Abstract
Social analysis is part and parcel of South African crime fiction,1 a genre which has been flourishing since the end of apartheid. Interrogating the country’s high levels of gender-based violence, various South African crime writers explore gender issues in their fiction.2 Critically-acclaimed crime writers Jassy Mackenzie, Angela Makholwa, and Mike Nicol stand out in this field through their creations of instantly memorable female serial killers as protagonists. In the interviews that follow, the three writers discuss the rationales behind their choice of a traditionally masculine role for their female protagonists, how they navigated through ensuing ethical problems and their characters’ potential for uncomfortable reader identification, but also virulent issues of gender in contemporary South African society. They argue that since assertions of power have so long been connected to assertions of masculinity, performing the male role of the killer is a way for their female figures to move to a place of power. Thus, their protagonists’ perpetrating agency enables them to be the equals — if not superiors — of the men they interact with.3 Moreover, it empowers them to act as renegades who contest the dominant power and who are generally in control in an environment which is rife with inequality and where women more often than not are the victims of crime. In this way, besides being a means to explore female perpetrating agency, the figure of the female killer also has the potential to transform the way readers of crime fiction view women.4
Keywords
Why crime fiction? Why now? Is the crime novel the new political novel? These are some of the most prominent questions which have been prompted by the unprecedented “explosion of crime fiction” (Warnes, 2012: 981) in South Africa following the onset of democracy. By way of contextualizing the interviews to follow, let me briefly map out the key critical explorations into the work that crime fiction is doing in post-apartheid South Africa. While South African crime fiction 5 draws from European and American genre traditions originating in both the nineteenth-century detective novel and the twentieth-century hard-boiled and noir thriller, it has — hand in hand with genre transformations across the globe — appropriated these traditions. 6 The notion of “postcolonial ‘genre-bending’”, which entails social detection, an investigation into power and authority, and a questioning of the social order, often “through alternative notions of justice” (Matzke and Mühleisen, 2006: 5), is a feature that it particularly shares with other crime fiction that has emerged in colonial and postcolonial contexts around the world. 7 In the New South Africa trying to overcome the burden of past crimes, the local crime fiction has further been attributed the capacity to rewrite South African subjectivities and to contribute to social renewal across established social and spatial boundaries (Binder, 2013, Drawe, 2013; Hunter, 2009; Martin and Murray, 2014; Primorac, 2011).
In relation to the present high levels of real, violent crime in South Africa and the concomitant pervasive discourse about it, 8 crime fiction occupies a more complicated place. 9 On the one hand, crime fiction partakes in the country’s larger discourses about crime, which encompass dinner-table conversations, news reports, television series, crime films, 10 as well as investigative journalism and true-crime stories. 11 Jean and John Comaroff argue that “there seems to be more to the public obsession with criminality and disorder than the mere fact of its reality. South Africans of all stripes are also captivated by images of crime and policing” (2004: 801). In a society that is threatened by real crime, while faced with an unreliable criminal justice system, crime fiction is argued to have a restorative function, “iterating an order that remains distinctly fragile” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006: 20). 12 In this vein, it reproduces the larger discourse about crime, the “criminal obsessions”, which Jean and John Comaroff read as an “effort to produce social order” (2004: 822). On the other hand, crime fiction can serve to critique discourses about crime. In her analysis of truth commission thrillers, Shameem Black (2011) demonstrates how crime fiction reveals the limits of the national narrative of disclosure and healing in its attempt to overcome the atrocities of apartheid. Leon de Kock puts forth another example of the critical stance crime fiction can take. He elucidates how it exposes the new social and moral economy of the country in which “the borderlines of legitimate and illegitimate, now far less clear or identifiable, are under erasure” (2015: 36). Crime fiction can occupy yet another place in relation to the larger crime discourse; it can itself be a discourse of resistance, an active coping strategy. Matthew Christensen demonstrates how it can teach us how to behave and survive in a world governed by neo-liberal rationales. Crime fiction “mediate[s] the chasm between popular and official narratives of collective justice in moments of acute transformation in the relationship between the individual and the state” (2015: 315). What is more, by creating fictional characters who refuse to give in to the threat and terror created by the discourse about crime, who refuse to reproduce the awareness of powerlessness and resolve to act against all the odds, such crime fiction offers coping strategies as Marla Harris notes (2013: 124). This is crucially important, especially in a society traumatized by such high levels of gender violence, as becomes evident from the following interviews.
