Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

The Congo

…a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Begin with a stain in the ocean. Three hundred miles out to sea, off the west coast of Africa, the mark of a presence the immensity of seas has not been able to swallow. Mariners saw it in the age of exploration, when each voyage held the fear that a ship might sail off the edge of the world. They knew it was the stain of land; mountains had coloured it, the rotting verdure of forests, perhaps, the grass of plains. A massive land, a continent, giving rise to and feeding a river great enough to make a dent in the sea.

The continent parts; the river opens a way in. Many journeys have beginnings flat and unworthy, but not this one.

I stayed a day or two at a beach on the west coast of Africa at the river’s mouth. Though the water was salt to my tongue and the tides rose and withdrew, it was not the sea that lay below the ochre cliff. It was the Congo River. All the Atlantic Ocean, as far as I could see, was the Congo River. In the bright sun, the water glittered like a seal’s coat; under the heavy skies of the rainy season, it was quite black. When I swam in it, even in the evening, it was warmer than the warm air. I had read that the Congo, measured by its year-by-year flow, is the second greatest river in the world; now the conception of the dry fact flowed around me, a vast environment.

Strange creatures live in the Congo River. From a small boat following the water maze of mangroves, with their cages of whitish roots set over a footing of black ooze, I saw the climbing fish perioph-thalmus. Pop-eyed, startled little creatures, they ran nimbly up the roots, but hobbled and flopped on the ooze. They are the colour of mud, they live in mud that is neither land nor water, and their lives span quietly the gasping transition that evolution made millennia ago, bringing life out of the sea. The manatee, a sea mammal with white breasts (the creature on which the fiction of the mermaid is based), is sometimes caught here.

A slender spatula of land runs out from the mangroves at the shining gape of the river’s open mouth. On it is a strip of a town, so narrow that you can see through the gaps between the rows of coconut palms and the smart little villas to the water on the other side. There are no blocks of buildings; the only objects of height and bulk are the ocean-going ships moored off the jetty. This town is Banana, an old slave port and the oldest white settlement on the Congo. It looks like a bright prefab; no memory, here, of the ships that passed, heavy with human cargo, taking Africa to the rest of the world — a world that lived to see a new nation in Brazil, a Negro ‘problem’ in the United States, riots in London’s Notting Hill. I could not believe that those extraordinary beginnings could have been wiped out entirely, but all I could find was a neglected graveyard by the sea. Dutch, French, Portuguese, English and German names were on the headstones, and the earliest was dated 1861. Nobody stayed in Banana unless he died there; nobody built a house meant to last; there were no solid monuments to community pride among slave traders.

Perhaps, while I am writing, the new past, so recent that it is almost the present, is disappearing without trace as the older one did. The white personnel from the Belgian naval base, and the comfortable hotel where Belgians from the stifling interior used to come to swim and lounge in the harlequin garb of resorts the world over — will there remain, soon, much sign of their passing?

A few miles up the same — and only — coast road that led past the graveyard, there was a fishing village that was unaware not only of the past but even of the passing present. On swept sand under coconut and Elaeis palms the bamboo houses of the village had the special, satisfying neatness of fine basketwork; big nets checkered the shore and a flotilla of pirogues lay beached. Squat monsters of baobab trees, fat-limbed and baggy, sounded tuba notes here and there among the string ensemble of the palms. In the hollow trunk of one of the baobabs was a chicken house, reached by a little ladder. Two old men sat making nets in the sunlight sliced by the poles of palms. One was rolling the thread, using the reddish bark fibre taken from a baobab not ten feet away. A woman came out of a house and took in a basket of flame-coloured palm nuts, ready to be pounded for oil. Under the eaves of her house hung the family storage vessels, bunches of calabashes engraved with abstract designs. These people had none of the aesthetic deprivations I associate with poverty. They walked between classic pillars of palm, and no yesterday’s newspapers blew about their feet. They were living in a place so guileless and clean that it was like a state of grace.

