos and the similar mock documentary format of District 9. I interrogate the depiction of Lagos and Johannesburg as well as their residents for the ways in which these representations reflect, historicize, and critique cultural responses to contemporary urbanization and globalization. These two social phenomena constitute some of the most significant manifestations of transition – in both economic and socio- political terms – in Nigeria and South Africa during the periods under consideration. The analysis pays particular attention to the films’ depictions of the slum and the slum dweller as social subjects within the frame of the nation. I argue that these narrative subjects are central to the overarching aesthetic and thematic strategies by which both films simultaneously reflect and document contemporary urbanization and social change. It is important to note in this regard, that slum dwellers represent a significant but as yet underrepresented social category within dominant narratives about, and emanating from, post-dictatorship Nigeria and post-TRC South Africa. It is also necessary to state that the terms, slum, and ghetto, are used interchangeably in this study as is the practice in urban planning studies. They are also referred to as informal, illegal or unplanned settlements, and

116 are invariably located at the peripheries of cities. Kolawole O. Morakinyo, Michael O. Ogunrayewa, and Bili O. Koleosho (2012: 1) provide the following description:

Informal Settlements (often called squatter settlements or shanty towns) may be defined as dense settlements comprising communities housed in self-constructed shelters under conditions of informal or traditional land tenure (Hindson and McCarthy (1994). … As such, they are characterized by a dense proliferation of small, makeshift shelters built from diverse materials (such as plastic, tin sheeting and wooden planks), by degradation of the local ecosystem (for example, erosion and poor water quality and sanitation) and by severe social problems.

The films under consideration are also significant for this study in that they highlight important transitional features and moments in the evolving cultural history of the respective countries. Through the narratives of characters representing the social underclasses – impoverished slum dwellers and illegal immigrants – the films supplement the national cultural archive with voices from the margins that are often obscured, ignored or elided from dominant national discourses and narratives. These voices are important for the ways in which they critique dominant and official narratives of democratic transition in both countries. They are also important in terms of how they reflect the cultural strategies with which large sections of these societies deal with the aftermath of mass violence and growing socio-economic inequality. Like the novels and memoirs discussed previously, the films reflect significant transitional moments in the recent histories of both countries. The filming and airing of Welcome to Lagos in 2010 coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence that was celebrated just over a decade after the return to military rule in 1999. That anniversary milestone was reached less than four years before another in 2014, namely the centenary of the country’s existence as a unified political and administrative entity. For its part, District 9 has been read as a strong commentary on the most critical socio-political indicators of post-TRC aporia in South Africa – increasing social divisions evidenced by economic inequality, violent xenophobia, and un-abating racial tensions. More specifically, it unambiguously recalls the forced removals of non-whites during apartheid and the deadly xenophobic violence against poor African migrants that have continued to recur in the post- 1994 era. Both films are therefore important cultural repositories with the potential of yielding a productive exploration of the ways in which contemporary social change in each country has been depicted.

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Engagement with specific transitional moments in the emerging national, historical, and cultural archive represents just one aspect of the social commentary that District 9 and Welcome to Lagos both provide. District 9 in particular is loaded with social and historical critiques as its growing critical commentary demonstrates eloquently. It has been associated with a wide range of themes including social difference and otherness, transhumanism, settler colonialism, a critique of post-apartheid governance, neoliberal capitalism, biopolitics, and personal social awakening (see Reider, 2011; Baum, 2009; Moses, Graham, Marx, Gaylard, Goodman & Helgesson, 2010). There has been much less critical engagement with Welcome to Lagos. Yet, its vivid depiction of the precarious conditions of life in dystopian urban centres, and the resilience of people who live in such conditions, has continued to attract scholarship since its release. It is in the critical responses to the peculiar filmic representation of city spaces that the films are most comparable. Like Welcome to Lagos, which is set almost exclusively in the worst slums of Lagos, the narratives of District 9 are set predominantly in the poorest parts of one of Johannesburg’s informal settlements. In spite of the obvious differences between the fictional science-fiction genre (District 9) and that of observational documentary, the focus on social conditions in similar peripheral, postcolonial urban spaces provides extensive scope for robust dialogue between analyses of the two films. As a work of non-fiction, the central thematic mission of Welcome to Lagos is stated expressly by its producers. By contrast, the possible discursive interests of District 9 are more varied and subtle. Yet, its powerful commentary on urbanization in general, and on the living conditions of the multitudes of South Africa’s poor township dwellers in particular, is quite apparent. Gerald Gaylard (2010: 168-9) observes in this regard that the film is “set in a ‘‘Third World context”, and recalls the director’s comment that the film

“doesn’t exist without Jo’burg. It’s not like I had a story and then I was trying to pick a city. It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg” (quoted in Gaylard, 2010: 168)

It is significant, as Gaylard goes on to show, that the film’s producers choose to focus on Johannesburg’s “ugliest side” despite the fact that the city has “a wide variety of areas and life-modes ranging from extreme wealth to shantytowns”. This choice, Gaylard argues,

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“serves [Blomkamp’s] apocalyptic vision” of urban life. A similar choice of narrative focus and representational scheme can be observed in Welcome to Lagos in which the poorest and most deprived parts of Lagos are used to depict the entire city, and, arguably, the whole country by extension. In this connection, the importance of these two films can also be considered in the context of the rise of ideas about Afro-futurism and genre fiction through narratives set within iconic spaces such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Lagos.73 But while these are interesting analytical approaches, they lie outside the scope of this chapter which focuses on the ways in which the depiction of Lagos and Johannesburg (as well as their residents) reflect, historicize, and critique cultural responses to contemporary urbanization and globalization. It is instructive that both films are produced in the West; the one by a South African-born Canadian director, and the other by a British broadcaster. It is therefore possible that the points of view of the various narratives offered by largely indigenous protagonists, are influenced or inflected by the apparent cultural or political perspectives of the producers. This is foregrounded in Abdullahi T. Abubakar’s (2011) analysis of initial reactions to Welcome to Lagos.Abubakar identifies sharp contrasts between commentators and audiences in Nigeria versus those in the West. While the former were largely indignant at what they perceived to be a pejorative portrayal of Lagos and the county at large, the latter seemed to be more concerned with the film’s entertainment value as well as the apparent resilience and resourcefulness of its impoverished protagonists.74 Abubakar compares these different reactions to those that greeted the 2008 release of the award- winning Slumdog Millionaire which is set in the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India, and is directed by the British Danny Boyle. Abubakar concludes, with regard to Welcome to Lagos, that:

The sharp contrast in its reception by Western and Nigerian audiences reflected both the cultural tension and cultural relativism that often mark such encounters. While the depiction of how the urban poor endured (and ‘enjoyed’) the harsh life of Lagos slums served as a source of entertainment to some Western audiences, it was seen by many Nigerian audiences as a deliberate attempt to sustain the stereotypical Western depiction of Africans as ‘savages’ (in Soyinka‘s word). It was an age-long ideological and cultural contrast in perception. (Abubakar, 2011: 152-3)

Similarly, Gaylard (2010: 167) has observed that some local South African audiences expressed “complex feelings” in reaction to the overall depiction of their “home” in District

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9. These feelings, he argues, includes pride in seeing “some elements of [their world] reflected on a Hollywood big screen” and the “discomfort of being identified with a dehumanizing apartheid past”. He notes furthermore, that the producers’ decision to film in the township’s “most destitute” areas made one local viewer to ask, “[W]here are the trees?” (168). These questions, together with the conflicting critical responses to Welcome to Lagos draw attention to the problematic of the different ways in which textual representations may be read depending on the presumed ideological biases of producers of such texts and those of different audiences. For example, Gayatri Spivak (1985: 247-272) has argued that colonized spaces are often inscribed into hegemonic Eurocentric narratives through particularly controversial discursive practices such as ‘worlding’, a concept popularized by Heidegger. Gareth Jones and Romola Sanyal (2015: 433) suggest that discursive practices like ‘worlding’ result in the production and circulation of specific and partial forms of knowledge of slums, poverty, and the urban poor. These controversies may indeed problematize the meanings purveyed by the selected films. Yet, they also facilitate the study’s exploration of diverse representations of transition in the places and spaces under consideration. This chapter is organized into three main sections. This introduction is followed by a short section in which I outline the major theoretical paradigms underpinning my close reading of the films. These include a discussion of the symbolic significance of the slum in imaginings of postcolonial African cities, notions of visual imagery, as well as the concept of biopolitics. These theoretical insights are appropriated in the two main sections of the chapter in which each film is analysed in relative detail. The chapter concludes with a concise summary reinforcing the overarching argument that the depiction of the cities (as well as the specific focus on slums and slum dwellers) can be understood as a critique of contemporary urbanization. The summary foregrounds furthermore how urbanization functions in these films as a trope for economic and socio-political transition in contemporary Nigeria and South Africa.

Theoretical considerations: The postcolonial slum and the imagery of abjection

The vision of Africa’s urban future articulated in each film is characterized by a strong sense of dystopia much more than in the novels discussed in the previous chapter. This is

120 far more overt in District 9 which continues a generic tradition that strongly connects science fiction to cinematic visions of utopia and dystopia in (post)modernist imaginings of urbanism and the future (see Milner, 2014). As Peter Stockwell (2014: 205) has noted, “[t]hough utopias were written from the Renaissance until the height of their popularity in the 1890s, science fiction in the twentieth century has largely been interested in failed, flawed or oppressive societies”. This resonates with Gregory Claeys’s (2010: 109) definition of dystopia as “feasible negative visions of social and political development, cast principally in fictional form”. Very significantly also, the urban apocalypse suggested in the social vision of both Welcome to Lagos and District 9 can be explored within the frameworks of capitalism (in relation to the extent of its dominance or otherwise) in Darko Suvin’s (1979) and Frederic Jameson’s (2005) theories of dystopia and utopia (see Milner, 2009; Moylan, 2000). While District 9 provides an overt anti-utopian commentary on globalized capitalism, the critique is more subtextual in Welcome to Lagos. In the opening montage of Welcome to Lagos, the filmmakers declare that the overriding concern of the series is the universal problem posed by unprecedented spread of urbanization. The establishing shots75 by which the primary setting of the series is revealed include an opening sequence of wide satellite images of a densely populated settlement that gradually transition to close-up shots of a busy marketplace. The marketplace is tightly packed with slow-moving human and vehicular traffic with the iconic yellow mini-buses of Lagos conspicuous in the foreground. The narrator then declares that humans have “evolved into an urban species” with more than half of the almost seven billion76 inhabitants of the world now living in cities for the first time in human history. Adding that the population of Lagos has skyrocketed from under 300,000 to 16 million between 1950 and 2010 when the series was aired, the narrator concludes philosophically that “[t]hings will never be the same again”. This simple statement has potential significance for this study’s interest in the ways in which ongoing postcolonial urbanization accompanies, and is itself accompanied by social changes that are persistent and extreme. It also resonates with Jean and John Comaroff’s (2012) controversial claim that conditions in the Global South can be understood as prefiguring imminent social transitions in the world in general, and in the West in particular. The links between urbanization as a significant aspect of rapid globalization and

121 social change thus foreshadows the representation of Lagos in the series. In this way, the documentary amplifies concerns of urban planners and scholars worldwide over the problematic of the mega-city as a product of explosive urbanization and increasing economic globalization. In 2007, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities crossed the fifty percent mark, prompting the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) to declare that year as the “dawn of the urban millennium” (UN- Habitat, 2007). In her influential theorization of the ‘global city’, Saskia Sassen (2005 [1991]) demonstrates that mega-cities are not only a key feature of contemporary globalization but are also critical determinants of the ways in which social spaces and temporalities are currently conceptualized. According to Sassen (2005: 1), global cities emerged within the context of an international economic system in which the nation is no longer the dominant spatial unit in the global exchange of capital, labour, goods, and services. This decline in the relevance of the nation has been accompanied by the rise of sub-national spatial units whose loci of power are cities and regions. These cities thus became the “command points” (Sassen, 2005: 2) from which processes of social, political and economic exchange are controlled across territories that stretch beyond national boundaries. This reality is illustrated by some of the specific representational techniques employed by the films under consideration. In Welcome to Lagos for instance, the point is made that one of the cattle markets in Lagos handles trade from countries as far away as Sudan and Chad. For its part, the figure of the alien in District 9 dramatizes the status of Johannesburg as a major locus of transnational networks of immigrants. In these ways, both films foreground the importance of the contemporary global city as a critical transnational node where diverse peoples, cultures, ideas, and capital interconnect. Noting that Sassen’s initial focus was only on three cities in the northern hemisphere (New York, London, and Tokyo), Ashley Dawson and Brent H. Edwards (2004) have argued for closer scholarly attention to the global cities of the South, of which Lagos and Johannesburg are important examples. They point out that these cities have become “an increasingly anomalous embodiment of the urban realm and public space” (Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 1). Citing Mike Davis (2004), they also demonstrate that it is this category of mega-cities that constitutes the overwhelming majority of the dominant

122 urban centres of the world:

[Ninety-five] percent of urban population growth during the next generation will occur in cities of the developing world. By 2010, for example, Lagos is projected to become the planet’s third-largest city, after Tokyo and Mumbai. By 2025 it is predicted that Asia will contain nearly a dozen “hypercities” (with populations of 25 million or more), including Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka, and Karachi.(Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 1)

Arguing similarly, Timothy W. Luke (2003: 11-12) differentiates between ‘Global Cities’, the

major metropoles –like London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo or New York – where the command, control, communication, and intelligence functions of transnational commerce is highly concentrated [, and] ... global cities ... where the rising level of a globalized urbanization is overwhelming the Earth's natural ecology to the point of threatening the sustainability of the entire planet's human and nonhuman life.

Dawson and Edwards (2004) therefore highlight the need for a significant shift in theorizations of global cities away from analyses that approach the major western metropoles as a normative model, and that simultaneously view global cities in the global South “either through a [limiting] developmental narrative or through a pluralistic framework” (2). Writing in the same vein, Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson (2012) argue that the study of urbanization needs to move beyond a mere critique of neoliberalism to more nuanced explorations of the complex realities that define contemporary city life in Africa. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (2012) take these ideas further in Theory from the South: How Europe is Evolving from Africa. In this book, they argue that global trajectories of social, cultural, and political transition suggest that the world (and the West in particular) may indeed be moving in the direction of the Global South. Contesting some of the key philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment that underpin the representation of Western modernity in universal and normative terms, they argue for a theoretical paradigm shift to reposition the Global South in general (and Africa in particular) in the calculus of global value production as sites where possible Western futures are foreshadowed. They suggest, in this regard, that the xenophobia depicted in District 9 for example can be understood as symbolically prefiguring increasing far right extremism that has attended the economic meltdown in the West since the late 2000s. This particular

123 analogy, as well as their arguments for the need to approach contemporary global realities from the perspective of the Global South are relevant to this study’s objectives. These views shed light on the ways in which socio-economic contingencies intersect with identity construction in contested spaces and within the highly disjunctive transitional contexts such as those that characterize post-military dictatorship Nigeria and post-TRC South Africa Collectively, the foregoing views undergird this study’s analysis of cultural responses to the economic and political dilemmas of city life depicted in, and represented by Welcome to Lagos and District 9. While both films provide strong critiques of neoliberal globalized capitalism and its role in postcolonial urbanization, the narratives they invoke and construct represent a discursive move away from a focus on material concerns only. In Welcome to Lagos for example, the robust social organization of the slum dwellers and their optimistic personal narratives reveal some of the hidden imaginaries that are part of the city’s complexity. These ideas echo Sarah Nuttall’s (2004: 740) contention that the South African city has been read largely “within the framework of the political economy of urbanization, segregation and underdevelopment” rather than in “its cultural dimensions as city life and form” (original emphasis). In her analysis of selected recent South African and Zimbabwean novels, Nuttall goes on to provide the kind of postcolonial interventions suggested by Dawson and Edwards (2004). She rightly also posits that:

The city of Johannesburg has emerged as the primary site for the creation of the social imaginary in much of the newest writing [in the region]. The city in fiction, that is, has become a vivid and explicit template for an entire array of social fears and possibilities. (Nuttall, 2004: 740)

Nuttall’s work is part of thriving scholarship on the various ways in which city life and space are invoked as creative cultural forms which document contemporary realities in the global South (see Nutall and Mbembe, 2008; Pieterse and Simone, 2013).77 This is particularly relevant to District 9 in which Johannesburg and the Chiawelo slum function as the space where a problematic vision of post-TRC interracial and inter-class relations is dramatized.78 Therefore, while recognizing what the films reveal about the materialist dimensions of life in Lagos and Johannesburg, the present study also pays close attention to the ways in which these portrayals can be interpreted in cultural terms especially in regard