Many South African crime writers feature strong female characters, usually in the role of the female detective. What distinguishes Jassy Mackenzie, Angela Makholwa and Mike Nicol are their memorable female killers. Their exploration of gender issues and female resistance through their female avengers is unique in South Africa. Theirs is not primarily an investigation into female detective agency, but into female perpetrator agency. 13 They explore alternative notions of justice for women and offer diverse ideas of agency and power for women. For Jassy Mackenzie’s and Mike Nicol’s heroines this entails being in control and refusing ideas of dependence. Angela Makholwa’s Black Widows, on the other hand, tap a resource common amongst black women: the interdependence between women. Their sisterhood procures female empowerment beyond the individual and beyond the current generation.
Despite its strong associations with masculinity, even misogyny, crime fiction the world over, since the 1970s, has become a prime site for investigations into female agency (Walton and Jones, 1999: 94) and into the “dynamics of power” (Plain, 2001: 8). 14 As Tiina Mäntymäki points out, a move away from female detective agency to that of “morally and socially deviant women is particularly revealing regarding the construction of gender and power [b]ecause deviance always makes visible the norm” (2012: 199). Challenging stereotypical notions of both femininity and masculinity, women murderers “do” gender against the grain (Mäntymäki, 2013: 444). Jassy Mackenzie’s white, middle-class serial protagonist Jade de Jong is both a private investigator and a killer with close ties to the criminal world. In her novel Black Widow Society (2013), Angela Makholwa features a secret collective of wealthy murdering women of various racial backgrounds. The members of the Black Widow Society empower women by eliminating their unfaithful and/or violent husbands and by securing their insurance money. The affluent Sheemina February, a woman of racially mixed origins, is the deadly avenger pervading Mike Nicol’s Revenge Trilogy. Moulded on the traditional femme fatale, 15 but at the same time significantly modified, she is a ruthless killer intent on bringing about the downfall of the man who once abused her in the anti-apartheid struggle camps.
The interviews with the three crime writers were conducted separately as part of my research on female figures in South African crime fiction. During my stay in South Africa, I spoke to all three authors in person. I interviewed Jassy Mackenzie in Johannesburg on 11 April 2014, Angela Makholwa in Franschhoek on 17 May 2014, and Mike Nicol in Cape Town on 6 June 2014. Despite the importance of race in a South African context, my interview questions focus on gender, rather than race. I made this choice based on the following considerations. In South Africa, as elsewhere, discourses on race and discourses on gender have sometimes competed. 16 For example, questions of gender violence have often been discussed in racial terms in South Africa, as both Helen Moffett and Lucy Graham demonstrate. While this has not only furthered racism, it has also prevented effective responses to violence against women (Moffett, 2008; Graham, 2012). Desiree Lewis discusses another example. She shows that black South African women autobiographers have chosen to remain silent about domestic violence so as not to jeopardize racial unity (1999: 42−3). Thus, my focus on gender in the interviews is a means to avoid the trap of blurring what is at stake: renegotiating power between men and women, not between people of different racial origins. Even though the objective here is gender equality, it must not be denied that a woman’s skin colour has a bearing on her battle for it. Precisely how this happens, is, I believe, best worked out in a textual analysis, not in an interview. In a country where race is such a sensitive issue, in my experience, direct questions — understandably — yield politically correct answers. The indirect path via the text allows both author and reader much more leeway in exploring the ways race intersects with gender and how this affects women’s lives in South Africa. Textual analysis has the further advantage that racial concerns can be considered from very specific subject positions, beyond the categories created by apartheid. It is in my larger research project on a variety of female figures in South African crime fiction that I will conduct such a textual analysis and probe racial questions. The excerpts of the interviews that follow are arranged as a conversation between the three writers which did not take place as such. This technique allows for a dialogue between the writers’ accounts and it serves the purpose of highlighting similarities and differences in the three writers’ crime fiction projects.
