Inside out: Gender,individualism,and representations of the contemporary South African prison

Abstract

This article examines A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Red Ink by Angela Makholwa, which are, respectively, auto/biographical and fictional narrative representations of the contemporary South African prison. Both narratives foreground gender because their female authors consciously posit their own femininity, in the case of Gobodo-Madikizela, and of her protagonist, in the case of Makholwa, as significant to the prison they portray. Although the way non-fiction and fiction operate cannot be conflated, Makholwa’s novel seems to mirror the structure of Gobodo-Madikizela’s auto/biography in obvious ways; an observation that helps justify why I analytically compare these narratives in this article. Most apartheid prison narratives, by authors of all genders, largely adopted an unambiguously political frame in articulating the subject positions of characters. The personal was deliberately subsumed in what appeared to be an urgent political need to dismantle the oppressive apartheid system. By contrast, there is a clear shift to the individualization of the prisoner at the expense of politicized collectivity in the selected narratives. However, my reading seeks to demonstrate that the ostensibly apolitical stance adopted by Makholwa and the personal and psychological approach taken by Gobodo-Madikizela are in fact deeply political and community-engaged processes.

Introduction and overview: Connections and parallels

Apartheid narratives of imprisonment often represented the South African prison as a politicized space of physical and psychological domination. In these obviously political autobiographies, there was a pronounced sense of agency in the writers’ depiction of themselves. ¹ In the two narratives that I have selected for analysis, there is an apparent shift from emphasizing the collective national political consciousness to exploring the personal psyche of the prisoner through a gendered perspective. While noting this process of individualization, I also highlight that this is an ambiguous process since it seems to ultimately reveal that “the prison has retained its centrality, if not its visibility, in South African life” (Roux, 2016: 3).

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness (2003) is an account of her interview encounters in 1998 with Eugene de Kock, “the quintessential apartheid killer” (De Kock and Gordin, 1998: 14), at Pretoria Maximum Prison. ² De Kock was given two life sentences for his extrajudicial execution of anti-apartheid activists. Gobodo-Madikizela’s narrative is auto/biographical. On the other hand, Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink (2007) is a fictitious crime and prison story detailing the interaction of Lucy Sibongile Khumbule, the protagonist, and an imprisoned notorious serial murderer and rapist called Napoleon Dingiswayo. Lucy is a 26-year-old public relations consultant and former journalist whom Napoleon invites to write his biography. The novel is set in post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa. Although both Gobodo-Madikizela and De Kock are not reducible to fictional characters, the relationship of Lucy and Napoleon resembles Gobodo-Madikizela’s rendition of her experiences with De Kock in many striking ways.

The titles of both texts signal the narratives’ preoccupation with crime and death. The title, A Human Being Died that Night, alludes to one moment in De Kock’s murderous career when he is haunted by an imaginary smell on his clothes and body after he kills a family suspected of being African National Congress (ANC) sympathizers in Botswana. In this sense, the title and the narrative as a whole seek to establish not only De Kock’s recognition of the humanity of his murder victims, but also Gobodo-Madikizela’s own realization of her deep connectedness to De Kock and the shared human need for love, susceptibility to suffering, and inevitable mortality. Her subtitle, A Story of Forgiveness, evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which had the objectives of fostering South African national reconciliation through public confessions of the grievous crimes of apartheid, and extended the possibility of forgiveness to those demonstrating contrition. ³ On the other hand, the title of Makholwa’s novel derives from the red ink of the ballpoint pen Napoleon uses in prison to write romantic letters to Lucy. The title also alludes to Napoleon’s violent and bloody career, and the danger that Lucy courts by closely interacting with him.

Both narratives inscribe gender into the prison experience in ways that reveal an unsettling undercurrent of sexual desire, which disrupts any attempts at simplistic configurations of a power matrix between male prisoner and female interviewer. Significantly, this complex foregrounding of gender eventually helps reveal that crime and the prison remain central to understanding not only the personal but also national identities that these narratives may initially be read as masking. The narratives ultimately reveal through their gendered focus a profoundly political problem, because although such a focus announces interest in personal and private experience, it demonstrates that this is inseparable from national politics.

