Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

Marta Fossati

doi:10.30687/tol/2499-5975/2021/23/018

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Highlights

Crime fiction in South Africa has exploded after the demise of apartheid in 1994, as many scholars have noted
Maimane shares few interesting elements: both set their narratives in mid-century Johannesburg, choose to write in English, and adopt the short-story genre. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of the detective stories, I argue that both Dhlomo and the Drum writer resorted to this productive strand of popular fiction to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans before and after the institutionalisation of apartheid, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions
It is interesting to notice that both Dhlomo and the Drum writers, Maimane in primis, resorted to this subgenre of crime writing to make a political statement

Summary

Introduction

Crime fiction in South Africa has exploded after the demise of apartheid in 1994, as many scholars have noted (see, among others, De Kock 2016, 36). Scholars like Tyler Scott Ball (2018) and Colette Guldimann (2019) have recently recognised an ethics of writing in Maimane’s adoption of the hard-boiled subgenre that goes beyond the mere function of entertainment inherent to popular fiction Starting from these considerations, this article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. Maimane shares few interesting elements: both set their narratives in mid-century Johannesburg, choose to write in English, and adopt the short-story genre Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of the detective stories, I argue that both Dhlomo and the Drum writer resorted to this productive strand of popular fiction to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans before and after the institutionalisation of apartheid, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions. The stories’ style and content, and their internal evidence, indicate that they were probably written between the early Thirties and the late Forties/early Fifties – in particular, “Flowers”, “Aversion to Snakes”, and “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy” belong to the more mature group of sto-

10 The play The Girl Who Killed to Save

Conclusion