Jassy Mackenzie was born in Zimbabwe and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. A journalist, an editor, and an internationally successful writer, she lives and works in Johannesburg. She has written two short stories and eight novels: the standalone crime novel My Brother’s Keeper (2009), the Jade de Jong crime series Random Violence (2008a), Stolen Lives (2008b), Worst Case (2011), and Pale Horses (2012), as well as the three erotic romances Folly (2013), Switch (2014b), and Drowning (2014a). Journalist, PR consultant, and much acclaimed writer Angela Makholwa likewise lives and works in Johannesburg. Her work includes short stories and three novels: the two crime novels Red Ink (2007) and Black Widow Society (2013), in addition to a chick-lit novel The 30th Candle (2009). Cape Town born and bred poet, journalist, creative writing teacher, and novelist Mike Nicol is a key figure in South African crime writing who turned to the genre quite late in his career. Well known for writing in the mode of magic realism, at the onset of the new millennium he felt that a change was necessary in South African writing, and that stories needed to be told differently (Breysse, 2004: 3), so he turned to crime fiction. His first crime novel Out to Score (2006), co-authored with Joanne Hichens, is followed by his so-called Revenge Trilogy (Payback, 2008, 17 Killer Country, 2010 and Black Heart, 2011), and by Of Cops and Robbers (2013) and Power Play (2015a). Mike Nicol has written numerous works of non-fiction. 18 Before turning to crime fiction he had published two collections of poetry and four novels. 19 He has had writer-in-residence positions at the University of Cape Town, the University of Essen (Germany), and in Berlin (Germany). In addition to being a prolific, internationally acclaimed writer, Mike Nicol has been promoting and documenting South African crime fiction in his blog Crime Beat, 20 set up in 2007.
Let me begin by asking you about your female protagonists. What made you choose to write female killers and thus give them a conventionally masculine role? What do these murdering women stand for?
When I developed Jade, I wanted to make her into somebody different and I wanted to make her a renegade. And in creating her I realized that if she is taking the idea of being independent and going against society to its limits, she has to be a killer. If she shies away from killing, she cannot live with integrity by her idea of justice. For all her failings, Jade has a lot of integrity. It is what makes her so determined to solve the cases, but her personal integrity also just does not allow her to see a bad deed going unpunished. She prefers to jump in and sort that out. And I think that she also has conflicts within herself, especially having a police-detective father who gave her a very moral upbringing — and yet the genes from her mother kind of call her towards the dark side. And that’s really how everybody in South Africa lives. We all complain about crime here, but there is hardly a citizen who does not commit crime, whether it is exceeding the speed limit or just slipping a metro cop R200 when you get stopped. So I guess that’s in all of us, the ability to want things to be better but at the same time wanting to commit crime. Funnily enough, though, I found that certain readers accept Jade being a killer far less readily than they would accept a male being a killer. Because of that they perceive my books as being more violent than books with a male hero. I think this is quite interesting and says something about women’s role in society. People are uncomfortable with the idea that a woman can go out and take the law into her own hands and kill, whereas for a man to do it, it seems more acceptable.
I created the Black Widows as a satirical way of commenting on situations of domestic violence. I really am appalled by the level of domestic abuse especially in South Africa and the fact that this is such a hidden issue. We don’t talk about it, especially when it happens in the higher echelons of society. For instance this Oscar Pistorius case 21 is a story of domestic abuse on many levels. You look at the communication between them [Oscar and Reeva] and if you’ve had experience with a domestic abuser, you can see that this is classic abuser behaviour. 22 These are the things we don’t talk about, but I felt it needs to be talked about. Those men need to be sorted out because domestic violence is entrapment. It is a very paralysing form of entrapment and a lot of women stay in those relationships because they are made to feel that there is no way out. The message I am sending is not empowering in the sense that it is about what should be done. Rather, the message is: when you do this to women, this is how desperate you make them. It could lead them to do something this ridiculous. You drive them to these levels and this is not how women are; this is not who women are. So my work takes all the real cases of women in South Africa who snap, 23 and puts them in a context that tries to explain in a tongue-in-cheek way how oppressive such relationships are.
