Counterfactual Cape Town

Two new South African novels explore the ghosts of our past – and future

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How much can we learn from alternative histories – and futures? That question was top of mind when I interviewed authors Karen Jennings and Nick Clelland about their new novels set in a counterfactual Cape Town.

Crooked Seeds by Jennings explores a 2028 Cape Town plagued by drought and social unrest, where Deidre van Deventer is drawn into a police investigation at her reclaimed family home following the discovery of several bodies. As detectives delve into her brother's suspected pro-apartheid activities from the 1990s, Deidre, overshadowed by her brother and abandoned by her daughter, must confront her painful past while caring for her ageing mother in a deteriorating environment under intense scrutiny from the authorities.

Good Hope by Clelland portrays a dystopian 2024 in the independent Good Hope Territory (GHT), the most prosperous country in the southern hemisphere. Lisa Robinson relocates from Durban to Cape Town to join Grant, the potential next First Minister of GHT. Life in this pristine state, where everyone is employed and tourism thrives, comes with a cost: citizens are constantly tracked by drones, executions align with the Noon Gun, and only the qualified vote. Despite its idyllic facade, Lisa quickly becomes a target in a regime where problems vanish quietly, revealing the dark underbelly of this seemingly perfect society.

1. What is it that historical fiction can do that historical non-fiction cannot?

NC: South Africa’s historical non-fiction is necessarily heavy with injustice, pain, guilt, identity, blame and disappointment. I wrote Good Hope, partially – it is a story too, after all – to give readers an imagination generated  ‘safe space’ tool to interrogate their history and the path taken to today. The diktats of a present day authoritarian independent Western Cape forces a reader to think, for instance, about the trade-off between historically important rights and their lived reality, artificially divorced from their own South African identity.

KJ: Fiction allows one more freedom to explore different options, scenarios and experiences. That freedom is not merely frivolous; when it is based on research, imagination presents a way of trying to understand the lived truth of the past.

2. Your settings are the future, but both books are about what happened in the past. What aspects of South African history do you believe are not widely known or understood by the general public?

KJ: There is a lot that Crooked Seeds explores, but in terms of the past/future issue, I will keep it simple and focus on one key aspect of our post-1994 history. The first is that the dream of the Rainbow Nation hasn’t been favoured by everyone, and not always for the reasons people believe. Deidre (my protagonist), for example, is a white woman who loses her leg on the eve of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. She quite literally sees herself as being crippled by this change in the country’s political trajectory. She believes that there is no job, no place, nothing for her in this New South Africa. Yet she is not in favour of apartheid, even speaks of staying in South Africa to build a new nation. But her bitterness at then feeling excluded from and handicapped within that new nation permeates all aspects of her life, preventing her from forming part of any community.

There are many more aspects of our history that are not widely known, which I have been exploring in several short stories and a recently completed manuscript, but I will leave those to discuss at another time.

NC: As a former politician and political consultant, I was involved in a great deal of polling of South Africans. I was always struck that, when it comes to history or recalling the past, people don’t care for complexities and nuances. People tend to clutch at grand historical themes ( ‘Apartheid was bad but this is worse’; ‘Mandela was good, Zuma is bad’; ‘The DA wants to bring back apartheid’). In my work as an author, I encourage people to question accepted narratives and grapple with contradictions.

3. Cape Town is the primary setting for both books, with echoes of contemporary issues; in Good Hope, the Cape is an independent political entity while in Crooked Seeds, the Cape is suffering a water crisis. What about Cape Town makes the past – and the future – more vivid, more real? (Or: could your book have been written about Bloemfontein?)

NC: Cape Town is a political emblem. It is the physical place that imprisoned Nelson Mandela, where the announcement of his freedom was made, where he walked his first steps as a free man and where the constitution that sought to draw a line under apartheid was signed.  In more recent history, for mostly political reasons, it is widely regarded as both the most prosperous and least ‘progressive’ South African city. It is that perfect combination of human triggers: fear and hope.

