Coming to Terms with Violence and Xenophobia: Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying, and Clinton Chauke’s Born in Chains

Abstract

This chapter continues to explore the topic of inequality from a perspective of violence and crime in Mark Gevisser’s, Kevin Bloom’s, and Clinton Chauke’s memoirs. All three writers attempt to outline the realities of living in a society rife with violent crime, albeit from widely different perspectives. Gevisser and Bloom draw on their journalist profession in their quest to understand violent crime and the effect it has on South Africa’s citizens. Personal traumas and tragedies are at the centre of their memoirs which also include the voices of others, people who have become victims of crime in a variety of contexts. The question whether to stay or to leave is prominent in Bloom’s text, whereas Gevisser attempts to reinforce belonging in Johannesburg once more after the home invasion of which he became victim. Chauke writes from a different perspective, belonging to the contested category of the born frees; those who were born or came of age after the end of apartheid. As Chauke depicts in his memoir, that freedom may still not be the same for all of the nation’s citizens and especially not for those born poor and Black. Violence and xenophobia emerge in his writing as central themes and Chauke ponders the ways in which they interconnect with lack of privileges.