Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories

14 Pages·2016·0.23 MB·English

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
A P A R T H E I D R E C K O N I N G
Dystopian Futures, Apartheid,
and Postapartheid Allegories
Contemporary Imaginings of Johannesburg
Neville Hoad
In this essay I focus on Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) as national political allegory, in the multiple
ways it reworks versions of South African and more particularly Johannesburg history and social life.
This national political allegory confounds itself at many points — the histories of capitalism and apart-
heid in South Africa have significant transnational determinants and environmental legacies, to name
two of the most obvious factors that move the allegories I find outside the frame of the nation. Genres
of speculative fiction can be useful in rendering visible these overdetermined histories and geographies.
The essay is divided into four sections. The first section speculates on the promises and pitfalls of
allegorical modes of reading this particular novel. The second section contextualizes the novel in rela-
tion to the recent outbursts of xenophobic/Afrophobic violence in South Africa. In the third section, the
novel is analyzed in terms of the long history of cultural representations of Johannesburg, and finally I
consider the novel’s engagement with contemporaneous debates about the term Afropolitan. Throughout
I argue that these four frames invoke a necessity for revivified modes of allegorical reading and writing
in an age of transnationalism through a kind of forensic restoration of extratextual historical figuration
and reference.
Summary, or, A Monkey on Your Back
Those who have not read Beukes’s Zoo City may need a summary. In the recent past, segments of the
global population got “animalled.” In this ontological shift, an animal — a mongoose, a sloth, a mara-
bou stork, a tapir — gets attached to an individual, as a mark of criminality, sin, shame, stigma. It is not
clear how the animals get to be with their specific person, but the animalled emerge as a specific class
of humans, mostly called zoos, in the novel. A zoo is a person with AAF (acquired aposymbiotic familiar-
ism). Should the human harm or attempt to get rid of his/her animal, a mysterious dark force called the
Undertow will destroy the human. In this framework, the novel recounts, in the first person, how Zinzi
Versions of this article were presented at the School of English and
Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and at the Department of
English, University of Exeter. I would like to thank Andrew van der Vlies,
John Bolin and the audiences at those events, as well as Aaron Bady,
whose comments on an earlier draft were most helpful.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 293
Vol. 36, No. 2, 2016 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-3603355 • © 2016 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
294 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 36:2 • 2016
December and her sloth come to leave Johannes- apparently antirealist in their central representa-
burg/Zoo City. She used to be a fashion journalist tional conceits, “attach to life,” often but not al-
before she shot her brother, Thando. Along with ways through shifting and complicated allegories.
the animal, the zoo may acquire a magical gift; As Virginia Woolf writes, “fiction is like a spider’s
Zinzi’s form of magic is the ability to locate lost web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still at-
objects. No longer employable, because of her sta- tached to life at all four corners.”4
tus as a zoo, Zinzi hustles hard, running a small Much more recently, in “The Affective Turn
business finding lost objects and impersonating in Contemporary Literature” (2014), Nancy Arm-
wealthy African refugees in e- mail scams to pay off strong has written:
her debts. She is hired by Odysseus Huron, a lead-
I see such anomalous protagonists as . . . Lauren
ing Johannesburg music producer, to locate Son-
Beukes’s Zinzi December rising to challenge capi-
gweza Radebe.1 She and her twin brother, S’busiso,
talism’s buoyant appropriation of biological evolu-
constitute the duo iJusi, the recent winners of the tion as they confront us with forms of human life
Coca- Cola Starmakerz auditions. After a torturous so innovative as to make it next to impossible for
journey through the underground tunnels of Jo- us to recognize ourselves in them. In view of their
hannesburg, among other travails, Zinzi witnesses international popularity, the absolute singular-
the twins being murdered by Huron’s lackeys in a ity of the protagonists currently being fashioned
indicates nothing short of a sea change in the
bizarre ritual in which Huron attempts to trans-
traditional subject of fiction, thus in what György
fer or “respawn” his animal to S’busiso. The novel
Lukács calls the novel’s biographical form.5
ends with Zinzi deciding to leave for the Congo to
help her boyfriend, Benoît, find his missing wife While I, too, think that Zinzi December is abso-
and children. The action of the novel takes place lutely singular — how many former lifestyle jour-
in 2011, just after the present of its writing. nalists turned private eye with a magical skill,
who cannot shake her companion sloth, can there
Impossible Allegories: Zoo City as Palimpsest be? — I also think Zinzi December can be read as
In a widely influential and widely critiqued 1986 figuring, maybe even embodying, an ongoing cri-
essay, Fredric Jameson argued: “All third- world sis in the production and reproduction of everyday
texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, life in the globalized, postapartheid world of con-
and in a very specific way: they are to be read as temporary South Africa and Johannesburg. Zinzi’s
what I will call national allegories, even when, or biography is potentially and impossibly national
perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms and civic, and we need strong and speculative al-
develop out of predominantly western machiner- legorical modes of reading to get there. Zoo City
ies of representation, such as the novel.”2 The most may give us the paradox of a national allegory for
contentious word in that powerfully generative sen- an era of transnationalism in that the novel alle-
tence is the prescriptive all.3 Nevertheless, I think gorizes, among other things, HIV/AIDS, environ-
the Jamesonian impulse to attach novels to their mental disaster, and South Africa’s relation to the
conditions of production and reception in an era rest of the continent, as well as the country’s politi-
of multinational capitalism, even as periodizing cal past and present.
