Violent Crimes in Selected Post - 2000 South African Novels

Abstract

Through an examination of Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink (2007) and Black Widow Society (2013), Deon Meyer’s Blood Safari (2009) and Trackers (2012), Margie Orford’s Daddy’s Girl (2009), and Water Music (2013), Sifizo Mzobe’s Young Blood (2011) and finally Lazola Pambo’s The Path Which Shapes Us (2012)-eight post-2000 South African crime novels, this study is positioned within major discourses about crime and violence in the country today. The study examined South African crime fiction by writers of different genders, race and social classes and from different literary generations. This enabled me to grapple with multiple current perceptions of violent crimes in South African from different backgrounds. Clearly, the background of these writers influences the way they depict violence, criminality, and the various fictitious ways they portray these uncomfortable realities. Through a post-colonial, feminism, Neo-Marxist lens and theories of space, the study explored the many ways South African crime writers narrate contemporary realities of violent crimes in the country today. The post-apartheid crime novel is a significant tool in helping the country understands its traumatic and violent criminal past which has spilled over into the post-apartheid period in many ways. The novels examined in this study showed that the crime novel can be appreciated both for its aesthetic quality and allegorical value. Furthermore, the post-2000 South African crime novel provides readers with a fictitious space where they see their deep-seated desires for justice fulfilled, law and order restored and maintained through the disruptive power and flexibility of the crime novel in creating a parallel universe of im/possibilities. The dissertation also notes that the burgeoning of crime fiction in South Africa today is an attempt by many writers to respond to the alarming levels of gender-based violence, eco-crimes, spatial crimes and how the political instabilities of the post-apartheid continues to drive the masses into various forms of criminality and violence.