Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.

最近有关犯罪小说的研究凸显了该类型日益跨国的关注以及移民侦探数量的不断增加。《Matsotsi》是 1960 年代初在赞比亚出版的一部鲜为人知的 Nyanja 文本，它在《巴拉拉中士》中提供了这个人物的一个更早的例子，巴拉拉中士是一名安哥拉侦探，在南非约翰内斯堡奋力遏制 tsotsi 的威胁。然而，马索齐不仅仅指出跨境检测是阐明跨国关系的一种手段。松加和祖鲁的文本运用了侦探小说和成长小说的体裁，讲述了在南部非洲历史的关键时刻，赞比亚和马拉维正处于战争的风口浪尖上的个人、国家和更广泛地区之间的关系的故事。独立。尽管非洲语言写作常常被认为过于本土化，不适合用于民族主义目的，但在这里，它被动员起来用于跨国背景下的国家建设目的。