The Circularity of Integrity and the Politics of Complicity in Thando Mgqolozana’s Unimportance

Abstract

Thando Mgqolozana's Unimportance traces one night in the life of a student on the verge of being elected Student Representative Council (SRC) president of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Troublingly, though, the protagonist, Zizi, has physically and verbally abused his girlfriend, Pamodi, and he now fears the imminent revelation of this news. But through the course of one night, Zizi undergoes a seemingly dramatic transformation. Where for much of the narrative he is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that what he has done to Pamodi is not revealed to others, by the end of the story he himself discloses his actions to the student body in the form of a speech. He does so because he comes to the conclusion that he lacks integrity and must act to restore it in himself, even if it costs him his political career. In order to do so, Zizi will renounce the "spectacular" political world for the "ordinary" world of people. In this article, I explore the complexity of the vision of renewal (of Zizi and more broadly of South African politics) that Zizi provides and argue that his development is fundamentally flawed because it is premised on the notion of a personal sense of self that is separate and distinct from the social order. I therefore show that it is inevitable that his change of character does not correlate with a meaningful alteration of his relationship to and ideas on women. Instead, I contend that the novel actually is quite critical of Zizi's so-called transformation precisely because of its limited invocation of responsibility. By way of contrast, I discuss the #RememberKhwezi protest of 2016 and focus on the ways in which it confronted then-President Jacob Zuma, his party, and the wider South African public with their complicity with gender-based violence. What most interests me, finally, is the potential of a South African literature that, like Unimportance, moves beyond ideas of personal culpability and agency in order to explore power and its effects in complex and transformative ways.