“For the city yet to come”: South African speculative fiction and futurity at the urban edge

Abstract

This article reads contemporary South African speculative fictions as portents of the African “city yet to come”. In Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum, Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City, and Muthi Nhlema’s short story, “Ta O’Reva”, vulnerable informal urban communities are depicted as expendable human resources, subject to industrial pollution and disease, data and body-parts farming, and cloning. Plagues figure literally as human disease but also metaphorically as signs of extractive capitalism. Situating South African speculative fiction within the field of world-literary studies, the article sheds light on the genre’s contribution to the critique of capitalist modernity, thereby challenging any preconceptions of speculative fiction’s inherent conservatism. The article augments world-literary studies with a reflection on the radical potentiality of speculations on communities existing at the sharp end of global capitalism. For, whilst each text depicts a world that is “one, and unequal”, as Franco Moretti conjectures in advocating for distant reading of structural inequality, at the same time, each registers this potentiality at the level of literary form. Through its singular spatio-temporality, speculative fiction opens the imaginative space in which the tension between immiseration and such potentiality can be realized, in what Darko Suvin calls “a mapping of possible alternatives”.

Introduction: “Black to the future” and South African futurity

In an article on “Afro-futurism” in African American science fiction titled “Black to the future”, Dery (1994) asks, “Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other — the stranger in a strange land — would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists” (179)? Dery’s article is ubiquitous in postcolonial and world-literary studies of science and, indeed, speculative fiction, especially on questions of African futurity. Yet the African American specificities of Dery’s argument lie in the fact that in the African American case:

in a very real sense, [Black people] are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind). (1994: 179–80)

Thus, for African Americans, forced to endure experiences so egregious and alienating that the bounds of humanity and reason are breached, the line between reality and the irreal is always already severely tested. Grappling with the relationship between futurity, the past, and the present, Dery poses the question, can communities deliberately “rubbed out” imagine “possible futures”? For Dery, science fiction opens up this imaginative space.

This article considers post-apartheid South African speculative representations in Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2018), Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), and Malawian Muthi Nhlema’s short story (set in South Africa), “Ta O’Reva” (2015), of the sharp end of capitalist modernity, that is, life in the slums, townships, and at the so-called urban edge — “the societal impact zone where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside” (Davis, 2006: 46). To do so, moving beyond extant critiques of gender and queer identities in Beukes and a smattering of articles on Ntshanga (Andrews, 2020; Burger, 2020; Schmidt, 2016), I bring into dialogue Dery’s and Simone’s (2004a) theories of African futurity with world-systems’ literary theory of the cultural registration of combined and uneven modernity that capitalism actively produces — “a system that”, Moretti (2000) explains, “is simultaneously one, and unequal; with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (149–50). Pace Dery, it should not pass the reader by that there are glaring parallels between the dehumanizing treatment of Black people in the US and in South Africa through shared histories of slavery, police states, and racial segregation (in Afrikaans, apartheid) — forms of which were perpetuated in both countries well into the twentieth century. South African cities, just as in the US, continue to be drawn along “zones of inclusion and exclusion”, as Bremner (1998: 62–63) argues, symptomatic of an enduring racialized capitalism. This is especially true in the period when the selected texts were published, 2008–2018, following the global financial crisis of 2008 and largely spanning Jacob Zuma’s period in office, from 2009 to 2018 (Zuma had been sacked from his position as Deputy President following a court case on charges of corruption in 2005). Like its US counterpart, in the post-apartheid city, fortified gated communities, razor wire, and armed response protect the middle classes from high levels of crime often attributed to the urban poor (Bremner, 1998: 60). Global cities like Johannesburg “with the greatest socio-economic inequalities”, as Davis (2006) argues in Planet of Slums, are “transformed into high security analogues of American ‘edge cities’”, where “security has become a culture of the absurd” (116–17).

For all the reasons set out above, it therefore seems apt to frame these texts within Dery’s model of Afro-futurisms to consider the ways in which the narratives imagine possible South African futures. The informal body, possessed as a resource in the capitalist world market and dispossessed of rights, land, and social justice, contributes to an understanding of African futurity — what urban studies scholar Simone (2004a) names “the city yet to come”, whereby “African cities can be seen as a frontier for a wide range of diffuse experimentation with the reconfiguration of bodies, territories, and social arrangements necessary to recalibrate technologies of control” (2). Whilst the speculative novel might invite a posthumanist critique (see Ericson, 2018), this article shows how imaginings of African futurity in these texts serve as portents on a future that is glimpsed in a present always already inflected by South Africa’s brutalizing past. Such a reading bypasses the hazards of universalizing the lived experiences and social realities of South Africa’s informal communities that a posthumanist critique is liable to produce. Imagining possible futures sheds light on the contemporary social reality whilst offering, through the genre’s literary modes of cognitive estrangement, as Suvin (2014) suggests, “a mapping of possible alternatives” (n.p.). Unlike Dery and Suvin, I use the term speculative rather than science fiction on the grounds that, as Hennessey argues, it “help[s] us to understand the meaning and significance of concurrences and explore [their] potential”: namely, to understand “the meeting of two different cultures, epistemologies, or value systems, a situation that frequently arose historically in the context of colonialism” (2023: 3–4). Science fiction, on the other hand, Hennessey contends, risks uncritically reproducing the colonialist paradigm (2023: 3–4). Drawing on the term coined by Fur (2017), concurrences, I argue, are symptomatic of the combined and uneven development of capitalist modernity, which is characterized by its “modes of spatio-temporal compression, its juxtaposition of asynchronous orders and levels of historical experience, [and] its barometric indications of invisible forces acting from a distance on the local and familiar” (WReC, 2015: 17). The often abrupt and violent collision of “asynchronous orders and levels of historical experience” and the concertinaing of space and time brought about by imperialism, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) argues, manifest as the “shock” of capitalist modernity (2015: 72). Speculative fiction has the potential not only to register but also to critique the invisible forces that produce this vastly unequal world. Through the singular dynamic between past, present, and future that world-building speculative fiction produces, the genre offers the redemptive potentiality of forestalling the nightmarish end point of capitalist modernity the texts foresee.

