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chaPTer eiGhT ‘The Trenches are The boarDrooMs of souTh africa’: Black DiaMonD Stereotypes and formulae To understand Mda’s depiction of black economic empowerment (BEE) in Black Diamond we need look no further than the novel’s chapter headings. These jaunty titles throw the reader into a parodic potpourri derived from numerous sources like the liberation movement during apartheid (‘Free the Visagie brothers’, ‘Comrades and lovers’, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ ‘Cadres in the trenches’). These escalate into the unashamed capitalism of comrade Molotov’s mantra (‘Accumulation cannot be democratised, comrades’) and combine with the banal colloquialisms of detective fiction, gangster movies, women’s magazines and television advertising. So we have ‘Somehow the bitch must pay’, ‘The cat that caused all the trouble’, ‘Stevo has a dream’, ‘An intruder in the house’, ‘Blonde bombshell’, ‘Shootout’, ‘See how she glows’ and ‘The big jol’. Designer labels mix with popular psychology in the plot’s trajectory (‘The curse of the Zara Man’, ‘Smart okes use psychology’); there are faint intertextual resonances in ‘Widows’ long march to freedom’ and ‘Hell hath no fury’ and finally the novel thuds to a potentially nasty dénouement in the last chapter, ‘The final dance’, which ends in near disaster, with the black protagonist Don Mateza in hospital, telling his lover, the white magistrate Kristin Uys, that he and his cat are moving into a new dimension: ‘Me and Snowy … we can no longer be kept’ (Mda: 2009, 207). The opening page is equally illuminating about how this novel works. The first sentence is spoken by a narrator who jumps in whenever the reader needs the plot explained: ‘No one will blame you if you think Kristin Uys is dressed for a funeral’. The narrator’s second sentence introduces the sartorial parody that will attach to designer labels and the people who like to be seen in them throughout the novel: ‘Not the black folks’ kind of funerals where women give the dead a glorious send-off in the same Versaces, Sun Goddesses and Givenchys that are a staple of such horse racing events as the Durban July Handicap or the J&B Met’ (Ibid, 1). So here are the upwardly mobile black women who dominate former whites-only events such as the Durban July Handicap. At funerals they sport expensive designer clothing so as to impress Dance of Life 148 the other mourners. Their mood is celebratory, giving the dead ‘a glorious send-off’. In this black culture ‘the living crack jokes about the dead, and get sloshed and dance to loud music at those marathon parties known as “aftertears ”’. In stark contrast to such gaudy and loud celebrations of mourning are ‘the sad and sombre affairs that pass for funerals in white communities’. This is what the novel is about: aspirant black BEE excecutives and the white executives with whom, post-apartheid, they share the same urban space. This urban space, in the formerly whites-only suburbs in which the upwardly mobile protagonists live, lacks any kind of cultural identity. Townhouses, streets and interiors have no individual features, whereas the Soweto townships to which BEE executives nostalgically retire every weekend bustle with life: food, music, nightclubs and community vibe. Lest the reader should lose track of these sociological complexities, an intrusive narrator continually intervenes to provide orientation, addressing the reader directly: ‘[The magistrate’s] black gown will soon disabuse you of any notions of bereavement, and will place you squarely in a courtroom’. The courtroom setting signals the detective-novel storyline, for Kristin Uys, the white magistrate, is hearing the case of the Visagie brothers, accused of running a brothel. As the storyline develops, it transpires that Kristin is on a campaign to eradicate prostitution, although in the privacy of her townhouse she dresses as a tart and performs a prostitute’s dance because her former husband, Barend, loved prostitutes. Black Diamond’s dust-jacket claims: ‘Zakes Mda tackles every conceivable South African stereotype, skilfully (and with the lightest touch) turning them upside down and exposing their ironies, often hilariously’. The opening chapter certainly exposes the ironies of stereotypes and formulae — the (white) Visagie brothers are supported by their white mother, Ma Visagie, and their coloured ex-nanny, Aunt Magda, who has carefully studied struggle literature to marshall its rhetoric so that she can publicly defend the boys. Ma Visagie and Aunt Magda are in bitter competition for the boys’ affection, and the white magistrate Kristin Uys abuses her power by sentencing Stevo...

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