The materiality of postapartheid: post-racial signifiers in Gray Hofmeyr’s Yankee Zulu (1993) and Mad Buddies (2012)

In 1994, South Africa transitioned from apartheid rule to a post-apartheid democracy, with a constitution in place. Significant scholarship has since covered the many constitutionalised aspects of the period after the end of apartheid: governance, political, social, cultural, and economic, among others. Less discussed is how citizens’ everyday life in this period was not merely about inhabiting a new time, but rather encountered that time as a unique experience, herein termed the postapartheid. This article is an interdisciplinary critique bringing together post-apartheid scholarship, South Africa’s cinema cultures, and the materiality of national political resetting post-1994. It critiques the storylines of racial coexistence in Gray Hofmeyr’s Yankee Zulu (1993) and Mad Buddies (2012) as its basis to theorise postapartheid as a travelling concept. The article argues that postapartheid ideas and experiences have materially changed as they have travelled across the first two decades of South Africa’s self-rule, and thus require new theoretical frames anchored on the pragmatic experiences of the present. This change, it argues, necessitates a shift in theory from racial and political frames to an afterlife of fortuitous conditions and happenstances not planned for, nor precipitated by apartheid history. To theorise this peculiar scenario, the article considers the materiality of postapartheid and the agency of cinema narratives as ecologies comprising multivariate ideas of South Africa’s postcolonial cultures.