KJ: Sadly, if Crooked Seeds had been written now, it could be set almost anywhere in South Africa. The news is increasingly filled with towns/regions/cities that have had no water for days, sometimes weeks, which has been horrifying to see unfold. I have had irrational moments of guilt, feeling that I had written this into being somehow. Of course, there are two larger issues at play than the power of my pen: 1) the devastating effects of the rapidly increasing climate crisis, and 2) bad governance and lack of maintenance of infrastructure in a political climate rife with corruption, ineptitude and cronyism.

For me, Crooked Seeds was set in Cape Town because the idea for the novel came to me in 2016 during the water crisis experienced in the Cape at that time, where everyone was doing all they could to prevent the arrival of the dreaded Day Zero – when the taps would be completely dry. In addition, I was born and raised in Cape Town, living in the same house for almost three decades, wandering the neighbourhoods on foot (it was still safe to do that back then). The southern suburbs are very well known to me. In fact, the bar that Deidre frequents is based on a bar opposite the flat where my (now ex) husband and I lived, and which, interestingly, used to be managed by my great-grandfather George Scaife when it was the Diep River Hotel. So, on a personal note, the history is there for me, and a connection with the area, not to be too dramatic, runs in my veins.

4. Nick, would you have been able to write Good Hope without your experience as a former South African Member of Parliament and, later, Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Auckland? Karen, you wrote Crooked Seeds after a period of loss and despair. How much of your own histories are in your books?

NC: My own political history and obsessions are at the heart of this book. The context and questions are ideas that excite and terrify me.  The technical insights give readers an insider’s guide to how politics is practised in a modern South Africa. The policy bits in the GHT Wikipedia come from my experiences and work in governments. The character, Grant, is an amalgam of my political ambitions and stories as well as and other South African politicians I know well.

KJ: I always want to laugh whenever I am asked anything related to how much of me is in this book. Deidre is such a dreadful person, and the book opens with her peeing in a plastic mixing bowl on her floor. It only gets worse from there! But to return to your more general question: how much of my history is in Crooked Seeds (or any other of my books)? I am always in my books, of course. Everything comes through me and will be coloured by that. Deidre is fictional, her brother is fictional, the events are fictional, but then there are aspects that are mined from my own life. They can be miniscule – for example, a striped mug that one of the characters holds is based on striped mugs my mother owns and which I hate! Or peeing in a mixing bowl – when I was 18 and camping through Europe, I was struck down by chicken pox and was incredibly ill. I didn’t pee in a mixing bowl, but was given a wastepaper basket into which to pee so that I wouldn’t collapse on my way to the campground’s toilets. These are small moments from my life, given to the book, and made different by Deidre’s experience of them.

5. Historians sometimes play with counterfactual histories: what would have happened if certain key events had unfolded differently. To some extent, you present us with counterfactual futures: we know that the present and future are unlikely to turn out the way you describe. How do you believe these speculative scenarios can inform current economic policymaking and help us understand the potential consequences of different policy decisions?

KJ: Well, as I mentioned above, I first had the idea for Crooked Seeds in 2016 and began writing it towards the end of 2017. I was imagining a drought-stricken Cape Town a decade in the future. Here we are, in 2024, and much of what I imagined has come to pass in certain areas. People open their taps and no water flows out. Tanks have to bring water to queues of people – yes, sometimes in informal settlements, but also in residential suburban areas. Recently a friend who lives in Joburg told me how his neighbourhood had been without water for a week or more. This happens with alarming frequency. One of the ways in which economic policymaking is failing the citizens of South Africa is that not enough time and money has been allocated to upgrading old and dilapidated water management systems. Too much energy is spent on repairs, and most often this is not preventative; in fact, it usually comes far too late. Infrastructure also needs to be expanded in informal settlements where overuse of the few taps shared by many families results in constant need for repairs. Because of a corrupt tender system in our country, it often happens that those companies contracted to repair the taps never come.

NC: I wish I could say that I believe that government policy formulation is an open-minded, creative process that seeks out new ideas and innovations. I’m afraid it’s more like the sausage in the adage about how laws are made. On the other hand, I do think speculative scenarios drive narratives and public sentiment, which have a long tail impact ultimately on policy. For example, many South Africans fear ‘another Zimbabwe’ happening here.

