The Implicated Subject in Four South African Autobiographical Texts

Abstract

Finding new ways to address oppressive pasts has been a prominent theme in South African nonfiction since the end of apartheid, writers often seeking to explore personal and collective implication and guilt. The legacies of oppression and discrimination spill over into the South African present of social and economic inequality. This article examines four autobiographical texts that address notions of personal and collective implication in South Africa’s apartheid past and its present-day inequality. At the centre of the analysis are Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart from the end of the apartheid era, which offers a personal exploration of Afrikaner history in South Africa, and Christopher Hope’s The Café de Move-on Blues, which attempts to determine the role of English-speaking white South Africans. In addition, Sisonke Msimang writes about class divides and implication crossing racial borders in Always Another Country, and Haji Mohamed Dawjee offers a forceful critique of seemingly well-meaning, guilt-ridden whiteness in Sorry, Not Sorry. The article draws on Michael Rothberg’s theorisation of the implicated subject as beneficiary of oppressive pasts beyond simple distinctions of victim and perpetrator. All four texts portray a South Africa in which boundaries are increasingly blurred, and implication transgresses temporal, spatial and racial lines.

Keywords:

• implicated subject
• implication
• beneficiary
• autobiographical writing
• South Africa

Introduction

Despite apartheid having officially ended in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of the majority-ruled nation, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed soon after, South Africa is still dealing with its past. Recent years have seen vocal protests against legacies of oppression through the ‘Fees Must Fall’ movement that advocated access to higher education, or through the removal of statues of Cecil Rhodes. This process of addressing legacies of inequality is visible in literary texts, too, most notably in works of nonfiction that depict personal experiences of growing up and living in South Africa. A central question to which many writers keep returning is that of redress and restitution for past wrongs, but also the question of what the nation needs today to keep moving in a direction of providing education, job opportunities and adequate living conditions for all. This article examines four autobiographical texts that investigate past and present South Africa through personal histories, asking in what ways painful and unequal histories should be addressed, particularly in terms of guilt.

The question of implication in oppressive pasts emerges as central. A deeply personal take on implication is provided by Rian Malan’s memoir My Traitor’s Heart, subtitled Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself, which gained widespread attention after publication.¹ André Naffis-Sahely defines it as ‘a bestselling memoir now rightly considered a classic’.² The edition used for this article was published by Vintage, and some changes were made for the reprint.³ The text originates from the apartheid era and has received scholarly attention before, but not explicitly from the perspective of implication. Malan investigates the lives of his ancestors and their participation in oppression in white-ruled South Africa. Thus, personal implication is a central theme, and Malan extensively explores his own role in the persistence of inequalities and discrimination.

A second autobiographical text is provided by South African writer and journalist Christopher Hope, who left the country in 1974 and then returned to write a nonfictional text on the nation and its current state in the late 1980s. White Boy Running addressed the apartheid past of South Africa and Hope’s own childhood and upbringing in the midst of it.⁴ Later, he returned again to write a second book on more recent developments in South Africa. It is particularly this second book, The Café de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa that this article deals with.⁵ Hope embarks on a journey through South Africa, trying to figure out what place white South Africans can and should occupy in the present moment. The question of collective implication in oppressive pasts is raised in a number of ways, for example with regard to memorials and statues that serve as physical reminders of unequal pasts.

Two recent texts by South Africans belonging to a somewhat younger generation are discussed in connection to Malan’s and Hope’s memoirs, providing further insights into autobiographical representations of implication. Sisonke Msimang, a writer and journalist currently living in Australia, outlines her Zambian childhood in Always Another Country,⁶ having been born to apartheid activist parents who fled South Africa and were working for political change from Zambia. The family later relocated to Kenya and Canada as expatriates and returned to South Africa after apartheid had come to an end. Msimang moved to South Africa after completing her studies in the USA, and she recounts the racial tensions still present in everyday life. From a perspective of implication, her most relevant contribution concerns class divides and becoming a homeowner in a wealthy neighbourhood. Her memoir thus provides a valuable perspective on implication in terms of class, and how it connects to the past.

The final autobiographical text to be discussed is Haji Mohamed Dawjee’s Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of a Brown Woman in a White South Africa.⁷ The book consists of a number of essays that are partly personal but also comment on and critique racial divides in contemporary South Africa. The topic of implication arises particularly in Dawjee’s discussion of what she terms ‘woke’ whites, people seemingly racially aware and accepting, yet who when probed resort to behaviour that indicates lack of historical and socio-political understanding about their own position and that of South Africans of colour.⁸ This relates to implication and the role of the beneficiary of apartheid in multiple ways, suggesting that with implication comes responsibility, even if many individuals are not personally complicit.

The primary material for this article thus consists of texts emerging from different locations and eras, depicting highly different experiences expressed in a variety of forms, ranging from personal memoir to travel writing to socio-politically committed essays. Despite their obvious differences, these texts ultimately address similar issues, as the writers examine their personal histories and ponder their role and place in South Africa. Previous studies of white South African nonfictional writing have largely focused on the concept of complicity and guilt, but the perspective in this article goes beyond notions of explicit culpability and moves towards examining less tangible forms of implication, examining the benefits of association with oppressive pasts.⁹

From a conceptual and theoretical point of view, this article draws on Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject, in which he discusses implication in relation both to oppressive pasts and contemporary situations still mired in historical continuities of inequality.¹⁰ The main contribution of his book is the suggestion that instead of perpetuating divides and binaries such as ‘victim and perpetrator’ in relation to legacies of oppression, it may be more useful to explore such historical injustice spilling over into the present moment through the concept of the implicated subject. This approach may offer a new way forward for contemporary challenges with regard to discrimination and oppression, as well as provide novel ways of addressing and dealing with the past. Further, he introduces the role of the implicated subject as beneficiary, which signifies people who may not have participated in oppression themselves but have benefited from it in various ways. This is where the primary texts examined can provide valuable insights, as although apartheid ended almost three decades ago, South Africa remains a deeply unequal society.¹¹ Before engaging in a more detailed reading of the primary material, the article begins with a discussion of the implicated subject as defined by Rothberg and others, and how this connects with the beneficiary.

