Making and Unmaking ‘African Foreignness’: African Settings, African Migrants and the Migrant Detective in Contemporary South African Crime Fiction

Abstract

This article aims to examine the portrayal of African migrants and South Africa's relationship to the African continent in post-apartheid crime fiction. Exotic settings and the figure of the stranger have featured in the crime genre since its emergence in the 19th century.

Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai's Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries

“…Her texts – both published with the South African publisher Kwela – can be regarded as the first crime novels in the South African context that feature a detective from elsewhere on the continent. South African crime writers have frequently addressed migration from other parts of Africa in their writing and included sleuths whose investigations lead them to other African countries (Fasselt, 2016). Golakai, who studied and worked as a researcher in Cape Town for a few years until her return to Monrovia in the early 2010s, adds to these engagements the perspective of a transnational, or Afropolitan, woman investigator from Liberia.…”

“…7. Since the 1990s a series of violent pogroms directed against migrants from other African countries has taken place in South Africa, involving murder and rape alongside the destruction of homes and businesses (see Fasselt, 2016, for a discussion of the problematic label of ‘xenophobia’ and engagements with the theme in contemporary South African crime fiction).…”