Bond (2024) describes South Africa as “the world’s most unequal society” (82); it is widely agreed that democracy heralded little tangible change for the significant majority. This social reality has tarnished the myths of the Rainbow narrative and of South African exceptionalism, which Lazarus characterizes as the illusion that South Africa averted its fledgling democracy from the fate of those other African countries that have succumbed to neocolonialism and global capitalism (2004: 611). After the first democratic elections of 1994, the ANC-led government quickly embraced a neoliberal macroeconomic policy, opening its markets to “free trade” through its GEAR strategy (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution). Lazarus contends that the government saw no alternative but to sell out to the capitalist world market: “What began as a commitment to ‘growth through redistribution’ has become instead a headlong, craven, and undignified scramble to transform South Africa into the ‘point man for global capital on the continent […,] that system’s subimperial power there’” (Saul qtd. in Lazarus, 2004: 612). The novels and short story discussed here paint just such a picture of the failure in the longer term of the South African government to deliver on the promises of growth and redistribution exacerbated by the recession following the 2008 global financial crash and by corruption.

Ntshanga’s Triangulum is set between the semi-rural Ciskei “homelands” and Cape Town in the early twentieth century and in near-future Johannesburg in the mid-twenty-first century. By the end of a novel that, according to one reviewer, is notoriously difficult to navigate (Gallin, 2020), we realize Triangulum is a retelling of the Xhosa cattle killing of the nineteenth century. The narrator-protagonist, aligning herself with the prophetess Nongqawuse, whose vision from the ancestors foretold that, in order to drive the colonialists of the Eastern Cape into the sea, all Xhosa cattle must be slaughtered and crops destroyed, has been troubled throughout the narrative by visions of mysterious machines and triangles that unexpectedly appear on ceilings and walls. As the meanings of these visions converge, the narrator realizes that her disappeared mother also has experienced the visions, but that she (the narrator) is their “Primary” — the channel between the machines and humankind (Ntshanga, 2018: 4110). ¹

The prophecy of real-life anti-colonialist Nongqawuse was not fulfilled and instead the Xhosa people fell victim to the devastating famine of 1856–1857. In one of the few articles on Triangulum, Burger (2020) argues that, since the narrator realizes that she must return to semi-rural East London, having relocated from there to a dystopian Johannesburg, the novel amounts to an “advocacy of a return to pre-industrial Africa” (124). This, Burger argues, “can be considered anti- or decolonial, since it complicates and ultimately rejects Western conceptions of temporality and progress” (2020: 113). Yet Nongqawuse’s catastrophic prophesies, which tragically envisaged for the Xhosa a “reset: to begin again from the beginning” (Ntshanga, 2018: 4102), lead instead to the loss of more than 40,000 lives. Ntshanga’s retelling thus offers a far more pessimistic aspect of African futurity. By casting a prophecy within an Afro-futuristic narrative, the novel nevertheless offers the redemptive possibility of forestalling a disaster yet to come, channelled through a newly imagined female visionary.

Beukes’s Moxyland is set in near-future Cape Town in 2018, at a time of heightened state control and a militarized corporate capitalism, when mobile phones are used to “defuse” those who refuse to comply. Situating Beukes’s corporate nightmare in a long history of colonialism, Samuelson (2014) argues that it is in these contexts that “the fortress city initiated under Van Riebeeck’s command is finally completely realized” (813). Narrated individually by four young people, three of whom are middle class and university educated, each in different ways attempts to subvert the hyper-corporatized status quo. Kendra, a talented photographer, is the least politicized of the four. Tendeka is a Black Zimbabwean man who lives in Khayelitsha township and has a criminal record for violent disorder; his homosexuality, as Stobie (2012) argues, “is treated as incidental” in the narrative (372). Toby is a white urban terrorist who becomes involved with Tendeka in civil disobedience, whilst Lerato is a young black woman who works for a corporation. She is coopted for her computer skills by Tendeka and Toby to their anti-corporate activism.