124 to the narratives and apparent (self)representations of protagonists.79 Using a range of cultural texts including novels and films set in different mega- cities in the postcolonial world as their point of departure, similar analyses are provided in a special issue of Social Text edited by Dawson and Edwards. The essays in that collection explore the cultural dynamics of urbanization and globalization in the local contexts of specific developing countries. It is important to note that in these essays, economic issues emerge as the dominant influences of urban cultures in the postcolonial world in general. Evidence of this abounds in both Welcome to Lagos and District 9. In the former, this is communicated most powerfully through the film’s concentration on the difficult pecuniary circumstances of the protagonists and the menial nature of their vocations. In the latter, it is the figurative and narrative role of the unsubtly named Multinational Union (MNU) Corporation that most conspicuously reveals the salience of material concerns to urbanization and city life. This is in spite of the attempt by commentators to highlight the presumably prime role of culture as a “mode of agency by which [inhabitants of mega-cities] wrench a space of self-fashioning and social impact away from the economistic narrative that would paint them as powerless, as empty, as silent” (Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 4). In this respect, and with particular regard to slum dwellers in the Peruvian city of Lima discussed by Victor Vich (2005), Dawson and Edwards observe that:

Some of the “cultural” forms charted [in the essays] are economic strategies. The most obvious example is the cómicos ambulantes in Vich’s essay: their performances on the streets of Lima are a form of what [Mike]Davis has elsewhere termed “informal survivalism,” the “new primary mode of livelihood” among economically disenfranchised subjects in the quickly expanding slums of most cities in the developing world. (2005: 4, emphasis added)

The idea that many cultural forms of city life, especially with regard to slums, reflect or constitute ‘economic strategies’ of ‘informal survivalism’ is strongly demonstrated in the ensuing analysis of Welcome to Lagos and District 9. The focus of both films on the dire living conditions in extremely impoverished slums can be read as an unmistakable comment on the socio-economic implications of late capitalist expansion and postcolonial urbanization. The conditions in these spaces have been traced to widening inequalities precipitated by the neoliberal economic policies practised by most countries of the world

125 today. These policies, Dawson and Edwards (2004) argue, trigger socio-economic processes by which the bulk of the growing global wealth becomes transformed from different forms of collective ownership into the private property of a few corporations and individuals:

Structural adjustment programs, widely deployed throughout the developing world by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, have turned the state into a mechanism to expand this dynamic of privatization. As countries slashed spending on domestic programs such as education, health, and agricultural production, local production sectors were hollowed out. Just as was true during the initial round of what Marx called primitive accumulation in British agrarian capitalism, the neoliberal dispossession of the commons has pushed peasants off their land, but this time on a global scale. Inequality, political instability, persecution, and environmental degradation have generated a massive exodus toward urban areas. Notwithstanding differing regional and national dynamics, the end result of this burgeoning inequality has been the growth of massive squatter settlements, where people live and die in conditions of appalling misery. (Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 5-6)

Perhaps the most conspicuous result of these macro-economic trends, in terms of spatial configurations, is the emergence of slums as one of the defining characteristic of the postcolonial mega-city. Achilles Mbembe (2008: 5) has noted in this respect that “[w]ays of seeing and reading contemporary African cities are ... dominated by the metanarrative of urbanization, modernization, and crisis. Indeed, for many analysts, the defining feature of contemporary African cities is the slum”.80 The narrator of Welcome to Lagos reinforces this view with the repeated claim that up to three-quarters of the residents of Lagos live in slums. Similarly, Edgar Pieterse (2009: 1) cites a UN-Habitat report as stating that “6 out of 10 urban dwellers in sub‐Saharan Africa live in slums”. The prevailing view that slums are the defining feature of postcolonial and African cities is in apparent disregard of the fact that, as Uli Linke (2012: 296) has shown, the proliferation of slums is not a postcolonial phenomenon alone. Linke invokes Mike Davis’ (2007) famous description of the modern urban world as a ‘planet of slums’ in arguing that “[u]rban poverty is globally dispersed across all continents, from the geopolitical peripheries to the economic centres – from the Third World to the First World”. It is probably for these reasons that the series uses the abject conditions of the city’s slums as its dominant visual aesthetic. Similar effects are produced by the vigorous graphic depictions of Johannesburg’s impoverished Chiawelo slum (together with the refugee camps of the aliens) in District 9.81

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The significance of the dominant imagery of abjection in these films can be understood in light of Douglas Kellner’s (2002: 81) observation that “[t]oday, we are living in one of the most artificial visual and image-saturated cultures in human history, which makes understanding the complex construction and multiple social functions of visual imagery more important than ever before”. It can also be analysed in view of the specific generic techniques and overarching representational scheme adopted in each film. As noted earlier, the observational format of Welcome to Lagos and the mock-documentary sub- genre incorporated into District 9 both rely on or mimic features of cinéma-vérité, a technique that presupposes ‘truthful’ depictions of narrative objects (Ponech, 2008). Andre Bazin (1999: 47) has famously addressed the problematic of such realist pretensions by advocating the evaluation of the image “not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it”. For his part, and in view of the polysemic nature of visual imagery, Kellner (2002: 86) proposes what he calls a “multiperspectivist approach, combining qualitative and quantitative, hermeneutical and critical, semiotic and structural,” which engages not only the political, but also the “moral, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of cultural texts”. In a recent study on filmic representations of Johannesburg, Alexandra Parker (2014: 1-2) makes the point that:

[s]creen images and narratives, including those of film and documentaries, contribute to a collective knowledge and memory of spaces and places in the city. Images of the city on film and television screens give symbolic meaning to spaces by defining purposes and activities for a large audience, and by simplifying and interpreting reality for the viewer. These new meanings shape perceptions in a social manner, leading to altered behaviour and contributing to the process of place-making in the city.

She goes on to describe how these images operate discursively to produce “the city of people’s minds” that exists side by side the actual “physical city” through processed images that “reconstruct, re-imagine and edit our urban spaces” and experiences (2-3). All of this is facilitated by the force of visual information that has been recognized to be a foremost mode of contemporary knowledge production (see Petchesky, 1987; Draper, 2002). Parker’s observations highlight the importance of interrogating the symbolic ways in which the visual imagery of abjection and precarity that dominates the depiction of Lagos and Johannesburg in the films under consideration operates in the portrayal of ongoing socio-

127 political transition in Nigeria and South Africa respectively. In “The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject: Cityscape and Cinematic Corporality in District 9”, Adéle Nel (2012: 547-569) explores, among other things, the textualization of abjection as it manifests in the film’s depiction of the Chiawelo slum of Johannesburg. Invoking Julia Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject, Nel (2012: 548) argues that the box- office success of District 9 may be linked to “the repugnant attraction (as with horror films) of that which is shocking, frightening and horrible”. There is therefore a strong sense in which the entertainment value of the documentary is associated with its depiction of images and narratives of abjection that evoke shock, disgust, and surprise rather than, or as well as, those representations of the characters’ industry and determination that have reportedly attracted the admiration of many western audiences (see Abubakar, 2011). Similar ideas are articulated in Jones and Sanyal’s (2015) analysis of dominant depictions of Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, India that has featured in several recent films and documentaries. In their article, “Spectacle and Suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space”, Jones and Sanyal interrogate the ways in which the production of the “slum as spectacle becomes part of a fluid representational stock of images and experiences that circulate, with the potential to be picked up and acted upon by diverse actors” (433). Focusing on the role of guided tours, arts, and television documentaries, they argue that “the production of space is dominated increasingly by images and events” (433). In particular, they show how documentaries82 “use the devices of familiar-strange, and exceptional as mundane, and juxtapose the lives of outsider with the ‘reality’ of poverty and suffering” (436). They observe furthermore that the slum

has become the locale through which concerns for the human condition are expressed, its residents representing the “universal individual, a particular group whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world” (Zĭzěk, 2004: 2). This claim provides slums with a representational significance far greater than an immediate concern with housing conditions or service provision. This is nothing new. They have long been a popular subject for novelists, journalists and academics, but slums are increasingly also the site and the subject of tourism, art, film and documentary. (434)

This point was dramatized during a recent tour of some Latin American countries by Catholic Pope Francis in July 2015. The pope concluded his visit with a highly publicized visit to Banade Norte, a sprawling flood-prone slum on the outskirts of the Paraguayan capital, Asunción. Media coverage of the visit draws attention to the plight of slum

128 residents and their struggle to access basic needs like food, shelter, and sanitation. One report features a close-up photograph of the slum’s muddy surroundings with the feet of residents wrapped in cheap plastic bags (Matranga, 2015). The strong visual dimension of this report is important to this study in a number of ways. First, it reinforces the saliency of visual imagery in contemporary culture in general, and mass communication in particular. Secondly, it illustrates the ways in which the discursive figure of the slum continues to serve as a powerful trope – both in literary and non-literary contexts – with which a range of existential questions and contemporary realities may be thematized (see Arendt, 1998). Furthermore, it exposes the ways in which socio-political realities are imbricated in the human and environmental dilemmas of slum life. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze’s (2013: 1) short description of biopolitics as “the expression of a kind of predicament involving the intersection, or perhaps reciprocal incorporation of life and politics” highlights the usefulness of the concept as a theoretical paradigm for the current discussion of Welcome to Lagos and District 9. The socio-political underpinnings of the dire living conditions of slum dwellers in Lagos and Johannesburg – as depicted by these films – can be understood in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) influential conceptualization of ‘bare life’ and ‘zones of indistinction’. Like the figure of homo sacer who can be simultaneously included in and exempted from a formal juridical regime, slum inhabitants operate within an economic and socio-political system that circumscribes their existence and yet excludes them from its benefits. The analysis to follow highlights the ways in which these conditions are dramatized in both films. This is achieved through their respective depictions of abjection and precarity in the slum, the city, and by extension, in the nation undergoing transition. This part of the chapter is organized a bit differently from the previous chapters to enhance the exploration of the themes under consideration. There are three sub-sections: the first two focus on the peculiarities of each film while the third sub-section foregrounds their areas of convergence and divergence.

Lagos is a country: conflating slum, city, and nation in Welcome to Lagos

Welcome to Lagos is a three-part observational documentary series that was aired on BBC2 in the United Kingdom in 2010. It was directed by Gavin Searle, narrated by David Harewood, and produced by Will Anderson for Keo Films and the BBC. It ran at prime

129 time on BBC2 on April 15, 22, and 29 in 2010 and on BBC1 on June 19, 26, and July 3 of the same year. The series explores “life at the sharp end of ... extreme urban environments” (BBC2, 2010) using Lagos – the world’s fastest growing megacity – as a case study. The documentary follows the lives of about a dozen characters who make a living in three of the city’s poorest slums where there is a complete absence of proper housing, social amenities, roads, basic sanitation, and conventional opportunities for business or employment. Through its mainly “entertaining narratives” (Abubakar, 2011: 150) of the private lives, difficulties, and optimism of these characters, the film, according to BBC2 (2010), “celebrates the resilience, resourcefulness and energy of Lagos’s 16 million inhabitants, and shows how successfully many of its slum dwellers are adapting to the realities of the world’s increasingly extreme urban future”. Critical responses to Welcome to Lagos have so far been dominated by commentary on how it highlights the challenges of contemporary urban planning on the one hand (Gandy, 2006; Smith, 2015; Revell, 2010), and debates on its representation of Nigeria on the other (Nwaubani, 2010, Abubakar, 2011) . With respect to the challenges of urban planning, the film has been compared to other cinematic explorations of other postcolonial mega-cities around the world. These include the multiple award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2009), and Slumming It (2010), the latter produced and aired by the British broadcaster, Channel 4. Both films are set in ghettoes in Mumbai, India’s largest city (see Jones and Sanyal, 2015; Abubakar, 2011; Revell, 2010). Regarding the overarching representational impact of Welcome to Lagos, responses are split between commentators who commend the film’s apparent valorization of the resourcefulness of its poor protagonists, and those who condemn the series for the perceived disparaging portrayal of Lagos, and by extension, Nigeria as a whole. Among the former group of commentators are Akin Ojumu (2010) and Rachael Cooke (2010: 45). Cooke (2010: 45) describes the series as “great: one of the most moving, interesting ... and uplifting things I have seen in years”. Similarly, Michael Holden (2010: 1) argues that “in depicting resourcefulness and the precarious nature of everyday urban life, the series emphasized the commonality of human experience”. For his part, respected British film reviewer, Sam Wollaston (2010: n. p.) extols the series as refreshing and upbeat, and as “a study of ingenuity and how people adapt to survive in places they shouldn’t really be able

130 to function in at all”. Furthermore, he praises the filmmakers for their focus on the people in the slums. This, he argues, sets the series apart from similar productions which tend to glorify self-seeking charity organizations with dubious philanthropic objectives. By contrast, Anver Versi (2010: 9) has argued that the film reflects a representational practice in Western media that uses “a long-outdated template of Africa as a ‘dark continent’ full of misery, backwardness, hunger and despair”. In this respect, the British-based Nigerian author, Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani (2010: n.p.) provides a short summary of the anger that the film generated among many Nigerians, including prominent individuals such as Wole Soyinka, government officials, and ordinary citizens:

“There was this colonialist idea of the noble savage which motivated the programme,” Wole Soyinka said about the documentary. “It was patronising and condescending.” Dalhatu Tafida, Nigeria's high commissioner to the UK, described the documentary as, “a calculated attempt to bring Nigeria and its hardworking people to international odium and scorn”. Facebook pages and blogs have also been ablaze. “They are giving us a bad image,” many Nigerians fume. Meanwhile, the Lagos state government has submitted a formal complaint to the BBC, calling on the corporation to commission an alternative series to “repair the damage we believe this series has caused to our image”.

Abubakar (2011: 153) describes the sharp differences in responses to the film as “an age- old ideological and cultural contrast in perception”. He argues, like Versi, that while the portrayal of how impoverished slum dwellers “endured (and ‘enjoyed’) the harsh life of Lagos slums served as a source of entertainment to some Western audiences, it was seen by many Nigerians as a deliberate attempt to sustain the stereotypical Western depiction of Africans as ‘savages’ … (152-153). This echoes Jonathan Haynes’ (2007: 131) instructive summary of what he identifies – three years before the production of Welcome to Lagos – as the two dominant ways in which Lagos is discursively portrayed:

On the one hand, there is a genre of lurid descriptions of Lagos as urban “apocalypse” – a term that foreign visitors seem to find unavoidable, as they find in it the ultimate expression of anarchic urban catastrophe, environmental destruction, and human misery; its “crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliché par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction” (Kaplan 2000:15). On the other hand, there is a postmodernist-inflected celebration of the coping mechanisms and creative forms of self-organization of a population whose ability to survive contradicts ordinary common sense, accompanied by an argument about the inability of conventional modes of understanding to explain what permits this survival.

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Haynes goes on to highlight the limitations of the latter celebratory portrayals of the conditions of residents who bear the brunt of the city’s problems. He cites commentaries that criticize such depictions for “ignor[ing] the suffering of the poor and the predation of many arrangements in the informal sector” (Gandy, 2005; Packer, 2006), as well as for “overestimate[ing] the extent to which coping with adversity is stimulating, rather than depressing”. He therefore argues that

existing vocabularies and analytical frames of reference from urban planning and other disciplines are trapped in an almost entirely negative contemplation of Lagos’s deficiencies and failures and are inadequate in showing how things actually operate needs to be given its due” (Haynes, 2007: 132).

This study both supplements and moves away from these arguments. I suggest that the portrayal of the challenges of urbanization in Lagos (in terms of impoverished residents and extreme deficiencies in basic infrastructure) can be understood against the backdrop of social and political transition within a national, postcolonial, and global context. In other words, I argue that, through its particularly graphic rendition of a section of the city’s social under-classes and critical lack of basic infrastructure, the film provides valuable insight into the conditions of life in contemporary Nigeria. These conditions reflect the vagaries of an unprecedented wave of globalized capitalism in confluence with local socio-political dynamics. In the first part of this section, which forms the bulk of the discussion of Welcome to Lagos, I focus on the series’ dystopian depiction of Lagos. I examine the depiction of the slum as a metonym for the city which in turn functions as a trope for the entire nation. In this regard, I interrogate the ways in which the city is described in terms that render it as an exceptional space. It is in this way that the study contributes to ongoing debates on the series’ perceived impact on how Nigeria is perceived internationally. The second and concluding part of this section focuses on the series’ protagonists, all of whom work and live in conditions of abject poverty, and who represent the flotsam and jetsam of an unprecedented wave of globalized capitalism and postcolonial misgovernance. I examine the representation of the precarity of their lives, and conclude with a summary of the ways in which national transition is reflected in the city’s “out-of-control” (Wollaston, 2010: n.