Implication and the Beneficiary in South African Contexts

While Rian Malan’s memoir can be said to deal directly with the guilt and implication of his Afrikaner background in South Africa’s past, more recent autobiographical writing from and of South Africa seems increasingly preoccupied not only with the guilt or transgressions of the past but also with finding personal space in the nation in which to thrive.¹² Irene Visser argues that topics relating to guilt and culpability were particularly characteristic of the writing that emerged during apartheid, yet ‘[i]n postapartheid South African literature this tradition has continued, and its themes of white guilt and complicity, truth-searching and desire for redress, have remained central characteristics’.¹³ Visser has not included an exploration of personal position and place in relation to South Africa and its histories. Such endeavours can be found, for example, in Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying, Mark Gevisser’s memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg or Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country.¹⁴ This personal and to some extent collective experience of dislocation (for lack of a better term) that many writers express in their autobiographical or nonfictional texts speaks to more than just complicity and guilt, or victimhood during and after apartheid.

In Hedley Twidle’s terms, nonfictions of South Africa ‘enact a reckoning in language with a bitter and compromised past, drawing its poison, writing it out’.¹⁵ His book on South African nonfiction deals with versions of history that present uneasy relationships with accepted truths through an analysis of various forms of autobiographical narrative. Twidle notes that there has been a ‘marked turn towards personal narrative’ in the wake of the university protests that demanded better access to higher education for South Africans.¹⁶ This ‘perceived nonfiction boom’¹⁷ deals in multiple ways with questions of the past and its renditions of ‘who has the ability to write about whom, which stories are told across history; what comes to be heard or forgotten, and why’.¹⁸ These notions connect to the topic of implication in multiple ways and emerge as central in the works analysed here, particularly through questions of voice and place exemplified in Dawjee’s essays.

The present moment thus requires new perspectives on issues that are currently resurfacing in nonfictional South African writing. Such new perspectives are called for in Michael Rothberg’s book The Implicated Subject, in which he argues that ‘beyond the unavoidable categories of victims and perpetrators there is the need for a larger reckoning with both the structures of power that undergird such cases and the histories that continue to resonate as afterlives’.¹⁹ This is relevant here, examining selected texts as manifestations of the ‘larger reckoning’ called for by Rothberg.²⁰ Rothberg expands on the concept of the implicated subject in an interview with Susanne C. Knittel and Sofia Forchieri:

Implicated subjects are those subjects who play crucial, but indirect roles in systems of domination and histories of harm. They are also subjects who inherit and benefit from such systems and histories: they are aligned with power and privilege, without occupying their control centers. Etymologically speaking, to be implicated is to be ‘folded into’ structures and histories. In other words, implicated subjects do not originate or direct regimes of power, but they inhabit them and participate in upholding them.²¹

This clarifies simultaneously broad yet narrow categories of implication. The notion of implication is seen as separate from complicity, although Deborah Posel, for example, defines complicity as ‘being implicated in wrong-doing, with varying degrees of knowledge and volition’.²²

Further, Rothberg states that literary texts ‘and other forms of aesthetic production – provide avenues of access to legacies of slavery and questions of justice that intersect with but cannot be reduced to empirical history and material claims’.²³ The anxiety with regard to physical, social, historical and psychological space in South Africa addressed and explored in several recent memoirs shows that contemporary South African autobiographical writing and other nonfictional forms do not easily represent simple categories of clear-cut victim or perpetrator. In the interview with Knittel and Forchieri, Rothberg elaborates further on the importance of investigating texts:

I believe in paying close attention to cultural texts – whether literary texts, works of visual art, or what have you. Such texts, I believe, give us a couple of different points of access to the question of implication. On the one hand, I read these texts as conceptual works in their own right; that is, I understand art as a form of medium-specific or inter-medial theorizing. Such theorizing reveals itself via close reading.²⁴

In a situation and context as complicated as that of South Africa, these endeavours and the related theorising activities become even more urgent.

The focus on whiteness requires some further comment. Wamuwi Mbao examines white South African autobiographies and focuses on, among other things, the presence of nostalgia, asking whether ‘there is a relationship between the loss of formal white political power, the challenge to white economic power, and the surge in popularity of nostalgic (white) literature?’²⁵ Mbao does admit that it may be a ‘reductionist reading’, yet the question is still relevant.²⁶ Both Malan and Hope can be argued to be nostalgic at least to some extent, although they also question their right to nostalgia. Malan writes about his years in the USA after dodging the draft, ending up in Los Angeles, a city in which he soon found a number of other white South Africans: ‘Many pitched up in Beverly Hills or West LA, burdened with moneybags and full of talk about how they’d fought apartheid, loved the blacks, and stood up to the Afrikaner tyranny for as long as they could stand it. I’d look at them and think, Fuck, there’s me eight years ago, lying through my teeth’.²⁷

Hope writes in his first memoir White Boy Running that entirely new approaches to South Africa were needed, not based on ‘fairness, impartiality, patience, or tolerance’.²⁸ His own response was to write a novel, A Separate Development, promptly banned by the apartheid government, in which the main character ‘did not know what colour he was’.²⁹ The banning of the book was based on it constituting ‘an incitement to racial hostility’, which made Hope realise that ‘it was not the condemnation of others that bothered the people in charge in South Africa – what really disturbed them were glimpses of themselves’.³⁰ These lines indicate implication, not being able to look oneself in the mirror, metaphorically speaking, and examine the image reflected. The memoirs by Hope and Malan can be said to perform such reflection, manifesting attempts to look at themselves in the mirror.

The connection between complicity and implication is central here and it is addressed by Rothberg, who argues that ‘[c]omplicity presupposes implication, but implication does not always involve complicity’.³¹ He makes a temporal distinction between the two concepts, stating that implication is more tied to diachronic perspectives and complicity to synchrony: ‘[w]e are implicated in the past, […] but we cannot be complicit in crimes that took place before our birth’.³² Rothberg connects this notion with the Holocaust and people who were born afterwards. Specific historical periods and events come with their very own sensitivities and present their own particular challenges. Apartheid officially came to an end in 1994, yet the repercussions can still be seen and felt in the form of socio-economic and educational inequality. A diachronic perspective is necessary in order to evaluate the lasting and persisting effects of apartheid, yet it is relevant to look further in order to avoid perpetuating victim/perpetrator dichotomies.

An earlier examination of complicity in relation to apartheid is offered by Mark Sanders in his book Complicities. He writes the following, drawing on Émile Zola: ‘Responsibility unites with a will not to be complicit in an injustice. It thus emerges from a sense of complicity’.³³ This sense is not necessarily connected to ‘criminal complicity… but the actively assumed complicity of one whose silence could allow their crime to go undiscovered’.³⁴ These lines connect to Sanders’s idea of the ‘little perpetrator’,³⁵ defined by J. Murray as something which ‘resides in each of us and contains the potential to commit the acts of which the “exceptional perpetrator” is guilty’.³⁶ Current economic and educational inequality in South Africa would make perpetrators, little or exceptional, of all more or less affluent South Africans, as manifested in Msimang’s memoir.

