Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

HOW NOT TO KNOW THE AFRICAN

A few months ago, 1st April 1966—April Fool’s Day — I read in a Johannesburg newspaper an advertisement for a course of lectures entitled Know the African. From the description given, it was clear that these lectures were designed for white people who have the only recognised relationship with coloured people in our country — that of white employer to black labour force — and who might find it useful, from the point of view of efficiency, to get to know just enough human facts about these units of labour to get them to give of their best. This sort of study of ‘the African’ as a strange creature whom one must know how to ‘handle’ in the eight hours he spends at work is apparently the limit of getting to ‘know the African’ permissible to South Africans, nowadays. For that same week there appeared in the papers an announcement of the ban, under the 1965 Suppression of Communism Amendment Act, on the utterances and writings of forty-six South Africans living abroad, and this list included all those black South African writers of any note not already silenced by other bans. The work of our country’s African and Coloured prose writers is now non-existent, so far as South African literature, South African thinking, South African culture, is concerned. They were the voices — some rasping, some shrill, some clowning, some echoing prophetically, one or two deeply analytical — of the thirteen millions on the other side of the colour bar. We shall not hear from them again.

White people are likely to come back pat as Pretty Polly with the remark that these African and Coloured writers who have been banned, gagged, and censored are, after all, a handful of intellectuals, completely unrepresentative of the ordinary people in the streets, locations, and kraals. What could one hear from them but the inevitable dissatisfaction of all intellectuals, exacerbated by the fact that they are black?

Of all the self-delusion white South Africans practise, this is perhaps the purest example. Who, of any group, in any society, formulates the aspirations, makes coherent the inchoate resentments, speaks the dreams of the mass of people who cannot express these things for themselves? Who, anywhere in the world, translates the raw material of the human condition, which millions experience but for which millions have no words? Would the private history — lived in the minds of all Afrikaners, whatever their station — of the Afrikaner’s bitternesses, hopes, and joys, the shaping of his attitudes in relation to circumstances over three hundred years, have been recorded if this had been left to the nation’s stokers and mine shift-bosses? The Afrikaners’ writers and poets spoke for them — their handful of intellectuals. The same applies to English-speaking white South Africans; their handful of intellectuals and writers are the medium through which the currents of their thought see the light as communication.

The silenced African and Coloured writers are, indeed, nothing but a handful among millions of ordinary labourers and domestic servants; and in their work they express what all these people could never, would never, say.

If we want to know — not ‘the African’, that laboratory specimen, that worker bee of fascinating habits, but the black men and women amongst whom we live, these writers are the only people from whom we could learn. They are not pedagogues or politicians; with the exception of the former Cape Town councillor, Alex La Guma, and Dennis Brutus and Alfred Hutchinson, none of them has ever been accused of involvement in practical politics. When they do deal with politics in their writings, they are short on political abstraction and long on personal anecdote. Some are not ‘serious’ at all, and the self-parody is as revealing as the Jewish joke (I am thinking of Todd Matshikiza’s zany and delightful autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife). Some exaggerate wildly a life whose everyday degradation and brutality, under our eyes in the faces of the dagga-smoking children thieving about Johannesburg streets — those “picannins” who are a feature of our way of life — would hardly seem to need it, and the exaggeration in itself becomes a revelation of the posturing fantasy bred by such a life. (I am thinking of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History.) All of them, from Can Themba writing his few short stories in an overblown yet pungent prose dipped in the potent brew of back-street urban life, to Ezekiel Mphahlele writing with dry lucidity (Down Second Avenue) of childhood in one of those mud huts you pass on the road, near Pietersburg, offer a firsthand account of the life that is lived out of sight of the white suburbs, and the thoughts that lie unspoken behind dark faces. If one wants to know more than a few poor facts, these autobiographies, novels, stories, essays, and poems are the place to find the inner world where men learn the things worth knowing about each other.

Many of these works are what I call ‘escape’ books: the record either of the fear and hazard of an actual physical escape from South Africa without passport or permit, or the other kind of escape, less finally and sometimes never accomplished — the slow escape, within the writer’s self, from the apartheid carapace of second-class citizen, and the retrospective bitterness that threatens to poison life, once outside it. Ezekiel Mphahlele’s autobiographical Down Second Avenue, Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife, Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana—escape books all, in their different ways — entered South Africa after publication in England, and were on sale here for a time before being banned. One of the first and perhaps the most movingly artless ‘escape’ book, Tell Freedom, by Peter Abrahams, was banned, although it had been out of print for years and the writer was long in exile. Modisane’s Blame Me on History and Mphahlele’s next book, African Images, a collection of essays, were banned before they reached the bookshops, and Alex La Guma’s novel and the poems of Dennis Brutus were automatically withheld because both writers were under personal bans. Dennis Brutus’s little volume of poetry consists mainly of love lyrics; Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night is, so far as I am aware, the only novel to come out of District Six — a slum story notable for a curiously impressive, fastidious, obsessive horror at the touch, taste, and smell of poverty.

These writers — with the exception of Abrahams and Hutchinson, whose books are banned individually — are under total ban now, and we cannot read what they have written, nor shall we be able to read what they may write in the future. One whose name I have not mentioned yet, Lewis Nkosi, is probably the greatest loss to us of them all. This young man, who left his home in South Africa on an exit permit in 1965, published a book of essays entitled Home and Exile. I took the opportunity to buy and read the essays while on a visit to Zambia, for Lewis Nkosi is on the list of exiles whose word and work are under that blanket ban of April this year. The book contains critical writing of a standard that has never before been achieved by a South African writer, white or black. Here is the sibling Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis we have never had. If the ban on his work did not prevent me quoting from two of the essays — the first a brilliant exploration of the conflict between truth as the individual has laboured to discover it for himself and truth as the glib public proposition dictated by the contingencies of political life; the second a cool, erudite look at fiction written by black South Africans — it would not be necessary for anyone to take my word for it. The book is divided into three sections. ‘Home’ includes an autobiographical chronicle of the fifties in Johannesburg that might perhaps have been entitled ‘Know the White Man’, had Nkosi with his wit and candour not long since outgrown the categorical approach. ‘Exile’ contains two fascinating encounters with New York that ring with the overwrought sensibility of the stranger in town. ‘Literary’, the outstanding section, is devoted to criticism of life and letters. The book clearly does not seek to present final answers on the author’s behalf, but deals with questions proposed to him by exile and the perspective of foreign countries. It is a long hard look at South Africa, at himself, at all of us, black and white, among whom he belongs.

In 1963 I wrote about the proliferating forms of restriction of free expression in our country, in general, and the effect of the (then) new Publications and Entertainments Act in particular. I pointed out that most of the writings of black South Africans who had recorded the contemporary experience of their people were banned; the process is now completed. No association of writers or intellectuals, English or Afrikaans, has protested against this virtual extinction of black and Coloured South African writers. One can only repeat, with a greater sense of urgency, the questions I asked then: These books were written in English and they provide the major part of the only record, set down by talented and self-analytical people, of what black South Africans, who have no voice in parliament or any say in the ordering of their life, think and feel about their lives and those of their fellow white South Africans. Can South Africa afford to do without these books?

And can South Africans boast of a ‘literature’ while, by decree, in their own country, it consists of some of the books written by its black and white, Afrikaans and English-speaking writers?

— 1966