Crime, Violence and Apartheid in Selected Works of Richard Wright and Athol
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) Crime, violence and apartheid in selected works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard: a study. Name: RODWELL MAKOMBE A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Literature and Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Studies at the University of Fort Hare Student Number: 200904755 Name of Institution: UNIVERSITY OF FORT HARE Supervisor: DR. M. BLATCHFORD Year: 2011 Contents DECLARATION .............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION ..................................................................................................................iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... v ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................vi CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................................. 1 Crime, violence and apartheid: the postcolonial/criminological approach .................... 1 Statement of the Problem ......................................................................................... 1 Background .............................................................................................................. 2 Aims of the research ................................................................................................. 6 Theoretical framework .............................................................................................. 8 Significance of the study ......................................................................................... 22 Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................... 24 CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................ 25 Stereotype, discrimination and inter-racial violence in Black Boy .............................. 25 CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................................ 57 Apartheid fostered violence and existential liberation in Native Son .......................... 57 CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................................... 94 Negotiating western modernity, „the interstitial space,‟ and existential crime and violence in The Outsider ............................................................................................ 94 CHAPTER FIVE .......................................................................................................... 132 Survival and apartheid violence in Boesman and Lena and Sizwe Bansi is Dead ... 132 CHAPTER SIX ............................................................................................................ 168 Apartheid repression, crime and gang violence in Tsotsi ......................................... 168 CHAPTER SEVEN ...................................................................................................... 216 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 216 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 246 ii DECLARATION I, Rodwell Makombe, do hereby declare that this work is entirely a product of my own personal effort except for those specific quotations that have been duly accredited to their original sources. This thesis is hereafter submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Literature and Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Fort Hare. It has not been and will not be submitted for any other purpose at any other university. Signature…………………… Date…………………………………. iii DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my late father, Rabson Makombe, my son Tapfuma Emmanuel and my wife Theresa. Indeed, they have been an inspiration. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly I want to thank God, not as a matter of habit as some are inclined to do, but because I strongly believe there is a divinity that shapes our ends. I also thank my supervisor, Dr. M. Blatchford, who has been very friendly and frank. We went up the valleys and mountains of reason together. We fell, but we never despaired, we disagreed but we also reconciled. Thanks Doc. I cannot forget Govan Mbeki Research Centre which provided the funds that enabled me to undertake this research I have also made friends throughout the period of brooding over this thesis, some of whom are also struggling to make their lives meaningful by way of reading many books. I am indebted to them, for they always afforded me time to share a smile and pray about those things I thought were beyond my comprehension. Without them this project could have been very different but perhaps not better. Prudence (now Dr. Khumalo), Timothy (who is battling to understand tiny organisms) and Njongehle (my son-in-law) - I sincerely appreciate their comradeship. I won‟t forget my brother Morgan (I think he prefers to be called baba P) who always deposited some money into my account at those critical times when I thought hell had opened its gates on me. My wife, Theresa and son, Tapfuma, cannot be left out; they provided what the library had taken away from me. Against all odds, they reminded me to smile and cheer up. v ABSTRACT Different forms of racial segregation have been practiced in different countries the world over. However, the nature of South Africa‟s apartheid system, as it was practiced from 1948 until the dawn of the democratic dispensation in 1994, has been a subject of debate in South Africa and even beyond. Apartheid was a policy that was designed by the then ruling Nationalist Party for purposes of dividing and stratifying South Africa along racial lines - whites, blacks, coloureds and Asians. It thus promoted racial segregation and/or unequal stratification of society. In South Africa‟s hierarchy of apartheid, blacks, who constituted the majority of the population, were ironically the most destitute and segregated. Some historians believe that South Africa‟s racial policy was designed against the backdrop of Jim Crow, a similar system of racial discrimination which was instituted in the American South late in the 1890s through the 20th century. Jim Crow and apartheid are, in this study, considered as sides of the same coin; hence for the sake of convenience, the word apartheid is used to subsume Jim Crow. Although South Africa‟s apartheid system was influenced by different ideologies, for example German missiology as applied by the Dutch Reformed Church, historian Hermann Giliomee (2003: 373) insists that „the segregationist practice of the American South was particularly influential.‟ Given the ideological relationship between apartheid and Jim Crow, the present study investigates the interplay of compatibility between apartheid/Jim Crow and crime and violence as reflected in selected works of Richard Wright (African American novelist) and Athol Fugard (South African playwright). The aim of the study is firstly, to examine the works in order to analyse them as responses to apartheid and by extension colonial domination and secondly to investigate crime and violence. The three criminological theories selected for this study are strain theory (by Robert Merton), subculture theory (Edwin Sutherland) and labelling theory (Howard Becker). While criminological theory provides an empirical dimension to the study, postcolonial theory situates the study within a specified space, which is the postcolonial context. The postcolonial is, however understood, not as a demarcated historical space, vi but as a continuum, from the dawn of colonization to the unforeseeable future. Three postcolonial theorists have been identified for the purposes of this study. These are: Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft. Fanon‟s psychoanalysis of the colonized, Homi Bhabha‟s Third Space and hybridity as well as Ashcroft‟s postcolonial transformation are key concepts in understanding the different ways in which the colonized deal with the consequences of colonization. It has been suggested particularly in Edward Said‟s Orientalism (1978) that the discourse of orientalism creates the Oriental, as if Orientals were a passive object of the colonial adventure. This study uses Bhabha‟s and Ashcroft‟s theory of colonial discourse to argue that the colonized are not only objects of the colonial enterprise but also active participants in the process of opening survival spaces for self-realization. The various criminal activities that the colonized engage in (as represented in the selected works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard) are in this study viewed as ways of inscribing their subjectivity within an exclusive colonial system. vii CHAPTER ONE Crime, violence and apartheid: the postcolonial/criminological approach. Statement of the Problem The study critically interrogates the interplay of compatibility between crime, violence and apartheid in selected works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard in the wake of ideologically-inclined readings that ascribe labels to the works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard, thereby reducing the complexity of their works to the conceptual