Several South African memoirists have criticised post-apartheid regimes and politics, among them Malaika Wa Azania, Lesego Malepe and Clinton Chauke.³⁷ Their texts paint a portrait of the nation as profoundly unequal, providing few opportunities for its black citizens. However, Wa Azania and Chauke raise questions about class, with Wa Azania dedicating her entire memoir to the ANC, writing as a letter to the party highlighting its failures to provide equal prospects for its more deprived citizens. As Susan Booysen outlines, ‘[t]he contemporary ANC has the inner organs and the nostalgic aura of the former liberation movement, and lifeblood that blends high morality with corruption and self-humiliation’.³⁸ The party itself seems to struggle with implication, particularly since South Africans ‘are less forgiving than they were a decade ago’.³⁹ In this context, Kgalema Motlanthe, South Africa’s president between Thabo Mbeki’s resignation in 2008 and Jacob Zuma’s inauguration in 2009, states that ‘[r]ace and class, joined with other sites of inequality, continue to play a role in determining life within our borders, and have a direct influence in the realm of politics’. This points to the complexity of doing politics in a nation with such legacies while awareness of ‘these continuities… [render] our leadership relevant and legitimate, ignoring them results in the realisation of the very fears that we sought to escape, and it implicates us, to some degree, in the continuation of the order that we sought to overcome’.⁴⁰ Thus, implication in this context becomes blurred, it cannot be neatly drawn across racial or political lines. Continued inequalities are confirmed by Aroop Chatterjee, who writes that: ‘[W]ealth inequality is a strong indicator of Apartheid-era injustice and inequalities perpetuated into the present’.⁴¹

Therefore, in a South African context, it is crucial to address the gain of those who have benefited from such structures, ‘the continuation of the order that we sought to overcome’.⁴² This is what this article sets out to do in the analysis that follows. Rothberg addresses this gain in the following way: ‘Societal participants who are not active perpetrators of human rights abuses, for instance, may still benefit from such abuses in direct or indirect ways or may have refrained from resisting abuses when they were in a position to do so’.⁴³ The role of implication and the beneficiary has been discussed by Gillian Whitlock:

Implication, as Rothberg argues, introduces a specific turn to the responsibilities we bear for injustices that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects. Implicated subjects are not direct agents of harm, as perpetrators, but neither are they innocent bystanders, for they inherit, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination – as citizens, for example, or, perhaps, as beneficiaries.⁴⁴

Thus, implication and responsibility go hand in hand, something Rothberg himself touches upon in the interview with Knittel and Forchieri, arguing that ‘implicated subjects are not criminally guilty; they are not indictable by a court, but are rather politically and morally responsible for addressing their implication’.⁴⁵ This notion provides an updated version of the responsibility Sanders referred to when stating that responsibility itself ‘emerges from a sense of complicity’.⁴⁶ Complicity has here been replaced by implication; the two concepts may be seen in terms of their temporal distance from apartheid.

The temporal perspective warrants further commentary; as Rothberg previously argued, implication generally has a diachronic dimension. Yet, in the interview he states that ‘[n]o one is essentially an implicated subject, no one is forever and in all situations an implicated subject. To be implicated is to occupy a subject position, which is to say a location in shifting historical and structural contexts’.⁴⁷ In the white South African context, this is an interesting notion. When does implication stop? Apartheid legacies will not easily be overcome, and even if South Africa manages to move towards more equal prospects for all citizens, apartheid-era injustice and post-apartheid inequality will still affect future generations.

Malan does not seem to suggest that implication will ever fully stop. At the end of his memoir, he writes in connection with his own Afrikaner heritage that ‘[w]hen the day comes you’ll still be whitey. A white is a white against the black’.⁴⁸ Christopher Hope is equally bleak at the end of his memoir, writing that white South Africans seem to resort to ‘self-righteousness mingled with self-pity’ when contemplating their position and the sacrifices they feel they have made, ‘yet things are more painful than ever’.⁴⁹ These lines suggest that the feeling of responsibility and implication may not have gone deep enough or been genuine enough. They seem to question Rothberg’s point about implication not being an inherent feature of certain people or individuals, rather shifting and changing with time.

The discussion of the four selected texts begins with a section on personal and collective implication in Malan’s and Msimang’s memoirs, and a section on future directions for South Africa, particularly in terms of whiteness, in Hope’s and Dawjee’s writing.

Personal and Collective Implication

The edition of Rian Malan’s memoir used for this article opens with an introduction that consists of an interview Malan conducted with himself, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut. At the outset, the writer states that the memoir ‘attempts to be honest about race and racism, including manifestations of those things in my own psyche’.⁵⁰ These notions point towards the memoir’s self-reflexive purpose, and this can be connected to the personal history Malan outlines in the first part of his memoir. It starts with the story of Dawid Malan, an ancestor who ran away with a black woman, ‘forfeiting his birthright and all his worldly goods for the sake of a black slave’.⁵¹ Malan found out that his ancestor later changed course, having children with a white woman and becoming an Afrikaner, ‘the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic, and “full of blood,” as the Zulus say of tyrants’.⁵² Malan goes on to connect subsequent developments in South Africa with the fate of his forebear, writing that ‘all of South Africa’s agony is rooted in Dawid Malan’s ancient act of self-blinding’.⁵³ This is a theme that is repeated throughout, the act of self-blinding and choosing not to see. He ends the chapter on Dawid Malan with a passage in which he writes about himself and his belief earlier that ‘only I, of all my blind clan and tribe, had eyes that could truly see, and that what I saw appalled me’.⁵⁴ The memoir builds on the desire to see clearly, not only with regard to South Africa but also to himself.

The topic of self-blinding and choosing not to see emerges in connection with Malan’s childhood and a woman named Lena who worked for the family as housekeeper and nanny. A picture of Lena portrays her as ‘our resident sangoma, or witch doctor’. Malan laments that they did not understand the full depth of this calling, or of the life she led: ‘Our eyes are sealed by cataracts against which our white brains project their chosen preconceptions of Africa and Africans. Some whites see danger, some savagery, some see victims, and some see revolutionary heroes. Very few of us see clearly’.⁵⁵ The passage speaks for the need not only to stop self-blinding but to stop categorising, something which Rothberg too asserts: ‘[T]he discourse of victimization tends to re-objectify contemporary subjects and strip them of agency in the present’.⁵⁶ The need to categorise implies a need to see the world clearly, paradoxically enough, and to be able to define one’s own place in contrast and connection to other groups. Malan’s memoir can be seen as an effort to let go of such categorisations, to acknowledge implication among all South Africans, including citizens of colour. This is manifested in the descriptions of violence and crime in the two latter sections of the book.