132 p.) urbanization with particular reference to the movement from military to civilian rule in the late 1990s. Welcome to Lagos focuses almost exclusively on living conditions in the poorest and most deprived slums in Lagos ostensibly in keeping with the producer’s avowed interest in “life at the sharp end” of the city (BBC2, 2010). Most of the footage is filmed in slums on three locations – the Olososun rubbish dump, a floating former fishing settlement called Makoko, and on the Kuramo beach. In addition, there is extensive filming at the Oluwanishola cattle market and the sawmill area of Ebute-Meta suburb. Other locations that feature in the series include the Ajegunle ghetto, parts of the sprawling Agege area, unidentified areas in the city, as well as places in the adjoining Ogun state – one of which is said to be a hundred kilometres from Lagos. These densely-populated slums together present a picture of extreme poverty, pollution, and environmental degradation. The physical surroundings of the settlements are characterized by disorder and the conspicuous absence of basic amenities and public sanitation in addition to the pervasive presence of waste and putrefaction. The home of one protagonist is furnished almost entirely with items from the dumpsite while another lives on the site and washes himself in the open. Some earn a living as scavengers, while others carry out their vocations using processes and equipment that are obsolete, and sometimes, extremely hazardous. In addition, those who live on the beach contend with unpredictable flooding from the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the constant threat that their shanties could be flattened without warning by government officials (who are portrayed as being high-handed). Using a variety of shots, camera angles and movements, as well as sustained interviews and narratives, the series pays detailed attention not only to the living conditions but also to the individual lives of protagonists. It explores their aspirations and the difficulties they face as they pursue their livelihoods amidst the acute lack of physical, economic, and social infrastructure. These characters have attracted the praise of the film’s producers and some commentators for the resourcefulness and optimism which they demonstrate in spite of the inhuman conditions of their existence. Although the squalour and deprivation that dominate the documentary relate more specifically to slums, the title of the series implies that it is an overarching representation of postcolonial urban dystopian spaces. It also implies that this representation extends to every

133 part of Lagos, a city that is so often deployed as both metaphor and metonym for the entire country (see Iheakaram, 1979). Karima Jeffery (2010: 99) writes more specifically about postcolonial littoral cities. He describes these cities as a literary trope and as “a fluid icon for representation, an emblematic space that can mirror the flux many subaltern figures may experience when they are forced to negotiate the social conditions and hegemony as a result of colonization”. In his discussion of the Nigeria film industry, Nollywood, Haynes (2007: 131-150) states that the industry has become “by far the most powerful purveyor of an image of Nigeria to domestic and foreign populations”. He argues, inter alia, that this image is strongly associated with Nollywood’s unrelenting focus on Lagos as a figurative means of highlighting cultural, social, and economic conditions that are actually nationwide in scope. According to Emmi A. Holm (2014: i), “the anxieties and the aspirations of the Nigerian people are mediated in Nollywood films”. A similar point is made by Ayo Kehinde (2007: 232) in his investigation of the ways in which the city of Lagos – and indeed the “African city” – functions in fictional texts as “a topos, a theme, a trope, a metaphor and a symbol”. He argues that many of such texts adopt versions of “mimetic realism and naturalism” (233) to foreground how social and environmental factors influence the living conditions of city dwellers in many parts of Africa. Although the immediate object of Kehinde’s analysis is fiction, the symbolic and signifying features that he identifies are equally relevant to this discussion of Welcome to Lagos especially in view of the film’s interest in the city’s most acute social and environmental deficiencies. The vigorous and unrelenting focus on slum areas in the film is accompanied by the almost complete exclusion of the other parts of the city that have better infrastructure. Upmarket business districts and affluent suburbs – what the narrator calls “the swankier parts of town” – hardly appear throughout the entire three hours of the documentary’s total running time. More often than not, these suburbs only feature in fleeting panoramic cityscapes in which individual neighbourhoods are not differentiated. By focusing almost exclusively on slums, the film translates the slum into the city’s dominant and possibly its exclusive representational icon. This portrayal is underpinned apparently by the narrator’s claim that three-quarters of metropolitan Lagos consists of slums. Although the filmmakers do not provide a source of this estimate, some studies do suggest that up to “two-thirds” of

134 the city’s population live in slums (see Agbola and Agunbiade, 2009). However, some of these studies distinguish between central areas of the city and peri-urban settlements. For example, as part of their discussion of urbanization and slums in metropolitan Lagos, Agbola and Agunbiade (2009: 79) refer to “the illegal slum and squatter settlements, as well as the city”, while Grandy (2006: 372) refers to the metropolis as “a loose federation of diverse localities” (emphasis added). But no such differentiation is made in Welcome to Lagos. This illustrates James Clifford’s (1986: 7) argument about the “inherently partial …and incomplete” (original emphasis) nature of cultural accounts such as those provided by the series. In general therefore, conditions in the slums, as well as the personal situations of individual slum-dwellers, become associated directly or indirectly with the city and its larger population. A good example is the narrator’s comment about Gabriel, one of the main characters in episode one who processes and sells cattle blood at the Oluwanishola cattle market:

All around Lagos, you’ll find millions of others like Gabriel; people who have found ingenious ways to make money and who are pursuing it for all they are worth. A few become wealthy, but the vast majority earn just enough to live on.

Two other examples in this episode are particularly instructive in terms of the ways in which these representations enable or reinforce the production of certain kinds of knowledge about Lagos and Nigeria (Jones and Sanyal, 2015). In the first example, the narrator states that the rubbish dump is “the place to start” as “an example of everything that’s fantastic about” the city (emphasis added). And on the second occasion, he says the Oluwanishola cattle market offers viewers “a good idea” of how the city’s sixteen million residents are fed every day. In addition, there are several other instances in which conditions in the dump are depicted as typical of the city and indeed of the nation. One of these is a scene in which a suspected thief is apprehended at the dumpsite. The suspect is subjected to an informal trial chaired by Erico, the leader of the scavengers. The trial is conducted in a primitive manner that shows little regard for human rights or the basics of modern jurisprudence. Close-up shots of the apprehended suspect show him bound hands and feet with blood dripping from his ears while surrounding scavengers take turns to strike

135 and revile him. While this is going on, one of the scavengers announces that, “This is Lagos. If you’re a thief, we are going to kill you, and burn you up. This is Lagos”. The idea that the scavengers have a unique way of administering justice is subtextually reinforced later in the episode when the same Erico successfully resolves a dispute which the formal courts have been unable to settle. These narratives are significant for the ways in which they contribute to the production of narratives about informal social organization in the slum, the city, and the country in general. These particular narratives represent informal social organization as exceptional (see Grandy, 2006). In similar ways, social, economic, and cultural features that are more commonly associated with Lagos (as well as Nigeria and indeed the entire developing world)83 are invoked to link slum, city, and nation via synecdoche and metonymy. This is what happens when the narrator asserts, in the opening sequence of the first episode that, “despite its reputation for corruption and poverty, Lagos is not all like that you know. These people will show you what ghetto life is really like” (emphasis added). The expression “these people” can be simultaneously understood in at least two ways. It either doubles as, or slides between, two possible immediate referents – ghetto dwellers in particular, and the inhabitants of Lagos in general – such that the two are conflated. In this way, the slum dweller figures both as slum dweller and city dweller. It is important to note furthermore that the discourse of corruption and poverty invoked in relation to the city in this scene are actually more commonly associated with nations rather than individual cities. In this case therefore, the reference to corruption and poverty applies more plausibly to Nigeria as a whole than to Lagos or its slums. This is expressed less ambivalently by the producer, Will Anderson (2010: n.p.) who writes in his blog that:

Nigeria, and Lagos in particular, seems to have a terrible reputation in Britain. Everyone thinks of it as a noisy, dirty, dangerous city, probably because all we ever hear about it on the news is the corruption, religious violence, and dodgy email scams.

This representational pattern is exemplified also when the narrator refers to the problem of epileptic power supply, one of Nigeria’s most pressing, and iconic infrastructural deficiencies. The narrator calls it “the city’s problem”. However, Joseph Orji, the character who is a scrap dealer at the dumpsite states, more accurately, that the electricity crises is

136 part of “the Nigerian factor” (emphasis added). Similarly, in episode three, brief but notable mention is made of the largely moribund and non-existent national railway service. By highlighting the fact that Lagos, the country’s largest city and commercial hub as well as its administrative capital for several decades has only one operational railway service a week,84 the series draws attention to the city’s celebrated traffic jams and the transportation chaos that continues to plague the entire country. One of the hallmarks of Welcome to Lagos, as pointed out by Wollaston, is its meticulous humanization of protagonists. By providing considerably detailed, and sometimes mundane, information about characters,85 the film not only succeeds in engaging viewers at a significant affective level, but also succeeds in highlighting the links between dominant national cultural practices and individual coping strategies. This is the case with the portrayal of Esther, through whom the series highlights the importance of religion to national cultural practice. The narrator observes that “[l]ike most people in Lagos, during uncertain times, Esther turns to her church”. In addition to Christianity, many Nigerians identify as Muslim.86 Regular, and in most cases, weekly religious observances represent a significant aspect of individual, communal, and national behaviour. Next to ethnicity, religious association has been identified as the most salient form of group identity in Nigeria (see Osaghae and Suberu, 2005). Yet, it is significant that Esther’s Christian identity is not portrayed in connection with group affiliation but rather as one of the ways in which she copes with the realities of her specific personal struggles in a difficult social, economic, and political environment. Similarly, the documentary ignores the ethnicities of most protagonists. This is significant in that it may signal a recognition of the view that subject formation in the post-independence and post-dictatorship dispensation is conditioned considerably by factors that are increasingly less primordial and that are more kaleidoscopic, contingent, and individual (see Krishnan, 2013; Dalley, 2013). Thus, while Welcome to Lagos, on the face of it, is interested in urbanization in the city of Lagos, it succeeds in dramatizing some of the more salient cultural ways in which Nigerians respond to the country’s difficult socio-economic and political realities. It is significant too, that the series was first aired in 2010 on the fiftieth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence. This inquiry into the figurative nexus between the featured slums, the city, and the nation as a whole foregrounds the ways in which the three spatial and social

137 categories are conflated in the film. One effect of this conflation is that the overarching portrayal of the city (and the country) is marked by a significant lack of differentiation between the respective diverse constituent spaces, inhabitants, and cultures. What then emerges is that the image of the slum is generalized to the entire city such that it becomes the default and totalized metonym not only of the city but also of the country. Indeed, the negative reaction the series has so far generated among many commentators in Nigeria is predicated on the view that it represents, overall, a “partial” (Clifford, 1986: 7) and ideologically loaded representation of its narrative objects. These concerns are equally relevant to my analysis of the portrayal of the individual protagonists and the ways in which these representations function in the film’s representation of contemporary transition. Holden (2010: 8) has observed that the protagonists of Welcome to Lagos are successfully humanized through the moving narratives of their complex individual lives. Through these narratives, viewers learn about the characters beyond their suffering. Viewers see their domestic affairs, familial and romantic anxieties, vocational ‘successes’ and aspirations, as well as their irrepressible optimism. Abubakar (2011: 152) has suggested that these narratives, in the context of the characters’ abject conditions, operate as “sources of entertainment” for the immediate western audience of the series. This provides a point of departure for a discussion of the filmmaker’s depiction of the “slum as spectacle” using “a fluid representational stock of images and experiences” (Jones and Sanyal, 2015: 433) in addition to language that describes the space and its residents in exceptional terms.87 This is one of the key features of the overarching representational scheme adopted in the documentary. Perhaps the most evocative evidence of this pattern of representations are the images and sustained scenes of extreme material, environmental, and infrastructural abjection that make up the run time of the entire series. Both close-up and panoramic shots of refuse, sewerage, and decrepit shanties form the overwhelming themes of the first and second episodes in particular. The landscapes of the Olososun dump, the Olwanishola cattle market, Makoko, and the shantytown on Kuramo energetically show the environmental disaster that has resulted from the complete absence of planned drainages, potable water, roads, housing, and waste-disposal facilities in these places. In the scene that closes episode one in which Makoko is introduced, the elderly Chubbey is filmed from the outside of what

138 is obviously an open-air latrine with plank walls covering the lower part of his body up to the neck. He announces that, “there is no odour. If you shit here, the water will wash it away ...” (emphasis added). Similarly, in the dumpsite, both Eric and the narrator observe, respectively, that whenever it rains, the place becomes “very horrible” making life “a whole lot harder and smellier” for the scavengers (emphasis added). Images of environmental degradation and spatial disorder provide the backdrop for characters whose personal appearance and immediate personal circumstances are largely burlesque. This is especially true of the scavengers in episode one who are mostly dressed in dirty-looking rags. In one scene for example, a close up shot exposes a huge tear under the right sleeve of Joseph’s coats, and the umbrella under which he shelters from the sun is in tatters. So also is the threadbare piece of dirty lace that serves as a curtain for Eric’s card-box shanty which strongly resembles the ‘office’ in which Paul, the sawmill operator in episode three sleeps. Eric and his friends have no toilets or bathrooms, and so they have to wash themselves in the open while surrounded by garbage. The image of abjection is reinforced in the depiction of the rather crude means of livelihood of the protagonists. Whether it is lumbering timber or sorting scrap metal, the characters in Welcome to Lagos use the most basic tools and archaic methods88 in their respective trades. Without the benefit of electricity and modern equipment, their daily tasks are performed in ways that are excessively laborious and tortuous. This is exemplified by Gabriel who processes cattle blood at the Oluwanishola cattle market using discarded vehicle tyres as a source of fuel. “It is a very stressful work”, he says. “The heat of the tyres, the heat of the fire, it tortures you” (emphasis added). Therefore, in spite of their resilience and resourcefulness, their productivity is minimal, and what the most of them earn is only “just enough to live on” (Searle, 2010). Furthermore, the specific conditions of their lives and vocations expose them daily to numerous hazards that sometimes prove deadly. A case in point is the death of two sawmill operators who were electrocuted at work within two weeks of each other just before the filming of the series. The sustained and intense focus on filth can be understood in both literal and figurative ways. In a literal sense, the graphic depiction of waste, as well as the characters’s and narrator’s choice of language functions as a technique of realism that evokes certain affective reactions such as disgust, surprise, and shock, for example, in the viewer.

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Figuratively, the pervasive imagery of waste can be understood as a trope for the socio- economic status of the slum and the postcolonial mega-city not only within the context of globalized neoliberal capitalism but also that of postcolonial socio-political dystopia (see also Morrison, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2002).89 Representations of this type in postcolonial African narratives, reflect, as Sarah Lincoln (2008: 99) points out, “the continent’s continued status as a ‘remnant’ of globalization – a waste product, trash heap, disposable raw material, and degraded offcut of the processes that have so greatly enriched, dignified and beautified their beneficiaries”. Focusing on African cinema, Kenneth Harrow (2013) has traced the use of trash as a recurring trope in visual depictions of socio-economic realities in the postcolonial world in general, and Africa in particular. Noting that the practice has spawned a plethora of theorizations which link “the material to the psychological, sociological, and political” (1), he suggests that, “trash, above all, applies to people who have been dismissed from the community, marginalized and forgotten, turned into “bare lives” in “states of exception” for others to study and pity” (x). His argument that the trope of trash is used to “define the lives of the poor” (1) sheds light on the significance of the imagery of refuse, environmental degradation, and abject poverty that constitute the preponderant visual aesthetic of Welcome to Lagos. A close reading of the film therefore demonstrates the various ways in which the slum and the slum-dweller both figure as the offcuts and detritus of the globalized economy.

