When cultures clash

 

Michael and Stanley - Thursday

We all know that one of the most important issues to grab the reader's interest is tension. When cultures clash, it generates a fracture point where tensions rise and angry people may commit violent acts. This isn’t always colonists versus indigenous people; it can also be tribal or religious conflict. Some fine crime fiction focuses on these situations to provide an intriguing and believable backdrop for an entertaining murder mystery. To illustrate what we mean, here are a few examples we've enjoyed where culture clash is a central theme. Each of the books mentioned takes on culture clash in a different context and comes up with a different type of story. Each could only work in its particular setting, both in terms of character and plot.

In Abir Mukherjee’s series of historical mysteries set in the British Raj, the clash is between the British rulers and the local Indian population. Ex-Scotland Yard detective Captain Wyndham teams up with Sergeant Banerjee, a local whose relationship with the British rulers makes him unpopular with some of his own people. The combination of the two of them allows us to see the crimes they investigate from different, and sometimes opposing, perspectives. In the first of the series, A Rising Man, a senior British official is murdered. The British assume that the murder has been carried out by some branch of the independence movement, but the detectives need to look at the crime much more deeply to make progress. The complex trail leads them through the fractious relationship between the British and their Indian subjects to a surprising conclusion. Along the way Mukherjee recreates the Calcutta of the 1920s with all its nuances. The book won the prestigious Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for best mystery of the year.

James McClure wrote during the apartheid era, and his books were banned in South Africa for some time. In fact, he relocated to the UK. His novels are set in apartheid South Africa, and here the clash is pretty obvious—the powerful minority White Afrikaner rulers of the country versus the local Black peoples. McClure illustrates the conflict through all his books, subtly taking on the premises of apartheid through his two policemen—the White Lieutenant Kramer and the Black Detective Sergeant Zondi – a similar stratagem to the one Mukherjee uses. The detectives’ backgrounds are very different, but they make a good team. McClure cocks a snoot at the racism of the era by making Zondi, lower-ranked because of his color, the smarter of the two.

In The Steam Pig, a beautiful music teacher is murdered with a bicycle spoke through the heart. It’s the collaborative work of Kramer and Zondi that eventually breaks the case and illustrates directly why the apartheid system was at such cost to all sides.

The Steam Pig was another CWA Gold Dagger winner.

Madagascar has a mix of peoples who originated from places as diverse as mainland Africa and Indonesia. It was taken over by the French at the start of the twentieth century and became a veritable boiling pot of diverse cultures and races. After the French left, a republic was declared in 1960 that has creaked under the pressures of a variety of corrupt regimes ever since.

Stephen Holgate worked in the US Foreign Service, and his time in Madagascar as a diplomat not only informed him about the island, but also saw him develop an understanding of the peoples, and that comes through powerfully in his novel. Holgate uses the outsider point of view to observe the cultural conflicts. His protagonist, Robert Knott, is a diplomat at the US embassy. He's spent his career abroad, and has finally washed up in Madagascar. 

The local culture and its belief in the ghosts of ancestors is central to the story. Knott understands this, but, of course, doesn’t believe in it. As he says himself: he prefers to keep the island at a distance. It doesn’t work out that way. 

A great example comes from our own Annamaria Alfieri. South America, too, has historical conflict between the locals and the invaders from Spain and Portugal. (Everyone knows the movie The Mission.) City of Silver was her acclaimed debut. It's recently been translated into Spanish.

The silver mines made Potosi in seventeenth century Peru the richest city in the new world. The wealthy and powerful mayor’s daughter dies at a convent there and is believed to have committed suicide. However, the abbess thinks otherwise and sets out to discover the truth.

The Spaniards, the Inquisition, and the local people produce a three way culture clash for an intriguing mystery in a fascinating historical setting.   

Culture clash is not always White versus Black. Our own crime fiction sometimes uses the clash between the Bushman cultures of the Kalahari and that of the Tswana people of Botswana. It's a major theme in the latest book, A Deadly Covenant. A massacre of a Bushman group by a Tswana gang is the flash point. Although many years have elapsed, the tensions and fears generated by the event lead to apparently inexplicable killings in the present. Kubu has his work cut out for him.