descriptions have shifted from “Third World” to Beukes’s Zoo City both offers and refuses a
“transnational or globalized,” remains valuable. range of allegorical readings of contemporary life
This impulse may be especially valuable for novels in the place of its setting — Johannesburg. Most
in the genres of speculative fiction, which, while compellingly, the novel has been read as a neolib-
1. Generally, Zoo City has considerable fun with 3. Aijaz Ahmad offered one of the first and even through from a physical distance, taken
names, in this case a pop star named Son- most compelling critiques of Jameson’s theo- as a comrade, was, in his own opinion, my civ-
gweza, with the last name Radebe that echoes retical claim: “So, I said to myself: ‘All? . . . nec- ilizational Other. It was not a good feeling”
the last name of one of South Africa’s greatest essarily?’ It felt odd. Matters got much more (Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric,” 4).
jazz singers, Dolly Rathebe. curious, however. For the farther I read the
4. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 41.
more I realized, with no little chagrin that the
2. Jameson, “Third- World Literature,” 69.
man whom I had for so long, so affectionately, 5. Armstrong, “Affective Turn,” 442.
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Neville Hoad • Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories 295
eral environmental disaster allegory by Henriette They said the animals were the physical mani-
Roos through the lens of ecocriticism: “In the city festation of our sin. Only marginally less awful
that has become known as the ‘City of Gold,’ the than the theory that the animals are zvidhoma
or witches’ familiars, which would qualify us for
financial capital of Africa, widespread ecological
torture and burning in some rural backwaters.
devastation is taking place — to such an extent that
The Adventists’ sermons were torture enough,
a ravaged surface now mirrors the deep excava-
going on and on about the animals being punish-
tions and myriads of mine tunnels underneath. It
ment that we were going to have to carry around,
is a world where horrific secrets are hidden in the
like the guy in Pilgrim’s Progress lugging around
gated enclaves of the rich, while the masses consist- his sack of guilt. Apparently we attracted vermin
ing of refugees, addicts and ‘animalled’ criminals because we were vermin, the lowest of the low.
struggle to survive in the festering slums.”6 Zoo City (51 – 52)10
observes some of the protocols of what Heather
Animality is a trope that signifies more than
Houser has recently termed “ecosickness fiction,”
just a range of religious and environmental dis-
which “shows the conceptual and material dissolu-
courses. As Achille Mbembe has elaborated, at-
tions of the body- environment boundary through
tributions of animality were central to colonial
sickness and thus alters environmental perception
sovereignty and remain prominent in postcolo-
and politics.”7 Anxieties about acid- mine drainage
nial regimes of impunity: “Such unconditionality
are prevalent in the novel and in contemporane-
and impunity can be explained by what long con-
ous newspaper accounts: “But today, after 120 years
stituted the credo of power in the colony. This re-
of mining, the gold is disappearing, hundreds of
quires distinguishing two traditions, each accord-
mine shafts have been abandoned, and Johannes-
ing a central image to an image of the colonized
burg is facing a nightmare of biblical proportions:
that made of the native the prototype of the ani-
a vast tide of poisonous water rising inexorably
mal.”11 Mbembe argues that what he calls a Hege-
toward the foundations of the city itself.”8 Such a
lian tradition produces the native as animal in that
scenario powerfully echoes one of the earliest en-
the native is constituted by a bundle of drives, not
vironmental disaster novels — Richard Jefferies’s
capacities. The native as animal, belonging to the
After London, or, Wild England (1885). While these
sphere of objects, could be utilized and killed with
environmental concerns powerfully underpin
impunity. This version of colonial animality exists
both the milieu and the action of the novel, they
alongside a divergent but related tradition of pro-
are not my focus here.
ducing the native as animal: “In the Bergsonian
Within emerging allegories of disease and
tradition of colonialism, familiarity and domestica-
being, the ontology of this ontological shift is
tion thus became the dominant tropes of servitude.
equally uncertain for much of the novel. There
Through the relation of domestication, the master/
may have been an environmental cause: “Other
mistress leads the beast to an experience such that,
theories postulated that the outbreak of the ani-
at the end of the day, the animal while remaining
mal phenomenon in Afghanistan was a result of
what he she was — that is, something other than a
the fallout of Pakistan’s nuclear tests in the neigh-
human being — nevertheless actually entered into
boring Chagai Hills in 1998.”9 Yet there are many
the world for his/her master/mistress.”12
other possible explanations. Zinzi tells the readers
While it would require some finessing to
about the Neo- Adventists:
produce the central conceit of the novel as a dis-
6. Roos, “ ‘War of the Worlds,’ ” 52. 10. In recent years, a field of inquiry called ani- mark the zoos. For starters, see the various es-
mal humanities has emerged to pose the ques- says in DeMello, Teaching the Animal.