You are asking me what made me choose to write Sheemina February? She was a character that came quite late into Payback, the first novel in the Revenge Trilogy. Aesthetically she was an experiment for me and I found so much freedom in writing her character. To a degree, there was a question mark over whether I was creating her or she was creating herself. And I know that sounds weird, but during much of the writing of her part that’s how it felt. She was completely different from anyone I had ever written before. Here one is creating a character that is female to start with, and is therefore supposed to have the attributes of being beautiful, attractive. Yet she has an agenda, which includes killing people and being quite nasty. There was a huge freedom in knowing that I could write a character that could embody both these qualities. It was an interesting time. As a female killer, Sheemina is subversive. Things have to be subverted before the next step can happen, before women can do things the way they think they should be done. In my view, there has to be subversion of the old order; to me that is what Sheemina is doing. We have not yet got to a position where women have been given complete agency to go out and rule the world. This is largely because the models from the past perpetuate and changing those models takes a long time. What I was trying to do with Sheemina was to show that the old order needed to be destroyed, but try as you may, at the moment you are still coming up against it. Whether that order is represented by Sheemina’s adversary Mace Bishop or Mart Velaze, the government spy, it is still the old order. I wanted to take the convention of the femme fatale and twist it. I didn’t want Sheemina to be in a position where she was there by virtue of being the attractive female. Her power had to not derive from her looks, but from somewhere else. She seemed to me such a self-standing character that I didn’t want her to be emotionally linked to anybody. She knew exactly who she was and what she wanted without needing a romantic attachment. She is also an interesting figure in terms of reader reaction. I wanted the empathy or love the reader has for her to be prickly. So it was interesting to see that readers were strongly behind her, even though they felt it was an uncomfortable position to be in. That’s exactly what I want readers to think, “Yes, she is battling against it, but my God, she is an awful character”. I can see similarities with Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong. I like her and I like the fact that she picks up guns and blows people away. Still, Sheemina is in a different league and playing a different political game. I don’t think that political game is as clear-cut as picking up the gun and blowing away the baddy, because we don’t know who the baddies are. As far as I am concerned, everybody is both: the goody and the baddy simultaneously. So when Sheemina died in the end, there was a great deal of relief that I picked up from readers, but it was an ambiguous relief, it was tinged, because they liked her and were sorry that it ended. For a long time I found it was a toss-up as to whether Sheemina or Mace would be the one to die.
Writing a murderer, especially a murderess, you had to deal with ethical questions. Many of your female perpetrators actually get away with killing.
Jade is uncomfortable with her killer side. She does feel remorse and regret; sometimes even before she kills and sometimes afterwards. She is not a psychopathic person with no conscience. I think her being a female heightens this. But her discomfort doesn’t stop her from doing what she believes to be right either. Nor does it prevent her from doing what she needs to do in certain circumstances to save her life, because obviously she does tend to get rather embroiled with baddies. Ultimately, her tragic flaw is that she has the ability within her to kill — and that ability you can almost call a talent. The problem with talents is that people often end up using them. Jade gets away with killing; I can never allow her to be caught. Because of that there is an unspoken contract with the reader that she can’t kill good guys. If she killed good guys, she would deserve to go to prison, and prison is not a place I can put her because it would slow the stories down. Additionally, people wouldn’t be happy to take on a private investigator who had been languishing in jail, so she would run out of business. But if she sticks to killing the bad guys, I keep her out of jail; we have that unspoken agreement.
Writing female murderers was a big moral question I had to resolve towards the end of Black Widow Society. The moral issue is this: if a group like the Black Widow Society exists for what they believe is a strong moral purpose, namely to right the wrong women experience at the hands of their husbands, then what right do they have to then kill these husbands? At first I thought I was going to kill all of the ladies and also their hired hitman Mzwakhe, because I somehow believe in turning the other cheek, especially when it comes to murder. But then I thought no, I just love Tallulah, the matriarch of the Black Widow Society, too much. So I killed some Black Widows and let Tallulah survive. The reason I love her is she really does things, she helps people and has a strong sense of service because she has a moral purpose. Edna is the same. So it was important for me in the end to at least preserve that and give them a bit of a happy ending. And after all, ending up in a fishing village in Malawi is punishment enough [laughs]. Of course, the school for girls the Black Widows wanted to set up is important too. Through educating girls, they want to create women who are strong. These women won’t allow themselves to get into such situations in the first place whereby they marry someone because they think he is going to take them somewhere in life. Instead, they are going to find their own path and own their own destiny. I liked the strongly feminist agenda behind their school project, which is why I had to let Tallulah at least realize the dream.