Zones of indistinction in District 9

District 9 tells the story of a group of sick and beggarly humanoid aliens who arrive in Johannesburg in 1982, roughly twenty years before the narrative present, in a huge spaceship that hovers over the city centre. In an apparent humanitarian response, the South African authorities set up a huge refugee camp, named District 9 for the aliens under the hovering spacecraft. After twenty years, the camp has metamorphosed into a slum that is sewerage-strewn, environmentally degraded, and crime infested. The aliens, who are disdainfully nicknamed “prawns” by the local population because of their insect-like appearance, live in shacks and scavenge for food from rubbish dumps. In the slum, there is a group of savage gangsters practising black magic and operating a drugs and prostitution

140 syndicate. The crime lords are foreigners – ‘Nigerians’ – who terrorize both the aliens and locals. Expectedly, locals start protesting and asking for District 9 to be closed and for the aliens to leave the country. The government intervenes by contracting a multinational corporation (named Multi-National United [MNU]), which possesses a heavily-armed private security force, to evict the aliens by force. But first, the corporation attempts to persuade the aliens to sign trumped-up eviction notices served by their agents, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) and Fundiswa (Mandla Gaduka). While doing this, Wikus meets Christopher Johnson, an intelligent alien who is developing sophisticated biological weaponry in a laboratory underneath his shack. Wikus is accidentally infected with an alien fluid which he confiscates from Christopher’s shack and soon begins to mutate into a ‘prawn’ himself. When the leaders of MNU discover this, they apprehend Wikus with a plan to ‘harvest’ his half-human, half-alien body for weapons development experiments in their secret laboratory. Wikus escapes to District 9 where he teams up (against MNU) with Christopher who promises, but fails to reverse Wikus’ mutation. An explosive three-way battle for the alien fluid and access to the aliens’ weapons technology follows. The forces of MNU and the gangsters fight each other and pursue Wikus and Christopher. In the end, Christopher re-activates the spaceship and escapes with his son, promising to return in three years to help Wikus. District 9 is demolished and the aliens are relocated to a new camp named District 10. Residents of Johannesburg are unsure of Wikus’ fate and whereabouts, and he is pictured in the final scene on a junk heap fully transformed into a “prawn”. District 9 is adapted from Blomkamp’s 2005 short film Alive in Joburg and deploys techniques of realism in a unique way that is significantly different from the more common forms of science fiction (see Gaylard, 2010: 168). Blomkamp produces a compelling cinematic narrative through an effective blending of a range of formats including elements of the mock-documentary (‘mockumentary’) such as interviews, news broadcasts, and footage from closed-circuit surveillance cameras. These are combined with special effects as well as a scrupulously detailed physical and social backdrop that is simultaneously contemporary and historical. The overall effect, according to Stefan Helgesson (2010: 172), is the setting of a “new standard for dirty realism in science fiction – dirty, contemporary realism” (original emphasis). Nel (2012: 552) explains how this is achieved, noting that

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were filmed with hand-held cameras, yielding grainy, docu-realistic images. The use of colour contributes to the sombre, realistic atmosphere of the images. Parts are filmed in black and white, and, where colour is used, it has a drained and washed-out appearance. In this way, Blomkamp displays some of the qualities of what Baines (2001: 189) describes as ‘conventions of realism’ to ‘construct an imaginary world that is credible’. This docu-realist filmmaking, together with the ‘authentic’ news footage, even reprises precepts associated with a particular strain of cinéma-vérité, concerning ‘participation, provocation and truth seeking’ (Ponech 2008: 84) – especially where truth pertains to realities of social and political injustice, as well as personal identity and human dignity.

As Helgesson (2010: 172) demonstrates further, the allegorical effect – in terms of conjuring the history of apartheid – is powerful:

It is evident not just in the ‘‘humans only’’ signs, the allusion to District Six and forced removals, the casspirs, or the tell-tale clicks of the aliens’ language, but also in such specific moments as when the protagonist Wikus van de Merwe goes from shack to shack to get the aliens to sign their eviction order. When an alien strikes the clipboard from his hand, Wikus says it counts as a signature. This is nothing less than a cinematic citation of Henry Nxumalo’s legendary 1952 Drum article on working conditions at Bethal: illiterate workers at the farm Bethal were told to hold a pen in their hand, which counted as a signature of a slave contract.

District 9 thus achieved considerable box-office success and critical commendation. The majority of reviews after its simultaneous release in August 2009 in New Zealand, Canada, and the USA were very positive (see Van der Vlies, 2010), and a growing number of scholarly articles have appeared in which the film’s formal and thematic features are interrogated. The positive reactions are validated by the fact that it received four Academy Award nominations in 2009 (for best picture, best adapted screen play, best visual effects and best editing), and won the Saturn Award for best international film in 2010. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (2010: 137) describes its impressive visual and special effects as “spectacular”. Similarly, Helgesson (2010: 172-3) hails its “rigorous formal execution” which “cut[s] between the audiovisual protocols of documentaries, newsreels, surveillance cameras, and more conventional (but intense) cinematic narration” to push “the story ahead without allowing the viewer respite”. In terms of its themes, the movie has perhaps attracted the most commendation for what is perceived to be its “progressive social message” (Moses, 2010: 156; see also Veracini, 2011). This is in regard to the collaboration between the lead alien character, Christopher Johnson, and the main protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, who undergoes a

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Kafkaesque corporeal metamorphosis from human to alien. Through this, and other aspects of the multi-pronged plot, the film offers layers of social commentary and an allegory of recent South African history that covers wide-ranging issues. These include racism, the destruction of non-white communities during apartheid, xenophobia, poverty, and the role of globalized capital in the developing world (see Walder, 2014; Goodman, 2010). But the film has also been criticized for perpetuating stereotypical images of specific migrant communities in post-1994 South Africa in particular, and for harking back to colonial representations of Africans in general. Concerning the former, several commentators have flayed the unremitting portrayal of Nigerians as criminals arguing that this may serve to reinforce already problematic xenophobic sentiments within South Africa. Critics also argue that such depictions resonate with the kind of jaundiced representations of Africans that characterized most colonial narratives (see Akpome, 2013; Graham, 2010). Nel (2012: 547-569) has however offered a problematical reading of the specific representation of ‘Nigerians’ in the film against a presumed historicity of Nigerian migrants in South Africa. The director, Neill Blomkamp, has also been quoted as defending the film in this regard, stating that:

“The bottom line is that there are huge Nigerian crime syndicates in Johannesburg. I wanted the film to feel real, to feel grounded, and I was going to incorporate as much of contemporary South Africa as I wanted to, and that's just how it is” (quoted in Okoh, 2000: n.p.).”

Heglesson (2010: 172) notes in this regard that the film’s director, Neill Blomkamp “seems deaf to the overtones of depicting Africans – and especially African foreigners in South Africa – as superstitious and violent”. Michael V. Moses (2010: 158) argues furthermore that

if the Nigerians are a throwback to the negative colonial stereotype of the ‘primitive’ African, the ‘prawns’ correspond to both the old stereotype and a new one, no less negative for being up-to-date: that of the shiftless, violent, and degenerate urban African lumpenproletariat.

David Korotky (cited in Smith, 2012) and Lorenzo Veracini (2011) read District 9 differently, asserting that it is a settler-colonial story like Avatar (2009). Veracini argues that both movies deploy the tropes and narratives associated with that genre in invoking familiar settler colonial histories and futures. Notwithstanding, he acknowledges what he calls the “progressive” and “regressive” registers according to which the movie has been

143 predominantly read with regard to its apparent theme of cross-species collaboration (Veracini, 2011: 355). This study simultaneously builds on and moves away from these readings of District 9. First, I explore the depiction of the film’s eponymous slum, District 9, as a liminal space that has loaded symbolic value with particular regard to globalization and urbanization in the context of a postcolonial nation. It is instructive that the fictional District 9 is set in the actual informal settlement of Chiawelo that is located on the outskirts of Johannesburg. I suggest that this location figures as a zone of contact and border- crossing, as well as a site of contestation between competing socio-economic groups. These groups are represented in the film by the powerful MNU, the hapless aliens, and the gangsters. Reading the space of the slum in these ways, I try to demonstrate how social, economic, political, and historical conditions in the specific space depicted in the film, reflect the powerful impact of globalized capital and the state on post-liberation South Africa in general, and on slums in particular. I begin by foregrounding the overarching symbolism of the slum as the dominant setting of District 9. In this regard, I return to Nel’s (2012: 547-569) useful exploration of abjection in the portrayal of the slum. Nel provides a detailed discussion of how the filmmaker successfully combines the use of the cinematic techniques of realism and the “authentic setting” of the shantytown to construct an abject and dystopian cityscape as the overarching backdrop for the story. Tracing the origins of Chiawelo to apartheid era policies of segregation, she foregrounds the role of colonial politics in the production of dystopic urban African spaces. Significantly, Nel also highlights the representational links between the informal settlement of Chiawelo, Johannesburg, and South Africa at large, arguing that through its focus on Chiawelo, the “film simultaneously offers a view of the essential as well as the latent, current-day Johannesburg” (551). Moreover, while District 9 can be read as a “representation of an underworld of the urban African reality” in general terms, Nel argues that “it is still distinctly South African”, in so far as Johannesburg is “the topographical and relational setting that binds people together and places them in a shared time and space … refer[red] to as ‘the national habitus’” (551). In this way, the city’s symbolic purchase as “a figurative alias for South Africa” (Akpome, 2015: 26) is highlighted.

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Compelling reasons for Johannesburg’s status as the country’s foremost representational spatial icon are adumbrated in the opening chapter of a recent collection of essays on the city. Phillip Harrison, Graeme Gotz, Alison Todes and Chris Wray (2015: 2) argue that Johannesburg is “the dynamo within the national economy” a situation that gives it “a commanding position in the national social imagination”. They provide an abridged summary of writing about the city in which two broad periods – before and after 1970 – are highlighted. In the earlier period, the dominant form of the discursive representation of the city targeted popular audiences with romanticized tales of gold mining on the Witwatersrand, and “the transition from a mining camp to a large modern city” (12). Writing on the city in the latter period was influenced by two main factors; the emergence of urban studies as a distinct discipline and the political activities that led to, and attended the Soweto uprising of June 1976. While this survey is not necessarily accurate or exhaustive,90 it provides a useful point of departure for this study’s interest in the ways in which the discursive representation of the city has been accompanied by, and reflected in, the economic and socio-political developments that mark its continuing transitions and transformations. It is important to note also that, like Lagos, representations of Johannesburg are often deployed in reference to African urbanization. In the introduction to the influential collection of essays, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008), Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have argued famously that “Johannesburg is the premier African metropolis, the symbol par excellence of the ‘African modern’” (1). Like Harrison et al. (2015), Mbembe and Nuttall link the city’s importance to its place as “one of the critical nodes of Southern Hemispheric capitalism and globalization”. In this way, they reinforce the prevailing view that the overarching perception of the city is influenced predominantly by its relationship to the forces and processes of globalized capitalism. However, they resist theories of urbanization and globalization – which invariably focus on materiality – as overriding conceptual frames for analysing the city in particular, and African cities in general. They argue instead for greater attention to the “cultural econom[ies]” – the flows of “ideas, people, images and imaginaries” (3) – of Africa’s unique urban spaces, for an understanding of the complex ways in which they not only respond to, but also contribute to contemporary cosmopolitan culture.

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Indeed, the focus on the Chiawelo slum in the overarching depiction of Johannesburg in District 9 echoes the prevailing view among analysts that the slum has become the defining symbol of contemporary African urbanism (Mbembe, 2008: 5). In this respect, it is helpful to return again to Nel (2012: 552), who states that the film

depicts a contemporary, urban, African ghetto: dirty, claustrophobic squatter homes, litter-strewn, nightmarish labyrinths and alleys, with hideous and unhygienic cattle carcasses for sale, and unsightly aliens digging for food in the mountains of garbage. The film provokes reflections of urban realities, of ghetto life that signals danger and violence, pollution and decay, and a state of oppression and imprisonment. For Blomkamp and his team, this was a problem which posed its own challenges, because the abject environment is so chaotic and unbelievably disgusting to be in. ‘Every single thing is difficult. There’s broken glass everywhere, there’s rusted barbed wire everywhere, the level of pollution is insane. And then in that environment, you’re trying to be creative as well. But of course, that gave birth to the creativity, so it kind of goes both ways’ (in Smith, 2009).

At issue for the present discussion is the significance of the loaded symbolism in the movie’s excessively graphic representation of Johannesburg in the specific post-TRC context. Beyond its apparent function as a figure for the unequal relations between global capital and the urban poor in general, the representation of economic circumstances and social relations in the film’s eponymous slum provides useful insight into the post-TRC condition of South Africa. As mentioned earlier, Gerald Gaylard (2009: 168) makes the instructive point that the filmmaker’s focus on the slum to the near total exclusion of better endowed parts of the city serves to express his “apocalyptic vision” of the city’s and the world’s urban future. Here again, as is the case with Welcome to Lagos, this echoes Jean and Jean Comaroff’s (2012) controversial argument that current realities in the Global South can provide a glimpse into, and foreshadow, the future of the world in general and the West in particular. In addition to the various ways in which the film’s dominant setting may be interpreted, the Johannesburg slum in District 9 can be read as a canvas on which the filmmaker’s imagination, not only of an apocalyptic future Johannesburg, but more significantly, of an aporetic post-TRC South Africa is sketched. The slum, as well as the city which it symbolizes, thus emerges as an important zone of contact where interactions between the country’s major social and cultural constituencies are dramatized. It becomes a site where claims for the promise of the new South Africa – the ‘rainbow nation’ – are contested between global capital, the state, impoverished locals, and desperate refugees.

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The graphic depiction of abject poverty, destitution, and the violent treatment of aliens unambiguously recall the apartheid era. This, in addition to the largely segregationist nature of relations between the different social groups in the film, serve to challenge the official narrative of post-TRC social harmony. As an allegory of the country’s socio-political condition, the slum can be analysed, partly, in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998: 10, 12) influential notions of ‘zones of indistinction’, the ‘camp’, and the ‘state of exception’. Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds (2014: 44) have demonstrated the fecundity of such a reading given international political trends whereby states increasingly seek to manage “populations through surveillance, monitoring and policing of public spaces.” They elaborate, furthermore, on the effectiveness of film in general, and science fiction in particular, in visualizing “spaces of exception” (59).91 This provides a valuable point of departure for this study’s related interest in the specific ways in which the circumstances in the eponymous slum and the conditions of existence of its inhabitants (aliens and locals alike) can be understood to reflect the post- TRC condition of many South African citizens and residents. These groups are simultaneously included within, and excluded from, the qualified life envisaged by the ending of apartheid and post-TRC national reconciliation. The specific socio-political space of the slum is investigated for how it figures as a simulacrum of the “camp”, which is the site and “realm of bare life” (Agamben, 1998: 71) that is dramatized powerfully by the graphic portrayal of extreme abjection and precarity of life, not only of the alien and the mutating protagonist, but also of the impoverished locals who populate the numerous informal settlements and squatter camps at the margins of South Africa’s expanding urban centres. Indeed, urban slums have been identified as one of the more conspicuous spatial illustrations of the camp in contemporary times.92 In a way that is especially relevant to this discussion, Timothy Di Muzio (2008: 305) has described the socio-economic inequalities reflected by the expansion of globalized capitalism and the simultaneous proliferation of slums as “the apartheid of life chances that has accompanied neoliberalism”. More significantly also, Di Muzio demonstrates why Agamben’s notion of the camp is appropriated in many analyses of slums. Exploring how slums are progressively illustrative of the “political paradigm of the modern” (Agamben, 1998: 69), Di Muzio traces their

147 origins to rise of agrarian capitalism and industrialization with the accompanying pauperization of increasing numbers of propertyless rural peasants. Following accelerated urbanization and globalization facilitated by neoliberal policies, these settlements have proliferated globally. They have also become, veritably, “exceptional, or … transitional, spaces of capitalist modernity” (Di Muzio, 2008: 307; emphasis added). This provides a useful backdrop to the ensuing interrogation of the multifarious representational strategies of District 9 vis-à-vis the peculiar transitional socio-political conditions of post-TRC South Africa. At a basic level of figuration, there are numerous features of the camp in the overall portrayal of the eponymous slum, District 9. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these are the physical and material structures that mark this slum out as a particularly carceral space. The images that dominate the opening scenes of the film include pictures of rows of refugee tents and, more poignantly, high prison-type barbed-wire fencing with armed security personnel standing at attention. These combine with scenes of rioting and violent protests to create a palpable sense of martial law for the viewer. These are the exact physical conditions that describe the camp in Agamben’s (1998: 19) analysis. And while this impression contributes to the allegorical effect of recalling conditions during apartheid, it also feeds into Blomkamp’s stated apocalyptic vision of contemporary city-cum-slum spaces as dystopic. The overarching images of incarceration in the context of an excess of state martial power renders District 9 as a figurative space where conditions for the production and reproduction of ‘bare life’ are met, and where the state of exception (illustrated by the actions of the MNU) is in force. It is important, in this regard, to highlight how the depiction of slum dwellers contributes to this interpretation of the film’s social vision. While the ‘prawns’ have been recognized as a commentary on the problematic relations between impoverished locals and poor immigrants in recent times, an understanding of the figure of the gangsters requires greater nuance. There is a strong sense in which this group, problematically called Nigerians in the film, can be understood as an ambivalent social category that operates (together with the other subjects associated with the slum – i.e. locals and ‘prawns’) as social outcasts. As Ato Quayson (2009) argues, these three sets of social subjects collectively figure as subtle referents to “black life” as a whole. Quayson makes this

148 argument in his exploration of the film’s “social imaginary” which includes the social relations of both groups (i.e. the locals and aliens), as well as the depiction of how each group seeks to influence the social order of the slum. Although the degree to which each group is portrayed as an ‘Other’93 differs in terms of social relations, Quayson observes that both are equally “alien to the civic and political order of Johannesburg and South Africa” (2009: n.p.) Comparing the film’s depiction of the ‘Nigerians’ with the dominant discursive representations of Nigerians on the basis of presumed historicity, he argues that:

what the film does is to deploy their representation as a shorthand to register black life in terms of the excess of unreason (magical thought and cannibalism), something they could have done without referencing Nigeria at all. Given the subtle binary overlaps and oppositions that we have seen help shape the discursive relations between the alien prawns and the Nigerians in the film, it would not be unfair to say that the “Nigerians” are redundant, and that we are obliged to interpret them predominantly as ciphers of black life rather than as a reference to a putative Nigerian historicity as such.