Towards the (de)politicization of the South African prison

A Human Being Died that Night and Red Ink both seem to belong to what Andrew Dilts (2008) calls the “neo-liberal proposal to radically reconceive the human subject as a rational actor”, and to participate in “the well-intentioned attempt to reform and perfect the liberal ideal of an unencumbered, atomistic, and universal subject before the law” without recourse to political redress (2008: 94). Both writers appear to share the objective of trying to understand the psyche of an imprisoned serial murderer in an environment where, although the prison is still historically significant in the collective national consciousness, there are clear indications that it is becoming in some ways more politically invisible. Gobodo-Madikizela clearly sets herself the task of rehumanizing De Kock, who during his apartheid heyday seems to have overcome his innate repugnance toward violent crime, if one may borrow Hannah Arendt’s (1994: 23) terminology in describing her project of writing about the Nazi killer Eichmann. Both Gobodo-Madikizela’s and Makholwa’s texts attempt to present individual subjectivities in the context of highly objectionable criminality so as to lay bare the subtle continuities between the crimes of the apartheid state and the violent criminal excesses of the post-apartheid moment.

The TRC found most of De Kock’s actions to be criminal, rather than being merely politically motivated, and therefore denied him amnesty. Although De Kock’s murderous activities were facilitated and even tacitly sponsored by the apartheid regime, the TRC and the courts ultimately made him personally responsible for his crimes. Caught up within the TRC logic, Gobodo-Madikizela’s narrative individualizes De Kock’s past career and his interaction with his interviewer to achieve a poignantly political objective. However, Gobodo-Madikizela puts forward a very personal purpose to her visits to the C section of Pretoria Central Prison; namely, “to understand the inner mind of evil, to follow its thought processes, and to expose [herself] to its human face, stripped of the media stereotypes and the easy distance of hatred” (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2003: 123) ⁴ . Although trying to make sense of the national politics behind apartheid’s murderous activities, Gobodo-Madikizela’s use of the first person narrative voice in relating her conversations with De Kock makes their encounters a deeply personal experience. Similarly, the De Kock that emerges from her narrative is quite humane despite his portrayal as a villain in dominant post-apartheid discourses. In this regard, Daniel Roux argues that Gobodo-Madikizela’s project does not only humanize De Kock but also re-politicizes him, “displacing the idea of a wrathful, sadistic, monstrous individual with something more complex and socially generated” (2016: 4).

By contrast, Makholwa’s fictional outlaw, Napoleon, is serving five life sentences for raping, maiming, and killing over 41 young women in and around Johannesburg. ⁵ Paradoxically, Makholwa’s narrative foregrounds Napoleon’s fractured upbringing and perverse family environment, and posits these as an explanation for his criminal character. This seems incongruous with a narrative keen on attributing individual responsibility over and above concern about redress of the political and social environments that contribute to Napoleon’s criminal mental instability. Moreover, Makholwa’s narrative is intimate and personal in that although sometimes Napoleon is the focalizer, the narrative point of view is largely that of the protagonist Lucy, whose decisions seem deeply individualistic and disconnected from national politics.

While both De Kock and Napoleon commit heinous murders and Makholwa seems to replicate the structure of Gobodo-Madikizela’s book, De Kock is not easily translatable into Napoleon. As much as Makholwa connects Napoleon’s crimes with a twisted past, which likely has to do with apartheid’s neglect of citizens it designated non-white, the novel shows that Napoleon only participates in anti-apartheid crimes because he is already a criminal. He is a case of a criminal hijacked into participating in the criminal excesses of the anti-apartheid political project. By contrast, Gobodo-Madikizela seems to argue that De Kock is a political scapegoat. While De Kock is clearly more ambiguous than Napoleon, in that he stands for the unavoidable criminal entanglements that became integral to the functioning of the apartheid state in the last decade of its existence, Napoleon is also indicative of the inescapable contamination by criminality of the anti-apartheid struggle. Jacob Dlamini (2014) has recently shown how the phenomena of collaboration and betrayal highlight that the extent of infiltration of liberation movements by criminal apartheid agents such as De Kock will remain unknown. The same difficulty exists in trying to determine the extent to which pure criminality rather than political convictions motivated certain individuals, in both the apartheid regime and the organizations that opposed it. While Makholwa touches on what Dilts (2008: 95) calls “the foundational exclusion” that led to Napoleon’s crime and imprisonment in the first place, Gobodo-Madikizela goes further. Although largely writing as a clinical psychologist rather than as a political scientist, Gobodo-Madikizela makes South Africa’s national politics her reference point and the framing mechanism for her project of humanizing De Kock.

