The previous chapter opened with a consideration of discourse about crime, and the manner in which public discussion about wrongdoing has contributed to the disorienting nature of the postapartheid period. The argument explored a ‘white phenomenology of crime’, as perceived by Steinberg, and moved on to a consideration of Bloom's Ways of Staying, where it found, instead of a contraction into a psychological laager, a breakout impulse, a widening of the authorial lens, the effect of which is to suggest a more widespread sense of contingency. Similarly, in Krog's Begging to be Black, the greater reach of integration among races also results in increased states of fear and growing suspicion. The expanded range of intersubjective encounter, along with states of peril differently distributed to those in the past, distinguishes nonfiction narratives of detection in the postapartheid period from earlier chronicles of unbelonging, namely travelogues and journeys into the interior, despite the persistence, if not compulsion, of the trope of journeying. In spite of what I earlier typified as ‘compulsive (re)iteration, a literature seemingly always, and repeatedly, at the frontier of not-knowing, on the brink’, there are signs in this literature that the writer now understands more than ever before that his viewfinder must include the larger race, class and gender picture; in addition, his or her tone must be stripped of all forms of paternalism. There is a new impatience to move on, working in Ginzburg's ‘conjectural paradigm’ of detection, based on a more general evidential paradigm (as noted in Chapter 3). So, despite black and white writers alike finding the symptoms of democracy perverse, brimming with ‘bad’ difference, it is also true to say that the return, in the sociopolitical sphere, of ‘frontier’ conditions is rendered deeply problematic, and subjected to what one might call a more stringent, peculiarly postapartheid critique. This critique, unlike many past reckonings with apartheid, cannot settle the matter in struggle preconceptions. It is a critique, rather, that must define the material details that underpin ruptures in the feverishly imagined discourse of democratic South Africa. The devil is in such detail, since master-narratives no longer hold sway.