In what follows I explore ways of being white in South Africa as they have been expressed in a series of autobiographies and other self-narratives. Most of the texts I consider were written in the mid- to late 1990s (an exception is a much earlier text by Ruth First, to which I refer), a period which marks a major shift in the ways in which whiteness began to be looked at as a result of the negotiated settlement that put an end to apartheid, the first democratic elections of 1994 and the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The texts are not a representative selection of work by whites from the last decade or so, but they have nevertheless been selected consciously and carefully to illuminate aspects of the representation of whiteness that I am concerned with here.

In the texts discussed below entanglement is frequently revealed to be a process of becoming someone you were not in the beginning. This process takes places through encounters with blackness, including involvement in the struggle for black liberation, and through confronting complicity with an apartheid order and imaginary; with the secrets kept regarding the subjects’ whiteness; even the lies that have been told to the self and to others. The work of entanglement is also, in part, the work of disentanglement – from whiteness in its official fictions and material trajectories, its privileges and access to power, now in an emerging context of black political power in South Africa – in order to become something, someone different.

In choosing texts written in the first-person singular (or, in the case of Coetzee, by a third-person narrator-substitute for the ‘I’ of this clearly autobiographical work) I am offering a reading of race, in this case whiteness, from the point of view of singularity – individual responses to a raced world, which may or may not, in time, add up to a collective interpretation and which, for the most part, were written into a cultural moment that was finally able to make space for a personal rather than a collective voice.