Gendered representations and the sinister symbiosis of the inside and outside

The fact that both narratives are written and narrated by women allows them to engage with crime and gender issues in unique ways that involve women’s political and cultural agency. Crime and prison, especially in South Africa, have often been predicated upon what Russell Dobash et al. call “patriarchal and gender-based assumptions” (1986: 9). ⁶ Referring to southern African writing in general, Dorothy Driver argues that gender is disregarded “as an analytical tool, so that political and cultural agency is still seen as male” (in Daymond et al. 2003: 153). A Human Being Died and Red Ink are first and foremost about how troubled masculinities, and the criminal and prison systems, are products of, inscribe themselves into, and perpetuate themselves mainly through patriarchal social structures.

By adopting a functionalist view of social structures, Gobodo-Madikizela’s and Makholwa’s narratives suggest that their protagonists’ twisted views of what it means to be a man can initially be located in childhoods characterized by dysfunctional families or abusive parents, and a political system that spewed out destructive masculinities across the social spectrum. Gobodo-Madikizela observes: “De Kock’s childhood was marked by emotional abuse at the hands of his father” (55). Red Ink also indicates that the mother of the Dingiswayo brothers was an abusive alcoholic and that they subsequently suffered abuse at the hands of foster parents. Napoleon says to Lucy: “D’you think I was born like this? Do you think God decided, yes, this one is going to spend most of his life in prison? No. It is people who have made me like this. From my mother to the rest of the stinking poison that kept on appearing in my life over and over again” (Makholwa, 2007: 60). ⁷ This suggests that apartheid triggered malformed notions of manhood which are at the heart of violent crimes against women, and the general ubiquity of violent crime in the post-apartheid state. ⁸

Both narratives show how the criminal and the prison relentlessly haunt the individual, specifically the female writer, and how the logic of crime and imprisonment possess the entire logic of the post-apartheid state. In Makholwa’s narrative, the post-apartheid state is a dangerous place for women, as evidenced by Napoleon’s serial rape cases and his multiple murders. Talking about what she calls the rape epidemic and the excessive murder rates in post-apartheid South Africa, Orford directly connects this phenomenon with what she perceives as the unresolved issues of apartheid violence. She argues: “It seemed to me that the whole civil war of the 1980s just sublimated into the body, into the family, and into intimate spaces” (qtd. in De Waal, 2012: n.p.). In Makholwa’s novel, these intimate spaces include the streets of Johannesburg, which are not only the location of many crimes whose perpetrators feed the prison, but have a much more sinister symbiotic relationship with the prison. That the prison haunts the outside and vice versa is dramatized in the fact that the very first time Lucy steps into prison to meet Napoleon for their proposed book project, her life beyond the prison walls is turned into a nightmare. When Lucy announces her book project to Patricia Moabelo, her business partner, Patricia has a sense of premonition and tries to dissuade her from doing it. When Patricia wisely points out that Napoleon is a psychopath who will get her into trouble, Lucy naively retorts: “‘I’ll take my chances, remember, he’s in jail and I’m not”’ (21). On another occasion, thinking about the possible danger that Napoleon could pose to her, she concludes: “Behind bars he was, after all, no more harmless than a trapped mouse” (44). Lucy imagines that there is something final and permanently secure about the distinction between inside and outside when a person is serving a life sentence in South African prisons. ⁹ Ironically, it is Patricia who is subsequently brutally murdered at the orders of Napoleon, after Lucy inadvertently confides in Napoleon about how Patricia has become selfish, reneging on their agreement about the division of their shares in the company. Her gullible view of the prison as a space of isolation and powerlessness prevents her from linking Patricia’s murder with Napoleon. The novel thus explores through a naïve protagonist how the post-apartheid prison, that is, the inside, spills over into the outside with tragic consequences. When one of Lucy’s friends, Fundi, is hesitant about accompanying her to see Napoleon because she suspects that the prison has dangerous links with the outside, Lucy reasons: “relax Dingiswayo’s harmless. Remember, he’s behind bars, we’re not, so don’t give him too much power” (105). Soon, however, Lucy has to reckon with the fact that the imprisoned Napoleon does not only enjoy disturbing patriarchal power over her, but also still rules the streets outside. While Lucy thinks that Napoleon is under her benevolent control, he is busy tricking her into playing the role of a gullible lover and is deeply satisfied by his power over her, musing that it is “better to observe from inside” (110).

