Kris Van der Bijl

Tintswalo is flying back to Oliver Tambo International Airport. She is the winning Rugby World Cup team’s captain. Her father is with her. He is a prominent coal mine manager turned politician. As they enter South African airspace, Tintswalo receives a text message. It gives her a quest. Unless she can solve the mystery of the missing coal, her father will be killed. She teams up with Rassie, an ex-gang member from the Cape Flats. The two travel from Johannesburg to the border of South Africa to complete their quest.

This describes the start of the best South African novel. Its author is fluent in nine of the eleven official languages. They were born in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal. NSFAS (a government-implemented student funding scheme) helped them study accounting at the University of the Witwatersrand. The city introduced them to storytelling in the written form. After finishing their studies, they worked for a local firm and came to know the economic reality of South Africa. They wanted to quit and write full-time, but their family needed them to send money home each month. They elected to write in their free time. Their Hillbrow apartment has since been demolished.

The book’s use of language marks it as uniquely South African. Foreign critics can read the book because it is written in English. International popularity for the book on The New York Times Best Seller list. Yet, people often need to be made aware of its use of English within the South African context. This is not unexpected. Even South Africans need to be made aware of this type of English. You see, English’s place in South African literature is contested. It will remain so as long as it carries the burden of being a language brought by the colonial encounter. But to say that contemporary English is the same as the unified, single, British English is a mistake. Local influences are ever present. This is despite English being an uncommon home language in South Africa.

Only some South Africans share a common home language. This has yet to lead to dissent amongst the population. It has created a world where South Africans are so comfortable conversing with someone who might have a different level of language fluency. South Africans adapt how they speak daily, often without realizing it. Few go a day without doing this because of language diversity in South Africa. The book has an English that reflects this. It is an English of implicit understanding that communication across invisible borders must work. It is a transcendence from the norms of division that must be broken. No quote from the book exemplifies this point. No epistemology exists yet.

The story follows Tintswalo and Rassie as they travel towards the border, searching for the lost coal. Their relationship is the center of the novel. Its model is a buddy-cop movie, where two learn to put their differences aside and work together. The writer uses this mode to create comedic situations for the characters. They tend to lean on the absurdist. Most of the conversations between Tintswalo and Rassie are cyclical. They each appear trapped in their own entwined ideologues and never change the minds of the other.

Crime and politics are entwined through these absurd situations. For one, Tintswalo’s father is both a criminal and a politician. He is the one who set up the criminal enterprise that seeks to take his life. He did this by selling them the now-missing coal. He made this deal with them, thinking it was another official they were after. The lame twist is that the money he makes as a criminal is the same money he can use to save his life. Even when his life is at immediate risk, he does not bring this information up to his daughter or to Rassie. Even stranger, his daughter knows this fact. She does not confront him or even mention it. The easy solution is ignored for the dramatic comedy.

Although Tintswalo ignores the easy solution, her perspective does change near the Northern border. There is a telling scene where she stands at the Limpopo River and sees groups of people crossing from Zimbabwe with suitcases of clothing. She squats down and eats the sand beneath her feet. Rassie, in the meantime, is delivering the money to the criminals to ensure her father’s safety.

If the text has an aim, it points towards South Africa’s absurdity by forming the great South African novel. It needs to capitalize on what stories are commonly associated with South Africa to the global population. That being said, South Africa has a host of critical voices. It is easy for them to criticize books written by South Africans about South Africa for a global audience as lacking the nuance of diversity that South African critics love to latch onto. It is a critical hole that is too easy to stick a finger in. The author covers this through their writing about sports, crime, and politics. Doing so piques the national interest and sustains the idea that they can attempt to capture the whole picture.

The text closes in what it left out. It shifts to a dream, written in the future tense, about dancing to amapiano on South Africa’s Northern border.