Haunting the social: conversing with ghosts in Redi Tlhabi's Endings and Beginnings.

The article discusses the recently published memoir of South African radio celebrity Redi Tlhabi,Endings and Beginnings(2012), which is a bestseller in South Africa and recipient of the prestigious Alan Paton non-fiction award for 2013. Following Tlhabi's haunting by the ghosts of her murdered father and her unlikely childhood friend, the Sowetan gangster Mabegzo, the article attempts to trace the meanings of ghostliness in the South African social, and the way in which these meanings are mapped onto township terrains of both hopelessness and possibility. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's seminal exposition inSpecters of Marx, it argues that the text's insistence on bringing closure to Mabegzo's narrative denies the spectre its efficacy as a signifier for unease. This uneasiness, it maintains, necessarily jostles and disturbs the certainties of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]