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On Boxing Day, Tutu died.

If he had championed the power of restorative justice, wrote Carlos Amato in the Daily Maverick that same day, he knew that it needed “a retributive justice (a simpler, colder form of justice) he had fought for”, but that he had nevertheless pushed to deliver “the precious dignity of electoral democracy and the urgent relief of peace”.

A day after Tutu’s funeral, South Africa’s Houses of Parliament, a building barely ten paces from the cathedral where the funeral had taken place, was set alight. A day after that, the extinguished fire in the electoral chamber flared up again, pouring flames and black billowing smoke into the sky. Soon, Zandile Christmas Mafe from Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest and fastest-growing township, was arrested for arson and charged additionally under the Explosives Act. He pleaded – vociferously – not guilty.

The story of this place, from this angle on the emerging 21st-century world, is writ large and with ever-renewing recursive power in the dyad of these two moments.

The “jettisoning of fundamental economic justice was a betrayal beyond his remit”, wrote Amato of Tutu. Tutu saw it as the state’s prerogative to champion broadbased redistribution, reminded Claire-Anne Lester and Carilee Osborne in US-based magazine Jacobin a few days later (crisis in South Africa always produces the best journalism), recalling the words found in volume five of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, published in 1998: “The government must close the intolerable gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged in society…”

I was in Cape Town that week. Soon after a small family Christmas lunch, fire erupted on the mountain behind us. The strong wind whipped it into massive flames and the enormous plumes of thick smoke that formed black cathedrals of doom in the sky sent a dark light across the sea. I grabbed children, dog, clothing and family photographs, piled them into the car and drove down the small road away from the fumes already making it difficult to breathe.

Over the following days, two other massive fires broke out in the area – and so from certain vantage points, one could see the fires of the peninsula raging and the fire at Parliament burning wild and furious, in a great fungibility of fire. 

Evacuated, filled with the adrenalin and uncertainty that living here so often produces, two images from the previous week came to my mind. One was listening on my laptop to my uncle delivering the sermon in remembrance at Tutu’s funeral mass. Tutu’s quest for justice, he said, was grounded in mercy. It struck me how long it has been since I had last heard the word mercy used in public; perhaps not since the days of the TRC.

The second recollected image was of standing at the arrivals gate with my sister-in-law at Cape Town airport. Among the steady flow of people through the sliding doors was a short thin, somewhat non-descript man with a tightly cropped beard. “Who is that man?” she said. “I recognise him.” My mind shuffled through its cerebral folders. “Wouter Basson,” I said, as we were silenced with the force of stoppage. Dr Death. A cardiologist and former head of apartheid South Africa’s chemical and biological weapons programme, known as Project Coast. The TRC determined that he should be put on trial and he was. Mounting his own defence, he had said he learned about weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein. This was “not illegal”, he argued. For the other 67 counts, the state’s case was said to be “fragmented and confused”. None of his crimes could be confirmed “beyond reasonable doubt”. When Basson was arrested he had 1,000 ecstasy pills on him and the documents detailing Project Coast on the back seat of his car. If you live in Cape Town, he’s working at a private Mediclinic near you.

In the aftermath of one of the world’s most global of 20th-century political struggles, the struggle against apartheid, South Africans and the world at large were again reminded of several important things: that the TRC took place alongside the rise of neoliberal economic policies both here and elsewhere in the world; that the National Prosecuting Authority did not pursue most of the cases for which the TRC did not grant amnesty; and that economic redistribution remained separate from, rather than integral to, the justice project that was Tutu’s, seen as it was then as the task of the new democratic state.

If Tutu’s formidable, complex legacy was centre stage as the old year transitioned into the new, the story of Zandile Christmas Mafe has deepened and stands, too, for aspects of how we might mount a Southern-inflected reading of our emerging world in 2022.

The moment his photograph was released on 3 January, within the lexicons of class and deprivation, one could see that he was an exceptionally poor man. When he appeared in court on 11 January, he was widely described as “homeless” as he shook his head repeatedly. In his second court appearance, Mafe was dressed in a light-blue shirt and jacket and was cleanshaven. He was additionally charged with terrorism.

Might one consider that for the Black poor in South Africa, committing a crime against the state may be the surest shortcut to some semblance of economic justice? To food – and a new jacket? Are we approaching a point where structural injustice and deprivation make him only partly responsible for his act? As researcher Markus Trengove asks in his work: when is violence a proportionate response to socio-economic injustice?

Two days after Mafe was found outside Parliament and arrested, a man wielding a hammer tried to attack the infrastructure of the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. In the apparent coordination of these various events many saw the signs of a second mini-insurrection. The first attempted insurrection had taken place across South Africa, but especially in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal in July 2021. The widespread looting of shopping malls was a clear retaliation for the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma, the man who had “captured the state” for the good of himself and his cronies. Now, as the Zondo Report into that state capture was released to the public, a second attempt was ignited. Was Mafe a pawn in all of this? Soon he was sent for psychological observation and declared a paranoid schizophrenic. It reminded me of the case of Dimitri Tsafendas, who assassinated the architect of apartheid Henrik Verwoerd in 1966, and was declared insane and institutionalised until his death. Then suddenly Mafe was recalled by a different judge, and declared sane enough. ne enough. As for mercy: where can we find it in the present, even if we must? There is Wouter Basson strolling through the airport arrivals lounge; and here on TV is Zandile Christmas Mafe, likely to spend the rest of his life in prison (eating more regularly than he had outside of it).