A fast motor launch took me in five hours from the West African Coast to the cataracts that kept the white man out of Central Africa for 300 years. The mangroves were left behind at once, the river continued so wide that the distant banks seemed to be slipping over the horizon, and islands appeared faintly as mirages and then came close, shapes extinguished beneath a dark cloth of creepers. The undersides of the clouds were lit by sunlight shaken glitteringly off the purplish-brown storm-coloured water that heaved past us. As we took the highway against the main current, far off, Africans moved quietly on the verges of the river, their slender pirogues threading the darkness of overhanging trees.

Ocean liners come this way up the Congo to Matadi, the town at the foot of the cataracts, and it has the air of a nineteenth-century seaport. The steep, twisting streets that lead down to the docks are sailors’ streets; there is even a notice in the hotel: No parrots allowed. The Congo here looks as I was never to see it anywhere else. It has just emerged from the skelter and plunge 200 miles down a stairway of thirty-two cataracts in a total drop five times the height of Niagara Falls. It is all muscle, running deep between the high confines of granite hills, and straightening out in swaths from the terrible circular pull of whirlpools.

I saw the rock of Diego Cão, naval officer and Gentleman of the Household to Dom João II, King of Portugal, who reached the mouth of the Congo in 1482. He set up a stone pillar on the southern point of the six-mile-wide mouth of the estuary, and so the river got its first European name, Rio de Padrão, the Pillar River. Diego Cão came back twice. On his third trip he sailed ninety-two miles up the river until he was turned back by impassable cataracts. He left an inscription carved on rock to show how far he had got; for more than three centuries this was the limit of the outside world’s knowledge of the river.

On the face of volcanic rock above the powerfully disturbed waters of the first cataracts, a mile or two above Matadi, was the cross, the coat of arms of Dom João II of Portugal, and the names of Cão and his companions, cut in the beautiful lettering of an illuminated manuscript. The inscription had the sharp clarity of something freshly finished instead of nearly five centuries old.

The place of the rock, where Diego Cão turned back, is a dark place. No earth is to be seen there; only great humps of grey-black rock, and, like rock come to life, tremendous baobabs (those anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, geomorphic living forms, always less tree than man or beast or stone) with their wrinkled flesh that looks as if it would cringe at a touch, their token disguise of brilliant leaves, and their mammalian fruit pendent from long cords. I took one in my hands; it was fully a foot and a half long and must have weighed five pounds. The light-green velour skin was fuzzy as a peach. There came to me, through my hand, all the queerness of the continent, in the strange feel of that heavy-hanging fruit.

There is a road bypassing the cataracts that once barred the way into equatorial Africa, and a railway. Without that railway, Stanley said, all the wealth of Africa behind the cataracts was not worth ‘a two-shilling piece’. Stanley himself hacked and dragged his way on foot, sometimes following hippopotamus trails, over the hills and through gallery forests — the dense tunnels of green that cover water courses. The black men dubbed him — with grim admiration, since many of their number died portering for him — Bula Matari, ‘Breaker of Rocks’. But it is easy, now, to come upon the splendid sight of Stanley Pool (Pool Malebo), the 360-square-mile river-lake above the cataracts, and the beginning of a million square miles of accessible river basin.

On the south bank of the Pool is Léopoldville (Kinshasa), one of the few real cities in Africa, if one of the most troubled, where last year the splendid celebrations of Congolese Independence Day gave way at once to riots and political chaos. Ever since the first agitation for independence, in 1959, there have been riots from time to time, and worse, the fear of riots all the time. When trouble does come, city people white and black flee in their thousands across Stanley Pool to Brazzaville until things cool down again. Brazzaville stands on the north bank, the capital of another Congo Republic, a slightly senior and entirely peaceful independent black state that was formerly part of French Equatorial Africa.

Many big airlines alight here, beside Stanley Pool, at Léo or Brazza, migrant birds always on their way to somewhere else; they bring the world thus far, with their thin filaments of communication they touch thus lightly upon the vast and lazy confidence of the great river that opens an eye of dazzling light beneath them as they take off and go away; the river that carries with ease the entire commerce of the deep Africa through which it is the only highway.