The titular Zoo City of Beukes’s later novel envisages a futuristic inner-city Hillbrow in Johannesburg. It is populated with “zoos” or asymbiots — criminals to whom exotic beasts have attached themselves in a process of animalling: a bodily possession which alienates and segregates them from society, just as apartheid segregated society along spurious raced lines. If apartheid was built on the grotesque absurdity of a “hierarchy” of race, which year on year even saw people applying on paper to change race, in Zoo City, no one is quite sure what the animals are for. Some believe “the animals were the physical manifestation of our sin. […] Apparently we attracted vermin because we were vermin, the lowest of the low” (Beukes, 2010a: 62). Protagonist Zinzi December has become a zoo, having shot her brother dead, and is accompanied by her attendant sloth. She is attributed with a mashavi, or magical power, to find lost things which are attached as ghosts to their owners. A former lifestyle journalist, she has morphed into an online scammer who assumes fake identities of victims of sectarian wars, genocides, and so on, by which to defraud sympathetic liberals of their cash. Just as in Triangulum, in which the narrator is trying to solve the case of an apparent abduction (that of her mother, Nobomi), Zinzi in Zoo City is investigating the disappearance of rising recording artist, Song, twin to her brother S’bu.

Bodily possession is figured in cloning technologies in the fourth and most overtly, if didactically, political of the stories, Nhlema’s prize-winning 2015 “Ta O’Reva”. The short story imagines the cloning of Nelson Mandela, brought back to life through a process of merging with an earlier “imprint” of himself in an attempt to save South Africa from self-destruction. The process exposes the fallibilities of Madiba in the past, the consequences of which pose a lasting legacy into the future. In an interview, Nhlema explains that, obsessed with Back to the Future II, the “idea of going back to change things and to do things differently, to get a second chance at life”, appealed to him (Nhlema, 2015b: n.p.). It is in the possibility of change through the unique dynamic that speculative and science fiction open up between the past, the world-making of an imagined future, and the present where the radical potential of the genre lies. “Ta O’Reva” is set between two time frames, 1990, on the eve of democracy, as Mandela awaits his “long walk to freedom” from Victor Verster prison after 27 years in gaol, and a future in the second decade of the twenty-first century, following a catastrophe when Johannesburg, where the story is set, has been destroyed. Opening in the future setting of the story, a stranger is confronted with a “monstrosity”: an “idol” or “towering behemoth of bronze”, which is later revealed to be a statue of Mandela’s Struggle comrade, long-term ANC President, Oliver Tambo, who in real life died one year before the official dismantling of the apartheid regime (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.). “Ta O’Reva” centres on the bludgeoning to death during apartheid of a Black man by an Afrikaner policeman, and an equally violent retribution in the present. Truth and reconciliation discourses pervading the public sphere in the immediate post-apartheid years are revealed as hollow in the present of the near future, and this is reflected in the visual degrading of language too: “Language has deteriorated so much here we can’t decipher what it means” (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.). We come to realize that “Ta O’Reva” is a damaged truncation of the mantra “Tata Foreva”:

The placard once read words that carried a different meaning — a meaning of hope for a once lost nation. Hope in a champion for whom the placard was writ. The words once read:

Tata Foreva! (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.)

By the end of the narrative, Tambo is invoked as “father of the nation” — “Tata Foreva” — on a broken placard as the population of Johannesburg is wiped out by the plague. The story crafts a temporal dynamic that contemplates African futurity. In the process of speculating on a future anticipated during South Africa’s spectacular past, the narrative reflects on the failures in the contemporary period of a new regime invested with the optimism of the ordinary people.

The state we are in: The critique of structural inequality in contemporary South Africa

Simone (2004a) ponders the notion that “African cities are works in progress” (1). Acknowledging that “[f]or many urban residents, life is reduced to a state of emergency”, he contends that emergency mobilizes the agency of the urban poor, who “become increasingly involved in one or more aspects of the provision of essential services” and the demand for rights (2004a: 4, 5). Simone concludes that African cities are “places from which people potentially can change many things”, but wonders what shape such change will take in the face of seemingly unsurmountable inequalities: where “little is left besides the fact of one’s physical existence, what can be mobilized to make conditions change” (2004a: 213)? The WReC serve this kind of account of the African city a severe rejoinder as the site of a singular African modernity characterized by “mobility” and “flexibility”, posing instead a world-systems model of a “singular global modernity”, shaped by the structural forces of global capital that produce lived experiences riven by profound inequality, in which agency is produced only despite the crushing immiseration capitalism wreaks (WReC, 2015: 151; emphasis added). This article explores how the four texts negotiate African futurity: between accounts of the immiseration of the urban poor and of recalibrated notions of agency in the city yet to come.

