Black lives, black crimes, and black consciousness in Gomolemo Mokae’s The Secret in my Bosom : a new vision of the police detective and democracy in South Africa

Abstract

Crime fiction and the police procedural subgenre have come under media scrutiny in the Global North, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Questions have been raised about the genre in relation to police brutality and whether the representation of police violence in the procedural might serve to normalize such action. Academic critics have also pondered the procedural, with some categorizing it as part of the ideological state apparatus, where the police force eradicate the threat of social disruption, thus reinforcing the status quo. The emergence of crime fiction and the procedural in several African countries has been concomitant with a shift from political repression to democratic reform. South Africa is a prime example as crime fiction rose to prominence following the end of apartheid in 1994. There are now recognizable local variations and crime fiction is widely seen as the new form of the political novel in South Africa. The Secret in my Bosom (1996) by Gomolemo Mokae, published shortly after the transition to democracy, is a groundbreaking, hybrid — and overlooked — detective novel, the first by a black writer after apartheid. While it draws on the police procedural frame, it also subverts the subgenre in significant ways. This hybridization of genre is used, I argue, to produce a bold new version of African crime fiction: with a black detective, and a vision of a new black police force and the country’s future — all in line with Black Consciousness thought in South Africa.