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“The foot does not sniff”: Imagining the post‐anti‐apartheid intellectual

Summary The South African literary institution is engaged in an examination of both its role in the history of apartheid and its potential futures. Originating in Edward Said's search for an alternative to a “politics of blame”, this article considers recent attempts to explore the possibility of “secular interpretation” in (and of) the South African context. Leon de Kock's trope of “the seam” and Mark Sanders's notion of “complicity” are considered. We characterise both as postdialectical descriptions of the interconnections that define South African (multivalent) being and mark its inscription. Further, we suggest that their postdialectical turn, despite the authors’ primary concern with the history of identity and historiography, advocates a persuasive mode of scholarship for engaging contemporary South African identity. Leaving the domain of scholarly debate, we turn to a literary representation of the contemporary South African intellectual. We look at the figure of Camagu in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000) in the belief that he, caught as he is between contending cults of interpretation, embodies something of the practice of secular critique sought by Said, De Kock, and Sanders. Through Camagu, we maintain, it is possible for us to describe aspects of the dilemma of the “post‐anti‐apartheid” intellectual as well as the potential of a nondialectical engagement with both our past and our present.