(Pre)apartheid time: Arthur Keppel-Jones’ When Smuts Goes (1947)

Abstract

South African academic and historian Arthur Keppel-Jones wrote When Smuts Goes as an imagined history of a time (1952 to 2010) when fascist Afrikaner nationalism consumed the country. Keppel-Jones’ book was published in 1947; apartheid began in 1948. This article considers previous scholarship on Keppel-Jones’ work (such as its depictions of race), before beginning an analysis on the text’s temporal forms. The work has also been discussed as a dystopic text, and I use this to introduce my primary concerns: the playful temporal forms apparent in the narrative’s telling, where this future is told as if a historical account. Derek Hook’s understanding of apartheid time is relied upon throughout the latter half of the essay, where the article argues that the text’s multiple temporal expressions may be explained by, and perhaps even expand upon, our understanding of the logic of apartheid temporality. Finally, I draw upon the shortcomings of using a theory of psychoanalytical temporality that looks back (Hook’s formulation of the theory, specifically), to read a work that looks forward.