‘The Darker Side of Durban’: South African Crime Fiction and Indian Ocean Underworlds

Abstract

Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging genre of South African crime fiction. Trevor Corbett’s Allegiance (2012) and Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens’ Out to Score (2009) map Durban and Cape Town, respectively, as deeply oceanic, port-dominated cities, connected through networks of smuggling and terror to distant Indian Ocean coasts. They reveal the flip side to the Indian Ocean carceral archipelago – networks of crime implied by networks of punishment. In so doing, producing, alongside the legal Indian Ocean world of trade and travel, the figure of an Indian Ocean underworld. Indian Ocean fiction from further afield – Lindsey Collen’s Boy (2005) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift (2012) – set up the Indian Ocean underworld as a critical lens through which the South African crime fiction can be read. Focusing on the underworld therefore provides a way not only of uncovering recent Indian Ocean history, but also of drawing together Indian Ocean with southern African studies.

Notes

¹ See Hofmeyr and Gunner on the ‘transnational turn’ in post-apartheid literature, Leon de Kock for a description of the ‘dispersal’ evidenced by South African studies, and Chapman and Lenta on the critical transnationalism of surveys such as those by Graham and Popescu: I. Hofmeyr and L. Gunner, ‘Introduction: Transnationalism and African Literature’, Scrutiny2, 10, 2 (2005), pp. 3–14; L. de Kock, ‘Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature Is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa’, English in Africa, 32, 2 (2005), pp. 69–83; M.J. Chapman and M. Lenta, SA Lit: Beyond 2000 (Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011); M. Popescu, South African Literature Beyond the Cold War (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); S. Graham, South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (New York, Macmillan, 2009). For a general discussion, see E.S. Davis, ‘New Directions in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship’, Literature Compass, 10, 10 (2013), pp. 797–804; D. Brown, ‘Reimagining South African Literature’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 5 (2014), pp. 1109–23.

² The most cursory list includes Lauren Beukes’ novel set in Detroit and Damon Galgut’s in India: L. Beukes, Broken Monsters (New York, Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Co., 2014); D. Galgut, Arctic Summer (London, Atlantic Books, 2014). For a survey, see C. Warren and National English Literature Museum, ‘South Africa and Zimbabwe’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49, 4 (2014), pp. 615–45.

³ Chapman and Lenta, SA Lit, pp. 8–9.

⁴ M. Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 14.

⁵ I. Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa’s Indian Ocean – Notes from Johannesburg’, History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), p. 509; M. Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides and Littoral States: Oceans and Coastlines in Post-Apartheid South African Narratives’, Alternation, Special Edition no. 6 – Coastlines and Littoral Zones in South African Ecocritical Writing (2013), pp. 9–28.

⁶ I. Hofmeyr, ‘Africa as a Fault Line in the Indian Ocean’, in P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Johannesburg, UNISA Press, 2010).

⁷ G. Baderoon, ‘The African Oceans – Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture’, Research in African Literatures, 40, 4 (2009), pp. 89–107. See also Nigel Worden’s work, including his article elsewhere in this issue.

⁸ A. Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (London, Granta, 1998), p. 220.

⁹ A. Gurnah, By the Sea (London, Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 14.

¹⁰ M. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London, Routledge, 2003), p. 12.

¹¹ A. Macdonald, ‘The Gold Kings’, elsewhere in this issue.

¹² For related work on the recasting of legitimate trade as illegal and subsequent informalisation and criminalisation into a ‘bazaar’ economy and smuggling, on south and south-east Asia, respectively, see R.K. Ray, ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29, 3 (1995), pp. 449–554; E. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

¹³ C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also her article elsewhere in this issue.

¹⁴ A. Burton, ‘Amitav Ghosh’s World Histories from Below’, History of the Present, 2, 1 (2012), pp. 71–7.

¹⁵ Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides’, pp. 15–16.

¹⁶ J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 2.

¹⁷ For critical links between crime fiction and postcolonial transnationalism, see, for instance, N. Pearson and M. Singer, Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (London, Ashgate, 2009).

¹⁸ See, in particular, these excellent surveys: S. Naidu, ‘Fears and Desires in South African Crime Fiction’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, 3 (2013), pp. 727–38; S. Naidu, ‘Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical Introduction’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 25, 2 (2013), pp. 124–35; C. Warnes, ‘Writing Crime in the New South Africa: Negotiating Threat in the Novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 38, 4 (2012), pp. 981–91.

¹⁹ A. Gurnah, The Last Gift (London, Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 259.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 150.

²¹ Ibid., p. 251.

²² Ibid., p. 249.

²³ Ibid., p. 253.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 257.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 258.