The stories recounted present a complicated picture of South Africa in the mid-1980s, when the roles of victims and perpetrators are often painfully obvious, but sometimes such lines become unclear. As Rothberg argues, no one is an implicated subject forever; it too is a category that remains fluid. Malan’s examples of brutal crime in South Africa show that individuals may be victims, perpetrators and implicated subjects, and these positions shift and change. The crime stories address another of Malan’s concerns as indicated in the preface of 2015: ‘It’s nearly twenty-five years since Mandela came out of jail, but nothing has really changed here. Or, rather, nothing has been resolved or settled. Whites and blacks still live largely separate lives, contemplating one another across an abyss of mutual incomprehension’.⁵⁷

One of the most complex stories told by Malan is that of ‘Hammerman’, a Zulu man who killed and severely injured white people in Empangeni, fomenting fear among the town’s white population.⁵⁸ The fear reached almost epic proportions, and Malan explains this as being connected to the guilt white South Africans feel: ‘The Hammerman’s killings raise the specter of indiscriminate black retribution; they force whites to examine their lives, and the structure of their society, and when whites do so, they see that they cannot escape complicity’.⁵⁹ Thus, implication runs deep, locking the killer, and other potential killers, and the potential victims into a loop in which all are more or less complicit. When Malan found out the true story of the killer, things became even more muddled. Simon Mpungose was arrested for the murders and willingly confessed to having carried them out ‘because he wants to die’.⁶⁰ During the trial, Simon told the judge about his life without a proper education and having to work hard from a very young age. He started doing petty crimes early, which eventually led to a lengthy sentence. The time in prison was brutal, changing Simon’s perspective of white men. After being paroled, Simon tried to get a pass in order to be able to travel and work, and had to go through the humiliating, racist procedures of the apartheid administration. Eventually, a white man tore his hard-won pass into pieces when Simon complained about the wages he was offered, which would not have left him with adequate means. These hardships led him towards the decision to kill white people.⁶¹

Malan’s account of the trial focuses on the lack of understanding of Simon’s background and heritage, particularly in terms of him as a Zulu. It is another example of subtle implication, of being blind and refusing to see, comparable to the photograph of Malan’s childhood housekeeper Lena. Malan went to Empangeni after Simon had been executed in order to find out more about his life and what had made him into who he was, presuming this meant ‘D F Malan’s apartheid,… Verwoerd’s Bantu education, and… Vorster’s barbaric prisons’.⁶² These assumptions turned out to be premature: Malan found out that Simon’s grandparents had been siblings and his wish to die was interpreted as a consequence of this transgression and the disruption caused in the ‘shades’.⁶³ Malan’s investigations led him to conclude that the truth was far more complex than he had envisaged, due to the incest from which Simon originated: ‘[H]e remained an abomination in the eyes of his own people’.⁶⁴ Complicity and implication merge in the story of Simon, and the question of whether apartheid lay behind his brutal acts remains unanswered.

Malan’s attempt to do justice to Simon and his multifaceted story falls apart on its own impossibility. As Malan observes, the right questions were not asked of Simon: the psychiatrist who testified in court was not from the same cultural background as Simon, and the interpreter could not adequately transform his ‘images, poetry, and metaphor’ into English.⁶⁵ Thus Simon lost his voice, and his story too was lost forever, implicating the interpreter, psychiatrist and eventually Malan himself in creating and supporting the void, or rift, that made mutual understanding impossible. The complex story of Simon combines with the perplexing fate of his own ancestor Dawid Malan, who went from living in secrecy and shame with his black mistress to being part of the ‘white tribe’, as well as with the transformation Malan himself went through when living in the USA and finally returning to South Africa only to find himself out of place even more than before.⁶⁶

These notions connect with what Naffis-Sahely writes when comparing Coetzee’s novels to Malan’s memoir:

these works of literature ultimately testify to what might be the most haunting revelation of all in South Africa’s painful transition from apartheid: that merely seeking atonement doesn’t necessarily mean one will attain it. In fact, quite the opposite: the best that these people can hope for, Coetzee and Malan seem to be saying, is to understand their shame and reconcile themselves to carrying that burden for the remainder of their days.⁶⁷

Seeing the stories of crime as a search for atonement is one way of reading the memoir. Yet Malan seems to suggest more than just personal responsibility for apartheid and its seemingly never-ending grasp on South Africans. He returns to his conflicted position at the very end of the memoir, writing that ‘I have always been two people, you see – a Just White Man, appalled by apartheid and the cruelties committed in its name, and an Afrikaner with a disease of the soul’.⁶⁸ Glen Retief addresses Malan’s critique of white leftists, ‘Just White Men’ like Malan himself, who participated in demonstrations against apartheid, and argues that: ‘The attitude underlying this political analysis can be characterized as one of extreme pessimism about the possibility of any kind of interracial comprehension or joint political action’.⁶⁹ The two sides to Malan represented in his memoir manifest such pessimism, and the suggestion is that the discrepancy may be too enormous to overcome.

Economic Domination

Sisonke Msimang’s memoir, Always Another Country, provides interesting insights in this context, with her background as the child of expatriate parents who first lived in Zambia as apartheid activists, then relocated to Kenya and Canada for professional purposes, only to move back to South Africa in 1993 after another stay in Kenya and Ethiopia.⁷⁰ Implication crosses racial lines, as Msimang writes about her relatively affluent childhood in Kenya and it becomes connected to one particular memory relating to a bicycle she bought when the family was living in Canada. The bicycle comes to embody the divide between wealth and poverty, blurring lines between victims and perpetrators. Msimang took the bicycle to school: ‘Everyone notices, though, just as I have been hoping they will. Belonging thrums in my veins’.⁷¹ The joy of finally belonging in Canada, after some difficulties at school and some racist and discriminatory incidents, is short-lived; and the family soon moved back to Nairobi, where ‘the bike assumes new importance’ due to its connection to Canada.⁷²

When young Msimang took the bicycle out for a leisurely ride, it was stolen by a boy whose ‘t-shirt is torn and so threadbare it isn’t clear whether it had already been torn before or whether the holes were the consequences of the manhandling by the Prosecutor-cum-judge and others in the crowd who caught him’.⁷³ The crowd bullies the boy into apologising, while the person in charge of the situation calls Msimang a ‘Young Madam’.⁷⁴ The apology is insincere, and the boy ‘stares at me with naked rage. He is sorry that I am rich and that he is poor and he is not moved by my tears or my vulnerability’.⁷⁵ Msimang writes that the story of the stolen bicycle and the people who came to her rescue became a story told repeatedly within the family, yet she kept essential parts to herself: ‘I could never say that he made no apologies for himself or that he blamed me for being a certain kind of girl and occupying the world with a certain kind of obliviousness that was not acceptable’.⁷⁶ This obliviousness connects with Malan’s refusal or inability to see, although the experiences are somewhat different. The privileged life of Msimang is reflected against the life of the boy, who makes her aware of the insurmountable barrier between the two, and the fact that the boy ‘wasn’t sorry because he understood he had just as much right to happiness as I did’.⁷⁷ The young Msimang thus becomes implicated in economic inequality.