In Triangulum’s deprived “homelands” — a throwback to apartheid — only the pharmacies are thriving. The unnamed female narrator’s parents, both journalists, debate poverty in the homelands and Alexandra township. Mama describes

a child who, on top of suffering from malnutrition, had developed an inflamed intestine. Mama […] had often seen such cases, more so, she added, in the township than when she’d been in the village. Tata [… had] seen things worse than hunger. (Ntshanga, 2018: 2704)

If each narrative glances upon the abject poverty experienced by the extra-peripheries, problematically, within the economy of the narrative these communities are held at the peripheries of the story as well. We are told about impoverished lives, but point of view is restricted to the less underprivileged characters in the text. Although Lerato in Moxyland lives in the townships and is described as an “Aidsbaby” orphaned by AIDS, Tendeka is the primary conduit in the novel by which the reader encounters informal communities through his work with the city’s street children. The most politically attuned of Moxyland’s four narrators, he describes the encroaching urban edge as the urban/rural divide breaks down:

Don’t be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it’s all Potemkin for the tourists. You just need to go a couple of blocks in to find the real deal, the tin shacks and the old miners’ hostels and the converted containers now that the shipping industry has died together with the economy. […] And despite the border patrols, the sprawl just keeps on spreading. You can’t keep all of the Rurals out all of the time. (Beukes, 2008: 28)

If in Triangulum, the narrator describes semi-rural Ciskei in bleak terms, with “herds of cattle throwing up dust on the horizon next to the landfills and squatter camps in Bhalasi Valley” (Ntshanga, 2018: 1216), the representation in Moxyland of the extra-peripheries, and through them notions of African futurity, are cast in similarly pessimistic hues. The so-called Rurals are segregated from the social reality of the central protagonists, intermittently quarantined in response to outbreaks of an unspecified disease that inevitably calls to mind South Africa’s catastrophic HIV/AIDs pandemic that tragically took hold as the country was emerging from apartheid. Just as in Triangulum, Beukes’s shadowy, undeveloped extra-peripherals are also segregated from the narrative economy, never to emerge as fully developed characters.

Zoo City is set in Johannesburg. Known locally as Egoli (“city of gold”), Johannesburg is built on the back of migrant labour and gold. The city is inscribed by the pollution mining has left behind: “Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline” (Beukes, 2010a: 7). The showy façade of metropolitan life obscures the underbelly of urban poverty, as gold mining casts alluring hues across the horizon, whilst squeezing the breath out of the city that sprawls beneath: “It’s the dust in the air that makes the Highveld sunsets so spectacular, the fine yellow mineral deposits kicked up from the mine dumps, the carbon-dioxide choke of the traffic” (Beukes, 2010a: 136). Egoli is figured in metaphors of bodily consumption: Zinzi ponders on “the last of the mine dumps […] gouged out […] Maybe it’s appropriate that eGoli, place of gold, should be self-cannibalising” (287–88). Zoo City is rendered as the endpoint of Joburg’s inner-city Hillbrow — crime-ridden and policed by “armed response” (233), where, in nighttime streets, “not even a plastic bag is stirring in the trees” (232). Yet whilst the protagonist Zinzi is a resident of Zoo City’s inner-city slums, her sophisticated social and linguistic habitus are more in tune with the hip youth of South Africa’s affluent Black middle classes, and fail to authentically speak to contemporary informal life.

Cloning, disease, a housing crisis, and political struggle drawing the contours of a ruined Johannesburg, all shape the near future reality of “Ta O’Reva”: “Amidst the concrete decay, the smoke and attrition of the wasteland once known as Johannesburg. […] The Jozi skyline was lost in a smog of contamination” (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.). The reds of a sunset attributed in Triangulum to urban pollution are “cut through” by sunlight, which “seemed alien in this dark place”, “in magnificent bars of rainbow colors” (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.). This is an allusion to the rainbow-washing of post-apartheid political discourse in the fledgling years of democracy. The catastrophes befalling the city are presented in shorthand as a timeline, a thick line separating the key dates and events in the published version:

2014-2017 Race riots spiral out of control across South Africa; A cargo of hazardous biochemicals disappears from Port of Durban.

2018 South Africans start dying from an unknown disease; Number of reported: 832

2019 The unknown disease is discovered to be an engineered airborne bio-agent; It is named after patient-zero, Johnnie de Villiers — a white farmer; Parts of South Africa are quarantined; Number of fatalities: 9264.

2021 WHO declares the Villiers Contagion “incurable” (Nhlema, 2015a: n.p.)

The timeline format, together with explicit references to “patient-zero” and the WHO’s intervention on the Villiers Contagion, present the characters through a problematized discourse of global public health.

Plague narratives, alienation, and accumulation by dispossession

Each text invokes a pandemic or plague. Calling to mind South Africa’s AIDS catastrophe, in three its origins are traced to the archetypal “patient zero”. Zoo City names the Afghan warlord attributed with being the first zoo or aysmbiot as Patient Zero “for what was then called the Zoo Plague and, later, AAF or Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” (Beukes, 2010a: 73). In Triangulum, this is the gold miner George Harrison, thus situating capitalism as the plague that has overwhelmed the city. Both Zoo City and Triangulum reference the quarantining policies instituted on the pretext of containing the spread of infectious disease in twentieth-century colonial South Africa, but that in actuality facilitated racial segregation. The impact in cities of the Global South of combined inequalities of urban poverty and urban-edge life, as Jason Corburn and Lee Riley argue in Slum Health, including “the lack of basic services, political rights, and health care”, “coproduce poor health for many urban slum dwellers” (Corburn and Riley, 2016: 2; see also Lewis, 2009: 40). Disease is symptomatic of the environmental conditions which informal, precarious communities endure.

