A major threat to democracy in post-apartheid South Africa has been the rising tide of crime in the public domain, overriding other key socio-historical transformations. Anti-crime discourses have begun to build an increasingly detailed picture of this phenomenon. Factors such as endemic poverty, accelerated urbanisation, blurred morality, ‘arriviste’ lifestyles, youth subculture as a counter-culture, (dis)continuities between the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, past animosities between political authorities and youth and the disquieting relationship between politics and crime in South Africa have become dominant subjects, generating a myopic, though persistently adheredto, understanding of crime in South Africa.

A glance at the literature produced in response to post-1994 crime offers mainly conventional frameworks for the understanding of social deviancy, delinquency, crime and violence; frameworks which hobble intervention strategies as they attempt to keep up with the growth of crime in South Africa. While these theoretical understandings have some value and may even lead to breakthroughs in understanding the causes and nature of crime, there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way in which crime and violence are perceived and investigated. This assertion is supported by the observation that conventional paradigms generated in privileged environments have, in many instances, failed to explain the social deviancy occurring in less privileged societies. Mainstream paradigms based on conventional modes of understanding will not be of much use in explaining the nature and causes of crime if they ignore the specifics of particular and possibly unfamiliar contexts. In contrast, the drama series Yizo Yizo (1999) and the Zulu novel by Mngadi (2004), Kuyoqhuma Nhlamvana (Concealed things will be revealed), as part of the public discourse, are insightful in examining this phenomenon in post-apartheid South African society. These texts enter into a dialogue with the existing scholarship and the public domain concerning the vantage points from which to explore and explain crime in the first ten years after the 1994 democratic elections. Significantly, it is not only new understandings of crime that are excavated from these texts but contrasting the film and the novel makes possible new departures in crime writing in isiZulu fiction. The isiZulu novel advances the treatment of this theme and exposes the multi-layered networks of crime.