6. You have created memorable (if sometimes troubled) characters – Deirdre van Deventer in Crooked Seeds and Lisa Robinson in Good Hope – who will linger in my mind long after the story details fade. What insights do you think this offers about the role of character-driven narratives in teaching history in schools?

NC: That’s an interesting question. I have spent many years teaching political communications to politicians and the equivalent to government communicators. I always invoke the Stalin line – ‘one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic’ – when trying to show them how to connect abstract concepts with their respective audiences. I think the same argument could be made for teaching history. Anne Frank immediately springs to mind.

KJ: From my own experience at school, there was nothing interesting or significant in learning dates or how maps changed or that there was such-and-such a war. The memorable moments that made me engage with the lessons and materials were when we learnt about individuals. Napoleon is one example, but he was famous, held a position of great power. What about the unnamed soldiers who died in the trenches of WWI? Or the ragged children in the factories of eighteenth and nineteenth-century England? Or the starving peasants who rose up against the Whites, seeking to launch a Bolshevik revolution? None of this matters if it cannot be imagined, and in order to do so, we must connect with individuals emotionally, whether in sympathy, revulsion, amazement, anger, horror, sorrow. Show us the lice in the soldier’s clothes, the child’s arm injured by a machine after 14 hours of relentless labour, the Bolshevik tired of starving while the elite live in palaces and eat as much as they wish.

7. How much do you need to know about the past to write about the future? Discuss the sources and research you relied on to create a compelling alternate future for Cape Town.

KJ: I always do a lot of research for my novels because understanding the past enables one to better understand the present and imagine the future. The manuscript I recently completed is set in the nineteenth century, making it a “historical novel”. With such novels, the research informs not only behaviour and experiences but also the surroundings. What did it look like? How did the people dress? What impact did the way they dress have on their movements? Etc… The research enables the creation of an entirely realistic version of an original place and time. With Crooked Seeds, however, which is set in the very near future, the research served to inform what might be possible for that future; I didn’t need to read up about robot dogs and flying cars. Rather, I looked at many newspaper articles from around the mid-2010s onwards. Issues that arose were linked to land reclamation, violence, the failure of the government, and, of course, the water crisis. For the parts of the novel that take place in the twentieth century, I again looked at newspaper articles. For example, when Trudy (Deidre’s mother) wishes she had a gun for protection since the recent (Soweto) riots (in 1976), this moment in South African history has an influence on her life, and affects the way she still thinks in 2028. Of course, I also had to visit the bar a few times, which might well have been the best part of the research!

NC: Most of my research went into the development of a full country Wikipedia for the Good Hope Territory. The version that made the book, interspersed as references between chapters is but 20% of the one I wrote. I had started out with the story first but quickly realised I would need to properly create my country first. What followed was about five months of writing the Wikipedia entry where I cajoled and harassed my former government colleagues and subject experts and political friends to help create the crazy country I had in my head. As for history, I segued neatly from real-life South Africa up until 2007 to what became the Good Hope Territory in December of that year.

8. Finally, is there a role for historians to collaborate more closely with novelists, filmmakers, and visual artists to enrich our understanding of history and explore its potential futures?

NC: Absolutely. I think my favourite movie is the perfect illustration. Baz Luhrmann reimagined Shakespeare and exploded the story of Romeo and Juliet for new readers in the 1990s who, until that point, had been limited to musty school books and tame drama productions. That said, in a world where ‘post truth’ is literally a thing and where lying politicians seem to be allowed to continue without consequence, any collaborations are going to have to tread a very careful path if they want to still be called ‘history’.

KJ: Historians are the ones digging in the archives, finding valuable information about our collective pasts. Ordinary people don’t always have access to that information, which tends most often to be presented at conferences or published in academic journals which are stuck behind paywalls. If connections can be built between historians and artists from various disciplines, this exponentially increases the possibility of more and more people finding out about our past: what worked, what didn’t, who are we, who can we be? Being able to engage with this information can produce ways of bettering the future for us all.

‘Counterfactual Cape Town’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Thank you for supporting my writing with a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v6.