Haunting the social: conversing with ghosts in Redi Tlhabi's Endings and Beginnings

Abstract

The article discusses the recently published memoir of South African radio celebrity Redi Tlhabi, Endings and Beginnings (2012), which is a bestseller in South Africa and recipient of the prestigious Alan Paton non-fiction award for 2013. Following Tlhabi's haunting by the ghosts of her murdered father and her unlikely childhood friend, the Sowetan gangster Mabegzo, the article attempts to trace the meanings of ghostliness in the South African social, and the way in which these meanings are mapped onto township terrains of both hopelessness and possibility. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's seminal exposition in Specters of Marx, it argues that the text's insistence on bringing closure to Mabegzo's narrative denies the spectre its efficacy as a signifier for unease. This uneasiness, it maintains, necessarily jostles and disturbs the certainties of the present.

Keywords:

• Soweto
• Redi Tlhabi
• spectres

Acknowledgements

My thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments.

Notes

1 District Six was established in the late 1800s as a hybrid community of freed slaves, artisans, and merchants. As Deborah Hart writes, it was an area infamous for its poverty and gangsterism, famous for its lively, heterogeneous communalism. Under the 1950 Group Areas Act, it was claimed for white settlement in 1966, initiating a long and contested process of forced removal and resettlement. See Hart (1988).

2 Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front. The incumbent ruling party in Zimbabwe, established during the liberation struggle in the 1970s and in power since 1980.

3 Local slang for ‘township’.

4 Shebeens are informal drinking areas that form the crux of the townships’ social and cultural life. In customary African society, gender labour divisions had accorded women the responsibility of beer brewing. This traditional role of brewing and distribution was usurped by state run brewing monopolies and beer halls from 1928 until the early sixties. The Liquor Act of 1928 prohibited any person from supplying or delivering ‘European Liquor’ to any African and forbade Africans from obtaining or possessing liquor. The ‘traditional’ sorghum beer could only be bought from the municipal beer halls. See Mager (1999).

5 The military wing of the African National Congress, also known as MK.

6 In February of 2014, South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper published an article stating that the number of protestors killed by police has risen substantially between 2004 and 2014 (Grant 2014). Thanks also to Hedley Twidle for alerting me to the renaming of footbridges traversing Cape Town's Nelson Mandela Boulevard. Activists’ suggestions that the bridges be named to mark the Marikana massacre and the death of Andries Tatane have been removed from the City Council's website. https://www.capetown.gov.za/en/PublicParticipation/Pages/ProposalnamesevenfootbridgesNelsonMandelaBoulevard.aspx

7 Niq Mhlongo's most recent novel Way Back Home (2013), details the haunting of struggle veteran and present-day fat cat, Kimathi Tito, by the ghost of a female comrade he raped and murdered in an Angolan MK camp during the late 1980s. Hani would be implicated in, but deny, involvement in the torture and murder of ANC dissidents in similar camps in Angola in 1983–1984. In this way, the novel invites us to read Hani's ‘ghost’ as a compromised and shadowy figure.