The Pool has always been the point where all the trade of the river, and that of the interior that comes down the river, logically converges, and life there since ancient times must have been a little different from that of the rest of the river. Life on either side of the Pool today is dominated by the presence of the new African — the young men with Belafonte cuts and narrow trousers. One sits behind a teller’s chromium bars in an air-conditioned bank, another may only sell lottery tickets in the streets, but they are all évolué — for good — from the old African, who sold his land and, as it turned out, his way of life to the white man for a few bottles of gin and some bolts of cloth.

On the south bank, Léopoldville’s Congolese cities of 360,000 people shuttle with vitality night and day, while the ‘white’ city — no longer segregated by anything except old usage, new fears and the black man’s poverty — is dead after the shops shut. On the eve of independence, 21,000 white people were living there; it is difficult to get a figure for those who live there now, for of the numbers who fled last year, some have quietly come back, and of course there is the shifting population of United Nations personnel.

The bloody foundering of the new state naturally has focused attention on what the Congolese have not got: not a single doctor or lawyer among them and not so much understanding of democracy as you might hope to find in an election of officers of a sports club. These are not sneers but facts. When you go about Léopoldville among the Congolese, you are reminded that if there are no Congolese doctors or lawyers, it is nevertheless also a fact before your eyes that the fishermen and warriors that Stanley encountered eighty-one years ago have become clerks, laboratory technicians, ships’ captains and skilled workers. They also reveal an aptitude for spending hours talking politics, reading party newspapers and drinking beer — a way of passing time that is characteristic of some of the most civilised cities in the world, and that has been the beginning of many a man’s political education. They stood small chance of making a success of governing themselves when independence fell into their clamouring hands; now they may have to pick their way through years of near-anarchy before they defeat tribalism, evade or survive foreign domination, and learn, a tragically hard way, how to run a modern state.

The city Congolese have the roaring capacity for enjoyment that looks as if it is going to be one of the pleasanter characteristics of the new African states. Dancing begins in the open-air cafés at two o’clock in the heat of a Sunday afternoon, only a few hours after the last cha-cha-cha of Saturday night has ended, and the influence of the weekend hangs over well into Monday, even in these lean times.

On a Monday morning I visited the Léopoldville market, that colossal exchange of goods, gossip and sometimes hard words. Two or three thousand vendors, mostly women, were selling fruit, vegetables, miles of mammy cloth as dazzling as the patterns you see in your own eyelids; patent medicines and nail varnish, and also several things you would never think of, such as chunks of smoked hippo meat and piles of dried caterpillars sold by the newspaper poke. At least five thousand people were buying there. Lost among them, I understood for the first time the concept of the values of the market-place. For it was clear that these people were not just doing their shopping; they were expressing the metropolitan need to be seen at the theatre, the city instinct of participation that fills the galleries of houses of parliament and the foyers of fashionable hotels. They had come to hear what was going on in their world, and what a man’s reputation was worth at current prices.

When I emerged from this vociferous and confident press, the Congolese taxi driver who drove me away remarked, ‘Ah, it’s a pity that you saw it on such a quiet day. No one comes to market on a Monday — all too tired after the weekend. You should have come on a Friday, when it’s full of people.’

The Congo crosses the Equator twice in its 2,900-mile length, and it is the only river system in the world whose main stream flows through both northern and southern hemispheres. Some of its tributaries are on one, some on the other side of the Equator. This means that the river benefits from both rainy seasons — April to October from the north, and October to April from the south — and instead of rising and falling annually, it has two moderate highs and two lows each year. It does not flood, and though navigation in times of low water is sometimes tricky, it is always possible.

The Congo is shorter than the Nile, the Ob, the Yangtze and the Mississippi — Missouri system, but only the Amazon exceeds it in volume of water discharged into the sea. Its hydraulic energy is estimated at a sixth of the world’s potential, and there are a thousand known species of fish in its waters.

From Stanley Pool the Congo opens a way more than a thousand miles, without a man-made lock or a natural obstacle, through the centre of Africa. It leads to what Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness; the least-known, most subjectively described depths of the continent where men have always feared to meet the dark places of their own souls.

