Load Shedding is one of the most compelling books I've read this year. I enjoyed it so much that I went back for its predecessor, At Risk. Both are collections of essays by academics, writers and journalists at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg. According to the 2007 WISER Project document, "[o]ne of the distinguishing features of [our] approach is … a strong emphasis on the practice of everyday life", and this is an underlying theme in these bold collections: academic reflection on everyday experiences expressed in a new and different form of writing.
My first thought on finishing Load Shedding was "If I had been allowed or encouraged to do this kind of writing, I would never have left academia." Instead of a few thin ideas camouflaged in a sandstorm of research, referencing and jargon – so often the norm insisted upon at universities and research institutions – each piece is reflective, creative and above all, clear. The authors are permitted to enter their writing as subjective agents, rather than masquerading as objective observers. Without cloaks of discourse or the silt of referencing, each contributor has to present their ideas and experiences au naturelle – and what a supple, lithe body of work emerges as a result. Imagination and personal experience are not shunned, but overtly engaged to answer compelling questions about what it means to be South African during these tumultuous, challenging and exciting times.
With a strong emphasis, especially during the apartheid era, on quantitative research in the social sciences, it is easily forgotten that the duty of the public intellectual is to form hypotheses for testing, to try to devise explanatory theories, narratives even, that unlock the conundrums that confront us daily. Why did Mbeki literally and metaphorically hold Mugabe's hand as the latter systematically wrecked the nation of Zimbabwe? How do we negotiate ethnic identity, especially if our threatened cultural heritage just so happens to be exclusionary, patriarchal and homophobic? How do we manage the never-ending and nerve-eroding fear that our lives (and the lives of those we love) will intersect with those of violent criminals, the bane of our fragile new civil society? How do we come to terms with the loss of a beloved parent? The death of a longed-for child?
These questions, and many more besides, are tackled with courage, grace and often exceptionally fine writing. Above all, they are handled with intelligence. The intellectual and moral resources of the authors are brought to bear on well-nigh impossible questions. In my own research, in which I grapple with the subject of sexual violence, I am repeatedly confronted with truly unanswerable questions – most notably, "Why would anyone rape a baby?" I know how difficult it is to apply my training as an academic to what amounts to a cry of agony. Perhaps this is why I am so struck with admiration for what these authors have accomplished.
It is the determined show of logic by the authors, their commitment to playing the full deck of cards each issue deal outs, combined with the universality of the questions asked, that makes both books so valuable; although both extremely contemporary, it will be a long time before they date. Universities should consider prescribing them, as exemplars of good academic writing, if nothing else. I also hope that we'll see more such essay collections from WISER .
Neither book is perfect; as is inevitable in multiple-authored collections, some contributions are weaker than others. Some suffer from a lack of structure. However, on re-reading both books after a period of several months, I found pieces that had not engaged me first time round now made for compelling reading. Context is also critical; I found Deborah's Posel's Load Shedding essay on a colleague's betrayal so simultaneously gripping and shocking, I gave it to my father, a retired academic, and insisted he read it. His response was to shrug: for him, such experiences had been, if not normative, sadly ubiquitous.
That being said, I have some personal favourites: Makhosasana Xaba's essays in both At Risk and Load Shedding are required reading for anyone interested in the tightrope of tension involved in negotiating racial identity and conflicting racial interests. Her account in At Risk of buying a house next door to a white working-class woman is as much a report from the frontline of class war as it is a story of racial conflict; and her bold account in Load Shedding of what it means for her to be Zulu is a brilliant corrective to Zuma's crude "100% Zuluboy" mantra.
Like Xaba, and with equally unflinching honesty, Kgomotso Matsunyane insists, in her reflections on childhood in Load Shedding, that gender violence and oppression defined and traumatised her as much as racial violence and oppression did. Liz McGregor's two pieces show exceptional range: her intriguing investigation of the Rain Queen in At Risk reads like a detective yarn, while her meditation on the deaths of her parents in Load Shedding was so agonizing, I was unable to finish it. Jonathan Hyslop's theory of "war envy" in Load Shedding as an explanation for Mbeki's outwardly senseless support of Mugabe's descent into dictatorship is both plausible and extremely creative, and a fine example of the kind of argument that is usually stifled within an academic environment, driven as it is by imaginative logic rather than research findings and readings.
Load Shedding in particular reflects on the experience of being outsiders; Achille Mbembe (who hails from Cameroon) and Karina Szczurek (whose family fled socialist Poland when she was a child) share deeply personal accounts of what it means to be an African who is also a "foreigner", in Achille's case; and a refugee, in Karina's case.
In the end, the piece that moved me the most was Sarah Nuttall's wrenching, yet delicate, account of the loss of her daughter shortly after birth (in At Risk). In it, she explodes any sense of an ivory tower as she uses every emotional and intellectual resource possible to sort through her anger and grief, and honour her daughter. There is also a valuable practical lesson to be learnt about health-care; in any hospital, private or public, I will now always ensure that I have an advocate on hand in case of an emergency arising at the same time that staff shifts change.
Both works wrestle with angels and demons on our behalf – and we are better (and better-informed) citizens and thinkers and more reflective human beings for reading them.
Load Shedding: Writing on and over the edge of South Africa
Edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall
Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2009