"Reader, Be Assured This Narrative is No Fiction": The City and Its Discontents in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (New South African Writing: A Special Cluster‪)‬

The delicate line between fact and fiction in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow is suggested in one of the novel's epigraphs attributed to W.E.B. Du Bois: "Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction." That Mpe evokes a strategy of address employed by African-American scholars and slave-narrative writers such as Harriet Jacobs who spoke directly to their readers insisting on the authenticity of their traumatic experiences in racist America, speaks volumes about South Africa's fledgling independence. (1) In his damning indictment of a South Africa that retains the socio-economic markers of apartheid, Mpe focuses on drug- and prostitution-ridden areas of post-1994 Johannesburg that are predominantly black. There is, here, neither evidence of Nelson Mandela's "rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world," nor of a reconciled society. If relations with whites who occupy positions of power over blacks seem strained, they are even more so amongst urban blacks who form a very fragmented community. In fact, the once politically oppressed South African blacks are now portrayed as the new oppressors of Africans from outside the country, thus making the notion of a new and different South Africa a very premature one. But the novel does attempt to steer away from this toxic mood by adopting a moral didacticism designed to encourage social transformation. In the recent Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood and based on Athol Fugard's novel of the same title, one gets a very real sense of the violence besetting South African townships and inner-cities like Hillbrow. Interestingly, in both Tsotsi and Welcome to Our Hillbrow, this pervasive violence is not contextualized, possibly because of the target audience's assumed familiarity with the effects of South Africa's brutal system of legalized racism that officially ended in 1994. For the targets of this racism, the once invisible black, coloured and Indian masses--thus categorized by the Population Registration Act of 1950--the city was a place of deep anxiety, entrenched segregation and often certain death. The working masses who flocked to urban areas like Johannesburg, especially from the time of the nineteenth-century gold rush and onwards, returned home with virtually nothing to show. Instead, Johannesburg--which is known in isiZulu as egoli (place of gold)--enriched the Oppenheimers, De Beers and others while the black homelands and townships remained the wretched spaces of abandoned people. Those who still do not have the "gold" often rely on violent means to attain not just economic justice but also a home of their own.