7. Houser, Ecosickness, 3.
tions of human- animal relations across a range
11. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 26.
8. York, “Poisonous Water Rising.” of disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations.
I can imagine a useful animal- humanities take 12. Ibid., 27.
9. Beukes, Zoo City, 62. Hereafter page numbers
on Zoo City, and while the novel broaches the
for this work appear in the text.
question of the species- being of its animals,
its primary interest in the animals is how they
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
296 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 36:2 • 2016
placed colonial allegory of sorts, the animalled in came known, incorrectly, as Patient Zero for what
the novel bear both features of Mbembe’s charac- was then called the Zoo Plague and, later, AAF or
terization. The animalled and their companion Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” (61). Baiyat
animals willy- nilly participate in a complicated set is explicitly compared with “Gaetan Dugas, the
of concept metaphors in imagining the human in Canadian flight attendant alleged to have been at
more generalized colonial and postcolonial con- the centre of the spread of HIV, in the U.S.” (62).13
texts. While there are important national, gender, The acronym form AAF, as well as the first word ac-
and class differences within the grouping of those quired, makes the AIDS analogy almost irresistible.
afflicted with animals, the community of the ani- The database summary denounces these
malled within Zoo City is strongly associated with comparisons. Being animalled is not quite a dis-
the companion animals. Some of the human char- ease or a moral punishment, but the stigma the an-
acters, such as Maltese and Marabou, are referred imalled face in their everyday lives further suggests
to simply by the names of their animals, and the the seduction of thinking about animalledness as
treatment of the animalled by the other inhabit- an allegory for HIV/AIDS, particularly in a South
ants of Zoo City sometimes suggests “animalled- African context. South Africa saw an AIDS denial-
ness” as a strong vector of dehumanization. The ism scandal in the early 2000s and had one of the
relationship of the animals to their humans reads largest populations affected by the pandemic in the
more like Mbembe’s version of the Bergsonian tra- first decade of the twenty- first century.14 Of course,
dition of troping animality in colonial and post- the allegory will break at any number of points:
colonial sovereignty. In key ways, Zoo City simply AAF is not sexually transmitted, and no treatment
literalizes the figurative and tropic versions of ani- or prevention programs appear in the novel. That
mality that have structured a colonial social imagi- said, the Hegelian version of the animal in Mbem-
nary. Animal autonomy is largely unimaginable in be’s argument mentioned earlier finds expression
the world of the novel. in long- standing discursive formations of race and
In contrast to the religious explanations for sex/sexuality, which emerged as powerful factors
animalledness, which the novel both renders ex- in the controversial initial responses of the South
plicit and then debunks, readers are also offered African government to HIV/AIDS. Former South
a pseudoscientific one, presented through an ex- African president Thabo Mbeki made the link be-
cerpt from “Get Real: The Online Documentary tween imputations of animality along the lines of
Database.” The use of the form of an online docu- race and sex/sexuality in the context of the South
mentary database as the means of presenting this African HIV/AIDS pandemic and his own AIDS
pseudoscientific explanation reveals the narrative’s denialism heartbreakingly clear in the inaugural
desire to distance itself from such an explanation Z. K. Matthews Memorial Lecture at the University
and to index the transnational determinants of of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape in 2001:
contemporary South African life. The film in this
And thus does it happen that others who consider
online documentary database is called “The War-
themselves to be our leaders take to the streets
lord and the Penguin: The Untold Story of Dehqan
carrying their placards, to demand that because
Baiyat (2003).” It has a user rating of 7/10, and in we are germ carriers, and human beings of a
the summary of the film and in the comments sec- lower order that cannot subject its passions to rea-
tion, animalledness emerges as something of an son, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to
HIV/AIDS allegory. Baiyat is called “Patient Zero”: save a depraved and diseased people from perish-
“This documentary tracks the life and death of ing from self- inflicted disease.
Convinced that we are but natural- born, pro-
Dehqan Baiyat. Descended from an Iranian clan
miscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world,
that once fought against Genghis Khan, he be-
they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an
13. See also Shilts, And the Band Played On, 147. 14. The literature on South Africa’s HIV/AIDS
pandemic and the AIDS denialism of the Mbeki
presidency is vast and growing. See Gevisser,
Legacy of Liberation, 276 – 97.
