By Assistant Professor Benjamin Goh
2025 marks the centennial anniversary of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess (‘The Trial’). As a contribution to the Law and Humanities Roundtable 2024 commemorating Kafka, my article ‘Apartheid Blueprints and Palimpsestic Time’ (published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction) reads J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), as a Kafkian inheritance that illuminates the postcolonial novel’s relationship with Europe and regimes of oppression. In step with Hannah Arendt’s juxtaposition of The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) as blueprints of bureaucracy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I generate diagrams of apartheid South Africa based on Michael K’s displacements between resettlement and rehabilitation camps during the fictional civil war. My analysis at once stresses Kafka’s pertinence to critical projects of resisting man-made structures of oppression and restores visibility to the politics of Coetzee’s storytelling.
Life & Times of Michael K (1983) is set in apartheid South Africa amidst an imagined civil war. The novel pays homage to Kafka’s novels by coalescing into its eponymous protagonist not only Kafka’s heroes with a similar patronymic, but also the title character of a ‘grandfather intertext’ that influenced Kafka’s authorship: Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810). Kleist’s novella provides the preceding script for the bureaucratic entanglements of Kafka’s and Coetzee’s characters, including a permit system that prevented Michael K from taking a train with his dying mother to fulfil her last wish of returning to her childhood Karoo farm.
By virtue of Coetzee’s double inheritance of Kafka and Kleist, Life & Times of Michael K lends itself to be historicised as a fictional critique of the apartheid bureaucracy, no less Kafka’s novels do in regard to the pre-war Austro-Hungarian Empire. Other than restaging the cruel inefficiencies and unaccountability of the permit regime, Coetzee diagrammatises two camps that enact two overlapping forms of structural violence, one as applied to the human body and the other on the soul, that instantiate the logic of the apartheid.
The Jakkalsdrif resettlement camp and Kenilworth rehabilitation camp are set up by the state to limit their prisoners’ disturbance and infection of the wider South African population. This motif of biopolitical contagion and control runs through Coetzee’s presentation of the two camps as perceived by their insiders and/or outsiders, and further recurs in the author’s extradiegetic theorisation of apartheid ideology as registered in the racist publications of the Afrikaner-nationalist Geoffrey Cronjé. The Jakkalsdrif resettlement camp, to which K has been displaced after being caught for vagrancy, is securely enclosed by ‘a three-metre fence surmounted with a strand of barbed wire’so as to prevent its stayers from malingering in Prince Albert or fleeing to the mountains to join the guerrillas. Since there is no plan to integrate its inhabitants into the wider population, but rather a transparent function of labour exploitation to meet the town’s and region’s needs, the Jakkalsdrif camp is more of a labour camp than a resettlement camp. The Prince Albert townspeople had protested against the setting up of the camp and continued to find repulsive its indigent stayers: ‘They ran a big campaign against the camp at the beginning. We breed disease, they said. No hygiene, no morals. A nest of vice, men and women together.’ This hostility has persisted despite the town’s reliance on the camp for labour, a fact that affirms K’s doubts about the police captain’s tendentious comparison of the camp to ‘a nest of parasites.’
The metaphorical (and also literal) description of the camp residents as carriers of disease, decay, and contamination resonates with the blood-purist rhetoric of the apartheid system as deployed by the Afrikaner-nationalist sociologist Geoffrey Cronjé. In ‘The Mind of the Apartheid’ (1991), Coetzee presents the apartheid thinking of Cronjé’s 1945-1948 publications in terms that doubly recall Arendt’s reading of Kafka and the fictional Jakkalsdrif camp: ‘Apartheid is many things, a mixture of things; one of the things it is is a scheme to make impossible for the desire to mix to find fulfilment.’ The architectural figure of ‘scheme’ or diagram is deployed by Coetzee to account for the rationality, or one of the rationalities, of the apartheid.
In Cronjé’s justification of the apartheid, mixing took the form of ‘blood-mixing’ or miscegenation, which threatened the purity of European blood, the latter of which was exemplified in the South African Boers as a ‘composite of Dutch, German and French forms’. In this dream of racial purity, the category of coloured people was constituted as the foremost threat to be counteracted by the segregationist apartheid. Blood-mixing and the desire for it was fostered by the spatial conditions of living in racially mixed residential areas, to which apartheid legislation and related practices sought to put an end. The purity of European blood was preserved, or attempted to be preserved, through the enforced segregation of spaces based on the category of race.
As registered on the police charge sheet, K was a ‘CM’, which corresponded to the apartheid administration’s classification of ‘coloured’ (and ‘male’). Because of his racial (and, indeed, gender, class, and age) identities, K was both displaced to the labour camp and consigned to perform gendered work (being fetched by truck each day to do various hard labour for the standard wage of one rand) whilst being excluded from dependents’ privileges (such as receiving free soup reserved for children). The enclosure of K within the camp, and the poorly remunerated exploitation of his labour to meet the needs of the town, were continuous with the apartheid logic of segregating the ‘coloured’ and other non-white persons from the privileged white population so as to preserve the latter’s so-called ‘blood-purity’and other interests.
Transposing Kafka and Kleist to apartheid South Africa, Coetzee generates blueprints of the system that had oppressed its nonwhite population. The author offers us diagrams of the regime’s oppressive camps, which would not only have contributed to their historical dismantling, but further aid in our guarding against their present repetitions.
My article concludes by turning to the temporal marker in Coetzee’s title. Perhaps more so than the apartheid blueprints, the time of the palimpsest accounts for the novel’s recitation of the European legacy to reimagine postcolonial worlds.
This research is part of ‘Planetary Law and Literature: Reading Across, Against, and Alongside Europe’, a project supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under the Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (FY2023).
Keywords: postcolonial literature; bureaucracy; resistance; J. M. Coetzee; Franz Kafka
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Benjamin Goh is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS).
Email: b.goh@nus.edu.sg