What is ”the edge of South Africa”? Are we talking about an outer edge, like our jagged coastline, or the serrated blade of our borders to the north? The pieces in this remarkable book — At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball), edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall — suggest that the edge of South Africa goes right through its heart and, moreover, that there are many edges lying uncomfortably at many different places in, and at many different angles to, our society.
One obvious edge is that of native/foreigner or native/immigrant; this is one addressed by Achille Mbembe and Tom Odhiambo. The former tells us why he left his native CameÂÂroon and why he stays here, testing, feeling and thinking about ”the South African experiment”. The latter gives us a delightful slice of life as he interacts with the people of Braamfontein, where he lives. Fred Khumalo, in his account of interactions with one particular immigrant, touches on this too.
Race and racism are (still) sharp edges; HIV/Aids is a really ugly one. So is crime and the paranoia it engenders. Deborah Posel’s piece deals with people living with HIV/Aids and meditates on what happens when you go over the edge of research into a direct involvement in your subjects’ lives — researching the epidemic is literally ”a matter of life and death”. Race is an important element of Makhosazana Xaba’s often very funny piece about moving into a new house alongside a recalcitrant white neighbour and Justice Malala contemplates what happens when crime begins to haunt your life and you go right over the edge of fear.
Almost all the writers here are associated with the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), but these are personal stories. Sarah Nuttall’s piece about the loss of a child is perhaps the most personal, the most private and the most painful. Jon Hyslop’s ”Rock and Roll Marxists” traces his own engagement, through the 1980s and into the present day, with Marxist approaches to a changing society. He asks whether such theory (once so all-embracing for leftists) is adequate to its new analytic tasks.
Many of the pieces here are also personal reflections on the processes of Wiser-type research and what can happen behind the scenes of such research — its under-stories, as it were. Graeme Reid writes about going to live for some time in a small town where he is researching modes of sexual being and relating, and his account of the people there, the textures of his temporary dwelling and whether there’s water or not tell as intriguing a story as the results of his more formal research. Jonny Steinberg relates a series of encounters with a storytelling prisoner, opening a space of ambiguity and performativity that illuminates, from an unexpected angle, the world Steinberg revealed in his book The Number.
Few, if any, of the pieces here have the formal conclusiveness of academic social research. That is a relief and this kind of writing is richer for avoiding the formalities. We are talking about futures here, the futures we are in danger of losing, as well as the futures to which we may yet aspire. Can an edge, rubbing roughly against another edge, become what Leon de Kock has called ”a seam”?
As Njabulo Ndebele puts it in his afterword, ”these remarkable narratives help us to recall just how harsh the public space in South Africa often is”, and they counter that harshness by putting ”niggling personal truths” on the page.
The book is titled At Risk partly because, despite our 13 years of freedom, there is still so much at stake. Perhaps the risk is even greater now. The title also resonates with the risks taken by these writers, and by the volume’s editors, telling such stories outside the conventional frames of academic and journalistic discourse. We talk about the need to ”tell our own stories” in cinema and literature and yet so often those stories come out as clichéd as any told by a blinkered foreigner. That is the gamble of fiction and it’s very hard to win against the bank of convention. The writers in At Risk go in a different direction, but do the job of telling our own stories magnificently.