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Books

An innocent abroad defies South Africa’s insane colour code

Jimfish, Christopher Hope’s caustic new satire on South Africa, has a surprisingly upbeat finale — but Patrick Flanery is unconvinced

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

Jimfish Christopher Hope

Atlantic, pp.192, £15.99, ISBN: 9780857898050

At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place, among its own kind, as if compartments for scientific specimens had been laid out across the land. Or, as Christopher Hope puts it in his caustic new satire, people were ‘corralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification’.

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