In this way, the slum dweller in District 9 (‘prawns’, gangsters, and locals) can be understood as an ambivalent discursive signifier that oscillates between – and doubles as both – the figures of black African immigrants and locals in South Africa. If so, there is a strong sense in which life in this particular slum becomes representative – whether intentional or not – of a putative form of African urbanism. This resonates with Nel’s (2009: 552) earlier-cited point that the film depicts a “contemporary, urban, African ghetto …” (emphasis added). Like Welcome to Lagos therefore, District 9 presents a distinctly dystopic imaginary of contemporary African urbanization, emblematized by crises, extreme poverty, and crime. This view, which dominates many analyses of African cities has been linked to another problematic notion. This is the racist and colonialist notion that African peoples are rural by nature, and are, to return to Quayson (2000: n.p.), “alien to the civic and political order of [the urban space of] Johannesburg and South Africa” (see also Ferguson, 2007). This idea strongly influenced urban planning in the former colonies94 and is frequently cited as one of the root causes of postcolonial urban dysfunction. It is largely responsible for the imbalance in the spread of amenities and opportunities that drives the unrelenting migration of people from rural areas to the congested cities (see Ilesanmi, 2010). In view of its specific South African iconographies, the depiction of the Chiawelo

149 slum in District 9 thus represents a critique, not only of African urbanism in general, but is also a strong comment on the problematic of urbanization in contemporary South Africa. This has been identified as one of the most critical social features of the country’s ongoing transition (see Smith, 2003; others). Various instances of population explosions in several parts of Johannesburg and on its peripheries since the early to mid-1990s95 is the most striking manifestation of this reality. It has brought into relief the extreme socio-economic inequalities that characterize the country many years after the official ending of apartheid. The continuing economic marginalization of the mostly black majority in spite of majority rule and fiscal reforms remains the most critical socio-political challenges facing the country currently. The situation is characterized by frequent and often deadly riots over deficiencies in public ‘service delivery,’ as well as xenophobic violence in townships all over the country.96 The ‘state of exception’ that obtains in the slum thus emblematizes the real-life paradox of South Africa’s underclasses – consisting of both poor locals and illegal immigrants – who are paradoxically included97 in the constitutional arrangement of a desegregated nation, yet are simultaneously excluded from the economic and social benefits of that arrangement. This aporia is linked to the role of globalized capitalism and urbanization, a theme which the film engages with in interesting ways. In this regard, it is important to recall that Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie’s (2010) have identified space as a salient concern in current cultural expression. They note that whereas “under apartheid, ‘space’ (residential areas, schools, amenities, institutions in general) was over-regulated, it is now a more open zone – controlled more by money and power than race, by inherently complex notions of ownership and belonging” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010: 3). This observation is useful for understanding how space, especially the particular space signified by the slum, is thematized in District 9. Given that within the film’s particular allegorical strategy, different historical and socio-political configurations are overlaid, both aspects of Frenkel and MacKenzie’s observation become simultaneously relevant. On the one hand, the film depicts the over-regulation of space and the curtailment of movement through the “humans only” images that recall racial segregation under apartheid. On the other, it simultaneously depicts the regulation of social space, conceived in both physical and figurative ways, in the current period through the combination of juridical, military, and economic powers

150 exercised over the camp by the government and its partners, the MNU. Alexandra Parker (2014: 166-167) draws attention to the specific cinematic strategies by which the atmosphere of authority and control is demonstrated in the film:

District 9 makes extensive use of the aerial viewpoint, mostly through a conscious use of the helicopter. The feature film is designed to simulate a documentary and makes use of created ‘news footage’ shot from a helicopter, looking down on the action. The film intentionally mimics the footage from news stories covering anti-apartheid uprisings during the 1980s, reinforcing a sense of familiarity even in the face of the alien narrative. The film’s storyline and action includes MNU agents travelling in, pursuing and firing from helicopters, which adds further drama as well as recurring aerial views. However, despite the fact that the helicopters are used as a form of transport, their meaning is not derived from a sense of mobility but rather the helicopter connotes authority, surveillance and control.

The involvement of the MNU in this regard is also significant for the ways in which it signifies the influence of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid South Africa on the one hand, and on the creation of states and spaces of exception in the country’s peri-urban settlements on the other hand. In “Rule of property versus rule of the poor?”, Mbembe (2012) highlights the limitations of the emergent democratic system, underpinned by a neoliberal capitalist superstructure, to guarantee economic and social redistribution to South Africa’s underprivileged majority. Noting that the state “lacks the capacity to incorporate [the country’s] vast reserves of propertyless citizens” into the global capitalist system, he argues, inter alia, that “it will become increasingly apparent to many that capitalism is not naturally compatible with democracy” (Mbembe, 2012: n.p.) This is reflected in the socio- political tensions that have rocked the polity in general, and the liberation fraternity in particular, in recent years. The most poignant case so far is the killing of 34 striking miners by police in August 2012 in what has been called the ‘Marikana Massacre’ (see Akpome, 2013). Ten other persons had been killed in intra-union conflicts before armed police were called in by authorities. Furthermore, there have been serious schisms in the political alliance between the ruling ANC and its labour partners, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions). The ANC itself has been rocked by turbulent factionalism, and after its firebrand youth leader was expelled in 2013, he formed a radical, populist left-leaning party, interestingly named Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The EFF has had moderate electoral successes following their aggressive campaign that included proposals for

151 nationalising industries in the country’s lucrative extractive sector (see EFF, 2014). This situation has tended to unsettle the idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ and challenge the official narrative of reconciliation that was the hallmark of the TRC. Mbembe’s analysis recalls Agamben’s (1998: 12, 13) exploration of the ways in which the oppositions between absolutist and democratic forms of governance dissolve within an aporetic “zone of indistiction” in which both forms of power become “complicit” in bestializing human subjects. This aporia arises from the paradoxical attempt to secure the wellbeing of citizens within the same socio-political matrix in which they are subjectified. This often happens when political (often martial) and biopolitical processes converge:

Hence, too, modern democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place – “bare life” – that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post- democratic spectacular societies … may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. (emphasis added)

In analysing the film’s depiction of the slum, it is necessary to consider the Kafkaesque figure of the mutating half-human, half-alien protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe who features as a powerful and ambivalent trope of transition. In this regard, I appropriate the scholarship of Eric D. Smith (2012: 128) who uses Agamben’s notions of biopolitics to explore the ways in which the figure of the alien operates to critique contemporary globalized capitalism and its attendant “catastrophic re-organisation of social space”. Smith argues that the unbridled expansion of globalized capital has been accompanied by the “erosion” of the powers of the nation state and the concomitant ascension of the multinational corporation to the status of “infinite sovereignty” (128, 149). He argues that MNU operates as the de facto sovereign in District 9, and not merely as an agent of the state:

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[T]he absent South African state is significant only in the conspicuous ceding of its authority to MNU, and no representative of state power (neither human nor architectural nor symbolic) appears in the film. Explicitly directing our attention to this transference of sovereignty, Wickus [sic] observes during the preliminary briefing of his crew, “I think it’s a great thing that it’s not the military guys in charge this time,” a point underscored in subsequent scenes depicting the socio- pathic military officer Koobus happily taking orders from the MNU director. (Smith, 2012: 149)

Global capital is thus capable of declaring and enforcing states of exception across geographical (national), demographic, and class borders to further its self-serving interests. This explains MNU’s attempt to ‘harvest’ Wikus’s mutating body for its economic potentials, an action that illustrates the power of the corporation to extend the state of exception to Wikus. Therefore, in spite of his privileged status as middle-class, white, and human, Wikus becomes exposed to the same conditions of bare life to which the impoverished slum-dwellers are subject. Wikus’s inter-species transformation can also be read as the film’s most effective trope of inter-group relations and socio-political transition. It operates, furthermore, as a strong indicator of Blomkamp’s problematical vision of post-TRC South African identity (re)formation. It is very significant that Wikus’ metamorphosis is brought about by his being infected with the mysterious alien fluid. Equally important is the fact the he is unable or unwilling to be reconciled with his transitory half-human and half-alien condition, and that he completely transforms into the Other at the end of the film. These suggest that the film’s vision of post-TRC South Africa is one in which social differences are preserved within the rigid, and often binary oppositions that undergird apartheid ideology. It may also seem that hybrid forms of identity are not included in the film’s post- TRC social imagination. This is because Wikus’ metamorphosis is portrayed as the consequence of the contamination of the Self by the Other, something that recalls the problematic hierarchical and Orientalist (à la Said, 1978) assumptions underpinning binary conceptions of the human-alien relationship. This supports Lorenzo Veracini’s (2011: 356) observation that “despite its progressive stances and criticism of contemporary South African developments, District 9 is incapable of effectively thinking beyond segregation”. He argues further that the relocation of the alien population to a new camp (District 10) after the destruction of District 9 represents “a more complete segregation” (364). Similar arguments are made by Laura Murphy (2000: n.p.) in her interrogation of the film’s “ambivalent representation of race in the depiction of the aliens”:

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[R]acial contamination provides the pretext for Wikus’ alienation in District 9 … . It is only as a hybrid that he begins to recognize the hideous oppression of non-humans, and it is only through this transformation that he is able to comprehend the intelligence in the exceptional alien Christopher Johnson. However, this transformation does not completely change Wikus, as Blomkamp would like to think it does. Wikus wants to chop off his own alien-infected arm because he cannot stand the part of him that is not human. Then he is driven to save himself enough to partner with the alien, but when he sees his opportunity, he still abandons the alien to save himself. He learns so little that he vociferously denies the accusation that he’s slept with an alien because, of course, his transformation has done little to actually make him (or the filmmakers) understand or sympathize with the aliens in anything more than a superficial level. He doesn’t want to have to live in a slum, but he’s not going to change his mind about how disgusting inter-species intercourse can be. There is no real change in Wikus.

What this means is that the critical social issues highlighted in the movie remain largely unresolved, a situation that is echoed by Mbembe’s (2012: n.p.) observation that “there is something unresolved in the constitutional democratic settlement that suspended the “revolution” in 1994 but did not erase apartheid from the social, economic and mental landscape”. This is highlighted by the constellation of realities at the end of the movie: Among residents of Johannesburg, the fate and whereabouts of Wikus is uncertain and becomes the subject of conspiracy theories. Furthermore, although locals let out a cheer when the ship bearing the alien leader Christopher Johnson and his son leaves earth, the ‘prawns’ have neither left nor have they been integrated with the local population. Instead, their population has grown considerably larger, and conditions in their new camp are worse than those in District 9. The result is that, in regard to the film’s broad socio-political backdrop, viewers and characters are left with a palpable sense of suspense, uncertainty, and unease similar to the mood that permeates sections of Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) and Jacob Dlamini’s description of the post-TRC period as a “time out of joint” (Nostalgia, 12). These emotions reflect the increasingly protean nature of subjectivization in the face of the widespread economic and social insecurities that accompany contemporary globalization (see Appadurai, 2006b). The analysis will now conclude with a brief consideration of important links between representations of space and temporality in District 9. Ana M. Calvo (2012: 95- 112) discusses this in her exploration of the narrative deployment of the slum as a spatial metaphor by which the marginality of the Other is foregrounded. Her point resonates, on

154 one hand, with Frenkel and MacKenzie’s (2010: 3) description of the period under consideration as one that is characterized, like “the post-9/11 era”, by “heightened intolerance, of more actively policed national borders, of heightened ethnic, racial and national sensitivities”. On the other hand, Calvo draws on Agamben’s (1998) idea of the ‘camp as matrix’ in relation to the symbolism of ‘District X’, the new camp to which the ‘prawns’ are relocated at the end of the movie. Highlighting the cycles of incarceration and dislocation that the aliens have been subjected to, Calvo argues that the film’s use of the Roman numeral, ‘X’ to designate the new camp can be understood in symbolic terms:

The new digit for the new camp situates the incarceration experience in different spatial and temporal coordinates, for there will always be a district 11, 12, 13, etc. … [T]he X is [also] the crossing of space and time, of a repeating heterotopia and a recurrent heterochrony. It is the possibility of endless metamorphosis and replacement that opens the political overtones of the movie; they move back into the past as they delineate the future. (110)

This reading foregrounds links between the movie’s thematization of space and time and South Africa’s socio-political transition during a period of increasing globalization – important movements that are constitutive of the film’s overarching backdrop. Calvo’s reference to the recurrence of specific social, cultural, and political trends resounds with Luiza Caraivan’s (2011: 31) description of post-1994 Johannesburg as an “urban palimpsest”, and a “composite environment, the product of overlapping forms that have emerged over centuries of growth and distinguish themselves in the different layers that are still visible at present”. This is echoed in Frenkel’s (2013: 25) reading of current South African cultural expression as palimpsests, marked by “a set of related perspectives that inscribe meaning across times and spaces”. This illuminates the interesting ways in which District 9 provides a revealing representation of South Africa’s contemporary transition; by overlaying the experiences of apartheid rule over the post-TRC dispensation while articulating a problematic post-TRC vision. It is perhaps useful to make reference here to Zulu Love Letter (2004), another important post-2000 film that complicates the signifying relationships between memory and history on one hand, and the temporal links between different moments in South Africa’s contemporary history and transition on the other. The film’s narrative strategy includes the superimposition of apartheid era experiences on those that transpire in the narrative present such that the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ overlap and the notion of fixed temporal categories 155 becomes questioned. This representation of time and temporality also “reenacts the fragmented texture of human memory” (Kruger, 2012: 144), while at the same time dramatizing how the growing national archive of apartheid and of its aftermath are being constructed and deconstructed. To conclude this section, I restate the major ways in which Welcome to Lagos and District 9 yield themselves to productive dialogic reading and how they advance the overarching objectives of this study. First, in a way that belies their apparent differences – fiction versus non-fiction, documentary versus science-fiction thriller – both films rely extensively on the techniques of realism associated with the documentary sub-genre of cinéma-vérité. Secondly, both films focus on two cities that are arguably the most powerful icons of contemporary African urbanization. In this way, the films offer extremely valuable commentary on themes of space and socio-economic relations, and how these analytic categories figure in the national imaginaries of the respective countries. In so doing, the films foreground the influence of political and economic forces in the profoundly disjunctive nature of postcolonial existence. This leads to the third significant parallel between Welcome to Lagos and District 9: each presents a vision of the African city, and of Nigeria and South Africa respectively, which is considerably apocalyptic. In this way, the films highlight the non-celebratory rhetoric that pervades national narratives in contemporary cultural expression in Nigeria and South Africa. The conditions highlighted by the films dramatize the fact that economic considerations continue to dominate cultural responses to the kaleidoscopic outcomes of contemporary urbanization and globalization that mark post-dictatorship and post-TRC transition in Nigeria and South Africa respectively.