It is possible that the fall of apartheid or the prospect of its actual shattering was one of the last dreamworlds of the 20th century, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final closing down of the century’s Cold War. But the story of what happened after that shattering of one kind or another is the lived story of my generation, of my world, my family. It is also a story that both maps onto, and doesn’t, 21st-century stories of a consolidating neoliberalism after the fall of the Soviet Union, often told from the North.

There have been two ways of telling the story of South Africa in the wake of a system of legislated difference. The first has been to adopt a politics of relationality as a form of refusal and contestation in the wake of that system. The other has been to assert the ways in which apartheid persists as a system of thought and a practice of social segregation, long after its official demise. Decolonialist movements have emphasised the latter.

That both are true, each is right, that together they form part of the same historical and political puzzle is a truth seldom sought after by most people now writing about this time and place. If there were a lantern there at the door onto the deepening dusk of my Johannesburg night, its patterns would be getting ever more intricate. If, as they say, the world of the late 1990s and early 2000s fractured into the world we have now, with more to divide us and less to share, then I fear I myself have fractured along with it. What’s the difference between being haunted by possibility and haunted by intractability? More likely: what’s it like to be doubly haunted by both? 

The same year – no, actually, the same month – that apartheid fell, the Rwandan genocide began. Strictly unrelated? Or is it what we see when we see with an ommatidia eye, a compound vision, a curved array of lenses producing peripheral vision – as history offers powerful shafts of light but dusk falls on the same day.

Living here, in the shadow and portent of our inheritance, there is always the twofold predicament: it is hard to avoid South Africa in the crux, the crucible of being in the world today – and South Africa as a myopic cortex bent on obsessing with itself, a compulsion.

It is here that it bears fruit to turn to Édouard Glissant. Glissant’s theory of Relation, in the knowledge of the abyss.

Decolonialist scholars often become impatient with the invocation of Glissant. He hardly proposes a clear-cut definition of the Relation for which he is so well known. The closest he comes is through a negative definition of the term: Relation is not “relationship” in English; it is left to the reader to reconstitute the concept through the traces he leaves throughout the text, through a mode of inference.

We can infer that Relation is wrought through shared knowledge and shared experience – specifically a shared knowledge of the abyss. The abyss Glissant writes about is the middle passage and its instantiation in the figure of the boat, the boat that crosses the ocean, entombs the slave, descends to its dark depths. This is the crucial experience out of which Relation is constituted. It – Relation – is not a relation between people; it is an archetypal concept hardly amenable to any classic sociological apprehension. We could – though seldom has anyone done so – think about the abyss of apartheid in a similar way. A concept of Relation that is both not and more than a relation between people, routed through the abyssal.

Glissant recognises and insists on the fact of domination: Relation depends on an Other – and can be and often is spoken from the point of view of the “vanquished”. Insofar as Relation is an assertion against processes of annihilation, it is not a mode of relationality at all. It is, rather, a placeholder for something that is and must remain open. The métissage Glissant invokes is less the synthesis of differences than something chaotic, whose consequences are and must be unforeseeable – and can only be multilingual. 

Underpinning all of this is motion, but with no established outcome. Glissant returns at several points to the element of convulsion or the convulsive conditions of Relation that allows one to conclude that his idea of Relation has finally to do with a kind of order that is continually in flux, if not chaos. 

He embraces errantry and/as the principle of the Open – an uncoding and an unframing – and in the end Relation operates deliberately as a seesaw, depending on the social forces at work. Now you see the Open, now you see the facticity of domination.

In measuring the distance from the optimism of the 1990s to the state of fracture the world finds itself in today, how have the historical dynamics of the South, or the South in South Africa, played themselves out?

In part, through fire. Commentators on the left in South Africa have often deemed fire a form of “non-politics”, as Jessica Breakey at Wits University has put it. But think back: the burning of passes in the Defiance Campaign of the 1960s, of public libraries and municipal buildings in response to Soweto 1976; necklacing – burning tyres around the neck – as a death sentence by fire; the opening of fire by police, meeting burning with wounding and killing; and 2016 when students set fire to libraries, buses, paintings and campus bookstores. In 2022, Parliament is alight. Fire is politics, and now Parliament burns alongside the fires of the burning planet, their smoke mixing high in the atmosphere.

In second part, the principle of the Open and the facticity of domination.

Opening the Mail and Guardian newspaper this morning, I read a piece by Elisha Kunene. He describes growing up with the understanding that Tutu was the (derided) figure “who told us to be satisfied with peace without justice”. In the wake of Tutu’s death, Kunene watches the actual TRC footage, all available online. He encounters Tutu’s anger amid his mercy. In a piece that looks in the mirror at midnight, in darkness, he writes, “South Africa’s political order is the only way to live with the unbearable … that is how I imagine Tutu’s work.”