Gobodo-Madikizela similarly treads on that slippery ground when she empathetically touches De Kock’s hand, and De Kock wastes no time in gaining psychological advantage as a result of her lapse in professionalism by touching his “trigger hand” (39). Roux (2016) reads more than just a woman who is held captive by a prisoner’s patriarchal power in the trigger hand incident. He describes the moment as uncanny because a “normal, everyday human gesture of compassion suddenly turns into an encounter with its opposite, with merciless inhumanity […] the brutality that had to be forgotten is suddenly on the surface of civic life” (2016: 5). This is an important observation. In addition, when one considers that on another occasion, Gobodo-Madikizela is tempted to give the apparently agonized De Kock a hug, one starts to realize that at stake is also a subtle interplay of female–male attraction which threatens the balance of power between the interviewed prisoner and the interviewing clinical psychologist.

This interplay between prisoner and clinical psychologist calls to mind Foucault’s connection of the biographical, the penal regime, and psychiatric discourses. He writes: “As the biography of the criminal duplicates in penal practice the analysis of circumstances used in gauging the crime, so one sees penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other’s frontiers” (1977: 252). It is at the intersection of Gobodo-Madikizela’s psychiatry-powered discourse and the post-apartheid penal regime’s posturing as a corrective humanizing system that one witnesses the most intense and troubled power negotiations between De Kock and his interviewer. For example, De Kock admits that his physical confinement forces him into introspection. He indicates that he has come to see the futility of his past life as a murderer, saying: “it’s not a life […] It’s not even an existence. You are in some twilight world of no peace, no rest, no trust, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing” (109). Soon, however, this self-searching is turned inside out. De Kock finds empowering ways of reaching the outside by transforming the prison, that is, the inside, into a launch pad for his battles with the outside, against the politicians whom he views as culpable in his exploitation as a cog in the apartheid death machine.

What De Kock is able to achieve proves true Robert Morrell’s observation that “power is exercised differently depending on the location and the specific arrangement of the relations which are in place” (2001: 9). While still inside, De Kock exercises some measure of agency on the outside by telling the world what he considers to be the extent of apartheid government’s involvement in his criminal offences. The book that he writes in collaboration with Jeremy Gordin, A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State (1998), is a claim to victimhood and also exposes the extent to which apartheid crimes are not reducible to the individual. De Kock’s biographies allow his prison cell to reach the outside world, so to speak.