No bridge crosses the river in all this distance. No road offers an alternate way for more than short stretches, and these always lead back to the river. The river alone cleaves the forests and reveals, in its shining light, the life there. Sometimes, for hours, there is no break in the wall of forest. Sometimes, beyond an open stretch of papyrus, a group of palms stands like animals arrested in attitudes of attention. One morning crowds of pale-green butterflies with black lacy frames and veinings to their wings came to settle on the burning metal of the jeeps that were tethered to the barge in front of our boat.

This boat — the Gouverneur Moulaert — pushed a whole caravan: two barges and another boat, the Ngwaka, for third-class passengers — mostly black. The pace, night and day, was six miles an hour; a little more than the pace of a man. We were never out of touch with the life of the shore. All day long, pirogues paddled out to hitch up alongside our bulky complex, and the people came aboard to sell dried fish and palm or banana wine to the passengers of the Ngwaka. Two huge catfish, each with a mouth big enough to take a man’s head, were lugged aboard for sale to the crew, and once a basket of smoked crocodile feet was casually handed up. For the wilderness was inhabited everywhere, though it often seemed empty to our eyes, accustomed to landscapes where, even if few people are to be seen, there are evidences of men having made their mark in the way the country looks. These people, slipping out of the forest into the sight of the river, didn’t obtrude; their flimsy huts, roofed with the fronds that the forest can abundantly spare, lay far down among the humus litter at the forest’s feet; their manioc and bananas were merely patches of vegetation a little differently organised from the rest of the wilderness.

There were many peoples, of course. Every day we saw different faces turned to us from the visiting pirogues. North of the Equator, tattooing was no longer a matter of misplaced vaccination scratches. There were patterns of serrated nicks that sometimes made a bold second pair of eyebrows; there were round engravings like beauty patches on women’s cheeks. On some faces the distortion was beautiful; they were formalised into sculpture in flesh. On the faces of the old, artifice had given way to nature, and the imposed face was broken up by the patient triumph of wrinkles.

Our water caravan did not halt for the first night and day, but in the small hours of the second night I was awakened by the sudden stillness of the engines. There were muffled cries in the air; I got up and went on deck. Out of the darkness and dark warmth the two great spotlights of our boat hastily framed a stage setting. A few palm trees were the only props. Before them, on the twenty feet or so of water between our caravan and the shore, black pirogues moved, silent and busy. The third-class ship ahead of ours glowed with light as if it were afire; everyone aboard was up, and life was going on purposefully. I saw the whole scene as if I had carried a lantern into a cave. Once, twice, the non-existent land showed the incredible sight of the lights of a car, carving through it and away. The calls of men and women traders graceful as shades in some watery level of a Dantesque Lethe, came to me as the caravan began to move away. The pirogues showed tiny candle halos of orange light; there was silence. Then a long cry: ‘Ivoire!’

By daylight, these ports of call were signalled by a mile or two of bank tamed by occupation; the red-brick buildings of a mission set back on a grassy slope, a palm-oil refinery or coffee-plantation headquarters. As well as the river people, and the workers from the refinery village, whatever white people there were always came down to the shore to survey us across the water: an old priest with a freshly combed, yellow-stained beard hanging to his waist, a couple of jolly-looking missionaries in cotton frocks, a Portuguese trader’s wife, with sad, splendid eyes and a moustache, who never waved back.

At Coquilhatville (Mbandaka), exactly on the Equator, I went ashore for the first time. It was a small modern town with its main street set along the river, and an air of great isolation. There is a magnificent botanical garden there, with trees and plants from the jungles of the Amazon as well as nearly all known varieties native to tropical Africa. The Belgian director was still there, then, a happy misogynist living alone with a cat. He opened his penknife and cut me a spray of three cattleya orchids from the baskets blooming on his open verandah. When I got back to the boat, I found that cargo was still being loaded, so I put the orchids into a mug and crossed the road from the dock to the main street again, where I had noticed the Musée de l’Équateur housed in a little old building. Striped wasps droned inside, tokening the peculiar resistance of the Equatorial forest to the preservation of material things; but if heat and damp threatened to invade the fetish figures and the carved utensils behind glass, it did not matter, because they were all in everyday use in the region, with the exception, perhaps, of a coffin, about twelve feet long, in the form of a man. It was an expression of rigor mortis in wood — angular, stern and dyed red. The face was tattooed, and in the crook of the left arm there was a small figure representing the dead man’s wife. But I was told that people in that part of the country usually bury their dead in ant heaps, and certainly I never saw a cemetery near any village along the river.