²⁶ R. van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights: Space, Travel and Transformation (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2007), p. 119.

²⁷ Gurnah, By the Sea, p. 65.

²⁸ Gurnah, The Last Gift, p. 87.

²⁹ A. Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London, Granta, 1998), p. 236.

³⁰ F. Hand, The Subversion of Class and Gender Roles in the Novels of Lindsey Collen (1948–), Mauritian Social Activist and Writer (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, Ontario, Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), p. 1.

³¹ L. Collen, Boy (London, Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 22.

³² Ibid., p. 2.

³³ Ibid., p. 22.

³⁴ In Warnes’ words, ‘The number of crime novels written in and about post-apartheid South Africa is starting to assume the “epidemic proportions” some believe characterise actual crime rates in that country’: Warnes, ‘Writing Crime in the New South Africa’, p. 981. See also R. Barnard, ‘Rewriting the Nation’, in D. Attridge and D. Attwell (eds), The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 667–78.

³⁵ See M. Titlestad and A. Polatinsky, ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s the Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45, 2 (2010), pp. 259–73; Warnes, ‘Writing Crime in the New South Africa’.

³⁶ Warnes, ‘Writing Crime in the New South Africa’, p. 983.

³⁷ M. Nicol, ‘A Short History of South African Crime Fiction’ (2014), available at http://crimebeat.bookslive.co.za/a-short-history-of-south-african-crime-fiction/, retrieved 30 November 2014.

³⁸ For a discussion of the thick description of urban landscapes as a key element of South African crime fiction, see also M. Titlestad, ‘Writing the City after Apartheid’, in Attridge and Attwell (eds), The Cambridge History, pp. 691–2.

³⁹ Interesting new developments in this field are represented by Justin Fox, Whoever Fears the Sea (Cape Town, Umuzi, 2014), about Somali piracy and east African–Indian Ocean histories, and Zakes Mda, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (Cape Town, Kwela, 2013), which recounts a history of African–Indian medieval connection through gold and trade. Both novels appear to rely heavily on established Indian Ocean historiography.

⁴⁰ I. Hofmeyr and M. Williams, South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2011). This is also the reason that I am not considering the obvious choice –Ghosh, The Circle of Reason – because, like many postcolonial detective fictions, it transcends generic conventions as much as it participates in them.

⁴¹ U.P. Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003); Pearson and Singer, Detective Fiction.

⁴² T. Corbett, Allegiance (Cape Town, Umuzi, 2012), p. 41.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 31.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 32.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 159.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 80.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 145.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 45.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 125.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 166.

⁵¹ See also Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides’, pp. 16–17; she writes that Capetonian crime novels ‘mark the sea and the rivers connecting it to the hinterland as sites of danger: strewn along the shore and river banks are clues through which to read the nation’s relation to the transnational in an era of neoliberal global capital’.

⁵² M. Nicol and J. Hichens, Out to Score (Cape Town, Umuzi, 2006), p. 41.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 45.

⁵⁴ M. Orford, Gallows Hill (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 2011); A. Brown, Coldsleep Lullaby (Cape Town, Zebra Press, 2005).

⁵⁵ For a discussion of Cape Town as a city of crime, although without mention of Out to Score, see C. Drawe, ‘Cape Town, City of Crime in South African Fiction’, Current Writing, 25, 2 (2013), pp. 186–95. For the Cape as port, see M. Samuelson, elsewhere in this issue.

⁵⁶ Nicol and Hichens, Out to Score, p. 116.

⁵⁷ See Darryl Accone’s auto/biography, All under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa (Claremont, New Africa Books, 2004). Also the discussion in Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides’, p. 16.

⁵⁸ J. Steinberg, ‘The Illicit Abalone Trade in South Africa’, Institute for Security Studies Papers, 105 (2005), p. 1. For a discussion of the long history of South Africa’s porous borders, see Andrew Macdonald, elsewhere in this issue.

⁵⁹ As Steinberg describes, the most profitable smuggling enterprises engage in the bartering of goods, such as drugs from east Asia and abalone or marijuana from southern Africa, in order to profit from a weak currency when exporting and to skirt it when importing. Steinberg, ‘The Illicit Abalone Trade’, pp. 2–3.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 1.

⁶¹ Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 1.

⁶² Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides’, p. 25.

⁶³ See, respectively, ibid. and S. Naidu, ‘Crimes Against Nature: Ecocritical Discourse in South African Crime Fiction’, Scrutiny2, 19, 2 (2014), pp. 59–70.

⁶⁴ I. Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa's Indian Ocean’, p. 509.

⁶⁵ E. Boehmer and A. Mondal, ‘Networks and Traces: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh’, Wasafiri, 27, 2 (2012), p. 31.