The ending of the Revenge Trilogy was very difficult. The issue was that I couldn’t have Mace kill Sheemina because that would have been the obvious end. And there were other reasons why I didn’t want that to happen. Besides the femme fatale issue was the fact that I didn’t want him to do it for political reasons because then it would seem as if the traditional law-giving facility in the country was triumphing once again over the previously oppressed. There was another political reason: a reviewer pointed out that Sheemina represented the current corruption in government. So to have her triumph would signal my cynicism about the political situation in this country. All that played at the back of my mind when I was writing that scene. I thought it would be a good idea to have her taken out by a member of the government because she is seen as a threat in that broad spectrum. This is why Mart Velaze came into the picture as the spook, the spy who is operating through the secret service and to me was suggesting that Sheemina was a threat, not to Mace but to government structures. She had to be killed because she knew too much or was manipulating her way to positions of power which nobody wanted. Maybe at another level it also represented the challenge of the coloured community against the black community, where there is a huge amount of racism as well. There was a multiplicity of possible interpretations that could be put to it, but I needed to signal clearly that her death was not because of the connection with Mace Bishop, but that it came from something else. And if you thought that this whole thing was plotted and planned, it wasn’t. It happened on the spur of the moment.
Are your female killers figures of female resistance?
Yes, definitely. It’s a case of channelling the power we women would like to be embodied in ourselves into a character. From a reader’s perspective it’s good to read about strong women. There’s a need to read about women who take power into their own hands and don’t rely on a man, who can stand on their own and give men a hard time. Growing up, I learnt from reading the occasional book that portrayed such a heroine. I admired those fictional women and aspired to be like them. I think we need as much help as we can get in developing our strength and assertiveness, including from nice, charismatic characters. There is probably a need within all of us as South Africans that we would like to do something against crime. This is perhaps even more true for women. Anyone who has had an incident with crime, which in South Africa is a lot of people, is left with a psychological desire to play the scene over again so as to blast these baddies out and set the balance right. I am sure that’s why revenge comes across in so much writing. It’s a sign of our nation’s psyche and our little act through fiction to fight back against the unfairness that a crime leaves you resenting.
In the books that I write, the female characters are very strong. They are like that because that’s what I relate to, that’s what I think I am, and I surround myself with that kind of woman. For me it is the order of things that women are equally capable of doing anything men do. It is empowering for women to watch and read about women who can kick butt. As a young girl, growing up with two brothers, we used to like watching action movies. From an early age it used to bother me that the women are always screaming and helpless and then a guy comes and rescues them. I loved it when this new kind of women like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider started emerging, and thought it was amazing that our children are growing up seeing women as equally capable of anything. I didn’t have that and I needed that so much as a girl-child. If you look at our children’s generation, it is already very different. If you engage with the way the born-frees 24 see the world, most of them are completely free of this whole apartheid mentality and the inequality that came with it. The way most of them engage with girls and with other boys is also completely different. Because they use social media and watch current movies, young people are exposed to different stereotypes of women. It is not perfect, of course, there is still the bikini clan, Botox and plastic surgery and all that stuff, but counter to that are stories like Black Widow Society. You know, boys read that and they have an opportunity at least to view women differently. It is a start.
If there is a positive side to Sheemina, it is that she is in control of her life, whereas Mace and his business partner Pylon are clearly not. And yes, there is a gender issue there. I know other crime writers feel that women are still downtrodden, but I have a slightly different view. I see women having positions that are equal to male positions and being able to manipulate the world as well. Sometimes in order to manipulate the world they take on what we understand as being masculine qualities. We only understand them as being masculine qualities because men have been in the superior position for so long. I don’t want my female characters ever to be meek and mild, but to have a strength of their own. Take the battle at the end of Killer Country, the second novel in the Revenge Trilogy. Oumou, who dies, is the equal of her murderer. She comes to that fight with a moral superiority that he doesn’t have. They both end up dying, but in a battle of equals. In fact, she was superior because of her moral integrity. What is more, throughout the books both male and female characters have succumbed — if that is what has happened to them — in equal degrees to the violence. I hope it hasn’t been played out upon the female body in any way.
