The Afrikaner Grotesque: Mediating between Colonial Self and Colonised Other in Three Post-Apartheid South African Novels

Abstract

In his important book, Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, John Scaggs traces the origin of crime fiction to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Reading Cain's murder of Abel alongside Oedipus the King, Hamlet and the Book of Daniel, Scaggs defines crime fiction as a narrative whose subject matter is a crime and its investigation (Scaggs). In spite of their different socio-historical contexts, these three texts adhere to Scaggs's template of crime fiction - their plots hinge on the commission of a crime and its investigation. To this list, one can add Amma Darko's Faceless because it also exhibits the core elements of crime fiction that Scaggs sketches. While the subject matter of the text is the commission of crime(s) - the prostitution and murder of Baby T and the assault and attempted rape of Fofo - its plot is framed as a quest to identify and punish the people who are variously responsible for these crimes: Maa Tsuru, Onko, Kpakpo, Poison, Maami Broni and Mama Abidjan.