For Nixon (2011), the ways capitalism and maldevelopment coproduce environmental ill-health constitute a form of slow violence: “structural violence may range from the unequal morbidity that results from a commodified health care system to racism itself” (23). This form of violence is imperceptible over time, producing imperceptible change, and thus requires “rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent effects” (Nixon, 2011: 10–11). In terms of HIV/AIDS, environmental factors may not directly cause infection as President Thabo Mbeki claimed when he suggested poverty causes AIDS, but they do contribute towards compromising the immune system (Poyner, 2020: 237). Accused of AIDs “denialism” in the late 1990s, Mbeki was disastrously sceptical of “Western” biomedical science. As a consequence, the necessary antiretroviral treatments were not rolled out in time to tackle the fast-paced spread of the disease. The tragic irony of the emergence of HIV/AIDs in South Africa coinciding with the dismantling of apartheid is that the desegregation and increased economic mobility democracy brought provided the necessary conditions for the disease to spread. As Marks (2002) notes, “As late as 1990 the estimated prevalence of AIDS in South Africa was less than 1 percent; by 1998 this had risen to 22.8 percent with the prevalence as high as 32.5 percent in ante-natal clinics in KwaZulu-Natal” (16).

Writing about Moxyland, Bethlehem (2014) draws on Adam Sitze’s article on Mbeki’s denialism. Startlingly, they show that AIDS was used as a pretext for segregation by the apartheid government, which, “at the brink of political transition, deliberately failed to prevent the spread of AIDS in the homelands in order to decimate black populations” (Bethlehem, 2014: 531; Sitze, 2004: 790). The necropolitical function of the homelands was perpetuated, Sitze argues, after the transition to democracy (Bethlehem, 2014: 531). Both Triangulum and Moxyland reflect on the ways in which the bubonic plague at the turn of the twentieth century was used as justification for segregation. A museum guide in Triangulum explains: “In the 1930s, when the plague drifted up from the south-west coast, the settlers thought it provident, bolstering the case for segregation, which had been stalled since its proposal” (Ntshanga, 2018: 1360). Similarly, in Moxyland, the threat of the spread of the Marburg virus, to which the first character Kendra has become immune after being injected by corporate nanotechnology, is used as a means of maintaining state control. Disease in these speculative fictions provides pretexts for urban containment that harks back to colonialist methods of population control whilst it opens up new markets for Big Pharma to distribute its wares.

As with the African American experience, the informal subject in the four stories is (dis)possessed in ways that revisit the horrors of segregation whilst resonating with their contemporary condition in the post-apartheid state. In Triangulum, the widow of murdered tech CEO Pius, Emilia, recognizes this long history of African dispossession: “Throughout our history, […] oppressors have always relied on our willingness to barter each other. From the Middle Passage to data” (Ntshanga, 2018: 3384). The informal body of the extra-peripheries — almost invariably Black — is literally possessed as a resource in the capitalist world market, even if part of an informal economy (of illegal mining, waste picking, crime — including the trade in narcotics and pharmaceutical medicines). At the same time, the informal subject is dispossessed of their human rights and rights as citizens. It is not too great a leap to see how the informal body is regulated and contained in ways that Harvey (2004) would term accumulation by (dis)possession, namely, “the continuous role and persistence of the predatory practices of ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ accumulation within the long historical geography of capital accumulation” (74). This is a process of “creative destruction” to manage the cyclical “crises of overaccumulation to which [capitalism] is regularly prone”: capitalism “creates a physical landscape in its own image at one point in time only to have to destroy it at some later point in time” (Harvey, 2004: 66). Just as in the typology of the subgenre of cyberpunk, in which as Stobie (2012) argues, fast-paced technological change renders “characters alienated from the elite power base” (373), slum and informal residents are alienated (dispossessed) from the means of production. As Marx (1844/1986) famously wrote, “The worker[’s…] labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. […] Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague” (39). In all four narratives, plagues thus figure literally as human disease but also metaphorically as signs of extractive capitalism.

In a fitting assessment of each work analysed here, Beukes (2010b) describes Moxyland as an “allegory for a corporate apartheid state” (n.p.). Connecting the story of capitalism in Africa with the stark inequalities shot through the stories of informal life, the value of reading the South African speculative genre from the vantage point of a world-systems approach is self-evident. The WReC shows how development under capitalism also incorporates the “development of underdevelopment, of maldevelopment and dependent development” (2015: 13). In Zoo City, for instance, the tower block in which protagonist Zinzi December resides, is “choke[d] by stewing garbage and black mould floating down the stairwell. Elysium Heights was condemned years ago” (Beukes, 2010a: 8). A world that is “one, and unequal” (Moretti, 2000: 55), made up of a core and periphery, is registered in the literary forms of world literature in textual experiments capturing the collision of great poverty and great wealth, of traditional (including Indigenous) cultural forms, and those emerging from metropolitan life (see WReC, 2015: 82–83). Each text portrays the ruination of the slums and urban edge; each features spatio-temporally concertinaed epistemologies and cultural and social formations, for example, in representations of muti and sangomas alongside those of Big Pharma and the global vaccine industry, or petty crime in the shadow of the crimes of the multinational corporation and the state. Not unlike the cognitive estrangement produced by science fiction theorized by Suvin (2014: n.p.), world-literary scholar Löwy (2007) names this literary mode irrealism, the typology of which the WReC describes as “discrepant encounters, alienation effects, surreal cross-linkages, unidentified freakish objects, unlikely likenesses across barriers of language, period, territory” (2015: 17). The speculative novel is the exemplary genre to capture in literary form the irreality of uneven development determined by “invisible forces” that produce discrepancy, alienation, freakishness. The capacity to imagine such forces across world-literary texts requires the telescopic vision Franco Moretti argues is made possible by the practice of distant reading. Moretti explains that distance “is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems” (2000: 57; emphasis in original). Thus, distant reading telescopes the structural forces governing the social realities portrayed, enabling the reader to make the necessary connections between the conditions of urban poverty, informal living, environmental ill-health, and racialized global capital.

