Hope against hope

At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place, among its own kind, as if compartments for scientific specimens had been laid out across the land. Or, as Christopher Hope puts it in his caustic new satire, people were ‘corralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification’.

Reminding us that ‘Jim Fish’ was a derogatory term for a black man in South Africa, Hope thrusts his eponymous hero, who fits no racial category, into this mad system of classification. To some, Jimfish appears ‘as white as newly bleached canvas’, to others ‘faintly pink or tan or honey-coloured’. Nonetheless, racist whites treat him as ‘not the right sort of white’. Forced into menial work, he comes under the influence of autodidact philosopher-revolutionary Soviet Malala, whose firebrand Marxist populism convinces Jimfish that, whatever else, one must fight to be ‘on the right side of history’.