Profoundly South African

The Kwazulu-Natal Midlands is where John van de Ruit’s Spud novels are set. The “Kwazulu” part, however, was absent when the events in the books took place. Nevertheless, van de Ruit conceived a profoundly South African setting for his upmarket boys boarding school. He took a lesson from the old adage that “truth is stranger fiction.” Names were changed to protect the identity of the people and places involved. Queue video.

Van de Ruit’s Spud novels are a South African publishing phenomenon. Despite our demographic penchant for not buying fiction, heads have popped up, ears are pricked, and hands are digging into pockets. Penguin has swept modesty aside and the first installment’s cover now heralds the fact that not 60 000, not 70 000, but over 80 000 copies have been sold. Their logic is implicit. If Spud is flying off the shelves, you should buy it too.

True, the Spud novels do have a lot going for them. Moreover, the beauty of their formula lies in its simplicity. Van de Ruit takes a familiar framework (the school diary) and inserts local content. Done! For South African readers bearing the yolk of a private boarding school background, the experience is akin to watching a True Hollywood Story of your adolescence. For the great unwashed, it’s a window onto the codes and rites of a masonic fraternity.

In spite of his nickname, the central character of the books has enormous appeal. A stranger in a strange land, Spud has entered an upper-class enclave on the back of a middle-class upbringing. The world filtered through his diary is engaging and his naivety (as the publisher puts it) is “wickedly funny.” It’s an easy read and the pages turn quickly. To top it off, van de Ruit has done an exemplary job of promoting himself and mobilising South Africa’s book-selling community.

Nevertheless, there is a bigger picture to the success of Spud and its sequel. What really sets them apart from other South African novels set in the 90s is the way they interrogate South Africa’s wobbly transition to democracy. In short, the “interrogation” part is absent. Spud’s boarding school diaries marginalize the realities of his bipolar country. Despite a handful of nuggets that provide social and political context, Spud’s world renders the outside one virtually inconsequential.

While Spud shows adequate disapproval for his family’s old-school take on South Africa, it is the ins and outs of his immediate surroundings that really count. As such, Spud’s diaries reflect an adolescent experience of the old South Africa, where politics hover on the periphery of the playground. He’s a kid with nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, for many book-buying South Africans in their thirties, Spud may very well be the first South African novel that legitimises their Apartheid experience. Could this be its bestselling ingredient?

Clicks:

• Spud: The Madness Continues Book Extract
• Related PSA Post: Apple of the Earth

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It’s the mid-70s and a French philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) has just hammered out a book concerning the birth of the prison system. The work tracks the evolution of the social and technological mechanisms used to entrench dicipline in Western Society. His ideas serve up an effective theoretical means of understanding the dystopian world conceived by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover, Foucault has devised a philosophical matrix through which the existence of Big Brother can be perceived in familiar contemporary contexts.

Discipline and Punish asserts that we live in a state of perpetual imprisonment, drawing connections between the mechanisms of law enforcement in modern society and the panopticon. A type of prison building dreamed up in the Eighteenth Century, the central characteristic of the panopticon was that the guards could observe prisoners while prisoners were unable to see the guards. The bottom line was that the prisoners never knew when the guards were looking. Fewer guards were needed, costing taxpayers less money. Everybody was happy.

Needless to say, Foucault would have drawn profound conclusions concerning the evolution of enforcing the speed limit on South African roads. Once upon a time, traffic cops crouched behind bushes and cables were intermittently stretched across roads in unexpected locations. When it was discovered that the income generated by speeding fines was not commensurate with the cost of conducting these stealth operations, the government turned to the panopticon method, slapping up signs like the one above.

As there were no cameras to go with the signs, people quickly realised that there weren’t any guards on duty. Big Brother was caught napping and all the mice came out to play. When the cameras arrived, the farmer’s wife raised her carving knife and speeding vehicles broke wildly to avoid persecution. However, they remembered where the cameras were located and formulated a strategy of slowing down in all the right places.

In a flash, the intuition of South African drivers sped to the lofty philosophical heights of Foucault. These days, even in unfamiliar territory, the collective consciousness of drivers around you makes it clear when there is trouble ahead. Nevertheless, the panopticon approach may not have been completely exhausted. Empty green boxes perched on metal poles might just do the trick. For the time being anyway.

Clicks:

• Horse’s Mouth: Foucault Quotes (Wikiquote)

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A profoundly South African sign that commuters pass as they shuffle onto metrorail trains. Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 - April, 11 2007) would have approved. The American novelist and social commentator contemplated the mess that dangerous weapons make during his involvement in the Second World War. Held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut took shelter in a meat factory during the infamous bombing of the German city in 1945. He emerged to find piles of rubble and death.

Vonnegut later drew on his experience in Germany to create a novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. An exploded narrative that skips backwards and forwards in time, the book is laced with science fiction and provides a gloomy picture of war. Published in 1969, it was was embraced by readers who were puzzled and drained by America’s Vietnam blundering. Around the time it hit the shelves, polls in the United States indicated that only 33% of the nation supported pursuing a complete military victory.

Vonnegut concocted a distinctive brand of hopeful pessimism in his literary contributions to Planet Earth. His final work, an exhortation of the Bush administration entitled Man Without a Country, sees him soaring the lofty peaks of intelligent insubordination. “What can be said to our young people,” he writes, “now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”

Clicks:

• Man Without a Country Extract: Custodians of Chaos

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