More than Gobodo-Madikizela’s factual account, Makholwa’s fictional narrative permits her to adopt different points of focalization which, at a narrative level, allow Napoleon’s point of view to travel beyond the prison. Clearly, although the post-apartheid environment tries to render the prison invisible, Makholwa’s and Gobodo-Madikizela’s narratives show that both the prison and the outside exist in a state of uneasy mutuality. For example, both writers are drawn to the prison because they hope it is a captivating subject to draw a sizeable readership. Makholwa’s protagonist, Lucy, unashamedly ignores all her moral qualms about being involved with a sex offender and murderer because she hopes that Napoleon’s notoriety will establish her as a writer. As the focalizer, Lucy reasons: “She’d give this venture her best shot […] she might end up being an accomplished writer” (44). Notably, this is also a moment of self-reflexivity on the part of Makholwa since Red Ink is her debut novel. The narrative shows that Lucy needs Napoleon for her own purposes as much as Napoleon wants her to “numb the boredom of his lonely life” (44). Evidently, Makholwa as the novelist engages in some soul-searching even as she addresses the popular topics of criminality and imprisonment in the post-apartheid moment to sell her book. Although speaking from the outside, her idea of what the inside is like captures her audience because it is put together from books such as Gobodo-Madikizela’s, newspaper stories, everyday discussions, and her own interviews with the convicted serial rapist and murderer, Moses Sithole. As such, it represents a popular understanding of the prison, rather than being a personal experience of its operation.

In Gobodo-Madikizela’s case, De Kock’s life and imprisonment offer themselves as excellent material for her PhD research, and her prison encounters with De Kock proved extremely rewarding in advancing her academic career as a psychologist. She writes: “I started to see my work on de Kock as culminating in two processes, one that would be purely scholarly (a PhD thesis) and another that would be a deeply personal account of my conversations with de Kock — this book” (170). Makholwa’s novel and Gobodo-Madikizela’s auto/biography illustrate that the post-apartheid prison is a space where the outside exists in what we might call a symbiotically parasitic relationship with the inside.

Gobodo-Madikizela’s interaction with De Kock also helps her realize that, although he is incarcerated, their relationship is still governed by rigid and condescending patriarchal notions about gender roles. Walby argues that “patriarchal relations form a system, and are not confined to discrete occurrences in specific social institutions at isolated points in time and space” (1986: 52). For example, although De Kock “revealed even the most gruesome details of his life story in a book written by Jeremy Gordin” (27), he seems reluctant to do so when talking to Gobodo-Madikizela. In one of their meetings, De Kock has an expression of embarrassment on his face and avoids eye contact, apologizing profusely for being unshaven. He thinks that it is not gentlemanly to appear “unshaven before a lady” (49). Gobodo-Madikizela sees this as an “alarming irony of being concerned about rules of social etiquette when one has violated some of the most fundamental tenets of morality” (49). Summing up the patriarchal assumptions which seemingly govern her relationship with De Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela observes: “[D]e Kock’s discomfort concerning the details had something to do with my being a woman […] he perceived my sympathy for him and was afraid that if we focused on the gory particulars of his past, he would lose it” (28).

Ironically, De Kock experiences Gobodo-Madikizela’s feminine empathy as both empowering and emasculating: “He was more comfortable seeing himself as an actor or initiator than as the object of another’s compassion” (42). Insofar as prison takes away most of his agency, De Kock experiences the penitentiary as a feminizing space. In Red Ink, despite suffering from the agonies of confinement, Napoleon also holds similar patronizing masculine views. For example, during their second meeting, Napoleon steals a quick kiss on Lucy’s cheek as she momentarily looks aside in distraction.

Makholwa also suggests that the development of same-sex desire in prisons as reflecting societal gender stereotypes. Her novel depicts prison homosexual relationships as being modelled on the male–female patriarchal relations that characterize societal sex roles in general and portrays them as being essentially violent. ¹⁰ For Makholwa, homosexuality develops out of a space of oppression and degradation, a space that figures modernity in one of its most coercive aspects. For example, after his stint in prison in the apartheid era, KK Mabote uses both homosexual and heterosexual sex to break the willpower of his obstinate underlings. The third person narrator observes: “Homosexual sex was a power game for The Sponsor” (203). Early in his relationship with Napoleon’s brother, Sifiso, KK used to make him “scream like a wounded animal from pain of penetration” as he established his domination over him (209). In post-apartheid South Africa, economically powerful men like KK Mabote reproduce the sexual violence of apartheid prison experience, penetrating others while never allowing themselves to be penetrated, and this allows them the illusion that their manhood, as constructed by societal gender norms, remains intact. ¹¹