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Neville Hoad • Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories 297
inevitable mortal end because of our unconquer- it was thought that HIV- 1 Group M, the strain of
able devotion to the sin of lust.15 HIV that causes the most infections worldwide,
originated in 1930 in Cameroon. Epidemic levels
President Mbeki here characterizes scientists and
of AIDS and HIV- 1 infections started appearing
intellectuals who maintain that HIV causes AIDS
in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa,
as unwitting participants in a history of racism that Democratic Republic of the Congo), around
sees Africans as creatures of appetite, as “human 1960. Findings from the new study, however, sug-
beings of a lower order that cannot subject its pas- gest that the virus most likely started circulating
sions to reason,” “natural- born, promiscuous car- among humans in sub- Saharan Africa sometime
between 1884 and 1924.16
riers of germs” with an “unconquerable devotion
to the sin of lust.” In short, Africans are seen as
The imagined history of animalledness thus
diseased animals who sin, eerily paralleling many
satirically echoes the popular pseudoscientific ac-
of the vectors — disease, sin, animality — that are
counts of the history of HIV/AIDS. The deploy-
used to discriminate against the zoos in Zoo City.
ment of various media forms and genres as forms
The database film summary tells us: “Now,
of information delivery and narrative framing is
it’s believed that cases of the animalled may date
not limited to imaginary online databases. The
back to as early as the mid- 80s, based on anthro-
novel also contains book excerpts with strong
pological reports coming out of New Guinea, Mali
real- world echoes. Chapter 10 of the novel consists
and the Philippines. The earliest recorded case,
entirely of excerpts from “Caged: Animalled behind
uncovered in retrospect, was that of notorious Aus-
Bars. Photography and Interviews by Steve Deacon,
tralian thug, Kevin Warren, who was gunned down
HarperCollins, 2008” (83), in a mild satire of the
by police during an aborted bank heist in Brisbane
liberal benevolence of giving voice to marginalized
with his ‘pet’ wallaby in 1986” (62). This account of
groups, not unlike Stephanie Nolen’s 28: Stories of
animalledness reads not dissimilarly to many cur-
AIDS in Africa or Emma Guest’s Children of AIDS:
rent popular accounts of the history of the HIV/
Africa’s Orphan Crisis. This invocation of certain
AIDS pandemic and appears almost as a parody of
key neoliberal documentary forms reliant on a no-
them. For example, in 2010, the year of the novel’s
tion of testimony both contrasts and anchors the
publication, National Geographic produced the fol-
fantastical elements of the novel. The novel’s em-
lowing paragraph on the origin of AIDS:
brace and refusal of current documentary and tes-
timonial representational conventions confounds
The AIDS pandemic in humans originated at least
three decades earlier than previously thought, readers’ temporal expectations. Much of the novel
and it may have been triggered by rapid urbaniza- reads as futurism/fantasy/science fiction, but in
tion in west- central Africa during the early 20th Zoo City the dystopian future is here; it has already
century, according to an international team of happened and is ongoing.
researchers. A better understanding of the con-
The use of fabricated epi- or intertexts may
ditions that helped fuel the pandemic could be
encourage reading for allegory. Beukes herself has
key in controlling the disease and preventing fu-
described her first novel, Moxyland, as “an allegory
ture outbreaks of other emerging viruses. “Rapid
for a corporate apartheid state.”17 Zoo City is con-
urbanization was the turning point that allowed
siderably more complicated. The doubled tempo-
the pandemic to start,” said Michael Worobey,
an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ari- rality of the novel opens up multiple allegorical
zona, Tucson, and lead author of the study. “We possibilities. The mise- en- scène of Zoo City is dis-
as human beings made some changes that took a tinctly that of the postapartheid present, explicitly
virus that could not exist on its own and turned it in the plethora of dates attached to the e- mails in
into a successful epidemic,” he added. Until now the e- mail scams, the online databases, and other
15. Address by President Thabo Mbeki at the In- 2/06lv04303/07lv04304.htm. For an analysis 17. Sarah Lotz, “Interview with Lauren Beukes,”
augural ZK Matthews Memorial Lecture, Octo- of this speech, see Hoad, African Intimacies, in Beukes, Zoo City, n.p.
ber 12, 2001, Nelson Mandela Centre of Mem- 101 – 2.
ory, www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index
16. Avasthi, “HIV/AIDS Emerged as Early as
.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv04206/05lv0430
1880s.”
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
298 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 36:2 • 2016
metatexts that punctuate the novel. Such forms “No. Wait. I’ll come down. Meet me at Reputa-
themselves were nonexistent in the apartheid era. tion. It’s the hotel bar across the road.”
