Finding new ways to address oppressive pasts has been a prominent theme in South African nonfiction since the end of apartheid, writers often seeking to explore personal and collective implication and guilt. The legacies of oppression and discrimination spill over into the South African present of social and economic inequality. This article examines four autobiographical texts that address notions of personal and collective implication in South Africa’s apartheid past and its present-day inequality. At the centre of the analysis are Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart from the end of the apartheid era, which offers a personal exploration of Afrikaner history in South Africa, and Christopher Hope’s The Café de Move-on Blues, which attempts to determine the role of English-speaking white South Africans. In addition, Sisonke Msimang writes about class divides and implication crossing racial borders in Always Another Country, and Haji Mohamed Dawjee offers a forceful critique of seemingly well-meaning, guilt-ridden whiteness in Sorry, Not Sorry. The article draws on Michael Rothberg’s theorisation of the implicated subject as beneficiary of oppressive pasts beyond simple distinctions of victim and perpetrator. All four texts portray a South Africa in which boundaries are increasingly blurred, and implication transgresses temporal, spatial and racial lines.

自种族隔离结束以来，寻找新的方法来解决压抑的过去一直是南非非小说类作品的一个突出主题，作家们经常寻求探索个人和集体的影响和罪恶感。压迫和歧视的遗留问题蔓延到南非社会和经济不平等的现状。本文审视了四篇自传文本，这些文本阐述了南非过去的种族隔离制度及其当今的不平等现象对个人和集体的影响。分析的核心是 Rian Malan种族隔离时代末期的《我的叛徒之心》，它提供了对南非南非荷兰语历史的个人探索，以及 Christopher Hope 的The Café de Move-on Blues，它试图确定讲英语的南非白人的作用。此外，Sisonke Msimang 在Always Another Country中写了关于阶级分化和跨越种族边界的暗示，而 Haji Mohamed Dawjee 在Sorry, Not Sorry中对看似善意、充满内疚的白人提出了有力的批评。这篇文章借鉴了迈克尔·罗斯伯格 (Michael Rothberg) 的理论，即受牵连的主体是压迫性过去的受益者，而不仅仅是受害者和肇事者的简单区分。四篇文章都描绘了一个边界越来越模糊的南非，暗示超越了时间、空间和种族的界限。