Msimang’s memoir offers further insights into the complex relationship between personal and collective implication in oppressive histories, and the difficulty of overcoming racial divides. Msimang dedicates a significant part of her memoir to her college years in USA, and writes that her life in America gave her ‘anonymity’, whereas her previous life placed her at the centre of events: ‘I was born into an Africa that was waiting for me and into a movement that needed children as emblems of the future.… The post-colonial children of the elite – those whose parents’ hearts were filled with dreams – we carried the vision of a decolonised future in our smiles’.⁷⁸ These lines indicate a privileged position as the future leaders of a democratic South Africa for which Msimang’s parents worked so hard; but as the memoir progresses, it becomes clear from Msimang’s experiences that no such simple, ‘decolonised’ future was possible. Implication and benefiting from oppressive pasts come into it in multiple ways.

The elation of democracy is outlined in a chapter entitled ‘Freedom’. Msimang returned to live in South Africa after graduating and then working for a time in the USA. The family’s privileged position is manifested through their home in a still predominantly white neighbourhood, and their relatively new car. Msimang writes that where black South Africans ‘greet us with pride, whites are angry and resentful. We are the enemy. We represent everything whites in Pretoria fear they will lose with the end of apartheid’.⁷⁹ Msimang recounts struggles in parking lots for space to park with owners ‘of a weathered yellow or blue bakkie’ (pickup truck), or in a grocery store where shopping carts become the centre of conflict. Msimang states that at this point in her life, she was ‘ambivalent about white people’, who ‘always have something to complain about and I wonder how this is possible, given that they are still here, with their houses untouched and their schools and offices uncharred’.⁸⁰ The pessimism present in Malan’s memoir is repeated in Msimang’s, and similar concerns also emerge in Dawjee’s writing, to be examined in more detail in a later section. Implication becomes not only a question of who is able to benefit from the past in unjust ways, but also about who gets to complain in the post-apartheid era. Her remarks imply a lack of acknowledgment of benefits received and preserved on the part of white citizens. As Msimang’s memoir progresses, the question of implication becomes increasingly complicated.

Msimang recounts meeting her future husband in 1997, with whom she eventually bought a house in Emmarentia, an area where she would not have been able to live during apartheid. The joy of owning the house, and living in a beautiful neighbourhood, were complicated by the fact that Msimang and her family had to ‘reckon with a part of South Africa we have not yet encountered in any meaningful way’.⁸¹ This implies the inequality still guiding life in the nation, and ‘the obviousness of our privilege begins to eat at us… Living in this house and on this street, smacks of domination’.⁸² The staff needed to take care of the house and, later, the children of Msimang and her husband turned Msimang into ‘my own madam. I was no longer an innocent. The house makes me complicit… [I]t places us firmly in the heart of whiteness’.⁸³ The explicit mention of becoming complicit is central here, as well as its connection to whiteness. Msimang implies with her writing that even though apartheid ended, its structures are still in place, allowing for black middle-class South Africans like herself to enter areas previously reserved for whites only, taking on the roles of earlier owners and carrying on with the ‘domination’ and separation between different groups: ‘We told ourselves that this is what our parents had fought for. This was not true, of course. Our parents had fought for equality, but we were not occupying spaces of equality – we were simply ascending to places higher up on a ladder that we knew provided unfair leverage to a tiny group’.⁸⁴

Economic inequality and implication in oppressive histories, and benefiting from them, are thus dealt with on multiple levels in Msimang’s complex memoir. The painful ruminations that dominate Malan’s memoir with regard to his Afrikaner heritage and the inevitable burden that comes with it are not entirely absent from Msimang’s writing either, despite her being on the right side of the fence as the child of apartheid activists and considered the future hope for free South Africa. Her burden eventually comes to concern similar things: economic and educational privilege, separating not only white and black South Africans historically but transcending racial divides in contemporary times. The fact that Msimang’s parents fought for majority rule and democracy makes the situation even more complex and indicates that implication goes far beyond being a personal choice or historical continuity.

White Tribes

Café de Move-on Blues is a travel memoir that depicts Christopher Hope’s journey through South Africa looking for monuments and statues that address the nation’s past and future, particularly for those who, like Hope himself, are white and English-speaking. While travelling to various places and interviewing people, Hope provides glimpses from his own childhood and past as tied to the places he visits, but the memoir remains far less personal than White Boy Running and offers a valuable contrast to Malan’s and Msimang’s personal explorations of implication. Hope’s writing is partly centred on the notion of being made to ‘move on’, to which the title of his book refers, a moving on that does not necessarily happen voluntarily but which is more about being ‘pushed out’.⁸⁵ The question that haunts the text is whether it is time for white (English-speaking) South Africans to move on or to be moved on. His book is here paired with Haji Mohamed Dawjee’s essay collection Sorry, Not Sorry, which deals with voice and who gets to be heard in South Africa. The book, among other essays, offers a ‘resignation letter to performative whites’, raising the issue of the spaces still occupied by white people in the country.⁸⁶ The concept of the beneficiary is particularly relevant for these two final sections: both Hope and Dawjee examine it in their respective texts in different contexts.

The notion of guilt emerges in Hope’s writing, although not as explicitly as in Malan’s memoir, for example through an encounter with a man Hope calls Theo in Hopetown in Kimberley. Theo is presented as a young, Afrikaans-speaking man whose family had lived in the area since the early 19^th century. When discussing the fate of Bushmen who used to live in the area, Hope told Theo that they had ‘got moved on’, to which Theo replied: ‘Someone had to give way. And it was us who opened up the country’.⁸⁷ Hope and Theo continue their debate about who was to blame and for what, and here Hope implicates Theo in the history of oppression in South Africa, in what ‘Theo’s people’ had done:

They set their faces against variety, reason, forbearance, love, toleration, imagination and humour. They closed schools, churches, universities and libraries. They banned books, films, plays; they expelled clerics and academics, and deported, banned, jailed or killed many who disagreed with them. During their half-century rule they put in place a system of racial intolerance so cruel, so pervasive and so murderously stupid that it blighted whatever it touched.⁸⁸

The passage seems to indicate whom Hope considers guilty of the horror that was apartheid, and the distinction between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans. Earlier in the memoir he mentions the balance between the two groups, stating that ‘the rampant White Afrikaner nationalists who ran the show from the mid-twentieth century reduced White English-speakers to a helpless, if noisy, minority, and however much they may have hated and opposed Afrikaner supremacy, they were just as hooked on the racial privileges it engineered for Whites’.⁸⁹ These lines clearly imply that if Afrikaners were seen as the actual culprits, English-speaking whites were beneficiaries, coasting along and enjoying the monumental perks that came with being white in South Africa.

