3Right from the outset reconciliation was meant to be the moral counterpart of a political compromise. Against the background of political uncertainties during the negotiations, the ideas of reconciliation and of a truth commission were publicised as the symbolical landmarks separating the obscenity of the past from a new culture based on human rights. Reconciliation was introduced as a process of national healing which carried the obligation of mutually acknowledging the wrongs committed on each side and entailed a firm commitment to the telling of the truth so that the horrors of the past might never be forgotten. Thus the political negotiations and their institutional outcome opened up a discursive arena in which memory and ethics were the mediating terms upon which true reconciliation was deemed possible.

5Mark Behr’s novel, The Smell of Apples is an attempt to deal with the past by uncompromisingly laying bare some truths about the Afrikaner community. The child narrator, Marnus, relates his happy childhood in the idyllic setting of False Bay in Cape Town. His family, the perfect image of respectability and success, is ruled by a loving but strict father who is a general in the South African Defence Forces. The child fully endorses the virtues of Christianity, manliness and racial superiority he has been brought up to believe in. The obvious contradictions, deceits and hypocrisies of his community are carefully spotted out but always rationalised by the child or his parents as being willed by God. The racial tension is hardly perceptible except through the savage aggression of their servant’s son by a gang of white thugs. The pastoral blissfulness of their suburban life seems unassailable until one day Marnus, looking through knots in the family home’s timber flooring, sees his father buggering his best friend Frikkie after making him fondle him. It is a shameful secret which he does not divulge to anybody so as to maintain the pretence of respectability in spite of his lost innocence.

6The political violence which prevails inside and outside the country is also suggested by the contrast between the two narratives which make up the novel: the child’s naïve narrative, written in the present tense, which relates the major events covering the span of one year in the early l970s, and the narrative of Marnus, fifteen years later, as an officer engaged in the war in Southern Angola, made up of short, fragmented, diary-like flash forwards, woven into the child’s narrative and in which he consigns his experiences and impressions until he dies in a battle.

7Behr’s method is essentially enthymematic: the incomplete syllogism which the contiguity of the two narratives implies leads to the conclusion that the innocent life of his childhood was founded on a violence which he finally encountered and exercised as an adult. Behr’s novel is thus based on the allegorical pattern of an initiation which serves to negotiate the passage from a state of innocence to one of experience. In the ostensible simplicity and innocence of the child’s speech two discourses are vying to be heard: there is first the discourse of the Afrikaner ethos handed down from generation to generation by the parents and the Afrikaner community at large, grounded in a strong sense of loyalty and solidarity. On the other hand, by dutifully recording the clichés, prejudices, half-truths or downright lies he hears around him, Marnus unwillingly exposes the moral shallowness of this community.

9There is no such self-consciousness in Van Niekerk’s Triomf, nor is there any explicit sense of shame or guilt. The story is set in Triomf, a white district built on the rubbles of the former African freehold location of Sophiatown, razed to the ground by Apartheid in the mid-1950s. It features a family of poor whites, the Benades, comprising two brothers (Pop, Treppie), their sister (Mol) and their incestuous son (Lambert). They are the descendants of bywoners (or share-croppers) who fled the poverty of the veld to acquire protected jobs in the railways and industries. An epileptic and half-wit, Lambert potters around and reads encyclopaedias but is feared by all on account of his unusual physical strength and sudden outbursts of violence. Treppie, the bread-winner, is a resentful bloody-minded character who, ever since his father beat him to a pulp for catching him while he was sleeping with his sister, has kept on persecuting all the other members of the family. The older brother, Pop and Mol, passively endure Treppie and Lambert’s verbal and sometimes physical violence and try to keep up a semblance of unity in the family.

10Unlike Behr’s novel, there is no narrative strategy to attenuate or hush the shameful family secret. In Triomf all the characters are presented in a crude light: their language is scurrilous, they live almost marginal lives in a derelict house, on a staple diet of South African brandy, coke and polony, and are unabashedly racist and anti-semitic. The narrative strategy, which is essentially based on a combination of scenes and dialogues interwoven with sections of indirect free speech or thought, ensures that there is no intermediary between the characters and the readers with the result that the latter is always exposed to the impact of their paranoia. It is therefore up to the readers to produce their own moral shield and deflect the racist ranting of the characters while simultaneously tuning in to the devastating irony which underlies the text. Like Mark Behr, Van Niekerk transforms the metonymy of realism into metaphor and allegory: the Benades represent the grotesque avatar of the Afrikaner myth which has finally given birth to an inbred monster. The Afrikaner allegory is all the more central to the understanding of the text since the Benades plan to hit the road North in a parody of the Great Trek when, as Lambert keeps repeating, ‘the shit hits the fan’ that is to say on elections day on 27 April 1994.

11Van Niekerk’s novel is jubilantly subversive in the sense that her characters happily and deliberately transgress all norms: the political norms of Afrikanerdom, whose representatives are turned into ridicule, the religious norms of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose creeds and texts are parodied, sexual norms since all the male characters freely indulge in incestuous intercourse with Mol whenever they feel like it. Finally it deliberately flouts political correctness since it serves the reader with liberal doses of racist abuse and ‘K’ words – K for Kaffir, now an actionable insult. The novel is also uproariously comical as characters repeatedly land themselves in genuinely farcical situations. It is moreover served by a vivid, popular and resourceful language. The carnivalesque thus constitutes the dominant literary mode through which the Afrikaner past is reappropriated.