Conrad romanticised the Congo; Stanley, for all his genius of adventurousness, had a vulgar mind. Conrad projected his horror of the savage greed with which the agents of Léopold II brought ‘civilisation’ to the river in the 1880s, into the look of the river itself. The inviolate privacy of the primeval forest became a brooding symbol of the ugly deeds that were done there, the tattooed faces became the subjective image of life without the organised legal and moral strictures with which the white man keeps the beast in himself at bay. Stanley sometimes saw the river as a potential old-clothes mart; the tattooed and naked people irresistibly suggested to him a ‘ready market’ for the ‘garments shed by the military heroes of Europe, of the club lackeys, of the liveried servants’.

Neither vision fitted what I saw on the Congo, though some of the anti-white and inter-tribal atrocities that have been committed since independence have matched in horror what white men did in the name of civilisation less than a century ago, and Conrad’s vision of this part of Africa as the heart of man’s darkness has taken on the look of prophecy. For myself, I had not been many days on the river when I stopped thinking of the people around me as primitive, in terms of skills and aesthetics. Their pirogues and all the weapons and tools of their livelihood were efficient and had the beauty that is the unsought result of perfect function. The pirogues were masters of the water, and like their gear, many of them were chased with carving of great restraint and discipline. The armoury of fishing spears, with their variety of tips and barbs, represented hand-forging and metalwork of a long skilled tradition, and a jeweller’s eye for the beauty inherent in the strength of metals. Any paddle or bailing scoop — common articles of everyday use among riparian people — could have gone straight into an art collection; which is as if to say one could pick up a plastic spoon in a white man’s kitchen, a spade in a suburban garden, and confidently put them on exhibition.

After Coquilhatville the river mustered such a day-and-night assault on the senses that you could not read. In the slowly passing forest were the halls and mansions of prehistory: great mahogany trees, ficus, and, out-topping the tallest palm, the giant kapok with its trunk like pale stone. There were times when the pull and contrast between the elements of land and water seemed to disappear altogether. On golden water, garlands of green islands floated. As the light changed, the water became smooth as ice; our length, our bulk skimmed it like a waterbug. Then the floating islands, with their hazy, lengthening reflections, coloured a surface like that of a mirror on which the quicksilver is worn; and perfume came to us from the forest. There were many flowering creepers — an orchid-pink one that spread itself out to the sun over a tree, an occasional red or orange one — but the perfume was the cold, sweet, unmistakable one of white flowers, and came from a waxy trail of blossoms, deadly poisonous, very beautiful.

A storm in the night brought tremendous rain hosing down on us. The sky swelled and thinned with lightning like the overblown skin of a dark balloon. In the morning, the jungle was dripping and brilliant, and an hour-long forest of trees suddenly appeared, covered with ethereal orchilla moss, their beards matted with water. Other trees had ant-heaps looking like spools of thread wound high up on their branches. When the boat drew near an island — there are four thousand of them in this stretch of the Congo — or passed close to one of the banks, the raucous gossip of grey-and-red African parrots was overheard. The Africans catch young parrots by letting a ball of latex, from the wild rubber lianas, down the hollow trees where the parrots nest; the claws of the young become entangled in the tacky ball, and when it is drawn up they come with it. They are caught to sell as white people’s pets, unlike the monkeys, which are favoured as food. In a lonely stretch of forest, two men wearing nothing but loincloths of bark startled me by holding up a monkey they had just found and killed in one of the traps they set up along the river.