After listing all the things Afrikaners were guilty of in terms of the apartheid system, Hope writes that Theo asked why he should feel guilty: ‘I was only ten when Mandela was released. You’re talking about my parents’ generation. Not me’.⁹⁰ Hope writes that the conversation was familiar and would not be resolved or come to any point of mutual comprehension.⁹¹ Claire Scott’s words about the beneficiary seem here appropriate: ‘Hence, the position of the complicit beneficiary is one of perpetual in-between-ness: never fully able to confess, and, consequently, never fully able to atone’.⁹² The inability to atone is presented in both perspectives examined here, although obviously presented only from Hope’s point of view. The past remains a battleground, and the question persists as to who is more to blame.

Although Hope does not delve further into the complexities of the relationship between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans, he does allude to some significant differences between the groups: ‘English-speaking South Africans were, inevitably, a disconnected lot, never joined by the heartstrings of the country’.⁹³ In contrast to these ‘perpetual arrivistes and unreliable patriots’, Hope explains that ‘Afrikaners, by contrast, seemed more real, more truly of the place’.⁹⁴ These notions are relevant in terms of implication, as both Malan and Hope refer to Afrikaners as a tribe, Hope describing them as ‘a deluded cabal of White Afrikaner tribalists’, indicating that the more homogenous nature of Afrikaners, or at least their stronger sense of group membership and shared community values, makes them more collectively responsible for the past.⁹⁵

Scott addresses the problem of the complicity of Afrikaners versus that of English-speaking citizens, and mentions the emphasis Antjie Krog puts on Afrikaners as the culprits: ‘Thus, the English-speaking white South African is able to deny his or her complicity in an unjust system, and is able to overlook and leave unacknowledged his or her position as a beneficiary of that system’.⁹⁶ Rothberg’s notion of the beneficiary is here important, and ties in with implication as essentially one and the same as presented by Hope. Further, Klandermans, Werner and van Doorn ask the following relevant question in their article on two studies of white Afrikaner students: ‘[W]hat if your group has a discreditable history but you cannot quit?’⁹⁷ Rothberg argues that implication is not inherent, but the question is whether South Africa forms an exception here.

Interestingly, Hope does refer to English-speaking South Africans as some kind of tribe too, when writing about a visit to Pretoria and the Paul Kruger monument in the city centre. He there met an Afrikaner woman and engaged her in conversation. ‘She summed up, in her defiant Voortrekker costume and her quiet despair, the quandary faced by the older generation of White South Africans who never imagined things would turn out this way’, Hope writes.⁹⁸ They proceeded to talk about the history of the place and about the statue, and while Hope felt some connection with her due to their being of similar age, he also felt a disconnect: ‘The tribes from which we came feared and detested each other and were mutually appalled at the other’s manners, culture, religion and politics’.⁹⁹ Thus, the whiteness that connects the two is also what creates a rift between them. Yet in terms of implication, Hope suggests that both groups may meet the same fate, ‘a managed redundancy’.¹⁰⁰ He argued earlier in the book that ‘the old ways of identifying your power were hard to shake and centre stage hard to leave’, yet this seems to Hope to be the only way forward,¹⁰¹ a topic addressed in more detail in Dawjee’s text. In addition, Hope argues for the preservation of monuments and statues erected to commemorate oppressive pasts, even though they ‘tell only one side of the story’: ‘We needed to know the other side and the other way of telling, and even then to treat both sides with caution’.¹⁰² These lines suggest that implication may not only be a burden for those on the wrong side of history, but for other groups, too. Further, Hope argues that tides have turned in terms of racism, with ‘hate-speech’ being directed at white people, or with insinuations that the time of white privilege is over.¹⁰³ These lines imply complex implication and the suggestion that white South Africans may no longer always be the sole beneficiaries, as already indicated in Msimang’s memoir.

White Benefits

Sorry, Not Sorry deals with implication, guilt and the benefits of oppressive pasts in multiple contexts. Haji Mohamed Dawjee constructs several essays around experiences of outright racism and discrimination along with more subtle forms of unearned benefits attached to certain groups. The collection opens with an essay on the topics writers of colour are expected to write about: ‘a responsible theme – race, politics, equality, righteousness’, whereas white writers are allowed ‘creative liberty’ to a different degree.¹⁰⁴ The essay ‘Begging to Be White?’ lists another set of benefits associated with whiteness; ‘[t]he ‘whites only’ signs have been removed, but destroying physical evidence means nothing when the ideologies have stayed behind and continue to be recycled’.¹⁰⁵ Dawjee explains this as a race which for white people becomes a ‘relay’ whereas the ‘lane is filled with hurdles’ for people of colour.¹⁰⁶ As Chatterjee argues, ‘wealth inequality is a strong indicator of Apartheid-era injustice and inequalities perpetuated into the present’.¹⁰⁷ This relates directly to the notion of the beneficiary.

Some of the benefits listed by Dawjee have to do with assumptions made about people who are white and people of colour. These include being seen as wealthy or poor, but also go further than that into less obvious territories of privilege. A considerable part of what Dawjee rails against has to do with the attention given to white people who take a stand, for example in matters of race and equality, ‘colonising the struggle’ and having ‘monopoly over the media’: ‘[Y]our wokeness occupies way too much space in newspapers and websites, and your virtue signalling at the forefront of any one of our fights makes me want to go blind so that I do not have to see you’.¹⁰⁸ Self-blinding and choosing not to see as discussed in Malan’s memoir is repeated here, albeit in a completely different context. Dawjee’s self-blinding is not about being blind to other people and their lives, as in the case of Malan and the family’s housekeeper, but about the ignorance and obliviousness of people who claim space in debates in which they may be better advised to take a backseat. Such ‘virtue signalling’ Dawjee calls ‘a humblebrag. It is a way to camouflage your vanity and self-aggrandisement… Your photos with black children, your visits to the outskirts of town, are all for vanity, and this vanity is worse than any other kind because you drape it in selfless conviction’.¹⁰⁹ Monopolising the debate thus relates to implication in the sense of continuing a tradition in which people of colour may be expected to take a back seat, or where white people will continue to occupy centre stage in an act of implied solidarity.