Makholwa also suggests that it is the absence of the opposite sex in prison that triggers homosexual desires, and that patriarchal notions of manhood are subsequently superimposed to justify and legitimate the behaviour. Homosexual relationships outside prison are depicted as being tainted by the same unequal power relations. The feminization through penetration of either physically weak or materially poor men gives the abuser a false sense of power since he starts to view himself as a dominant male who can subdue both men and women. Sifiso, although he is gay, does not allow himself to be penetrated for similar reasons. Although he does not rape his murder victims because “the female sex represented filth, disease and whoring” (209), he ironically imagines his gay partners as being female. The narrator says: “Somehow, being the one who always shoved it into them made him feel better about his sexual tastes. He was still the alpha male” (204).

The Lucy–Napoleon and Gobodo-Madikizela–De Kock relationship of aversion and attraction, fascination and repulsion can be read as a metaphor for the way South African society in general views and relates to the penal regime. While stories of desperate and daring criminals and prisoners shown on media occasionally hold the audience spellbound, at other times, crime and prison exist as spectres on the periphery of most people’s imagination. After one of Lucy’s prison visits, the narrator reports the following thoughts of a contented Napoleon: “He was certain that Lucy Sibongile Khumbule had much to learn. Their lives touching and penetrating each other so deeply […] that was no accident” (92). The sexual implications of touching and penetrating seem deliberate in view of Napoleon’s fantasies about Lucy. Moreover, the novelist seems to hold up Lucy’s naivety as a mirror to the readers who may assume that their fate is separate from that of incarcerated criminals. On the contrary, although Gobodo-Madikizela’s recognition of De Kock’s humanity grows during the course of their interviews, she also becomes more aware that De Kock’s crimes were an integral excess of the functioning of the apartheid regime.

However, both Makholwa’s and Gobodo-Madikizela’s narratives suggest that not only is there a troublingly mutual relationship between prison and the outside, but also “that good and evil exist in our lives, and that evil like good, is always a possibility” (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2003: 34). A few months before starting her interviews with De Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela has a meeting with Gcina Hlongwane, a black prisoner at the Durban Westville Prison who was formerly an Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) hit man, and who, like De Kock, had been abandoned by his organization when his crimes were exposed. Gobodo-Madikizela is perturbed to learn that she shares a birthday with this man. What exacerbates Gobodo-Madikizela’s distress is that during the course of her interview with Hlongwane, she finds herself colluding with this notorious killer, when he indicates in coded language that they should switch over to Zulu since the guard who is hovering around them was an IFP spy. As she leaves prison, she is seized by paranoia, imagining that she is being followed by IFP spear-wielding men in traditional regalia. Likewise, during one of her visits to De Kock, he tells her how people were killed through letter bombs and even ball-pen bombs, and she afterwards throws away her pen which she had lent to a young white man at the Home Affairs office because she imagines that it has been exchanged with one equipped with a bomb. Even after travelling thousands of kilometres to America, she is troubled by the tapes and the interview transcripts with De Kock. At the centre of her haunting is her “own empathy for De Kock” (116). She seems to have internalized the logic of the penal regime and finds that it has become like the “shirt of flame” she elsewhere associates with De Kock, which she cannot take off.

What Gobodo-Madikizela calls “this sense of paper-thin line” (36) between evil and good, prison and outside, is also evident in Red Ink. In Makholwa’s narrative, one of the ways the prison reaches the outside is through the corrupt activities of warders and visitors of the incarcerated criminals and the criminals’ connections with the politically influential and criminally inclined figures such as KK Mabote, Napoleon’s sponsor. Makholwa illustrates that her protagonist, Lucy, and Napoleon’s brother, Sifiso, become dangerous links between the prison and the outside. Not only does Lucy’s relationship with Napoleon lead to the deaths of her business partner and her boyfriend Karabo Monare at the hands of Sifiso, the novel shows that right from the first day she steps into prison, she is slowly but relentlessly drawn into the corrupt web of prison life. In order to record their conversation, she agrees with Napoleon that they discreetly but illegally use the notebook and pencil that he provides. Unknown to Lucy is the fact that she is playing along in a patriarchal drama whose script was written both outside and inside prison.

