The personal story, or the story of or about an individual’s experience, as opposed to one that raises explicitly large questions – of philosophy, politics, culture and society – the keyword here being “explicitly”, continues to exercise a notable influence on recent black South African writing. Given the times, this is to be expected: the large questions have shifted to the background and become, in the words of the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, the “political unconscious” of the narratives.
Against this background, Redi Tlhabi’s Endings & Beginnings (Jacana) is a retrospective narrative of her brief platonic, but for an 11-year-old nevertheless intense, friendship with Mabegzo, an Orlando East jackroller, that raises deeper social questions within a personal narrative framework.
The author states her approach in the preface, “(m)y fervent belief that social conditions create the monsters who terrorise our lives and make us prisoners in our own country has made me curious about their background”.
My curiosity lies in the intersection of, and tension between, the personal and the socio-historical points of view that Tlhabi uses as the basis for this memoir.
For it is in the movement of the narrative between these modes that Tlhabi finds some difficulty in attempting to process, in 2004, the meaning of the events of her brief friendship with Mabegzo in the few months of 1989, which is also the time in which he died by a friend’s bullet at the age of 22.
In this light, Endings & Beginnings could be said to perform two seemingly mutually incompatible acts within two seemingly incompatible narrative frameworks: Tlhabi’s personal narrative seeks a symbolic exorcism of the “ghost” of Mabegzo, while the other seeks to explain the broader socio-historical context that shaped him.
The narrative framework of the 26-year-old Redi Tlhabi (nee Direko) is relatively secure in its empirical method and social analysis, and it is through this that she frames another, much less secure, of an 11-year-old Tlhabi grappling with a social milieu in which metaphysical explanations of social phenomena co-exist with sociological ones. For instance, describing some of the times she had with Mabegzo, the 11-year-old Tlhabi recalls one moment in which “he launched into the story of his life”, that is, of the gang-rape of his mother and of his birth from the rape, overheard in the streets from other children. But she also recalls how these moments of “clarity” – they never were clear – would be followed by spells of absence while Mabegzo visited a “sangoma for cleansing”.
