Masondo is amongst the few isiZulu writers who have written detective stories. He produced six detective novels and one anthology of crime fiction short stories within a period of four years, from 1990 to 1994. Although he eventually wrote outside the detective plot, he is particularly celebrated for his detective stories. His first trilogy, Isigcawu Senkantolo (A scene at the court), Iphisi Nezinyoka (The hunter and snakes) and Ingwe Nengonyama (The leopard and the lion) set him up as amongst the first to introduce novel ways of dealing with contemporary reality in the literature of isiZulu, especially in the face of the crime crisis and waning confidence in the South African law enforcement agencies. But perhaps even more intriguing are the naming practices in his detective stories. Masondo's act of naming in these narratives is peculiar and might be regarded as fortuitous. In this chapter I demonstrate that far from being fortuitous these naming practices can be seen as extraordinary strategies for disrupting expectations.

An overview of Masondo's acts of naming in his fiction

There is an established tradition in the use of names in isiZulu novels which is a practice copied from centuries of orality and of literary writings in dominant languages. As Ragussis (1984: 4) claims, the novel ‘emerged as a genre by organizing its plots around acts of naming’. Masondo's naming techniques, particularly in his detective novels, take on an unconventional, non-standard but refreshingly unique approach. While his naming of personages in the detective narratives serves to highlight their personalities, capture their mannerisms, and centralise their roles, his application of similar names in his other narratives explores entirely different psychologies. In other words, the name he assigns to a character in a particular text, exploiting his or her physical attributes, temperament and psychological or emotional state, could denote a completely different personage when the same name is used in a different text. This means that whilst he exploits archetypes with the roles the personages represent in the narratives, he disrupts and defamiliarises their conventional meanings in the Formalist and Structuralist sense. This simultaneous stereotyping and de-stereotyping is seen in the prevalence of the same names across his detective narratives.