Lucy and Napoleon’s near-romantic involvement can be viewed as a metaphor for prison’s entanglements with politics and society in general. The thin line dividing politics and crime is further highlighted by the fact that the friendship between the Dingiswayo brothers and KK Mabote has its roots simultaneously in crime and in anti-apartheid politics. As the Dingiswayos try to hijack KK Mabote’s Mercedes Benz during the dying years of apartheid, he uses his political demagoguery to convince them that their crime is in fact a political act since apartheid has basically dispossessed every black person in one way or another. KK Mabote wins over the Dingiswayos, and during the waning years of the apartheid regime, the “two brothers carried out a number of hits on the regime’s policemen and women. They planted bombs, they killed black spies and police informants and for this, they were well looked after by The Sponsor, known as KK to his friends” (195). Although the Dingiswayos’ behaviour may be viewed as purely mercenary and perverse, Makholwa seems keen on showing that even though criminal, their behaviour is deeply implicated in the anti-apartheid and post-apartheid politics of violence and patronage respectively. They view themselves as fighters of sorts against forces of oppression, and in a warped way, their killing and raping sprees give them a sense of control as they “overpower, conquer and humiliate” (232).

Red Ink also raises the question of society’s fascination with the prison in general and with incarcerated dangerous criminals in particular. Lucy finds herself in a moral quandary right from the time she receives Napoleon’s letter inviting her to write a book about his criminal exploits. While Lucy thinks that Napoleon’s is a great story staring her in the face, she also realizes that it is a story that she cannot share with her parents and even with her boyfriend. She observes: “He (Napoleon) wants to be immortalised; he enjoyed all the attention he received in the media during his heyday. I’m just worried that I may be glorifying a killer” (130). She soon understands that by accepting Napoleon’s challenge she automatically enters into a no man’s land which is neither criminal nor non-criminal.

Tellingly, Napoleon equates writers’, and especially journalists’, quest for fame with his own criminal life of rape and murder. From chapter three onwards, Makholwa’s narrative juxtaposes Napoleon’s prison fantasies with Lucy’s delusional desire for success and fame in an unnerving way, which shows that their destinies are intertwined in a manner that Lucy could not have imagined. For example, in chapter three, the imprisoned Napoleon imagines himself having sex with Lucy, whom he has not yet met, and derives great satisfaction from masturbating. Hinting at the danger that awaits Lucy, the narrator juxtaposes Napoleon’s thoughts and actions in prison with Lucy’s anxiety in her bedroom as she awakes on the morning that she will meet Napoleon for the first time. Her thoughts are hauntingly dominated by her daring project as much as Napoleon is fixated on his imaginary sexual relationship with Lucy.

Makholwa’s novel can be seen as foregrounding certain aspects which Gobodo-Madikizela’s journalistic account cannot easily articulate. For example, the fact that Gobodo-Madikizela is haunted by the idea that she may be colluding in legitimizing or performing a certain logic of forgetting, as the word “amnesty” suggests, is evident in that she devotes the entire last chapter, “I have No Hatred in my Heart”, to the defence of the principle of forgiveness and by extension the TRC project. She controversially argues: “The act of humanizing is […] at once both punishment and rehabilitation” (120). Despite this rationalization, she still experiences inner conflict when she realizes that this humanizing stance stands in contradiction of the deep-seated desire for justice. She writes: “Part of my own struggle in my visits with De Kock stemmed from the fear of stepping into the shoes of a murderer through empathy” (120). Where Makholwa’s protagonist was afraid that her book could glorify a serial rapist and murderer, Gobodo-Madikizela is afraid that her compassion may make her occupy the space of a murderer. In light of the above, Makholwa provides a fictional rendition of the tensions and contradictions that Gobodo-Madikizela also raises within the limits of a factual account.

