Johannesburg is South Africa’s largest and richest city with four and half million people. It was founded after the Gold Rush in the 1880s on the hopes and dreams of Europeans looking to get rich quick. Some did, some didn’t. Johannesburg is also home to one of the most notorious of the Apartheid-era townships, Soweto (once home to both Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu), built specifically to keep black people out of the city centre. There’s bound to be a fair amount of working through what South Africa and Johannesburg have experienced in the last three decades since the end of apartheid. There are multiple lingering legacies. The city’s crime rate spiked during the first turbulent post-apartheid decade of the 1990s, but has receded as the economy has stabilised and investment into the city grown. Johannesburg’s murder rate, which hit 1,697 deaths in 2007 (a rate of 43 per 100,000 inhabitants) is now down to 29.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, about half the murder rate of Cape Town, and half the national average.
Perhaps the calming down of the crime situation in Jo’burg by the early 2000s in part explains the explosion in crime writing around 2006. This is when a record number of locally written and set “krimis” (the shorthand for crime books in Afrikaans is the same as in German) appeared and sales took off. Quite simply, as quite a few past Crime and the City columns have shown, it’s harder to justify fictionalizing crime when it’s at epidemic proportions and all around you everyday. However, while there’s now a reasonably healthy local market for crime novels it has to be said that Joburger authors, and South African crime writers in general have not yet managed to break out significantly into the wider English crime writing/reading world.
Jo’burg journalists appear to be keen krimi authors. Muff Andersson is an arts and culture journalist in Johannesburg, and she was also very active in the anti-apartheid movement. Bite of the Banshee (2003) is a ride through the city’s underbelly following the gruesome murder of a human rights lawyer. The cast of characters is ambitious—a superstar rapper, a former international spy, a drug dealer, a troubled journalist, a disenchanted politician, and a police detective. The novel was hailed as being as “new South African as they come criss-crossing the landscapes of contemporary South Africa.”
Diale Thlolwe is a genuine crime writing original—his novels mix magical realism with hardboiled styles. Born in Meyertown, south of Johannesburg, his first novel, Ancient Rites (2008) received the South African Literary Award debut prize. Thabang Maje, a retired school teacher and part-time private eye is hired to find a missing school teacher. His twin problems are that the missing woman was his childhood sweetheart and, to find out what’s happened to her, he’s going to have to become a primary school teacher in a remote district. A serial killer stalking prostitutes, mysterious children and strange night-time drumming in the mountains all play a part in the investigation. Thabang Maje returns in Counting the Coffins (2011) which is more hardboiled and pounds the streets of downtown Jo’burg—”…corruption, malfeasance and skulduggery, African-style.” It’s been a while since the last Thabang Maje book and so we can only hope for his return courtesy of Dial Thlolwe.
Modern downtown Jo’burg is Private Eye Jade de Jong’s beat. Jassy Mackenzie has written five PI Jade de Jong novels starting with Random Violence (2010). Jade fled South Africa a decade previously after her father was killed. Now she’s back home and working with her father’s former assistant, Superintendent David Patel. Car jackings (a big Jo’burg crime in the 1990s and still today) are turning deadly and rich whites living in gated communities are dying so the police are forced to sit up and take note. The second Jade de Jong book, Stolen Lives (2011), looks at people trafficking in South Africa, while book four in the series, Pale Horses (2013), see Jade investigating a suspicious base jumper death. In the latest, and fifth, Jade de Jong book, Bad Seeds (2017), she’s really pushed to the limit as a nuclear disaster threatens Johannesburg.
A few more Johannesburg-set books:
- YA crime readers may like British-born author A.J. Hartley’s multi award winning Steeplejack (2016) series, set in a nineteenth-century South African fantasy world. Seventeen-year-old Anglet Sutonga lives and works as a steeplejack in Bar-Selehm, a sprawling South African city that could well be a steam-punked Jo’burg. When Anglet’s apprentice is murdered she resolves to track down the killer. Anglet returns in Firebrand (2018) investigating murder and corruption among Bar-Selehm’s elite.
- Joburger-transplanted-to-London Richard Kunzmann writes the Tshabalala and Mason investigation novels set in Jo-burg. In Bloody Harvest (2006) Jo’burg Cops Jacob Tshabalala and Harry Mason investigate a serial child killer and allegations of witchcraft. In Salamander Cotton (2007) a wealthy retired farmer is murdered in Jo’burg. His widow believes the answer to why he was killed is to be found in the Northern Cape where the dead man’s farms were. Tshabalala and Mason travel to a desolate landscape of extreme poverty. Finally, Dead End Road (2011) sees Tshabalala and Mason embroiled in political vengeance killings with roots in the dark years of apartheid.
- Angela Makholwa has written two novels. The first features Jo’burg-based PR consultant and ex-journalist Lucy Khambule. Red Ink (2013) starts with Lucy receiving a call from convicted serial killer Napoleon Dingiswayo. He wants to tell his story, but Lucy needs to investigate his past and that means a journey through the contradictions and dark side of modern Johannesburg. The Black Widow Society (also 2013) sees three successful black South African women banding together gathering to bring justice to less fortunate women who suffer domestic violence.
- D. Villiers City of Blood (2007) was an explosive novel that brought a lot of attention to this Johannesburg-born writer and deserves to still be read. It’s a revenge tragedy in modern Jo’burg featuring Siphiwe, a nineteen year old orphan, haunted by memories of the senseless death of his elder brother. McCarthy Letswe, notorious crime lord, has returned to Jo’burg after several years in exile, determined to wreak his revenge on Abaju, a Nigerian gangster responsible for Letswe’s forced departure, and the man now seen as Johannesburg’s king of crime.
And, as usual, one particularly strong recommendation. James McClure deserves to be better known and more widely read. Born in Johannesburg in 1939 he worked as a photographer before becoming the crime reporter on the Natal Witness in Pietermaritzburg. In the 1960s he moved his family to Scotland and worked on a succession of Scottish newspapers and then, moving to England, the Oxford Mail. In 1971 he wrote The Steam Pig which won the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Gold Dagger award. The Steam Pig introduced the detective duo of the Afrikaner Tromp Kramer and Bantu Mickey Zondi. Another seven Kramer and Zondi novels followed. The Steam Pig starts with a white woman killed by a bicycle spoke to the heart, Bantu gangster style. The Caterpillar Cop (1973) raises the specter of a child killer on the loose amid the racial tensions of 1970s Jo’burg. The theme of murder amid heightened black vs white tensions continues in The Gooseberry Fool (1974) a churchgoing devout white man seemingly murdered by his black servant and meaning Kramer and Zondi must enter the townships.
The eighth, and final, Kramer and Zondi novel, The Song Dog (1991) is actually considered the best by many fans of McClure. It is essentially a prequel to the entire series, set in 1962, as Kramer investigates the murder of a famed Afrikaans detective in Zululand, Maaties Kritzinger. During his search he meets Detective Sargent. Mickey Zondi hunting a killer among the black community. The two team up.
Most of Mclure’s novels were written during the apartheid exile—although he lived in England and never returned to live in South Africa, even after the end of the racist regime. He died in 2006. The Kramer and Zondi novels show what crime writing can often do best—reveal the layers and complexities of a society we, as outsiders, cannot ever know. Since the end of apartheid Johannesburg writers have returned to re-examine the apartheid era and, particularly, to show what a long shadow it still casts on their city, the new South Africa and its society.
