Losing the Plot - Leon de Kock

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identity; they reopen ‘grounds of contest’39 in ways that render precarious any cosy metanarratives or settled identity politics on the basis of victimhood in the world of postapartheid. To conclude this introduction, I offer, below, an extended reading of The Number as an instantiation of the stakes involved in contending lines of storytelling in post-transitional culture.

       The politics of (true) stories

      Steinberg’s The Number is indubitably one of the most suggestive works of postapartheid South African writing. The narrative itself is a dense, analytical weave of stories told, scrutinised, picked apart, reconsidered and retold. When all else fails, The Number suggests, narrative accounts – stories – are what South Africans cling to. Here, the double entendre in the term ‘accounts’ is apposite, for there is the all-important matter of accounting for oneself, and laying accounts at the door of history, if not other people. Steinberg is acutely sensitive to the charge and importance, in postapartheid society, of stories. His mission is to excavate layers of narrative as a means of understanding various postapartheid ‘others’ in a country where, as Steinberg has commented, writing continues to be a business of ‘coordination between deaf people’.40 Not only does Steinberg retell stories told to him, and read by him, in the course of the book, but he also retells the story of how the stories told to him, and read by him, have been shaped by earlier histories. Somewhere in this entanglement of storylines, data originally perceived to be true ‘transmogrifies’ (a word often used by Steinberg) into myth, or philosophy, or law, either written or unwritten. And these articles of belief, resting on the foundation of perceived truth, with origins in real events, are decisive for the people about whom Steinberg writes, because they live by such lore. In Steinberg’s work, and in the wider domain of postapartheid writing, stories therefore gain a secular prominence of critical proportions.

      Steinberg’s telling example of this, in The Number, is gang mythology in South Africa’s prisons. The ‘Number’ bands derive their sense of origins from the densely worked and reworked story of Nongoloza Mathebula, a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century bandit figure who straddled the boundary between law and its abrogation amid oppressive social conditions. Mathebula’s tale was first recounted in book form by Charles van Onselen in The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867–1948, published in 1984. At one stage in The Number, Steinberg turns Van Onselen into a character in his book by relating the venerated historian’s version of Nongoloza to his interlocutor-subject, Magadien Wentzel. One must remember here that, academic accounts aside, rival versions of the Nongoloza story, in the country’s prisons, can have life-or-death consequences because they are allied to what Steinberg’ calls ‘competing doctrinal positions’; moreover, competition of any kind between the Number gangs often leads to killings. Whether or not, for example, sex with men is validated by the Nongoloza story depends on a doctrinal difference between different Number factions, a difference that might well have deadly consequences.41 So, when Steinberg brings Van Onselen’s account of the Nongoloza story into confrontation with the understanding of it held by long-term prisoner Wentzel, this Numbers gang leader is not impressed:

      ‘There is the black man’s story and the white man’s story. Go to any prison in this country, you will hear the black man’s story – exactly the same in every prison. You go there with Van Onselen’s story, they will kill you. Serious. How can you say Nongoloza spoke to a white man?’ (The Number 236)

      Steinberg tries to explain how Van Onselen came into legitimate possession of the story he tells, but Wentzel interrupts him:

      ‘Van Onselen is fucking with something very fucking important. You look at Shaka’s history, you look at Piet Retief, at Jan van Riebeeck. This is history people believe. It is like a power. People are prepared to die for their stories.’ (238)

      Here, we witness a turn in the politics of knowledge production. In this instance, intellectual jousting in the cloistered halls of the university is rendered relative by contention over stories in another hothouse of competing narratives, another enclosure in which understanding is forged via the giving and taking of accounts: the South African prison, with its marked cultures of institutionalised violence. Van Onselen, himself widely known for his gloves-off style of argument (in his years at the University of the Witwatersrand, especially), would be at something of a disadvantage in this debate with Wentzel, who seems capable of giving the term ‘visceral engagement’ a wholly new twist. The democratic space of postapartheid writing, via story-aggregator Steinberg, opens up a dialogic zone in which such unlikely bedfellows are allowed to share the privilege of open, public dialogue, even if it is reconstructed after the event. This is what one might call a Bakhtinian moment, a dialogic zone never available in quite the same measure before 1994. Steinberg, and writers like him, stitch together stories from irreconcilably polarised realms because real communication and real listening remain an urgent need despite – or because of – the gains of postapartheid. Recall Steinberg’s statement that writing in and about South Africa ‘is a question of coordination between deaf people’. Steinberg’s raison d’être as a writer seems to be to act as a collector of accounts, and to scrutinise them with an unsparingly sharp eye, while also embedding himself inside his interlocutor’s felt world, his felt life. Anyone who has read Steinberg, whether it is The Number, Three Letter Plague, A Man of Good Hope or any of his other books, is likely to agree that his ability both to listen to, and to elicit from, his subjects what one might call ‘heartfelt’ stories is quite extraordinary. These subjects open up to him, entering into a bond in which the right, or best possible, telling of the story becomes an objective of the utmost importance because, always, the stories matter deeply; on these accounts hang someone’s sense of self, or at least their own understanding of it.

      Clearly, then, this is serious business, involving the most intimate textures, or layers, of people’s lives, their self-making and identity construction, their aversions and resentments, and their most prized memories. There is little place in such a highly sensitive process for ‘fiction’, or for fictionalising life stories, and yet there is much fictionality in these accounts; here, one might talk about the fictions that underlie – in some cases make up – much of what is taken to be the real. This kind of ‘fictional’ content almost always enters into Steinberg’s stories at a secondary level, as he disentangles truth from half-truth, perspective from fact. Despite such blending of nonfiction and fiction, however, the emphasis remains squarely on the primacy of an impeccable standard of accuracy, and of reported actuality. Steinberg frequently refers to himself as a ‘journalist’, despite the fact that his books are a hybrid of investigative journalism and scholarly research, achieving a quality of social history that is, in South African studies, unique, though he does acknowledge, in The Number, a great debt to Van Onselen. In this regard, Steinberg, like Dlamini, is unique to postapartheid writing, and his mission as a discoverer of deep stories, excavated with due regard for both their surface feel and their below-the-radar complexity, gives his work an edge over writing that is merely imagined or made up. Perhaps this is what Krog means when she says, ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’, and Van Niekerk, too, when she opines that a reading of the best South African nonfiction (in this case, Antony Altbelker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree) ‘almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-Fiction’ 5).42

      It is as if the analytical edge of nonfiction, in its commitment to establishing a baseline account and its dedication to getting the story right, is necessary precisely because the ‘right story’ can only be achieved, or nearly achieved, in a continuous weighing up of the value of the stories people tell themselves, which are likely to have varying degrees of usefulness. That is to say, Steinberg deploys a mode of nonfictional investigation, akin to journalism in the best sense of that term, to discriminate between orders of information folded into stories. Steinberg is alert to the fact, always, that subjects use stories strategically and pragmatically, so he cannot take them at face value. Much of the information gleaned in the course of a Steinberg-type book, although based on fact, often verges on a kind of fictionality in its arrangement of elements. For example, Steinberg writes, at one stage, that

      [Wentzel’s] identification with

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