Lucy’s book project, which seems to be idolizing a serial rapist and murderer, and the real danger to her life and to all those connected to her through her close interaction with a ruthless killer, raises moral questions which Makholwa’s protagonist battles with throughout the novel. What exacerbates Lucy’s moral dilemma is that when she goes to meet Napoleon for the first time she expects to see a fiend, but upon seeing him she is completely thrown off balance by his “frailty” and his “gentle almost priest-like” appearance (24, 25). He was “a fairly normal, really nice guy” (27). This is comparable to what Gobodo-Madikizela’s friend, Marie-Claire Kamin, says after shaking hands with De Kock in one of the TRC public hearings in Cape Town. Completely dumbfounded and bewildered, she blurts out: “He looks like my brother” (50). Lucy’s crisis is deepened by Napoleon’s over-familiarity with her. Instead of a formal handshake, Napoleon insists on a hug and basically treats her as his lover. ¹²

Eventually, when Lucy cannot bear the pangs of her conscience on her own, she decides to confide in her maverick architect uncle about her weird book project. Uncle Qiniso tries to encourage Lucy to proceed with her proposed book by offering the following understanding of the function of art: “[Art’s] role is to expose some facet of the human soul. Whether it’s good or bad, express it the best way you know how, and don’t give a damn about other people. Art doesn’t kill anyone” (130). Similarly, after commenting on the frightening and discomforting moments when people’s lives connect with the likes of De Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela tries to find a moral justification for her project. She asks: “Could it perhaps also be a source of hope, that through our recognition of evil as a constant possibility in human experience we can learn to prevent it from taking over our lives?” (50). Through this rhetorical question, Gobodo-Madikizela suggests that her interaction with De Kock can be justified by recognizing that narratives play a role in the understanding of human experience.

The relentless way in which the prison haunts society in general is illustrated by the imagery that Gobodo-Madikizela uses to capture De Kock’s painful yet futile attempt to rid himself of the guilt of his dreadful crimes. She calls it the “intolerable shirt of flame” which De Kock tries to slip off in vain since “in some ways the cloak [is] part of him” (47). Similarly, both Gobodo-Madikizela and Makholwa in their narratives seem to suggest that violent crimes and imprisonment are South Africa’s intolerable shirt of flame which has become stuck to the political, social, and economic structure of the nation. The two texts help us see that steeped in the past of criminal violence of the apartheid state, the violent crimes of formerly oppressed groups in the post-apartheid environment are a disconcerting but unsurprising extension of the same logic which was once secretly sponsored and publicly condoned by the state and anti-apartheid activism.

Conclusion

Although A Human Being Died that Night and Red Ink cannot and should not be conflated, they do, however, share several preoccupations related to crime, prison, and gender which cannot be easily ignored. An examination of these two narratives indicates that confined male criminals exert disquieting patriarchal and masculine power over their female interviewers. However, unlike Lucy, Makholwa’s protagonist, Gobodo-Madikizela is not a passive dupe. She is deeply conscious of the precarious power negotiations between De Kock and herself. While Gobodo-Madikizela’s book primarily documents her attempt at humanizing and re-politicizing De Kock, it also registers her anxiety at slipping into socially prescribed gender roles and represents an attempt to write herself out of them. On the other hand, Makholwa’s novel highlights a gendered post-apartheid prison which has unsettling and often dangerous links with the outside. Ultimately, the strand that connects these two texts is that they are both participating in the post-apartheid project which apparently prioritizes the individual in understanding the politics of both the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present. Both texts posit dealing with the individual, the “real person” behind the mask, and the “inner self” supposedly “behind the political”, as important ways of understanding the connection of the government-sponsored apartheid violence and the more intimate and seemingly personal violence that has gripped South Africa since 1994. Both narratives highlight that although the end of apartheid has made the prison less politically visible, it is still deeply implicated in the politics of the nation.