Let us come back to the real. It has been argued that there is a gender civil war raging in South Africa. 25 Would you subscribe to this view? Does it play out in your fiction?
Here in South Africa we do have gender inequality and a lot of abuse of women, and there are very many deep-seated reasons for it. There is a need to address issues like that in fiction, so that you can try and equalize them. Probably one little novel can’t do much to change it, but every little drop of information and inspiration counts. It involves changing the men’s role too. That’s why I like Jade’s father so much. I don’t allow my heroes to display chauvinistic qualities and funnily enough that also goes for my romances. I just can’t tolerate chauvinism, which for me is not sexy or likeable. I sometimes have the quite difficult job of writing romances where the hero honestly perceives the heroine as a true equal or even slightly superior and is prepared to hand power over to her. I don’t want women to think that male power and control are sexy, because they are not. They may be sexy for the first five minutes but after that you live a life of misery and in some cases abuse. This whole Oscar–Reeva thing (see Note 21) is an example of that. You can see exactly why Reeva didn’t leave Oscar earlier because she was genuinely trying to make it work. His stardom made her feel that she must be the one at fault, that she couldn’t possibly be unable to be with a man who is such a hero and who everyone worshipped. Unfortunately, she was too strong and she couldn’t comply the way his young little teenage girlfriends complied. She ended up paying a price. Just my feeling (see Note 22).
If we are talking about the majority of South Africans we mean black South Africans. I think the gender issue there is very complex. The reason there is so much violence inflicted against women in the townships and in rural areas, comes from this migrant labour system that we had for many years. The impact of that migrant labour system is still with us in the sense that a lot of women were forced — whether they were married or unmarried — to raise their kids on their own. At the same time the men would work in places where they were denigrated, where they were made to feel inferior. How they then asserted their masculinity was by being violent towards their women. If you are kicked around and called a boy, you want to feel like a man once you come home. And now we’ve got a new South Africa, a new constitution, and all of a sudden there are all these powerful women who are super assertive. The policies the government have in place, whether it is affirmative action or BEE, 26 have led to a crop of women who are really powerful, more powerful than many men. Whether black or white, women own businesses and run companies. When they get back home to the policeman they married at the age of 20, they are now so different, bringing in the money and all of that. Of course it is going to create some huge insecurities. Our men are battling with that dynamic as well. They are asking themselves, what their role is in the relationship. It is a huge problem if it is not properly addressed because this emasculation usually manifests itself in violence to get the power back. It is a dangerous precipice we are sitting on and we need to bring it out in the open and engage with it. I paint gender relations in Black Widow Society in a deliberate way. For example, I enjoyed working with the lovely kind of power play that exists between Tallulah and Mzwakhe, the hitman. The society is so powerful and matriarchal and the one person that works for these people is a man. He is not a weak man either, but a strong character in his own right. His partner Marie, on the other hand, validates him as a man and this is something he has not experienced in a long time. In all the years he has worked for the Black Widows, he hasn’t had many opportunities to assert his male authority. Another thing that is paradoxical about him is that he is partly a feminist because he is sympathetic to the Black Widows’ cause. At the same time, because of the nature of the work he has to do, he has to develop this layer of cynicism around women in general. Then Marie comes and brings out the softer side to him, but also the masculine side because he feels very protective towards her and this validates him as a man.