These issues are revisited towards the end of Dawjee’s collection, in an essay entitled ‘Sorry, Not Sorry’, in which she recounts an incident concerning a column she wrote about domestic workers in South Africa, focusing on her observation in a park in which white people seemed eager to walk their dogs but left their children in the care of nannies. The piece caused some controversy on publication, and incited a backlash against Dawjee, compelling a colleague to write another piece partly in defence but also to defuse the conflict. Dawjee argues that the response by her colleague was ‘another silencing of sorts’, causing her to ponder the reasons behind ‘people of colour (women especially) always needing to be the bigger person by making themselves small’.¹¹⁰ The critique in Dawjee’s essays against ‘woke’ whites and their seemingly well-meaning efforts to support people of colour in their daily endeavours, goes beyond being just about South Africa’s lingering inequalities and residues of oppressive pasts. The essays in Sorry, Not Sorry address the general dominance of whiteness, and the implication in often invisible structures that connect white people across borders. Implication thus takes on a far wider scope than being connected to South Africa’s own past.

The performance of white progressiveness is exemplified in several essays, and the encounters Dawjee writes about that cause her pain and humiliation are often based on acts of overt racism. In ‘The Curious Case of the Old Architect’, Dawjee recounts her own troubles making her way in the media industry as a person of colour.¹¹¹ She remembers a competition for young journalists in which she took part, where the prize was money and a paid internship at a magazine. Dawjee won along with three white students, making her question her own success: ‘Was I there to maintain a good BEE [black economic empowerment] demographic while keeping the place appropriately white? Was I the box they would tick on the employment-equity form?’¹¹² This is echoed later when visiting the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg with fellow students, one of whom was also a winner of the competition, and who commented on Dawjee’s hair, stating that during apartheid she ‘would have passed the pencil test’.¹¹³ Dawjee argues that it was a manifestation of casual racism, ‘worse than the in-your-face kind’.¹¹⁴ The reference to the apartheid past suggests that racism and discrimination, despite being global concerns, can take profoundly local forms that remain embedded in national histories. Implication in such histories is thus both general and specific, requiring global attention, yet also local consideration.

The painful introspection offered in Malan’s memoir and the more detached and disillusioned travels of Hope in dealing with the responsibility and culpability of Afrikaners and English-speaking white South Africans are here in Dawjee’s essays too, seen from a perspective of voice and power. Dawjee moves beyond apartheid as the antagonist, the centre around which so much writing about race revolves, and provides a perspective on whiteness and the benefits attached to it that is both deeply personal and profoundly global. In her writing, implication is no longer solely about specific oppressive pasts such as apartheid, but about the assumptions and expectations that come with different racial categories. Msimang examines personal implication in present-day domination in her memoir, going beyond racial divides. Still, she sees her position as a ‘madam’ with a staff of her own, as something that ‘places us firmly in the heart of whiteness’.¹¹⁵ Going beyond victims and perpetrators in a South African context thus seems to suggest, in the autobiographical texts discussed, that implication still attaches itself most irrevocably to white South Africans and to whiteness more generally. Dawjee’s essay collection shows that it is now no longer solely a South African concern but a global one, stretching beyond national borders.

Conclusion

Rian Malan’s and Christopher Hope’s memoirs raise questions about the culpability of white South Africans past and present; their texts seem to suggest that from a temporal perspective, complicity and implication began when white people arrived in South Africa and pushed other groups to the margins, a practice which culminated in the apartheid era. Such legacies of oppression provide insurmountable obstacles, yet Rothberg’s theory of implication and the implicated subject as beneficiary of oppressive pasts may offer some relief, or at least a way forward. Msimang and Dawjee provide further depth to the discussion in their respective texts, showing complexities of implication that may still be connected to whiteness, but go beyond national borders and specific historical periods. The self-scrutinising, guilt-ridden prose of Malan’s memoir speaks more to discourses of complicity than implication, whereas Hope’s text implies the difficulties in finding common ground on which to examine the past. Malan’s Simon and Hope’s Theo come to function as mirrors of complex implication in which the two writers see reflections of themselves.

Msimang’s memoir emphasises the economic aspect of implication, which is not offered as a critique of income gaps more globally but entrenched in South Africa specifically, with its histories of white madams and black domestic workers. This history, too, becomes a reflection for the writer. Dawjee’s perspective goes beyond explicit acts of implication and addresses invisible structures that continue to keep people in unequal positions. Her essays manifest the wish to stop being a mirror for ‘woke’ whites in which they can see reflections of their well-meaning selves. The categories of victims and perpetrators have thus transformed into implicated subjects, which may be more difficult to define, but the four texts examined here testify to the urgent need to keep exploring these topics in recent autobiographical writing. These texts also show that while there are specific local historical contexts to reckon with, implication in unequal and discriminatory structures transcends national borders. The concept of implication thus needs to be examined locally and globally, in order to reach its full transformational potential.

Lena Englund
University of Eastern Finland, Philosophical Faculty, School of Humanities, Finnish Language and Cultural Research, 80101 Joensuu, Finland. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 R. Malan, My Traitor’s Heart. Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself (London, Vintage, 2015 [1990]).

2 A. Naffis-Sahely, ‘Acts of Treason’, The Nation, 299, 18 (2014), p. 32.

3 Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, p. xv.

4 C. Hope, White Boy Running (London, Atlantic Books, 2018 [1988]).

5 C. Hope, The Café de Move-On Blues: In Search of the New South Africa (London, Atlantic Books, 2019 [2018]).

6 S. Msimang, Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (New York, World Editions, 2017).

7 H.M. Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of a Brown Woman in a White South Africa (Cape Town, Penguin Books, 2018).

8 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, pp. 76–8, 193.

9 For a discussion of complicity and guilt, see for example M. Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002); C. Scott, At the Fault Line: Writing White in South African Literary Journalism (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2018); G. Horrell, ‘White Lies, White Truth: Confession and Childhood in White South African Women’s Narratives’, Scrutiny2, 14, 2 (2009), pp. 59–71; I. Visser, ‘How to Live? Guilt and Goodness in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart’, Research in African Literatures, 39, 3 (2008), pp. 149–63.