If Afro-futurisms project possible futures, they are also weighed down by the burden of the past. Capitalism was the key driver behind the development of racial segregation in South Africa: Alexander (2003) contends that the “racist logic” of apartheid was “to guarantee cheap black labour and the continued profitability of ‘maize and gold’” (22). That Black South Africans continue to make up the majority of the working classes gives a markedly racial hue to class relations today. The WReC identifies a “dialectic between stasis and mobility” of underclasses and itinerants, between “increasingly balkanised patterns of settlement along ethnic and ‘racial’ lines”, despite formal apartheid coming to an end, and “the increasing ‘casualisation’ of the labour market [which] means that this ethnic and racially balkanised pattern of habitation is disrupted by the constant flow of economic migrants forever looking to gain a toehold in the interstitial niches of the cityscape” (2015: 149). Triangulum captures a terrain that is always already racially inscribed. The narrator reflects that “Schornville [is …] known as a Coloured area, meaning it has more tar roads than a township […] another rundown block with children skipping rope over potholes” (Ntshanga, 2018: 1670). In Moxyland, Tendeka describes the ways in which the city is overwritten by inequality. As the taxi bus hurtles on its route, it passes through

the tourist zone, where the rubbernecks come to get their taste of poverty and their photographs with the kiddies […] The tourists don’t venture too deep into the heart of it, which means they’re missing out on the drop toilets and spiderwebs of illegal electricity connections in the newest parts of the sprawl. (Beukes, 2008: 43)

Representations of informal life confirm how the new government’s housing policy in the late 1990s, as Bond and Tait show, “was based on market-centred principles and is failing on its own terms”, leading, amongst other things, to the perpetuation of “apartheid-style ghettos” (1997: 31, 27).

Corporate crime and the new technologies

In the mode of accumulation by dispossession, capitalism relentlessly searches out new markets even as it produces maldevelopment. Typifying the speculative novel (and its subgenre, cyberpunk), the dystopic underworld each text portrays is sedated by narcotics and pharmaceutics, including psychiatric medicines, as well as online gaming (the titular Moxyland is the (fictional) name of one such game). This is a social reality governed by drug cartels and armed response, propped up by a corrupt state that monitors and controls technologies like the mobile phone and data analysis and data mining synonymous with global twenty-first-century surveillant life. The narrator in Triangulum is a programmer in the Grant Regulation Office (G.R.O.), casually referred to as Population Control — a “corrective” government agency tasked with monitoring grant fraud in the social welfare system, and an unofficial wing of the Department of Social Development. Tapping into the emerging new technologies market, G.R.O. is acquired by a Silicon Valley investor, who maintains international development grants whilst employing scientists and computer programmers like the narrator, and moves into data mining “to monitor the rise and decline of the worker population in the metropolis and beyond, and to note their consumption patterns in the townships and the CBD” (Ntshanga, 2018: 2603). Informal communities emerge most prominently in the narrative when we learn that the Tower at which the unnamed narrator is temporarily employed by G.R.O. is mining the city’s precariat for new data markets. A colleague of the narrator tells her, “G.R.O.’s helping Delta source labour for the Zones […] That’s what the experiments were for. To draw from a pool with limited rights and no relations. Then to program their compulsions towards products supplied by the companies signed on for the trials” (Ntshanga, 2018: 3816). The extra-peripheries have rights suspended and are treated as expendable: they are the “unimagined communities” of emerging postcolonial societies that Rob Nixon names in his analysis of the slow, environmental violence done to the Global poor, whose “vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development” (2011: 150). In the South African context, with the ANC government adopting macroeconomic policies like GEAR from 1996, such communities present an inconvenient truth about the failures of the Rainbow Nation to build an equitable, just society through reparations and redistribution.