These are just a few examples of a broad spectrum of first-rate crime fiction based on the clash of cultures. We haven't touched on North America - Tony Hillerman’s Native American novels are well known, and the modern-day black-white culture clash in the US is powerfully illustrated in SA Cosby’s work.  Europe, too, has plenty of examples. John Banville’s crime fiction set in Ireland has religious as well as political tensions in the background, and what about all the refugee culture (and other) issues?

It's all grist to the mystery writer's mill. Friction, tension, anger. Maybe even murder...

Apartheid and James McClure

James McClure

In retrospect it seems strange that the wave of good crime fiction that we have in South Africa now almost all developed after the apartheid era.  It seems a natural genre to use to display the rigid behaviors and eventual breakdown of an artificial system, a context that would display the excesses as well as the successes of the police.  It was also an era when some great writing talent was focused on the country – Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee.  Writers at that level choose their own subject matter, of course, and may have felt the crime genre too superficial for the sort of issues they wanted to address.  Certainly many of their books revolve around violence but not in the context of a mystery.  

South African writer Wessel Ebersohn wrote three thrillers at the time, exposing the security police and exploring the nature of evil.  His books were initially banned in South Africa.  He moved “up” to a fictional study of Adolf Hitler (although he’s returned his focus to South Africa in recent years).  Only one writer took a serious look at the nature of apartheid through crime fiction and that was a writer living outside South Africa.

James McClure was born in Johannesburg in 1939.  He became a teacher and then a journalist in Natal until in 1965 he immigrated with his family to England.   In 1971 he published his first novel set in South Africa – THE STEAM PIG – in which he introduced his detective duo, the white Afrikaans Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and the black Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi.  He set them up in a conservative fictional town, Trekkersburg, and let the South African context generate the stories.  The relationship between the two detectives and the artificial structures in which they live and which they largely accept, provide a clear illustration of the apartheid set up of the time and of the way it twisted the lives of ordinary people.  If you are interested in South African crime fiction (as we hope you are!) then these are excellent books to read.  Even now as historical fiction, they are very revealing and very good.  The whole series was recently reissued by Soho Crime.

I’m interested in what McClure thought about his own writing and what he was trying to achieve with it.  His books were never banned in South Africa as ‘subversive’ – as many were – and he was accused of being an apologist for apartheid for not explicitly condemning it in his books.  Then, again, is that what being a novelist is about?  So I was pleased to discover that in 1988 he was interviewed by Don Wall, Professor of English at Eastern Washington University.  It was published in a book titled “Mysteries of Africa” edited by Eugene Schleh.

When asked why he had chosen the mystery genre, this was McClure’s reply: “Because crime is something I knew quite a lot about, and because I wanted to write about South Africa in a context which would allow South Africa to become incidental to the story.  Which doesn’t mean it isn’t very much part of the story.  Unlike some other writers about South Africa, I try to make sure that the action is peculiar to that environment and arises out of it.”  He went on to compare the audience he was trying to reach to that of the Big Name authors: “I chose this genre also because it allowed me to reach a much greater audience than it would if I wrote about South Africa in a straight novel.  That way, you preach to nobody but the converted, usually – or to the so-called intellectual reader.  You’re not reaching the ordinary guy at all.”

In fact, he didn’t enjoy the Big Names’ work that much (except for Herman Charles Bosman – see my post about him  here.) questioning – among other issues – their lack of humor.  “It’s all as deadly serious as a political meeting.  I always hear laughter as well as sobbing when I recall life in Africa.”

On the issue of apartheid he was quite outspoken, pointing out that a novel is about people not about systems.  Speaking of black security policemen, he said: “But I know they’re not all monsters – far from it.  What fascinates me is the man who isn’t a monster who works as a monster.  I find that much more interesting than monsters.  There’s no insight into these people – a form of literary apartheid.”  He continued that he couldn’t stand stereotyping and found it repulsive whether in a novel or “as the outright fascism and racialism of the more rabid Nationalist Party member.” 

Don Wall summed up McClure’s views as follows (and McClure agreed with him): “You’re not an apologist for (apartheid) and you certainly don’t defend it, it’s an abhorrent policy to you, but, on the other hand, you understand the people who live under that system, and you see that good men can live under a bad policy and do good things, too.”

A moral as true today as it was twenty-five years ago.

Michael - Thursday.