10 M. Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 83.

11 See for example the following publication on inequality in South Africa: ‘Inequality Trends in South Africa: A Multidimensional Diagnostic of Inequality’, Statistics South Africa. Available at: http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/Report-03-10-19/Report-03-10-192017.pdf, accessed 30 October 2021.

12 L. Englund, South African Autobiography as Subjective History: Making Concessions to the Past (Cham, Springer Nature, 2021).

13 Visser, ‘How to Live’, p. 150.

14 K. Bloom, Ways of Staying (London, Portobello Books, 2010 [2009]); M. Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (London, Granta Books, 2014); Msimang, Always Another Country.

15 H. Twidle, Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa (Woodbridge, James Currey, 2019), p. 224.

16 Ibid., p. 187.

17 H. Twidle, ‘Experiments with Truth: Narrative Nonfiction in South Africa’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 31, 2 (2019), p. 96.

18 Twidle, Experiments with Truth, p. 4.

19 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 10.

20 Ibid.

21 S.C. Knittel and S. Forchieri, ‘Navigating Implication: An Interview with Michael Rothberg’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 3, 1 (2020), p. 8.

22 D. Posel, ‘Human Complicities’, In J.W. de Gruchy (ed.), The Humanist Imperative in South Africa (Cape Town, Sun Press, 2011), p. 222.

23 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 68.

24 Knittel and Forchieri, ‘Navigating Implication’, p. 15.

25 W. Mbao, ‘Inscribing Whiteness and Staging Belonging in Contemporary Autobiographies and Life-Writing Forms’, English in Africa, 37, 1 (2010), p. 64.

26 Ibid.

27 Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, p. 111.

28 Hope, White Boy Running, p. 261.

29 Ibid.: pp. 261–2.

30 Ibid., p. 262.

31 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 13.

32 Ibid., pp. 13–4.

33 Sanders, Complicities, p. 4.

34 Ibid., p. 5.

35 Ibid., p. 3.

36 J. Murray, ‘“Accused by the Place and Face of the Other”: Negotiations with Complicity in the Work of Antje Krog and Yvonne Vera’, Literator, 30, 3 (2009), p. 3.

37 C. Chauke, Born in Chains: The Diary of an Angry ‘Born-free’ (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2018); L. Malepe, Reclaiming Home: Diary of a Journey Through Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley, She Writes Press, 2018); M. Wa Azania, Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the New South Africa by a Member of the Post-Apartheid Generation (New York, Seven Stories Press, 2018 [2014]).

38 S. Booysen, Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the Time of Zuma (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2015), p. 1.

39 Ibid., p. 4.

40 K. Motlanthe, ‘South Africa’s Complex Party System after the 2016 Local Government Elections’, in H.A. Thuynsma (ed.), Political Parties in South Africa: Do They Undermine or Underpin Democracy? (Pretoria, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2017), p. xv.

41 A. Chatterjee, ‘Measuring Wealth Inequality in South Africa: An Agenda’, Development Southern Africa, 36, 6 (2019), p. 842.

42 Motlanthe, ‘South Africa’s Complex Party System’, p. xv.

43 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 61.

44 G. Whitlock, ‘Implicated Subjects’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 35, 2 (2020), p. 496.

45 Knittel and Forchieri, ‘Navigating Implication’, p. 11.

46 Sanders, Complicities, p. 4.

47 Knittel and Forchieri, ‘Navigating Implication’, p. 10.

48 Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, p. 506.

49 Hope, The Café de Move-On Blues, p. 303.

50 Ibid., pp. xviii, xiii.

51 Ibid., p. 12.

52 Ibid., p. 20.

53 Ibid., p. 22.

54 Ibid., p. 23.

55 Ibid., p. 268.

56 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 62.

57 Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, p. xvii.

58 Ibid., pp. 212, 219.

59 Ibid., p. 221.

60 Ibid., p. 226.

61 Ibid., pp. 230–8.

62 Ibid., p. 241.

63 Ibid., pp. 250, 254.

64 Ibid., pp. 262, 264.

65 Ibid., pp. 265–6.

66 Ibid. p. 20.

67 Naffis-Sahely, ‘Acts of Treason’, p. 33.

68 Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, p. 503.

69 G. Retief, ‘Heartfelt Horrors: Africa, Racial Difference, and the Quest for Moral Enlightenment in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart’, Conradiana, 36, 3 (2004), p. 234.

70 Msimang, Always Another Country, p. 193.

71 Ibid., pp. 120–3.

72 Ibid., p. 126.

73 Ibid., p. 132.

74 Ibid., p. 133.

75 Ibid., p. 134.

76 Ibid., p. 138.

77 Ibid., p. 139.

78 Ibid., p. 182.

79 Ibid., p. 247.

80 Ibid., p. 251.

81 Ibid., p. 289.

82 Ibid., p. 292.

83 Ibid., pp. 291–2.

84 Ibid., pp, 324–5.

85 Hope, The Café de Move-On Blues, p. 27.

86 Ibid., pp. 73–9.

87 Ibid., p. 102.

88 Ibid., p. 103.

89 Ibid., p. 25.

90 Ibid., p. 104.

91 Ibid., pp. 106–8.

92 Scott, At the Fault Line, p. 121.

93 Hope, The Café de Move-On Blues, p. 119.

94 Ibid., pp. 119–20.

95 Ibid., pp. 119–21.

96 Scott, At the Fault Line, p. 123.

97 B. Klandermans, W. Merel, and M. van Doorn, ‘Redeeming Apartheid’s Legacy: Collective Guilt, Political Ideology, and Compensation’, Political Psychology, 29, 3 (2008), p. 331.

98 Hope, The Café de Move-On Blues, pp. 198, 200.

99 Ibid., p. 202.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., p. 137.

102 Ibid., pp. 203, 286.

103 Ibid., pp. 141, 233.

104 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, pp. 8–9.

105 Ibid., p. 37.

106 Ibid.

107 Chatterjee, ‘Measuring Wealth Inequality’, p. 842.

108 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, pp. 74–5.

109 Ibid., p. 76.

110 Ibid., pp. 190–2; italics in the original.

111 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, pp. 141–51.

112 Ibid., p. 143.

113 Ibid., p. 144. The pencil test was devised during apartheid in order to distinguish between different racial groups. Janell Le Roux and Toks Dele Oyedemi explain that people ‘passed or failed the test based on how easily the pencil came out of the hair’. J. Le Roux and T.D. Oyedemi, ‘Indelible Apartheid: Intergenerational Postcolonial Narratives of Colonial-born Coloured Females about Hair, Race and Identity in South Africa’, Social Identities, 28, 2 (2022), p. 153.

114 Ibid.

115 Msimang, Always Another Country, p. 292.