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’. History, unsurprisingly, has other ideas.

Beginning in 1984, Jimfish sets out on a decade-long globe-trekking odyssey of disillusion that takes in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Chernobyl, Siberia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the last days of Ceaucescu, Mobutu’s Zaire, the Liberian civil war and Somalia. Though funnier and more anarchic than Orwell, Hope is similarly concerned with the grotesqueries of totalitarian systems and the Kafkaesque contortions of late 20th-century geopolitics.

As Jimfish makes his way through West and Central Africa, the book achieves something of the quality of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief and Scoop. By now, South Africans are no longer ‘polecats and pariahs’ but desirable mercenaries with the best ‘armaments, muscle, money and business acumen’ on the continent. How quickly the political sands shift, while little actually changes: one cruel regime usurps another; an outcast at home becomes a hero abroad.