Political historian Lodge (2002) argues that “[t]o compete in the global economy Africa needs to upgrade its infrastructure, especially in information technology [and to] invest in ‘human capital’ and promote exports and economic diversification’’ (230). Triangulum captures these new markets as forms of accumulation by dispossession. A gift from the Delta corporation, Revolution Tower is intended to “draw attention to the city of Johannesburg; to attract investors and signal an economic shift towards information trading” (Ntshanga, 2018: 2788). As the narrator wryly observes, the work of data mining was not unlike “the history of labour in the metropolis”, hence, G.R.O.’s nickname, Population Control — an allusion to apartheid’s heinous Pass Laws that controlled the Black populations travelling into the cities for work. The narrator is quickly drawn into the murky world of data mining, where nanotechnology is implanted into comatose victims picked up from informal communities, whose limited rights mean they are unlikely to fight back and can easily be disappeared. Recalling 1990s neoliberal initiatives like GEAR, the narrator reflects:

Ever since the 2019 launch of the Delta Urban Renewal Project — an initiative to redevelop township space in the province, using local labour — there’d been a shortfall in both materials and wages […] [I]n ten years, each Zone would fall under corporate, rather than governmental, regulation. […] [T]he nation was transitioning from underdeveloped state to multifaceted corporation. […] [T]he settlements would ultimately be available for purchase. […] [A] sociologist […] describe[ed] Zones as a new form of apartheid. (Ntshanga, 2018: 2611–27)

Invoking the figure of the zombie originating from Haitian Voudou that resonates with slave histories, Tendeka, in Moxyland, describes how corporates are using mobile technologies “like shock therapy […] so we’re all unquestioning, unresisting obedient model fucking zombie puppydog citizens” (Beukes, 2008: 41). Whilst taking new, cognitive forms, the capitalism mapped here follows its typical path, driving towards new markets through processes of accumulation, including deregulated free trade. In Triangulum, the narrator reflects:

There was a premium on our information […]; all the tech start-ups, responding to market saturation in both the West and the East, had focused their sights on our continent. It was public knowledge that in order to take advantage of this development, and in amendment of our constitution, the government was legislating digital access as a human right, which would open a new and untapped market of users that numbered in the millions, as well as creating new government tenders and subsidies. Regulations were loosened, no doubt to facilitate Zoning. (Ntshanga, 2018: 2711)

In Empire of Normality, Chapman (2023) maps emergent emotional and cognitive capitalist forms that, by the 1970s and 1980s in the US, were succeeding industrial capitalism. Building on Marx’s theory of alienation and a study by US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, Chapman shows how manufacturing was superseded by the service industry in the US from the 1950s, whereby emotional labour — specifically, the interpersonal relationships built between service-provider and customer — was commodified. From the mid-1970s, the accumulation of knowledge (cognitive capitalism) predominated, driven by “new technological innovations, most notably, the personal computer, the internet, and the digital revolution more broadly” (Chapman, 2023: 111–12). Capitalism simultaneously found new markets in the treatment and maintenance of a depressed and anxious, over-burdened workforce: “pharmaceuticals were increasingly prescribed year after year, in many cases to people working long hours in the new services industries” (Chapman, 2023: 112). The objective was twofold: to maintain a healthy and productive workforce, whilst at the same time generating new markets in pharmaceutical and over-the-counter remedies (Chapman, 2023: 112). Speculative fiction takes the idea of cognitive capitalism to its logical conclusion. Triangulum sketches such a history: Protopa Incorporated was to become the largest conglomerate in the third millennia, for instance, shifting in the late twentieth century from manufacturing to “fossil-fuel extraction and the distribution of petrochemicals to energy production and electronics” (Ntshanga, 2018: 3808). Control in the stories is exerted through the administering of illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals, vaccinations and, in Moxyland, through new technologies of mobile phones (used to “defuse” dissenters and noncompliers) and online gaming. New technologies enable criminal and government forces alike. The rule is “No phone. No service. No life” (Beukes, 2008: 17). Those who fail to toe the public-order line are “relegated to homeless, out of society, cut from the commerce loop, no phone” (Beukes, 2008: 91). In her reading of Moxyland, Samuelson draws on Manuel Castells’s (2010) notion of the network society, which “connects places unevenly and selectively, producing as its outside ‘spaces of exclusion or “landscapes of despair”’, as global cities plug into international networks while disconnecting their hinterlands” (Samuelson, 2014: 814). But if this may seem the stuff of speculative fiction, one only has to look to the new technologies deployed in the 2024 co-ordinated attacks in Lebanon by Israel’s Mossad, when mobile phones used by Hezbollah exploded simultaneously, to see how dystopic visions collide with present-day realities.

Triangulum makes a direct comparison between data and gold mining as forms of extractive capitalism. Raising spectral stories of gold on which Johannesburg is built, the narrator reflects on (real-life) miner George Harrison, credited with mining the region’s first gold nugget, but who tellingly may have been homeless. Memorialized in bronze, Harrison is fittingly stood outside a new shrine to capitalism: the Eastgate Shopping Centre. The narrator “imagine[s] us as prospectors too […] burrowing into what [Harrison had] left behind” (Ntshanga, 2018: 3352). Anti-globalization activist and corporate hacker, M/A/R/K, instructs the narrator, “The development of the townships and slums through Zoning was always set to come at a great cost. In the end, both models were a form of slavery” in which residents would be “lock[ed] […] in sites of indentured labour and consumption” (Ntshanga, 2018: 3869).