Similarly, many of the institutions the novel de- “I think they have a policy,” I say, leaving it
hanging.
picts (private security firms and such, one of the
“Oh, Oh right,” he says.
few sectors where it is possible for zoos to find em-
Which is how we end up meeting under the flu-
ployment) and the urban landscape of Johannes-
orescent lights of the local Kauai, attracting the
burg that it describes locate the novel clearly in the
rapt attention of a cluster of well- pierced teens sit-
postapartheid present. For example,
ting around a plastic table loaded down with bile-
green smoothies. (111)
Makhaza’s Place is already vibey at three in the
afternoon. This is a reflection of the lack of rec-
The difficulties that the animalled and the
reational facilities in the area. Although Mak’s
unanimalled have in meeting socially cannot help
popularity in a neighbourhood packed with bars
but echo apartheid- era spatial and social rela-
and churches can be ascribed to two things: the
tions. The eruption of the language of apartheid
Lagos- style chicken, and the view. The bar is sit-
throughout marks a similar kind of haunting. Mar-
uated on the second floor of what used to be a
shopping arcade back when this part of town was abou tells Zinzi of how her stork became legless:
cosmopolitan central with its glitzy hotels and res-
“She had a run in with another animal. She came
taurants and outdoor cafes and malls packed to
off worse. It wasn’t a dogfight, if that’s what you
the skylights with premium luxury goods. Even
are thinking.”
Zoo City had a Former Life. (42)
“I wasn’t. I’m surprised it does not happen
The aside that “Even Zoo City had a Former more often. Herbivores and carnivores all mixed
up together. We should probably segregate.” (73)
Life” satirically rendered apartheid- era Johannes-
burg as a kind of equivalent for what the characters The joke here — and there are many biting
throughout the novel refer to as Former Life, that jokes in Zoo City — is that Maltese is Marabou’s
is, their lives before their animals arrived. Read- friend, so “it wasn’t a dog fight,” and as a meat-
ers are subtly asked to juxtapose a Eurocentric and scavenging bird, a marabou stork is not exactly
consumer-driven version of inner- city Johannes- a herbivore. Zinzi’s deeply ironic and throwaway
burg’s cosmopolitanism — luxury goods and glitzy line that “we should probably segregate” can only
hotels — with an Afropolitan version (more on that resonate painfully in postapartheid South Af-
later) that includes Mak’s Lagos- style chicken. Ironi- rica, where mandatory segregation has ostensibly
cally positioned as features of apartheid- era Johan- been confined to the past, though “I think they
nesburg, “luxury goods and glitzy hotels” have have a policy” marks a continuation in the prac-
persisted into the postapartheid era, as even a cur- tices of segregation and exclusion. If in Zoo City’s
sory visit to Sandton City reveals. The differences Former Life segregation was mandated and en-
between Former Life and what I could half- jokingly forced through the law, in Zoo City’s Current Life
call Current Life, while pivotal to the trajectories of inequality, along with so much else, has become
key characters in the novel, frequently become at- privatized. There are many such invocations of the
tenuated by the continuities in wider social and eco- apartheid past as offering strategies for dealing
nomic inequalities, and practices of exclusion that with the animalled or zoos. The crime writer in
seem a feature of Johannesburg/Zoo City in both the Daily Truth, who occasionally offers glib com-
its former and current lives. mentary on some of the events that the novel docu-
Former Life is not just a site of nostalgia; it ments from Zinzi’s perspective, offers this sugges-
provides difficult continuities. The movement of tion after an armed robbery in Killarney Mall:
the animalled is restricted in public space, for ex- “The tsotsis hit the jewellery store and emptied the
ample, when Zinzi calls her former boss and lover, tills at Checkers before clearing out while mall se-
Giovanni Conti: curity twiddled their thumbs. Okay, maybe under-
standable when witnesses report that the gangster
“Zinzi? Holy Crapola. Where are you?”