14Ambivalence is another dominant mode of this novel. The rhetoric of ambivalence proceeds from the fact that the narrator abstains from any comment and resorts to a system of multiple focalisation, shifting from one character to another, with the result that the reader imperceptibly comes to endorse the truth and validity of each character’s point of view. However repulsive these characters are – and the author systematically uses a discourse of defilement to make sure they are – they eventually interest us more for what they are than for what they represent. There are moments in the narrative when they become genuinely moving as they awkwardly grope towards some form of common humanity expressed through feelings of compassion or nostalgia as when they reminisce about past hardships.

16Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying is also allegorical and subversive in dealing with the issues of transition and reconciliation, and particularly with that of urban violence. The story is set in an informal settlement in an unnamed South African harbour city shortly before the general elections of 1994. The narrative deals with the past and present adventures of two major characters, Toloki, a tramp and self-styled professional mourner, and Noria, a former prostitute, who were childhood friends in the same village. They later migrated to the city following different paths. When the novel begins, they meet by chance at the funeral of Noria’s second child Vutha and they revive their past friendship with childhood reminiscences. The main narrative line develops around the question of how it came that Noria’s five-year old child was necklaced by young militants, members of a self-defence unit whose duty it was to protect the inhabitants of the settlement from the attacks of neighbouring hostel dwellers.

17By choosing a marginal place and socially marginal characters, Mda sets his narrative in the uncertain zone of borders and divisions which the characters regularly transgress. The picaresque theme links the village and the town, rural and urban cultures, the townships and the CBD, without opposing them or setting one above the other. The informal settlement, although part of an urban area, has not yet achieved a definite status or a clear identity: it is an area of precarious living where new issues and new social positions are violently fought out, where people die or struggle to survive. It is also a world which wavers between slapstick comedy and tragedy, between legality and illegality.

19The magic realism of the novel lies in the unquestioned endorsement of the extraordinary and, more generally, in the deliberate contiguity of two African literary traditions, the urban tradition of critical realism and naturalism of the 1950s and 60s and the rural tradition of legends, tales and myths, or, in other words, of the written and oral traditions. While neither of the two discourses seems to have been prioritised, Ways of Dying is constructed in such a way that it reclaims the latter. The omniscient narrator turns out to be an anonymous but ubiquitous storyteller who faithfully relates the adventures of Toloki and Noria. He tells their stories through the categories of oral discourse, adopting an external point of view, calling upon other witnesses’ testimonies and addressing an imaginary audience. His voice is a communal one which fuses in the flow of a single utterance all the differences and arbitrary divisions which several centuries of colonisation have painstakingly produced. In Mda’s novel discursive hybridity is thus used to relativise the pre-eminence of urban culture in Black South African fiction. His narrative replaces rural culture within the compass of modernity and redefines its relevance through the instrumentality of magical realism.

21The rhetoric of Mda’s novel simultaneously addresses two issues: first, it seeks to take in the totality of African cultures in a non-contradictory, non-totalizing way. He takes for granted the heterogeneity of cultural differences which developed before and during the long period of colonisation. Second, it addresses the question of shame defined above as the honour of the group. Unlike the Afrikaner community in Behr’s novel, Mda’s heroes do not adhere to a code of honour to hush the crimes of the community. The manifestations of political or criminal violence, greed and corruption among Africans are represented as negative forces which threaten the country on the eve of liberation and are denounced as such. The abrasiveness of Mda’s satire is meant to jolt people into moral awareness.

22Of the three novels, Mda’s is the one which is the most explicit about the issue of reconciliation, but his appeal for peace and unity is directed primarily at Africans themselves. By so obviously leaving aside the white Other, Mda’s novel seems to intimate that the question of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators is not the only major issue. By focussing on the black community it points to the priorities for the future such as fostering social solidarity and attending urgently to the needs of those most severely hit by apartheid. Mda’s novel thus provides a more comprehensive view of the South African situation, some distance away from the oppressive guilt, confusion and uncertainty of the white moral conscience. In a way, it definitely brings the margin back to the centre.

23The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a unique way of ritualising the passage between Apartheid South Africa and the New South Africa; post-apartheid fiction has correlatively sought the proper language to encode the hopes, contradictions and ambiguities of the period. Like its institutional counterpart, the discourse of reconciliation in fiction has acknowledged the necessity of delving into the past and laying bare its most unpalatable secrets. It was deemed essential to redefine human relationships on ethical grounds and thus resuscitate forgotten or betrayed principles of behaviour. What the three novels have in common is that their discursive structure is affected by the implicit presence of the Other which the political transition has imposed. None displays a single and stable narrative form to account for the period. Their underlying canonical patterns – the romance and the pastoral in The Smell of Apples, the epic and the biblical allegory in Triomf – the realistic novel and the picaresque in Ways of Dying are systematically subverted by different forms of hybridity resulting in discursive strategies which aim to address contemporary issues and define new identities.