Online scamming, human trafficking, murder, violent crime, and drug dealing occur on a cartel scale: crime props up the informal economy yet is entangled within corporate life. As Simone (2004b) explains in an article on Johannesburg’s informal economy, as the drug economy expands, it is increasingly driven “to generate ambiguous interfaces […] between supposedly discrete groups, between illicit activity and legitimate investment, and between inner-city Johannesburg as an increasingly well-known site of the drug economy and other less visible, and often more advantageous, sites of operation” (421–22). In Moxyland, the contours of society are drawn along segregationist lines not unlike apartheid, with the Rurals at the urban edge forming an underclass or precariat sporadically quarantined from city dwellers. Containment is achieved through narcotics and branded consumables, like the Ghost soft drink to which the first narrator, white photographer Kendra, is addicted and that ultimately leads to her death. Whilst Ghost provides her immunity from the Marburg Virus sprayed over protesting residents who must report to police vaccination centres within three hours of contamination if they hope to survive, Kendra’s Ghost sponsors exterminate her. On camera and infected by the strain, Tendeka calls this “an act of government-corporate censorship” and a “human rights violation taken to its worst” (Beukes, 2008: 289).

The informal economy in Zoo City is synonymous with crime: “[g]unfire has always been part of [its] nocturnal soundscape, like cicadas in the countryside” (Beukes, 2010a: 59). Intersections of divergent sectors of urban life brought about by an increased mobility and flexibility of residents, Simone (2004b) argues, make the city “legible” for its users at specific times and places (409). Legibility captures how nighttime in Zoo City, when for non-residents the inner city is too dangerous to traverse, is when the informal residents are at their most convivial: “From 6pm, when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they’ve been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. […] The crack whores emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape” (Beukes, 2010a: 132). Chatting and smoking provide opportunity to build a sense of shared community between those reduced to “crack whores”. Yet Davis names the contentious mapping of criminality on to the segregated urban poor “so much semantic apartheid […] that disable[s] any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion” (2006: 202); and Bremner points out that “[t]he geography of crime is a geography of vulnerability” (1998: 55). In Johannesburg, “the areas most disadvantaged or least protected under apartheid are now the most vulnerable to murder, armed robbery, rape and violent assault — Soweto, Alexandra and Orange Farm”. New landscapes of crime shape the inner cities too: as property owners fled Hillbrow’s “foreseen demise” from the mid-1980s, “its economic and social base is now substantially outside the law” (Bremner, 1998: 55). Davis notes that slum clearances are often justified as a means of fighting crime: because of their invisibility, especially to the surveillance of the state, slums “are frequently seen as threats” to state power. Problematically reproduced in the underdeveloped portraits of informal life sketched in the speculative fictions analysed here, they are effectively “off-Panopticon” (Davis, 2006: 111).

Conclusion

For Simone, a radical potentiality of futurity emerges from extreme immiseration in the remaking, flexibility, and mobility amongst an agential informal urban poor. Dery in “Black to the Future” posits futurity as that which is provident but not yet attainable. Yet the narratives of Ntshanga, Nhlema, and Beukes can only be read as portents on the “city yet to come”, warning that, to avert the hazardous social realities they predict, we must act now. Slum resident Zinzi in Zoo City escapes with her life, avoiding the ominous Undertow that sucks zoos into its forcefield once their animal has been slaughtered. Only Toby, the entitled white student in Moxyland, survives the plague. Triangulum tentatively offers ethical redemption by drawing the narrative finally back into the turn of the twenty-first century. The calamity that will strike humanity is forestalled — at least for now. “Ta O’Reva” initiates a ground-clearing exercise, tearing down the monolithic symbols to the new nation that has failed to deliver on promises of reparations and redistribution, in this way preparing the ground for the city yet to come.

Reviewing Triangulum, Kevin Gallin focuses on the question of formal difficulty: “This frenetic world-building at the outset offers the promise, inherent in […] science fiction […] that everything will snap together. This is the power of world-building as such […] [But] there is no snappy coda at the end to bring it full circle” (2020: 147). For Gallin, such cognitive labour ought to provide the pleasure of the text, ultimately satisfyingly tying up all narrative threads. Yet the irrealism of world-literary forms (freakishness, strange discrepancies, alienation), working in tandem with characters struggling to make sense of the South African cityscapes they inhabit, set the potentiality of a redemptive, radical world-building process in motion. Whilst Alexander argues that “it is the illusory quality of the ‘global,’ incarnate within Western pop culture and media phenomena” in Beukes’s fiction, depicted in “digital format — text messages, emails, smartphone video recordings”, that “makes the generic distinctions with her oeuvre deliberately slippery in their gesturing to seemingly ubiquitous disembodied spaces” (2015: 157, 158), this article has argued that it is global capitalism that is the common denominator shaping a combined yet uneven modernity that determines the lives of rich and poor alike. In these speculative fictions, the difficulty of the text — its cognitive estrangement — requires the reader to struggle to “snap together” a chaotic mix of urban poverty, violent crime, disease, and corporate capitalism. The reader becomes invested through this labour in the city yet to come, contemplating possible alternatives, which begin to take shape in the work of literary criticism.