When you look at the situation of the rape of women and children, it is a war. To understand it in historical terms, I must say that through colonialism and apartheid men have been utterly emasculated and the only ways they have of showing any power is to rape women and children. And that is just completely appalling. It suggests that there is a society-wide emasculation. The impact on and destruction of lives are huge. Rape is a social issue and a social illness, but individuals still have to be held culpable for what they do because not all men are doing it. It is a dreadful thing; I have a partner, a stepdaughter and a granddaughter, so I live in dread. Why should one have to live like that? When you read about German history when the Russians marched in towards the end of the war you wonder how these women coped. We are in the same kind of situation now, yet there has been no war and there is no invader. We are doing it to ourselves. So yes, I think it is an incredibly important topic, but at the moment the focus is all on women when the men are the ones who need the attention. They are the ones that are sick. We live in an age when women are being given their due in life and that probably threatens a lot of men anyhow. When I look at the world I see a rise of very competent women who are making a change in society and then I see men floundering around, trying to behave as if they’ve just stepped out of the cave. They think they are the captains of the ship while it is obvious that their lives are controlled and managed by women. For many, many men this is the case. If they go out, they play games in order to pretend that they are still in control of what they are doing, but these games are ultimately quite empty. The men in my fiction struggle to find meaningful occupations. Take Mace and Pylon in the Revenge Tragedy: now, post-apartheid, they struggle to find a place. Mace and Pylon are clearly not in control of their lives. In a sense, this is also the purpose of Isabella, another female perpetrator in Payback, to test Mace and to bring out the weak side of his character. Her function is to give Mace a relationship once again over which he doesn’t have that much control. She is the one who is manipulating the relationship from the very beginning and is another of these strong female characters I have a preference for.
Angela, while Jade de Jong and Sheemina February are isolated female figures without any ties to female friends, your Black Widows operate as a collective and a sisterhood. What is the significance of this?
Female friendships have an important role as part of coping mechanisms. If you are dealing with children, husbands, good and bad relationships, you need that kind of outlet. The joke in the black community is that black people don’t go to see psychologists. Why should you go to see a psychologist when you have friends you can offload everything onto. So, female friendships are important in that sense. That’s why even in the old days, with absent husbands and all of that, there were societies called stokvels. 27 A reviewer said that the Black Widow Society reminds her of those stokvels because it is about women coming together for a purpose and being a support structure for each other. The stokvels still exist. They are also called burial societies because if somebody passes away in your family, the stokvel comes together. They cook for you and prepare everything for the family, so you don’t have to worry about anything. That concept of sisterly ties is a way to deal with life and to cope with all of the things that life throws at you. It is a big, big thing. It gives you the possibility to be around people, spend time with people, share and talk things over. You don’t have to process everything on your own. That’s where this sisterly thing comes from.
Conclusion
Female killers in South African crime fiction critique the larger discourse about crime and its aim of restoring social order. Painfully aware of the limitations of this (patriarchal) order, they seek to enlarge the scope of agency for women and explore alternative notions of justice and different ideas of power and agency. Creating transgressive female figures allows the authors to address the country’s pervasive gender-based violence and to expose the effects of constraining gender norms across colour lines. While all three writers clearly favour strong female figures, in Angela Makholwa’s and Mike Nicol’s novels strong women tend to be contrasted with weak male characters. This seems to correspond to the way in which Makholwa and Nicol regard gender-based violence as a means by which otherwise emasculated men can assert their masculinity. They see emasculation happen throughout society, even though the reasons may differ according to racial and class background. In different ways, all three writers acknowledge that tackling violence against women requires changing the men’s role too. Makholwa is the most optimistic in seeing this happening already within the younger generation of born-free South Africans (see Note 24).
Refusing to be paralysed and silenced by the terror of crime, female perpetrators are figures of female empowerment and thus partake in a liberating counter-discourse of resistance, of the kind outlined in my introduction. They offer coping strategies and alternative role models, as Mackenzie and Makholwa particularly stress. Lastly, they permit the authors to probe questions of retribution and justice from a female perspective in a weak state where justice is not dispensed independent of gender, race, and/or class. Mackenzie exposes the reader to the moral considerations and conflicts her trigger-happy heroine Jade is subjected to, Makholwa ponders — through her murderous Black Widows — under what circumstances the end justifies the means, and Nicol tests the effects of his arch-manipulator Sheemina February’s unleashed perpetrating agency on a fragile, male-dominated environment where there is no clear line between the good guys and the bad. The conversations with the three authors are testament to the fact that the figure of the female killer in South African crime fiction allows for nuanced and meaningful socio-political interventions.
Footnotes
Funding
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant number PBZHP1_147227.