The protean New South Africa in Deon Meyer’s Heart of the hunter

Abstract

After a virtual absence from South African writing under apartheid, there has been an explosion of crime fiction in post-apartheid South Africa, largely within the various thriller sub-genres. This article examines Deon Meyer's Heart of the hunter (2003). Drawing on distinctions between the traditional detective story and the thriller, I argue that Meyer uses the ambiguity and radical perspective of the latter genre to challenge the binary oppositions of black and white, and good and bad that dominated thinking and culture in apartheid South Africa. In doing so he adapts the form to the post-apartheid context, revealing how the thriller can be used as a vehicle for postcolonial investigation and suggesting why it has become the genre of choice in a democratic South Africa. The novel presents multiple, and often conflicting, representations of the main protagonist, Thobela Mpayipheli, a former Umkhonto we Sizwe soldier and assassin for the KGB. By linking these activities to a longer history of resistance to colonial domination, through Nelson Mandela and historical Xhosa figures, Meyer invites readers to question the true source of “crime” in the apartheid and post-apartheid contexts of South Africa. By ultimately refusing a simple inversion of good and bad, however, he mobilizes a textual web of re-reading and re-interpretation that, I argue, should be read as a postcolonial and political strategy, appropriate for a country in a state of transformation.