“Downstairs. Can I come up?” had a lion with them. Makes me wonder if we do
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Neville Hoad • Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories 299
not need a pass system for zoos after all” (27). This of long duration, that inhabitants of a city like Jo-
invocation of apartheid- era South Africa’s dompas hannesburg struggle to live the relationships of
system, or what was euphemistically called influx kin and stranger, native and foreigner, friend and
control, marks the zoos as potentially the modern- enemy. New and old social imaginaries compete
day equivalent of black South Africans under in making sense of both feelings and rhetorics of
apartheid. belonging and estrangement. At the novel’s con-
The invocation of South Africa’s apartheid clusion, when Zinzi heads for the Congo, some-
past is not limited to references to segregation and thing like what Elspeth Probyn has termed “out-
parallels between that past and the postapartheid side belonging” may emerge. Probyn writes: “As a
present of Zoo City. The name of the narrator of Zoo theoretical term and as a lived reality, I pose the
City, Zinzi December, struck many resonances with term outside belonging against certain categorical
this reader. Zinzi December as a name has both tendencies and the rush to place differences as ab-
auditory and patronymic affiliations with Dulcie solute.”19 The ending of the novel marks either the
September, a South African political activist shot necessity of Zinzi leaving Zoo City or an acknowl-
five times in the back outside the African National edgment that Zoo City may be everywhere. Despite
Congress’s offices in Paris, while she was opening intracommunal tensions among the zoos, they can
the office after collecting the mail on March 29, be seen to represent something like “outside(r) be-
1988.18 The present of Johannesburg/Zoo City longing,” and in Zinzi’s final move she moves even
represented in Zoo City is haunted by so many pasts. further outside national belonging.20
In May 2008, riots broke out in Alexandra,
Xenophobia a densely populated neighborhood of some four
hundred thousand people adjacent to some of the
On the lips of those who had gathered
wealthiest suburbs of Johannesburg. Alexandra
to loot and kill were freedom songs
has a complicated history, but as a black freehold
composed during the struggle against
Apartheid. “township,” it was one of the few places within the
— Jonny Steinberg, “South Africa’s metropolitan area of Johannesburg where black
Xenophobic Eruption” South Africans could own property both prior to
and during the apartheid era.21 The 2008 violence
While features of life under the political dispensa-
quickly spread to periurban settlements around
tion of apartheid persist in both Zoo City and con-
Johannesburg and to the inner city itself, then
temporary South Africa, and it is tempting to read
to Durban and Cape Town. The violence was di-
the novel, at least partially, as an apartheid allegory
rected at refugees and immigrants from elsewhere
unevenly projected into a postapartheid present,
in the continent: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans,
the strongest political allegory that the novel can
Congolese, Somalis. While the causes and the
be argued to work through is the recent and con-
consequences of the riots remain contested, many
tinuing outbursts of violence directed against refu-
commentators noted that these riots marked the
gees and immigrants from other countries in Af-
first instances of mass violence since the first dem-
rica. While the animalled come from everywhere,
ocratic elections of 1994 and, as such, may mark
the depiction of Zinzi’s Congolese boyfriend, Ben-
the end of an era of constitutional triumphalism
oît, almost seems to require such a reading.
and reconciliation.22
It may not be an exaggeration to claim that
Speaking of Benoît, Zinzi’s Congolese boy-
contemporary urban life in South Africa can be
friend, who appears in the novel as something like
characterized as exhibiting a crisis in hospitality
18. Newman, “Who Is Dulcie September?” ality” in Zoo City’s struggles to imagine the ex- Law School Review draft paper, accessed March
perience of home. 1, 2015, www.nylslawreview.com/wp- content
19. Probyn, Outside Belongings, 9.
/uploads/sites/16/2014/11/Raboshakga- 2.pdf.
21. For a lucid history of land tenure in Alexan-
20. See Bethlehem, “Scratching the Surface,”
dra, see Ngawko Raboshakga, “Housing in Al- 22. Steinberg, “South Africa’s Xenophobic
for a powerful account of how “metonymies
exandra: Transforming the Legacy of Decades Eruption.”
of contagion shift into metonymies of convivi-
of an Oppressive Housing Scheme,” New York
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
300 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 36:2 • 2016
a typical migrant fleeing the violence of his war- tender voice dominates the novel, “feet like that,
torn country for a distinctly ironically rendered they tell a story” too.
“rainbow nation,” Beukes commented:
The full story only came out later, and then only
It was inspired by the shame and horror of the in snapshots, images caught in a strobe. The last
xenophobic attacks in 2008, my visit to the Central time he saw his family, they were running into
Methodist Church (which had all the ravages the forest, like ghosts between the trees. Then
of a refugee camp trapped in a building) and the FDLR beat him to the ground with their
interviews I did with Rwandan refugees for an rifle butts, poured paraffin over him and set him
Italian documentary I was involved in a few years alight.
ago. That was over five years ago. He’d sent mes-
sages to his extended family, friends, aid organi-
The tensions around refugees in South Af-
zations, refugee camps, scoured the community
rica are nowhere near resolved and we have al-
websites, the cryptic refugee Facebook groups
ready seen outbreaks of new violence, albeit on a
that use nicknames and birth orders and job de-
smaller scale. It is horrific that people fleeing war
scriptions as clues — never any photographs of
and rape and famine and genocide, and giving
faces — to help families find each other without
up everything they know, should be treated this
cueing in their persecutors. No dice. His wife and
way.23
his three little children had vanished. Presumed
dead. Lost without a trace. (56)
It may be that the author herself wants this par-
ticular political allegory to acquire interpretive au- Can “the full story” ever come out? Ben-
thority over the many other possible allegories this oît’s story emerges in “snapshots, images caught
essay has suggested. The opening of the novel con- in a strobe”; its full horror is not really tellable,
firms the centrality of the im/migrant experience not even by his feet. Readers feel the limits of
as an informing historical context for the novel: the testimonial or documentary realism in the
face of trauma that can be literally unspeakable.
Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine
dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and Even in the imagining of remedy, there must be
sears through my window. My own personal bat recourse to the circuitous and coded: “never any
signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get photographs of faces,” instead the “cryptic refugee
curtains. Facebook” pages. The above passage is indeed one
Shielding my eyes — morning has broken and of the most explicitly testimonial moments in the
there’s no picking up the pieces — I yank back
novel, and we still see the impossibility of realism.
the sheet and peel out of bed. Benoît does not
I belabor this point, because, ironically, it might
as much stir, with only his calloused feet sticking
only be through elaborate figural conceits like ani-
out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood.
malledness, sliding into allegory, that the trauma
Feet like that, they tell a story. They say he walked
of history can be felt, its self- shattering impossibil-
all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose
strapped to his chest. (1) ity engaged and rendered somewhat bearable.
Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 is in
The novel’s opening two paragraphs thus begin
many ways an apt companion piece to Zoo City in
with a mention of the most iconic aspects of Johan-
the sense that it uses the conventions of specula-
nesburg, the skyline and the mine dumps, and end
tive fiction along the human/animal divide to al-
with the feet of a Congolese refugee. The meta-
legorize aspects of South African everyday life and
phor of driftwood is not simply descriptive but tells
their deep historical determinants.24 The aliens,
us quickly about Benoît’s arrival in Johannesburg.
called “prawns” in the film, respond to the long
While Zinzi’s arch, world- weary and sometimes
histories of migrancy to Johannesburg, in both the
23. Sarah Lotz, “Interview with Lauren Beukes,” 24. For a comparative analysis of Zoo City and Research, University of the Witwatersrand,
in Beukes, Zoo City, n.p. District 9, see Timothy Wright, “Mutant City: wiser.wits.ac.za/event/mutant- city- partial
On Partial Transformations in Three Johan- - transformations- three-j ohannesburg-n arratives.
nesburg Narratives,” seminar talk, May 21,
2015, Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Neville Hoad • Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories 301
apartheid and postapartheid eras, but in the film’s In the edgy city of Johannesburg, any claim of
scandalous depiction of Nigerians, it participates in rights or even of new perspectives comes up
a climate of xenophobia rather than critiquing it.25 against a history of refusal of such claims under
the aegis of both official policy and customary
behavior during segregation and apartheid, and
Joburg Sis or Civic Allegory
against the hard facts of violent exclusion as well
Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic as habitual marginalization of unwanted others
process. Every time you think it’s going in the present, when more than 17 percent of
to get moving and take you somewhere, the population has no visible income in the city
you hit another jam. There used to be that contributes 17 percent of the entire country’s
shortcuts you could take through the GDP (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007, 198) — facts that
suburbs, but they have closed them off, suggest anything other than enchantment.27
illegally: gated communities fortified like
In its depiction of the Herbert Baker house
privatised citadels. Not so much keeping
where Odi Huron lives and dies, Zoo City provides
the world out as keeping the festering
middle- class paranoia in. an encapsulating spatial crystallization, meta-
— Lauren Beukes, Zoo City phor, parable, allegory (the right term eludes me)
of the city. Herbert Baker was arguably the most
As the title suggests, it is Johannesburg itself, in
significant designer of public architecture in the
the incoherence of that phrase, that is the central
British Empire of the early twentieth century. He
protagonist of the novel. The cityscape of Zoo City
designed, among other edifices, the Union Build-
is recognizably Johannesburg in its full plenitude
ings in Pretoria, Parliament House in Delhi, State
of dystopian juxtapositions. Zinzi moves between
House in Mombasa, and several houses on the
her residence in Hillbrow through the wealthy
Parktown and Westcliff Ridges in Johannesburg.
white northern suburbs, and while the block of
Odi — short for Odysseus — lives in one. A leading
flats she lives in has the satirical name Elysium
music producer, he is also a zoo, and his animal
Heights, the more fantastical elements of the novel
is a huge and voracious white crocodile. Croco-
are grounded by real and familiar place names,
diles are indigenous to Africa and are symbolically
such as Killarney and Rosebank, and extant places
redolent, but the size and the whiteness of this
and venues, like the Rand Club.
crocodile recall the last National Party president
Zoo City thus participates in a long and var-
of South Africa before F. W. de Klerk: P. W. Botha,
ied representational history of the city, recently
whose nickname was Die Groot Krokodil — the big
and brilliantly assembled and analyzed by Loren
Crocodile — was a diehard defender of apartheid
Kruger. Johburg, Jobai, Johazardburg, Soul City,
and opponent of the democratic transition.28 A
Egoli — the nicknames, usually more affectionate
secret underground lake lurks under the house
than phobic, hint at the sustainedly antinomian
connected with the network of disused mining
figurations of the city. Alan Paton, a notable hater
tunnels where the acid mining drainage is rising
of the city, noted that “all roads lead to Johannes-
and threatening to destroy the city. Here is how
burg.”26 Phaswane Mpe in his Welcome to Our Hill-
Mandlakazi Mabuso, intrepid crime writer for the
brow rendered the city as hospitable and terrifying,
Daily Truth, reports on the novel’s denouement:
a place endlessly extending its welcome and betray-
ing that embrace. The title of Mark Gevisser’s 2014 The Daily Truth 30 March 2011
memoir, Lost and Found in Johannesburg, echoes
POLICE FILE
that constitutive ambivalence. The list of literary
Crime watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso
representations that invoke such polarities is too
long, but Kruger offers a useful summation: The day the music died
25. The distinctly derogatory representations of about what happens when aliens land for the 26. Paton, Cry, 52.
Nigerians in the film led to the film’s banning first time in Lagos that allegorizes the great
27. Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 7.
in Nigeria, but they more happily led Nnedi drama of that other defining first encoun-
Okorafor to write Lagoon, a wonderful novel ter — colonialism and its devastating legacies. 28. See Oliver, “Few Tears.”