Late capitalism, urbanization, and cultures of economic survivalism

In their analysis of representations of Dharavi, Mumbai’s best-known slum, Jones and Sanyal foreground the links between representational practices and economic concerns, arguing that the overarching depiction of the slum as spectacle “operates as both a sign of and means to domination of the social by capitalism” (2015: 432). They invoke John Hutnyk’s (1996: xi) argument that the tourism industry and charitable practices, which are some of the methods by which postcolonial urban spaces are inscribed into global

156 imaginaries, can be understood as “the soft edge of an otherwise brutal system of exploitation”. Although the narrator of Welcome to Lagos is silent about the role of globalized neoliberal capitalism in shaping conditions in the slums of Lagos, iconic images of, and allusions to the globalized economy appear throughout the series in various forms. This happens mainly through the ubiquitous presence of the logos and insignia of major international brands and business organizations like the electronics’ giant, Samsung. In this way, the central role of multinational corporations in the local socio-economic calculus is subtly registered. There are also short scenes in which some characters discuss games between the major rival European football teams that each supports.98 Further indication of how the slum and the city are circumscribed within an increasingly globalized system is given when the narrator observes that the availability and cost of cattle at the Oluwanishola cattle market is sometimes determined by wars and droughts in places as far away from Lagos as Chad and Sudan. But the best example of the various ways in which the slum and slum-dwellers are inscribed into global commerce is provided by Joseph, the scrap dealer who buys hand- picked recyclable trash from scavengers. Joseph informs viewers that his business is “just like the stock market”, both of which depend on international currency exchange rates. He notes however that people like him and those in international financial centres are at the opposite ends of a vastly unequal economic equation. Whereas those in the one group are able to afford – in Joseph’s words – “suit[s] and ... tie[s] and fine shoes”, those at the other end only get “a very small piece of the action” and earn less than enough to make a decent livelihood. People like Joseph thus live in what Anthony Downey (2009: 109) calls a “limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life”. Nonetheless, there remains a sense in which the protagonists of Welcome to Lagos demonstrate a certain amount of what has been called “squatter agency” (see Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 2013). Many slum-dwellers and squatters in different parts of the world are known not only to develop successful and diverse cultural responses to their dire socio- economic realities, but also to affirm their humanity and existence beyond, and in spite of, the dominant economic ethos of the postmodern milieu (see Roy, 2011). Yet, as Dawson and Edwards have demonstrated, more often than not, urban cultures in postcolonial mega-

157 cities invariably reflect strategies of economic survival. This is highlighted in Vich’s (2004: 75-89) study of street performances of informal traders in the Peruvian capital, Lima, during the 1980s. These performances, as Vich demonstrates, are self-representational cultural forms by which the performers critique modernity and simultaneously construct informality as “a normal condition of capitalist development (2004: 47, 60). According to Vich, while the performances demonstrate “the nonpassivity of subjects”, they also reveal “the multiple mechanisms used to grapple with modernity, and the different strategies used to survive within (or outside)” its unequal and exploitative socio-economic architecture. There is a strong sense in which one of the dominant modes of self-representation in Welcome to Lagos can also be read in this way. Throughout the series, the main characters act as tour guides to viewers. Alternating with the narrator, each character provides information about his or her identity, personal circumstances, vocation, struggles, and aspirations. This functions as a technique of realism that apparently enhances the credibility of the information provided while also enhancing the entertainment quality of the narrative as a whole. Yet this is constantly exaggerated as the characters announce that they “love” or “like” their abject and precarious conditions in a way that suggests mimicry. For example, after admitting that his job is “very stressful”, and that the heat from burning discarded vehicle tires “tortures” him, Gabriel goes on to declare straightaway, with a visibly exaggerated smile, that, “I love something hard. I like a hard job. I love doing it”. Such illogicality may add to the apparent spectacle of life in the dump that may be an intended objective of the production. However, the suggestion that slum dwellers actually “‘enjoyed’” (Abubakar, 2011: 152) their suffering appears unconvincing, and exposes the filmmakers to accusations of paternalism. To return to Vich’s (2004: 75) exploration of the street performances of informal traders in Lima, it is perhaps more plausible to interpret the self-representations of the protagonists as cultural discourses of socio-economic “survivalism”. The discussion will now turn to the ways in which the depiction of urbanization in Lagos both reflects and comments on Nigeria’s recent socio-political transition. I focus on the country’s return to democracy in 1999 after a cumulative period of twenty-nine years of military rule. This sub-section of the chapter examines the third and final episode of the series which focuses mainly on the implementation of the Lagos Mega-City Project, an

158 ambitious programme of the Lagos state government to transform the city into a modern and efficient metropolis. The episode follows the operations of a government official, the zealous, energetic and out-spoken Zagede, who leads a special ‘task force’ that demolishes shanties and illegal structures in the city to make way for the government’s planned infrastructural upgrades. The portrayal of this task force and the terror it unleashes on many of the city’s hapless residents constitutes a critique of the role of the militarized state in processes of socio-political transition. I interrogate the representation of the anxieties and aspirations of characters for the ways in which they dramatize the uncertainties and precarity that mark contemporary Nigeria as a zone of social, political, and economic “indistinction” as conceptualized by Agamben (1998: 10). I begin with a summary of the economic and socio-political factors that gave rise to current conditions in Lagos. The role of globalized capital expansion in the explosion of urban populations globally has been well documented (see Ashley and Edwards, 2004). Equally significant is the role of the politics of decolonization in shaping the regional and national dynamics of the growth of specific urban agglomerations in the global South (Ilesanmi, 2010). Writing about Johannesburg in this regard, Sue Parnell (1997: 899) notes that the

dependant relationship between an efficient state and the development of urban government (generally municipalities) who were responsible for overseeing the implementation of sustainable standards and a viable urban financial base is critical to understanding both decolonization and the nature of the city in the rest of the colonial world, especially Africa. For the same reasons it would be useful to revisit urban African political and administrative representation….

Tunde Agbola and Elijah M. Agunbiade (2009: 78) point to 1951 as the beginning of Lagos’s “metropolitan explosion” while Adetokunbo O. Ilesanmi (2010) traces the decline in the city’s infrastructure and socioeconomic crises to political and administrative development from the colonial era. During that period, the provision of social amenities followed the policies of racial segregation whereby the minority population of colonial administrators was favoured, a practice that laid the foundation for enduring inequality. Thereafter, as Ilesanmi argues, the “pressures of political instability [and] accelerated rates of migration (accentuated by the 1967-70 civil war)” neutralized the “initial optimism” that accompanied independence in 1960. He notes that the global recession of the 1980s, and

159 the introduction of IMF and World Bank sponsored structural adjustment programmes in 1986 “further intensified the spread of poverty, resulting in declining levels of investment in public services and many abandoned projects” as well as “near-complete infrastructural collapse” (2010: 246). This abridged account is replicated in the political-economic trajectories of many developing countries where there has been a constant and unsustainable drift of citizens from increasingly impoverished rural areas to growing squatter settlements in mega-cities (see Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 14). Since the movement of the administrative seat of Nigeria’s federal government to Abuja in 1991, political responsibility for the development of Lagos has resided almost entirely with the government of Lagos state, one of the country’s thirty-six federating states within which the eponymous mega-city is located. It is the administration of the state government that launched the Lagos Mega City Project in 2007, eight years after the return to civilian rule in 1999. In its critique of the implementation of this project, the producers and protagonists of Welcome to Lagos draw the attention of viewers to, among other things, the continued militarization of governance and civil life even after the official end to military rule in 1999. This is dramatized in very graphic and spectacular ways by the brutality, highhandedness, insensitivity, and lawlessness that characterizes the operations of Zagede’s task force, dubbed ‘the Lagos State Government Environmental and Special Offences Enforcement Unit’. Indeed, the actions of Zagede and his team, which includes gun-toting police officers, recall the excesses of military rule. They also problematize the official post- dictatorship national narrative that the ushering in of a new democratic dispensation represents the end of oppression and totalitarianism. In this regard, Cyril Obi (2011: 372) has argued that the country’s “post-military transitions demonstrate the contradictions embedded in a democracy authored by military generals and their civilian political allies”. Tracing the strong links between the pre-1999 ruling military establishment and the new civilian ruling class, Obi (2011: 372) demonstrates that the transition to democracy “included the transfer of a ‘militarized’ political culture that reflected a command-and-obey ethos to the democratic arena”.99 This point is foregrounded in the way the narrator of Welcome to Lagos describes Zagede’s task force: “Made up of hand-picked policemen and state paramilitaries, the task

160 force operates on a mandate all of their own. They have the power to arrest, seize goods, and even destroy property without providing any compensation” (emphasis added). This particular description accompanies chaotic scenes in which members of the task force descend on traders in commando fashion. Their operatives confiscate and destroy merchandize, demolish makeshift shops while assaulting and apprehending distraught traders who lament the government’s insensitivity to their plight. Similarly, at the shantytown on Kuramo beach, squatters express the fear that their homes could be razed without warning from the authorities. The despondence is heightened by the account of the personal circumstances of Esther, a resident of the beach slum who has separated from her partner and is uncertain about what to do next with her life. There is therefore a palpable sense of anxiety and distress among the series’ characters in this final episode. In this way, the documentary uses a combination of images of violence and chaos, as well as narratives of loss and distress, to offer a cinematic portrayal of social and political conditions of post-1999 Nigeria. This portrayal recalls the “rhetoric of disillusion” (Lazarus, 1990: ix) that marks a considerable number of literary representations of post-independence Africa. But unlike the majority of post-independence texts, Welcome to Lagos can be read for the way it suggests, subtextually, that the transfer of power from the military to civilians in 1999 did not constitute “a moment of revolutionary uplift” in Nigeria (Lazarus, 1990: ix). Yet, the series resists a melancholy ending. It concludes, rather, with promise after Esther attends a special prayer session alongside millions of worshippers from all over the country at the massive compound of one of Nigeria’s leading charismatic churches. Back in her shanty at the beach, Esther begins to envisage her future as an independent career lady who will seize the earliest opportunity to travel around the world. These narratives are to be understood for their symbolic meanings in the context of the series’ overarching critique of social change in Nigeria. The specific discourses of anxiety and optimism that conclude the series reflect Dawson and Edwards’s (2004) views on the ways in which urban cultures in the mega-cities of the South often reflect economic strategies of survival. In these ways, both Welcome to Lagos and District 9 dramatize the dire material realities of postcolonial subjects who inhabit the spaces of ‘exception’ produced on the cusp of contemporary social changes. Driven largely, though not exclusively, by an

161 unbridled and unprecedented wave of globalized capitalism, these changes have proven to be profoundly disjunctive in the particular postcolonial experience of postmodernism. They have also accompanied by a dizzying array of social, economic, political, and cultural responses that animate an increasing number of cultural texts over time. Through their creative, and largely realist depictions of the slums and slum dwellers of Lagos and Johannesburg respectively, Welcome to Lagos and District 9 offer scope for a compelling, even if controversial, reflection on the socio-economic textures of post-dictatorship Nigerian and post-TRC South African transition.

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CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION: THE NARRATIVE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL CULTURE

Introduction

This concluding chapter summarizes the main points of the foregoing textual analysis. I trace the trajectory of the themes under consideration, and draw out the salient divergences and convergences between the pairs of texts in each chapter on the one hand, and those between the post-dictatorship (Nigerian) and post-TRC (South African) texts on the other. In doing so, this conclusion highlights the different ways in which narrative is involved in the (re)construction of culture in general, and how the specific narratives under consideration are implicated in the re-imagining of new national visions for Nigeria and South Africa in particular. The articulation of these new visions draws attention to the dialectic between literary production and prevailing socio-political imperatives, especially in the context of the nation-state. This recalls John Breuilly’s (2009: 16) earlier-cited observation that “[t] hings do not remain static in nation-states. What were major concerns when the nation-state was formed get marginalized while new issues arise”. The importance of the rough decade between 2000 and 2010 is therefore reflected by the interesting developments in cultural articulation in both countries during this time. At the turn of the 21st century (1999-2000), each country was in a critical phase of social and political transition. Nigeria had returned to civilian rule in 1999 after long periods of military dictatorship capped by the brutal reign of Sani Abacha who had died a year earlier. In South Africa, the first democratic president, Nelson Mandela stepped down after his five-year tenure in 1999, shortly the after end of the TRC’s public hearings. Literary expression between 2000 and 2010 thus offer a unique site from which these crucial socio-political transitions are interrogated in this study. The detailed analysis of the six selected texts in the foregoing chapters highlights the different ways in which narrative contributes to the reconstruction of social imagination and national culture through representation and (re)historicization. The exploration of three sets of texts (chosen from three different genres) has revealed the changing ways in which transition, social identity, and national history are thematized during the period under

163 consideration. Collectively, the texts demonstrate how official discourses of national reconciliation in both countries are problematized, contested, or reinforced, through the ways in which national history and social identity are (re)imagined and portrayed. The texts do so by opening and filling cultural spaces with the voices of children, youths, women, individuals with different sexual orientation, slum dwellers, and illegal immigrants. These are voices that are often obscured, ignored or elided from dominant national narratives. The study has also highlighted critical threshold moments in the trajectory of literature from both countries, as well as the important intertextual links that describe what I have theorized as post-dictatorship Nigerian literature and post-TRC South African cultural expression respectively. In doing this, I make the necessary caveat that the post in ‘post- TRC’ and ‘post-military dictatorship’ needs to be understood not as a marker of temporality or of negation (i.e. turning way from) but as an indication of the dominant contexts of literary expression with regard to the texts under consideration.100 In the case of post-TRC South African writing, the context is that of changing attitudes to the TRC, marked most conspicuously by a declining pre-occupation with its dramatic public hearings and controversial amnesty programme. In the case of ‘post-dictatorship’ Nigerian writing, the prefix connotes responses to, and critique of, the legacies of decades of military dictatorship. Given that Nigeria and South Africa are highly representative of Africa and the postcolonial world in important ways, this study expands our understanding of contemporary African cultural production. This becomes particularly evident with regard to the two films included in the study, Welcome to Lagos and District 9, which focus on Lagos and Johannesburg respectively. As the analysis of these films in chapter five of the study demonstrates, both cities possess unique metonymic purchase in terms of the dominant discursive representations, not only of their individual national societies, but also of the continent as a whole. Lagos and Johannesburg are without doubt critical sites of contemporary urbanization, modernization, and globalization in the postcolonial world. As ubiquitous icons within national, regional, and continental imaginaries, they have become increasingly popular settings for, and subjects of, many critical and creative works on Africa in particular, and the global South in general. In these ways, Nigerian and South African iconographies increasingly dominate representations of contemporary Africa in

164 various spheres of knowledge production and dissemination. This study of important recent writing on and from the two countries therefore deepens and expands scholarship on the fluid intersubjective body of themes, discursive practices and figurative arsenals that together make up the evolving cultural archives of postcolonial African societies that Abiola F. Irele (2001) describes as ‘the African Imagination’. The Nigerian texts discussed – in particular, Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a Saint and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time – are part of the corpus of Nigerian literature that is increasingly identified by critics as third generation Nigerian writing. While these texts exhibit the general features that have been ascribed to the problematically tagged ‘third- generation’ corpus, I have argued that they should be further delineated in terms of their distinctive responses to, and reflection of, the social, political, and historical contexts of military rule and national transition. My argument builds, in part, on debates about the temporal limitations and ambiguities associated with the notion of ‘third-generation’. Such terms, as Harry Garuba (2005: 31) notes,

The idea of a post-dictatorship category is thus bolstered by Garuba’s observation that literary periods are less problematic as “markers of general trends” that are “open-ended” (52), and reversible, highlighting the description rather than demarcation of the works under consideration. Similarly, the selected South African texts fall within the scope of what was first proposed by Meg Samuelson (2008) and formally theorized by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie (2010) as ‘post-transitional’, a term that has continued to gain traction among scholars since it was introduced into the South African critical lexicon in 2010. The term has also been challenged for what appears, on the face of it, to be its temporal connotations that wrongly suggest that South African society and literature have already passed the phase of transition. I have built on these debates to question the term’s underlying assumptions about national history. I have therefore proposed ‘post-TRC’ in its place while

