South Africa is experiencing a crime wave. The protagonist in Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) may be correct that “the wave is anything but new,” but it is certain that crime in post-apartheid South Africa is exceptionally, perhaps uniquely, violent. The relationship between law-enforcement and violence has shifted: whereas the apartheid police were powerful agents of the apartheid state, “storm troopers of law and order” as Bloke Modisane memorably describes them in Blame Me On History (1963), the police in post-apartheid South Africa are, and are widely perceived to be, powerless to prevent acts of criminal violence that threaten the social order.
My paper focuses on representations of criminality and its effects in Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006). Showing the influence of French theorists and documenters of the quotidian such as Lefebvre, De Certeau and Perec, Portrait with Keys is a hybrid work, an experiment with genre that combines autobiography, travel writing and the essay to explore spaces, rhythms, objects and practices in Johannesburg, the city in which Vladislavic lives and works. His purpose is to represent the imbrication of the private and the historical, the individual and the social, alienation and freedom, within the weave of postcolonial urban life. I shall explore a central strand of the book: crime and its effects on the material and mental lives of the citizens—the profusion of security devices that protect property and the neurosis, psychic disfiguration and trauma generated by the threat and actuality of violent crime.