Published by Duke University Press
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
302 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 36:2 • 2016
They said the music industry had teeth — but who historical complicity with apartheid represented by
knew they meant literally! Legendary music pro- the white crocodile to S’busiso. S’busiso may rep-
ducer got himself chowed last night by his secret resent the fortunate few black South Africans who
animal, a moerse white Crocodile after slaughter-
have prospered economically in the postapartheid
ing twin teen pop sensation in a gruesome muti
era. The price for this burden/inheritance is the
murder! Turns out the man behind some of the
murder of his twin sister. The allegories will never
biggest talent in this country was also a big time
map entirely, but strictly realist modes of reading
tsotsi, running drugs, killing homeless zoos for
are clearly not sufficient for making sense of re-
muti, feeding others to his Crocodile and cultivat-
ing talent only so he could slice them open! Some spawning a white crocodile onto a young pop star
20 bodies so far have been recovered from a se- in an underground lair in a wealthy Johannesburg
cret underground lake. . . . Police have seized all suburb. What alternatives to such impossible dia-
assets, but I hear there is a moerse sum of money lectics of belonging and estrangement, foreigner
missing from his account. Just goes to show you
and kin, victim and victimizer may the novel
never know who’s a zoo. (305)
present?
Huron confirms that zoos can be victimizers
as well as victims, but as a palimpsestic figure of Afropolitanism
historical allegories of multiple temporalities, he While Afropolitan is not a word that Zoo City en-
embodies many of the contradictions of Johan- gages, in certain key ways Zinzi December em-
nesburg as Zoo City. The place where he com- blematizes, if not quite embodies, some of the key
mits murder is a house built by an architect of the debates around the term.31 Arguably, the term was
British Empire. His house is connected to the en- first coined by Taiye Selasi in the 2005 article “Bye-
vironmental devastation facing the city. His “ani- Bye Babar.” Selasi offers the following provisional
mal” references one of the staunchest defenders definition/description: “We are Afropolitans: not
of the old apartheid regime. His victims include citizens, but Africans of the world.” While Selasi’s
celebrated youthful black South African pop stars, version of the Afropolitan is celebratory and is ac-
who came to Johannesburg in search of fame and knowledged as self- congratulatory, Beukes’s novel
fortune. There is little chance of restitution be- attempts to imagine an insurgent Afropolitan-
cause a moerse (South African slang for very big or ism that does not need London nightclubs to get
numerous) sum of money is already missing. The started and must risk an Afropessimism in its de-
mythological reference of his first name perhaps pictions of Africans suffering a lack rather than a
indicates that he, too, was never quite at home in surfeit of citizenship options.
Zoo City. Odi Huron’s place of abode and his ani- The term Afropolitan had a moment in often
mal concretize a kind of “savage cosmopolitanism” boosterist versions of “Johannesburg: A World-
that underwrites the imperial history of places like class African City,” a notorious advertising cam-
Johannesburg.29 Huron attempts to transfer or re- paign, and it occurs across a range of genres of
spawn his crocodile to S’busiso, by forcing him to writing and media venues and spaces. In the run-
murder his twin sister in a scene that almost begs up to the 2010 World Cup, it became a term used
to be read as national allegory. The following al- to promote tourism in the city and to help recon-
legorical speculations are possible: Huron repre- figure the dystopian branding of the violent and
sents Anglo South African cultural capital — Her- crime- ridden city in what loosely could be called
bert Baker was, after all, a kind of “court architect” the global imagination.32 There is an Afropolitan
for Cecil Rhodes.30 Huron wishes to transfer his Magazine based in Johannesburg; the term ap-
29. “Savagely cosmopolitan” is how Jean Co- 30. Cecil John Rhodes was the most important 31. For a pithy, cogent, and lucid discussion of
maroff describes the determinants of South British imperialist in Southern Africa, founder these debates, see Bady, “Afropolitan.”
Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic: “The pandemic is of the colony of Rhodesia, and prime minster
32. Flak, “Joburg’s Gold Rush Vibe.”
savagely cosmopolitan, making blatant the ex- of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.
istence of dynamic, translocal intimacies across
received lines of segregation, difference, and
propriety” (Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life,” 198).
Published by Duke University Press