165 accepting the salient thematic and formalistic features already identified and described by Frenkel and MacKenzie. In re-examining how national history is conceptualized, especially within South African literary and political discourses, the study questions the problematic philosophical subtexts of the notion of transition as “a swinging door moment” (Samuelson, 2010: 130) encompassing a few finite years during which dramatic political events occurred. This notion of transition is fraught with a strong sense of linear temporality and teleology that fails to account for the “complex temporality” (Little, 2014: 68), as well as the “multiple durées” (Mbembe, 2001: 14), that characterize social change in the postcolonial world. The study therefore draws attention to the extreme disjuncture that has attended Africa’s contemporary modernization – which, in this study, covers periods of European colonization, decolonization, and (post)modern globalization – much more profoundly than other parts of the world. This disjuncture, I argue, is the central topos of modern cultural expression in Africa, and is most powerfully highlighted by the ever-changing nature of narrative subjects, objects, as well as contexts of expression. For this reason, I posit that contemporary African literatures (much more than literatures from the western world for example) should be generally understood as literatures of transition in addition to whatever else they may be. This formulation helps us to re-consider transition in plural terms – more accurately as a series of transitions covering an almost perfectly elastic historical or temporal scope. It also foregrounds the constructed nature of a ‘national past’ as that which could indeed also reference the lived experiences of the here and now. This is illustrated by Mbembe’s (2012) observation, again in regard to South Africa, of how apartheid remains inscribed in the South African “social, economic and mental landscape” in spite of the far-reaching changes that have been taking place since 1994. Contemplating the 2000-2010 post-TRC context within (rather than away from) these transitions can therefore be very productive. This is because it allows us to interrogate conditions that obtain across facile temporal categories and periods. Similarly, the concept of post-dictatorship Nigerian literary expression has proven to be a helpful analytical tool in the exploration of the narrativization of social, economic, and political conditions that have marked the evolution of Nigerian nationhood across ‘generations’ of writing. While all three texts included in this study possess the main

166 characteristics of ‘third-generation’ writing, they also reflect the unique features of post- dictatorship transition that are evident in the period under consideration. Yet, as has been noted previously, theorizations of ‘third-generation’ Nigerian, and post-transitional South African writing also contribute significantly to my objective of highlighting salient developments in recent literature from both sites. Beginning with the Nigerian texts, it is clear that In the Shadow of a Saint and Measuring Time demonstrate ‘third generation’ characteristics as outlined by Adesanmi and Dunton (2005 and 2008). Both Wiwa and Habila were born in the late 1960s (1968 and 1967 respectively), and started publishing in the aftermath of the return to civilian rule in 1999. In the Shadow of a Saint, Wiwa’s first full-length book, was published in 2001 while Helon Habila’s debut, Prison Stories: A Collection of Short Stories was released in 2000. Both writers have also had significant personal experiences of the harsh realities of life under military dictatorship. Although Wiwa has lived outside Nigeria since he was nine years old, he is nonetheless acquainted with the horrors of military brutality through his father’s experiences and eventual murder at the hands of the Abacha regime. For his part, Habila moved to the United Kingdom in 2002 after working in Nigeria as a journalist and lecturer. Both writers thus have some important things in common with their real and fictive protagonists (including the characters in Welcome to Lagos) whose personal experiences reflect not only the harsh conditions of military dictatorship in Nigeria, but also a paradigm shift in subject formation in contemporary African cultural expression. In regard to the South African texts, Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie’s (2010) theorization of post-transitional South African literature provides the main point of departure for the conceptualization of post-TRC writing in this study. The South African texts included in this study exhibit the main features of ‘post-transitional’ writing. These features include unpredictability, revised thematizations of “race, history, and space/place” (Frenkel and Mackezie, 2010: 2), as well as identifiable traces of the didactic slant of apartheid-era protest writing. They also adopt a range of narrative techniques with which temporality, and space/place are rendered as palimpsests (see Frenkel, 2013). These features can be identified in Native Nostalgia in which Jacob Dlamini deploys a provocative model of nostalgia to recall the apartheid past. Another ‘post-transitional’ hallmark of this text, is the non-celebratory quality of its rehistoricization, as well as

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Dlamini’s decision to marginalize major historical events and dominant figures from his revisionist and counter-discursive account. For its part, Bitter Fruit dramatizes the productive use of palimpsests in Dangor’s portrayal of temporality. It also deploys the palimpsest creatively to represent the kinds of transnational connectivity that characterize subject formation in post-1999 South Africa. For his part, Neill Blomkamp succeeds in overlaying apartheid-era with post-apartheid realities and temporalities in dramatizing the dire social conditions of under-privileged South Africans and illegal immigrants in District 9. In the ways outlined above, the notions of third-generation Nigerian writing and post-transitional South African literature provide a workable template upon which the ideas of post-dictatorship and post-TRC writing have been constructed in this study respectively. Furthermore, my analysis of the selected texts highlights important turns in the trajectories of cultural articulation of each cultural site, while drawing attention to the salient areas of convergence and divergence between post-dictatorship and post-TRC writing. In regard to identity construction and space in the post-dictatorship contexts under consideration, the nation remains the dominant frame of reference although transnational connections are strongly evoked in Measuring Time and, to a lesser extent, in Welcome to Lagos. Through In the Shadow of a Saint, Wiwa engages in a spirited (re)construction of Ogoni ethnic identity using history and a vigorous mapping of the exploited oil-rich Ogoniland as a homeland. Ogoni identity and ethnic nationalism are portrayed in direct opposition to what he represents as the hostile and oppressive regional and national centres typified by the pre-civil war Eastern Region and the more recent brutal regime of Sani Abacha. The Ogoni (the land and the people) are represented as a ‘doubly marginalized’ social subject, as a “micro-minority” (Nixon, 1996: 39) within the politically marginal Niger Delta area populated by many of Nigeria’s ethnic minorities. Wiwa therefore emphasizes difference and opposition in his representation of social identity in contemporary Nigeria. His version of national history is framed within an account of recent political developments relating to Ogonis, especially the human rights and environmental activism championed by his martyred father. Against the backdrop of Nigerian nationhood that is represented as fragmented, fragile, and artificial, Wiwa’s narrative operates to fetishize, valorize, and legitimate ethnic Ogoni nationalism. Yet, he remains highly self-

168 reflexive, drawing deliberate attention to the varied roles of historicity, imagination, memory, and political contingency in the narrative construction of constantly mutating social identities. There is a marked shift in Habila’s representation of social identity and space in Measuring Time. He consciously downplays the more familiar issues – ethnicity, region, and religion – that usually dominate discourses of identity in Nigeria. Although he retains the nation as his overriding spatial and social backdrop, Habila constructs the subjectivities of childhood and youth as preeminent forms of identity in post-dictatorship Nigeria. In this way, the novel dramatizes Ouma’s (2009) insightful exploration of how the construction of childhood has emerged as a major topos in recent Nigerian writing, against paterfamilias authority and the gerontocratic power structures that sustain it. Habila focuses on the inner consciousness of his major child and youth characters and follows their psychosocial development throughout the story. He uses their consciousness as the dominant focalizer through which virtually every other narrative subject and theme in the novel is focalized. Another unique feature of Measuring Time is the specific pan-African imaginary that it invokes in its thematization of space, history, tradition, and contemporary African modernity. Through this, the novel draws attention to the increasing transnational and plural temporalities that influence postmodern African subjectivities in constant transition. The transnational dimension is also highlighted in Welcome to Lagos, a documentary which explores what Sam Wollaston (2010: n. p.) calls the “out of control” urbanization of Lagos. This dramatizes the dystopian effects of contemporary globalization, driven by late capitalism, on Nigerian society. Like Measuring Time, the film looks beyond the usually dominant forms of social affiliation in Nigeria, namely ethnicity, region, and religion, in its portrayal of social sensitivities in post-dictatorship Nigeria. What emerges most conspicuously from the analysis of this film in terms of the focus of this study is its graphic portrayal of the dire socio-economic realities of slum-life. Like District 9, Welcome to Lagos demonstrates how the conditions of slum-life operate as a commentary on the misgovernance and dysfunction that characterize post-independence and post-dictatorship transitions. In spite of the upbeat tone of the narrator and the entertaining narratives of the protagonists, Welcome to Lagos offers a grim vision of postcolonial urbanism in particular, and post-independence Nigeria in general.

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Post-TRC South African society is imagined in similarly unenthusiastic ways in the three texts analysed in this study. Like Wiwa who focuses on marginal socio-political subjects in In the Shadow of a Saint, Jacob Dlamini’s main narrative subjects in Native Nostalgia are ordinary township dwellers who are often placed on the margins of South Africa’s social and political discourses. Dlamini’s history of the struggle against apartheid challenges official national narratives that sustain the hegemony of the current ruling classes, as Wiwa’s text does with regard to Nigeria. Furthermore, Dlamini’s decision to marginalize the usually dominant historical subjects in favour of ordinary township dwellers echoes the historiography adopted in Measuring Time where emphasis is placed on the lives of common people. In this way, the three texts employ counter-discursive strategies as a means of delegitimizing and deconstructing existing and emerging power structures in their respective transitional contexts. While Habila’s approach is more subtextual and generalized, both Wiwa and Dlamini adopt a much more overt approach, ostensibly due to the specific affordances of the respective narrative genres. My analysis of Native Nostalgia in chapter three highlights the increasing role of space and place in the construction of transitional subjectivities in post-TRC South Africa. Dlamini passionately produces the unique semi-rural and peri-urban space of a South African township as a central site for the formation of contemporary black identity in a way that subverts dominant neo-colonial and post-liberation constructions of the township as a zone of deprivation. But he eschews the ostensible organic links between social identity and space/place such as those suggested in Wiwa’s representation of Ogoniland as an aboriginal homeland. Instead, Dlamini highlights the sophisticated forms of socialization that mark the township as a site of socio-political agency and cultural creativity. He therefore argues against the dominant discursive practice of positioning townships as inferior to spaces like the main city sections of Johannesburg where the majority of South African narratives (such those in Bitter Fruit and District 9) are set. Like Native Nostalgia, Dangor’s novel draws attention to the importance of space and place in the morphing South African imaginary, although his focus in this regard is not exclusively on identity. In Bitter Fruit, the depiction of space helps to demonstrate the various forms of local and transnational connectivity and border-crossings that characterize social relationships in a country undergoing transition. The discussion of this novel in

170 chapter four highlights the ways in which the portrayal of the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Berea, where the Ali family lives, can be interpreted in terms of transnational connectivity. Another significant example is the Indian Ocean connections invoked in the protagonist’s search for his roots. I have noted that the transnational imaginaries conjured in this novel are strongly different from those in Measuring Time in terms of how trans- African connections are highlighted in one novel and marginalized in the other. Habila produces specifically African ‘elsewheres’101 in re-imagining the links between history, space, and belonging. He does this through extensive reference to a diversity of African imaginaries – notably places, histories, and texts from across the continent. By contrast, there is the conspicuous absence of such a specific intra-continental connectivity in Bitter Fruit. Instead, it is the Indian Ocean connections of the South African Muslim community that are invoked in regard to shared histories, cultures, lived experiences, and identities. Indeed, the novel’s references to Africans from elsewhere on the continent are largely, although not entirely, negative. In terms of identity (re)construction, this study has drawn attention to the ways in which Bitter Fruit gives voice to several marginal subjects including South Africa’s racial minorities, abused women, and queer people. The release of female and homosexual characters from oppressive heteronormative relationships at the end of the story is particularly instructive of the novel’s post-TRC social vision in terms of the deconstruction and reconstruction of social identities and solidarities. This study has paid close attention to Dangor’s extensive focus on the specific points of view offered by the main protagonist, the child, Mikey whose development into adulthood is signalled by his insistence on being called by his proper name Michael. In this way, the novel is similar to Measuring Time in terms of the central concerns of this study. Notwithstanding the dissimilar socio-political backdrops of the different narratives, both texts deploy child and youth focalizers as a major method of thematizing fluid social identities. This is particularly significant, given the kaleidoscopic contexts of late postcoloniality and postmodernism which frame South Africa’s contemporary transitions. This point is highlighted later in this chapter. As the discussion in chapter five reveals, District 9 (like Welcome to Lagos its counterpart film in this study) offers a harsh critique of postcolonial urbanization. Both

171 films portray urbanization as one of the dominant manifestations of contemporary social change and transition in Africa. Despite their clear generic and formalistic differences, the two films demonstrate striking similarities with regard to the key themes of this study. Both highlight the growing iconicity of the slum and impoverished slum-dweller in dominant representations of postcolonial urbanism as well as in critiques of the effect of late capitalism on African modernism. While the critique of capitalism in Welcome to Lagos is largely subtextual, it is overt in District 9. In the latter, the precarity of slum life is strongly evocative of what Giorgio Agamben (1998) famously theorized as the zones of indistinction produced by states of exception within particular socio-political configurations. The post-transitional social visions of these films are thus largely dystopian. This highlights a marked shift from the optimism and euphoria of the early post- independent and post-apartheid narratives of the early 1960s and 1990s respectively. It is significant that the mood of disillusion and the spectre of dystopia pervade all the texts analysed, albeit to varying degrees. In Native Nostalgia, dissatisfaction with the prevailing economic, social, and political conditions of South Africa, result in palpable anxiety over the unknown and perhaps unknowable post-transitional future. This feeling is echoed in Bitter Fruit through Dangor’s deployment of a palimpsest of multiple twilights, and in the uncertain futures facing virtually all the major characters. In the case of In the Shadow of a Saint, Wiwa expresses serious doubts about the integrity of the post-1999 democratic regime and voices the fear of a return to military dictatorship in the future. In Measuring Time, the sense of hopelessness is firstly highlighted in the despondent childhood of the main protagonist and reinforced by the tragic fates of almost all the other youthful characters. These dystopian elements notwithstanding, post-dictatorship and post-TRC cultural expression, as typified by the texts under consideration, are tempered by a critical sense of ambivalence and cautious optimism which sets them apart from the disillusionment that was a hallmark of much post-independence African literatures. This is most evident in the analysis of the two novels in which the psychosocial metamorphoses of youthful protagonists are used to offer alternative socio-political possibilities. The highly self- reflexive narratives in Measuring Time and Biter Fruit recall Adesanmi and Dunton’s (2005: 15) observation regarding third-generation Nigerian writing, that a focus on child,

172 adolescent, and youth subjectivities in recent writing highlights

the scopic regime of the postcolonial and the postmodern, an order of knowledge in which questions of subjecthood and agency are not only massively overdetermined by the politics of identity in a multicultural and transnational frame but in which the tropes of Otherness and subalternity are being remapped by questioning erstwhile totalities such as history, nation, gender, and their representative symbologies.

The narrative techniques deployed in representing and developing the characters of Mamo and Michael in these two novels particularly dramatize the protean nature of contemporary African subjectivities within the profoundly disjunctive contexts of ever-changing socio- political conditions. By elevating childhood and youth identities to near ontological levels, these narratives suggest that, beyond being states of transition, childhood and youth can be understood as modes of being in themselves. This forces us to re-consider socio-political transition, not only in terms of fleeting movements between presumed origins and destinations, but as a state of being itself. In these ways, the study has highlighted the different ways in which various forms of narrative engage in the discursive construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of constantly changing social subjectivities.

173

NOTES

1 On 16 August 2012, thirty-four miners were shot and killed by police in an attempt to bring six days of deadly protests under control (see BBC News Africa, 2012).

2 See pages viii-x for a timeline of selected historical developments in Nigeria. It is based on the various sources of political and literary history cited in this study, especially Falola and Aderinto (2010), Usman (2000), and Fasan (2010). It is followed by a similar compilation on South African political and literary history that is based on information from the sources on South Africa’s political and literary history referenced in this study. The notable sources are Chapman (2003), Attwell and Atteridge (2012), as well as Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie (2010).

3 Two other important postcolonial cities that operate prominently in such an emblematic way are Mumbai and Sao Paulo (see Segbers, Raiser and Volkmann, 2007).

4 This is explored in detail in chapter five.

5 Some of these meanings include vertical humanistic affinities that may subsist between individual writers and texts, and that manifest in the form of tradition or influence (see Bloom, 1997). However, such an interpretation does not apply to this particular study that deals with a range of texts produced during an important period rather than with specific texts and writers.

6 Gérard Genette (1992: 83) proposes ‘transtextuality’ as “a more inclusive” term, to connote “all that sets [a particular text] in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”.

7 See also Gikandi (2001) and Korang (2011).

8 They list Italian and Russian Futurism, French Surrealism, Latin American boom fiction, and American Beat poetry as examples.

9 See Attwell and Attridge, 2012; Heywood, 2004; Chapman, Gardner and Mphahlele, 1992; Ntuli and Swanepoel, 1993; Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie, 2009.

10 This term was used by President Jacob Zuma and sections of the African National Congress in the run-up to the party’s 2012 elective conference to designate another phase of the democratic dispensation (see ANC, 2012).

11 I engage extensively with Frenkel and MacKenzie’s theorization of the post-transitional in chapter two.

12 Ha-Eun Grace Kim (2011) uses the term post-TRC (in a dissertation titled, “Marginality in Post- TRC Texts: Storytelling and Representational Acts”) to “explore the poetics and politics of representation, as well as the past’s impact on contemporary South Africa” (2011: ii). A similarly titled paper is Danielle Tran’s (2012) “Post-TRC South African Writing and the Trauma of Apartheid”. While focusing on texts produced after the conclusion of the TRC, these studies do not attempt to theorize literary production within the contexts of socio-political transition as is done in the present study.

