Economic Informality in South African Fiction

As many scholars including Patrick Bond, Gillian Hart, and Martin Murray have shown, the end of apartheid did not mean an end to racial capitalism. For Louw, majoritarian democracy (rather than consociationalism) was achieved at the expense of dismantling the economic hegemony of the mine-owning Anglo-capitalist class (Louw 176–7). The GEAR programme implemented soon after the end of apartheid seemed to consolidate existing racial-economic inequalities, with the average per capita income of white households nearly ten times higher than black households in 1996 (Hart 20). This has produced a class of people who move between two distinct economic realms. A strand of criticism has emerged which celebrates the improvisatory and informal kinds of social organisation. For scholars who have straightforwardly celebrated these kinds of sociality, the informal economy represents an alternative social velocity to both the corrupt or “can’t do” state and the global capitalist modernisation. But more and more South African writers are interrogating the idea that living in the interstices of institutions is in fact liberatory or counterhegemonic. One formal and aesthetic feature linking several novels produced in this era is a shifting between the still divided economic zones of South Africa—either a shift between township and city, wage-labour and informal work, the university campus and the family, and so on. In this chapter I argue that this is extrapolated to the global scale in Nadine Gordimer’s 2001 novel The Pickup—representing as it does a transnational rather than merely domestic form of labour migrancy in South Africa. But first I show how the country’s uneven development has been represented in Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014).