Angela Makholwa

INTRIGUING, surprising and ruthless, Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink is one of the first novels about a serial killer written by a black female South African, and provides a fascinating glimpse into the Buppie lifestyle.

Lucy Khumalo, bright and beautiful, lives in an upmarket townhouse, has a successful career, and comes of solid, middle class, professional stock: on the surface she is Western to the tips of her well-manicured fingernails, but there are subtle yet distinct differences which set her apart from her white counterparts.

When Khumalo is approached by convicted serial killer Napoleon Dingiswayo to write his story, she agrees because she has always wanted to be a writer and sees it as a chance to fulfil her ambition: although the courts ruled Dingiswayo acted with no accomplice, events in Lucy's life soon start to suggest otherwise.

Thrillers, no matter how well written, usually consist of a series of clichés, but Red Ink is refreshingly different. The usual motivations result in familiar scenarios, but whereas in most Western novels the cavalry arrives in time, there are no 11th-hour rescues in this book; Makholwa is bloodthirsty.

People are killed, lots of people, until the reader cannot be certain that even Khumalo will survive as the hidden and convoluted intricacies of the truth are gradually revealed.

Actually the plot, although original, is far from spectacular; the style is uneven, the characters contradictory, and the writing so fresh as to be unripe: Red Ink is a book in dire need of a competent editor. Yet it possesses a raw charm and a certain gritty reality that is far more enlightening and informative than many of our polished and socially relevant SA novels.

We meet a collection of new SA stereotypes, the sort of people who make the headlines or try to manipulate the headlines.

Khumalo could be any young, successful, single mother, while her sexy and disreputable friend Futhi — “smoking her way through countless failed relationships” — could be any of the soapie starlets whose antics enliven Sowetan or the Daily Sun.

Dingiswayo is another character we meet all too often in the press, while Futhi’s politically powerful multimillionaire married empowerment lover is based on men like Tokyo Sexwale.

The book is uniquely South African, not only in its frequent use of the vernacular and uncomfortably intimate (for Westerners) female relationships, but also with references to Jenni Button pants suits, Metro FM, Generations and other SABC-TV shows, and the local trendy landscape, where people club in Melville, visit family in Soweto, but live in Johannesburg’s expensive northern suburbs.

Most interesting is the attitude to race: there is none. The book does not distinguish between black and white, and while the expensive Khumalo’s white, male Afrikaans client plays fair by her, she is let down by her black, female partner.

The only racial observation is the throwaway line — “skin colour was big with the BEE types” — and the book does not allow apartheid or past injustices to excuse or explain the rape and murder sprees, the bullying or abuse.

Thrilling, exciting, page-turning, discomforting and occasionally cringe-making, it is not a sophisticated read, but it is a satisfying one which I recommend highly.… (altro)