13 Adeoti Gbemisola (2003b) and Christopher E. W. Ouma (2009) use the term in a largely temporal sense to denote the period following the return to civilian rule in 1999.

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14 Debates over the value or otherwise of this term has spawned extensive scholarship covering a range of historiographical, epistemological, representational and philosophical issues which are outside the scope of the present study. What is directly relevant to the discussion here are the common reservations that have been expressed concerning the term’s inherent contradictions and weaknesses in regard to the problematic notion of linear time in the analysis of the history of formerly colonized peoples and spaces. I have limited myself to Simon Gikandi’s (2006) and Anne McClintock’s (1992) views on this subject as they provide an adequate point of entry into the argument offered here.

15 This is not aimed at defining transition or post-transition. Instead, it is meant to place dominant uses of ‘post-transitional’ in context for the specific purpose of the discussion in this chapter.

16 These include the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts, and the national truth commissions of post-civil war Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Chile (Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction, 2015).

17 Jamal borrows the term from Nicolas Bourriaud (2005).

18 In his reading of these texts against Frederic Jameson’s (1986) controversial claim that so-called Third World narratives are “necessarily” national allegories, Thurman foregrounds significant resonances between articulations of disillusion in post-apartheid South Africa and those of writers from elsewhere in Africa.

19 They cite Kader Asmal’s Politics in My Blood: A Memoir (2010) and Ronnie Kasrils’s Armed and Dangerous: From Undercover Struggle to Freedom (2013) among others.

20 Paulina Grzeda (2013) traces the term to the journalist, Mark Gevisser.

21 Globalization is used in this study to mean the processes “whereby nation-states are influenced (and sometimes undermined) by trans-national actors” (Powell and Steel, 2011: 74).

22 I am using this word here in a strictly literal sense.

23 The novels are Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2008) and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows (2006).

24 West-Pavlov designates the present dispensation as a time “after postcoloniality”, an idea, which, in my view, shares the temporal problematics of post-transitionality.

25 Lorenz goes on to show that this view of history has lost its validity in view of the postnational trends of recent decades. However, the analysis here remains applicable to South Africa and Nigeria, and indeed much of the postcolonial world whose nationalisms are still strongly marked by the telos of the nation-state in the making.

26 These include Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1962), A Man of the People (1966), Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1969), Mwangi’s Kill Me Quick (1973) among others.

27 There is thriving debate among political scientists whether the Arab Spring of 2011 can be considered as part of a possible fourth wave of democratization (see Diamond, 2011; Howard and Hussain, 2013).

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28 See timeline of Nigerian political history on pages viii-ix.

29 Throughout the study, ‘Wiwa’ refers to Ken Wiwa, author of the text being discussed, while ‘Saro-Wiwa’ refers to his late father.

30 See chapter one for the way the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ are used in this discussion.

31 The more notable of these are Sikhalo (1966), Mama and the Load (1979) and Sekunjalo (1973) which was performed at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 1987 (see McGregor, 2004).

32 The period under focus is broadly post-independence but the specific contexts of the post-military dictatorship era (from 1999) are especially salient to this discussion.

33 Dlamini maintains a similarly non-normative approach in Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-apartheid Struggle (2014). It is a story of Glory Lefoshile Sedibe, who defected from the ANC and worked for the security force of the racist state. Dlamini’s seeming sympathies with defectors like Sedibe has sparked controversy (see Qambela, 2015).

34 Ndebele’s works (Rediscovery of the Ordinary Essays on South African Literature and Culture [1991] and Fools and Other Stories [1983]) represent significant contributions to debates on the notion of the ordinary, following the prior scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, Michael Gardiner, Benjamin Highmore, Michelle de Certeau and others.

35 This is not to suggest, however, that ideological investments in literature and art are easily discernible (see Kavanagh, 1984).

36 See also Olney, 1973; Quayson, 1996; Adegoju, 20`12). In “Trends in the Nigerian Auto/biography”, A. O. Dasylva and R. Oriaku (2010: 303-319) provide brief genealogies of life writing from Nigeria demonstrating its link to pre-colonial oral traditions.

37 While such a reading is definitely not conclusive, it is suggested by the apparent spread of the ages, gender, and places of residence of the three individuals. The first is an 84 year-old woman, the second is aged 42, and also female, while the third is a 53 year-old man. The women live in Limpopo while the man lives in the Eastern Cape.

38 Although commonly grouped together in most discussions of Nigeria’s political history, the Hausa and Fulani are actually distinct ethnic groups and any suggestion that they are culturally homogeneous is misleading (Usman, 2000). I have retained the practice of grouping them in this study for referential convenience and because this study is not concerned with providing an accurate delineation of ethnic and cultural groups.

39 Ethnic nationalist agitation surged in the immediate post-1999 period with socio-cultural pressure groups such as Ohanaeze Nd’Igbo (Igbo), Afenifere (Yoruba), and Arewa Consultative Forum (Hausa/Fulani) gaining prominence. Militant agitation in the Niger Delta area also intensified during this time but an amnesty programme in 2009 and the election of Goodluck Jonathan in 2010 brought attacks to a stop a few years later. However, some recent attacks on oil facilities after Jonathan’s exit have been linked to anger over the perceived sectarian orientation of the new government (see The News, 2016).

40According to the publisher’s blurb on the back cover, the book is “part-history, part-memoir, part- meditation and part-ethnography” (Nostalgia, back cover). 176

41 During the period it was outlawed in South Africa (1954-1990), he ANC had its headquarters in exile in the Zambian capital.

42 In a footnote at the end of his article, Medalie states that he only came across Dlamini’s text while completing the article. He explains that he could not integrate Native Nostalgia into the article “in way which does justice to its complexity and subtlety” (2010: 43).

43 See also Mwangi (2009).

44 Khana is one of the five mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the people collectively known as Ogoni (Shadow, 54-55). It is also the name of a local government area in the present Rivers state.

45 Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There was a country: A personal history of Biafra (2012) is one of the more recent accounts offering a controversial Igbo point of view. Although there are several notable literary works dedicated to the war by non-Igbo writers (including Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy [1973] and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes [1986]), Hugh Hodges (2009) has correctly noted that literary historicization of the war is done mostly by Igbo writers.

46 See also Gambo (2008).

47 On 20 November 1999, under the Obasanjo civilian regime, government forces raided Odi, an Ijaw village, resulting in scores, possible hundreds of civilian deaths. This was the culmination of several weeks of violent protest by Ijaw youths and the abduction of six policemen in the area (see Omeje, 2004; Aka, 2003).

48 I return to this theme in chapter five in my discussion of the character of the alien (in District 9) as a possible figure for the native African perceived in colonial discourse to be ‘alien’ to the city.

49 It is also possible that, given the mainly autobiographical nature of this account, Dlamini’s focus on this period is due to the practical reason that he was only born in 1973.

50 Ethnic consciousness and conflict between different black South African groups is a complex subject which is outside the scope of the discussion. The point I am making here is to observe that Dlamini’s decision to leave out these conflicts is deliberate and that this silence is significant to our understanding of the text.

51 By this I am referring to the three individuals whose comments on the state of the nation Dlamini refers to in the book’s introduction.

52 The protests were quite widespread and occurred in six out of the country’s nine provinces.

53 Although this is not the direct context in which Nuttall and McGregor make the argument, it resonates strongly with the specific historical and social contexts in which Native Nostalgia is set.

54 These were non-executive posts. Wiwa stayed largely on the periphery of Nigerian politics while remaining ordinarily resident in Canada where he continues to pursue a career as a journalist.

55 Following Jonathan’s exit after the 2015 election and the emergence of the former dictator Mohammadu Buhari as president, there has been growing uncertainty about the fate of southern minorities who reportedly voted against Buhari. The separatist rhetoric that followed the annulment 177

of the 1993 general elections seems to have returned with intensity especially among people from the Niger Delta and the Igbo dominated southeast. A new pro-Biafran movement, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has sprung up. The arrest of its leader, Nnamdi Kanu in November 2015 resulted in mass protests and eight protesters were killed when soldiers opened fire on them on 1 December 2015 (Nwaiwu, 2015).

56 An exhaustive account of commentary of Bitter Fruit is outside the scope of this study for obvious reasons. However the themes mentioned here represent the majority of the growing number of critical essays that have been written at the time of this study.

57 I deliberately avoid the term ‘utopia’ because Dangor’s representation of dystopian possibilities automatically forecloses expectations of utopia. Furthermore, the closing images of the novel depict on-going transition in the form of movement towards, rather than arrival at an imagined destination (see Samuelson, 2008).

58 A detailed exploration of the significance of twins is however outside the scope of this study. See Phillip M. Peek’s edited volume, Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures (2011) for an investigation of the significance of twins in divination, performance, artistic representation, religion and popular culture.

59 It is important to note that the aftermath of 9/11 affected the initial reception of the novel in the West (see Capur, 2005). It was only in 2005 that an American edition was published.

60 The major examples include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004) and Becoming Abigail (2006), Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005), Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2007).

61 LaMamo’s mobile perspectives are discussed in the sub-section that follows this one.

62 Ouma draws on Hron (2008) in making this point.

63 The list of civil wars in the region during this period include: Liberia (1989 – 1996; 1999 – 2003); Mali (1990 – 1995); Sierra Leone (1991-2002); and Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2007).

64 Most of the leading post-dictatorship writers were born in the period between 1967 (when Habila was born) to the early 1980s (see Adesanmi and Dunton, 2005; 2008).

65 Before independence, there were serious misgivings about the political viability of a united Nigeria (see chapter one). In February 1966, a small militia made a failed bid to establish a breakaway Niger Delta Republic. Then came the civil war in 1967. More recently, there have been rumours of a prediction from American security experts that the country would implode in 2015. Even though this did not happen, political and security tensions abound, and some commentators still express the view that the country may still break up in the future (see Nwamu, 2015).

66 In this sense, the novels recall the rhetoric of pessimism that characterized leading novels of the early post-independence period as noted previously.

67 This is Adeoti’s (2003b) term.

68 This is to distinguish between Asabar as a child and as an adult. 178

69 In Democracy at Home in South Africa: Fictions and Transitional Culture, Kerry Bystrom (2016) dwells extensively on the figurative links between novelistic depictions of post-apartheid democracy and family life.

70 This group speaks the Tangale language and their traditional rulers bear the title of ‘mai’ used in the novel (Harnischfegar, 2002). Habila ascribes some actual historical events in Kaltugo to the fictional Keti. These include the death of a colonial officer who fell from the Kilang Peak in 1937, and the sacking of a traditional ruler in 1937 by a colonial army of Hausa soldiers (Adelberger, 1994). Habila’s first book, written in 1997, is a biography titled Mai Kaltungo (Jacana, 2002).

71 My idea of ‘African elsewheres’ is based on Gillian Hart’s argument that place may be understood “not as a bounded unit, but as always formed through relations and connections with dynamics at play in other places, and in wider regional, national, and transnational arenas” (quoted in Dlamini, 2009: 61).

72 I disagree with Dobrota Pucherova’s (2009) view that Michael’s willingness to identify with the ancestry of Ali Ali and Lydia’s decision to have sex with João represents a symbolic gesture of hospitality for foreigners. This argument, in my view, reads too much into a singular act, and ignores repeated references that suggest a different attitude towards African characters (see Fasselt [2014] for a discussion of apparent trends in the representation of non-South African black characters in a growing number of recent South African texts).

73 Notable literary texts from South Africa that have attracted attention in this regard include Lauren Beukes’s novel Zoo City (2010), Henrietta Rose-Innes’s short-story “Poison” (2010) as well as Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti (2015).

74 This is discussed in some detail in the section on Welcome to Lagos that follows this introduction.

75 Establishing shots are the long or aerial shots that contextualise cinematic settings, narratives, and scenes. In regard to filming cities, Parker (2014: 21) associates these shots with “the way that planners and urbanists view the city in Lefebvre’s ‘Representations of space’ (1991)”.

76 This is the film’s estimate at the time of its production and release between 2009 and 2010. The United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) announced that the seven billion mark was reached in October 2011 (BBC, 2011).

77 See also Jonathan Haynes’ (2007) influential study on representations of Lagos in Nollywood films. Some of the more recent studies on artistic depictions of Johannesburg (including television and literary works) include those by Alexandra Mary Partker’s (2014), Vivian Bickford-Smith (2006; 2013) and Loren Kruger (1999; 2001; 2005; 2006), Sarah Nuttall (2004; 2008a; 2009), and Megan Jones (2013).

78 This is examined in greater detail in the relevant section of this chapter.

79 While one might speak of self-representation regarding the protagonists in the non-fictional Welcome to Lagos, the same cannot be said of the characters of District 9.

80 This is also expressed with such terms as “slum urbanism” (Pieterse, 2008) and “rogue urbanism” (Pieterse and Simone, 2013) in regard to African cities.

179

81 I discuss this in detail later in the chapter.

82 They list the following BBC productions – Welcome to Lagos, Famous, Rich and in the Slums (2011), Welcome to India (2012) and Slum Survivors (2014).

83 In several instances, the ghetto dwellers in the documentary are compared to people in the ‘developed’ and ‘western world’ regarding how each group is adapting to the extremities of contemporary urban life. Although the term ‘developing world’ is not used expressly, a subtextual representational scheme based on the binary between developed and developing or underdeveloped is implied. The implications of this are however, not a central concern of this study.

84 This was the case at the time of filming in 2010. More services had been introduced by 2014 but they remain grossly inadequate for the teeming population (see Adamu, 2014).

85 Even the names of minor children of protagonists are provided despite that fact that these children are not involved in any significant action or plot exposition.

86 See Osaghae and Suberu (2005).

87 See also and Gandy (2006).

88 For example, one character is shown heating cow blood using discarded vehicle tyres as fuel; another ferries logs over a hundred kilometre waterways with wooden rafts; and a young lady delivers a baby in a shack on the beach.

89 My interest here is slightly, but significantly, different from those studies whose focus on the literary functions of waste relates mainly to (post)modern cultures of consumption, materialism, and wastefulness (see Esty, 1999 for example).

90 An exhaustive account of writing on Johannesburg is outside the scope of this study. A useful and fairly comprehensive account is provided by Harrison et al. (2015).

91 However, they only make passing reference to District 9 without analysing it.

92 This is in addition to the hospital and prison which Foucault discusses at length in The History of Sexuality (1978). See also Schinkel and van den Berg, 2011; Calvo, 2012; Linke, 2012; Simone, 2004. It is important to note that Di Muzio (2008) also goes so far as to suggest, controversially, that the slum has indeed become the contemporary version of the concentration camp. I do not subscribe to this extreme comparison of the concentration camp and the slum. However, I show in the paragraph that follows, the ways in which the film’s portrayl of District 9 recalls the general aesthetic of concentration camps.

93 Like most commentators, Quayson decries the portrayal of the ‘Nigerians’ as “first and last barbarians, with no redeeming features”. He observes that the ‘prawns’, on the other hand, are shown “to possess superior "human" characteristics of familial love, reason (in the mastery of science), and political consciousness (in the prawn leader's desire to come back and save his people).”

94 Jacob Dlamini (2009: 130) deliberates extensively on this issue in Native Nostalgia. He argues that apartheid authorities were strongly averse to the idea of black Africans living in cities.

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95 Gauteng Province which comprises Johannesburg, Pretoria, and a host of peripheral towns and informal settlements accounted for 39.3% of the increase in national population between 1996 and 2011 (see Harrison et al., 2014: 4).

96 According to Niki Moore (2014), there were 218 public protests in 2014 compared to 27 in 1996. Eighty percent of the protests that took place in 2014 turned violent and over half of the protests in that year took place in the country’s five largest metropolises.

97 South Africa’s constitution is hailed as one of the most progressive in the world. It has in its preamble, a statement inherited from the Freedom Charter of 1950: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity” (Act No. 108, The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, Preamble).

98 Frenkel and Mackenzie (2010: 3) observe, for example, that support for foreign, rather than local sports teams is a good example of how transnational allegiances characterize local culture in contemporary South Africa.

99 This point is underscored by the recent emergence of the former dictator, Mohammadu Buhari as winner of the 2015 presidential elections. Buhari led the coup that ended the Second Republic in 1983 and was himself overthrown by Ibrahim Babangida in 1985. He is now the second former military ruler, after Olusegun Obasanjo, to become president in the post-1999 dispensation.

100 Adeoti (2003b) and Ouma (2009) use the term, ‘post-military’ in a sense that is largely temporal, to denote the period following the return to civilian rule in 1999.

101 See note 68.

181

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