Not long after the caravan had left Bumba, its most northerly stop in the curving course of the river and the point at which the Congo — Nile road down Africa meets the Congo, we approached a village where a whole armada of pirogues came out to meet us. From our galley came a shower of jam tins; men, women and children leaped for them from the pirogues into the water. The men were naked; the women were wrapped in mammy cloth but they too seemed unencumbered. Some who boarded our boat did not leave it for several miles, when the pirogues had left them behind long ago; they simply stepped off into our swirling wake and swam back home. They are the only people I have ever seen who swim as others walk or run.

We passed, and sometimes made a stop at, places that were once the Arab fortresses of Tippu Tip, a powerful Arab slave trader whose help Stanley was ironically forced to seek in his journeys, although one of the professed objects of the association for which Stanley worked was to wipe out the slave trade. One of these places was Yangambi, which Stanley came upon in 1883 as a populous village in ruins, with its male population murdered and its women and children fettered by the neck or leg in an Arab slave camp built of the remains of their home.

The Belgians built a fine agricultural research station at Yangambi, the biggest in Africa, a garden town with its own shops, school, hospital, club and pleasant houses as well as laboratories and experimental plantations. It belonged, like everything else, to the new Congolese state, and it still had its complement of Belgian scientists when I was there, but the disorder that has since descended on nearby Stanleyville (Kisangani) may have brought its usefulness to a standstill.

Across the river, from a great village that stretched for several miles along the bank, Topoke people brought huge forest pineapples to sell us. The tribesmen were intricately tattooed, with the attentive eyes of merchants, though they grow bananas and catch fish. Many of them are followers of what is known as the Kitiwala — an African corruption of the name as well as the character of the Watch Tower Society, which (like a number of other harmless religious sects in a country where Christianity, traditional animism and black nationalism provide a heady inspirational mixture) has become a subversive secret society. So much so that the Belgian colonial administration outlawed the distribution of those apocalyptic pamphlets familiar on street corners all over the world.

At Stanleyville the river’s great right of way through twelve hundred miles ends; the Stanley Falls (Boyoma Falls) break it — they are rapids, really — and the Equator is crossed again. On the other side, in the southern hemisphere, is the stretch of the Congo that leads to its source near the copper belt of the south; it has another name, Lualaba. Livingstone ‘discovered’ it (for Europe) but did not dream that it could be the distant Congo, known far away in West Africa.

Stanleyville lies just below Stanley Falls, as Léopoldville lies just above the lower Congo rapids. But the river at Stanleyville is of a size the eye can encompass, and in fact the town is on both sides of it. Here is a place deeply of Africa, sunk in Africa. In Léopoldville the tropical vegetation is not dwarfed by, but a match for, the giant modern buildings; the modest colonial buildings of Stanleyville make no challenge to the towering fecundity of the tropics. There is a lofty feeling that comes from living things, not buildings; palms, whose trunks are covered with a cool compress of moss, bright as seaweed and feathered with ferns, hang above the avenues, and the Traveller’s Tree — an exalted relation of the banana palm that stores cool water for the passer-by at the base of fringed fronds arranged like the spread of a peacock’s tail — is common.

Stanleyville is — or was — the late Patrice Lumumba’s town, and it has become a place of terror for white people. From time to time, now, it is cut off from communication with the rest of the country, and the world; planes cannot land there, and the river convoy service from Léopoldville, carrying food and other supplies, is disrupted by unrest. But the Gouverneur Moulaert and its water caravan reached the end of their journey at Stanleyville during an interval of calm. There, I was even able to have one last experience of the river before I left it to continue my journey by land.

I went with the Wagenia fishermen to visit their fishing grounds in the rapids of Stanley Falls. I found them at home in an ugly ‘Arabised’ village a mile or two from the town. It was a poor collection of low mud houses like a heap of sandcastles that a tide had lapped over; the extent of its Arabisation seemed to consist of the one mud hut, daubed with white and a line of shaky Arabic script, that served as a mosque. African villages such as this one on the riverbank are relics of the proselytising for Islam that was a sideline of Arab slavers from the East Coast.

It was just five in the afternoon when I got to the Wagenia village, and I had to wait while the crew mustered, struggling out of the patchy decency of the white man’s cast-offs that they wore to work in Stanleyville, and emerging from their dark mudholes in shorts and loincloths. There were twenty-five paddlers and three musicians, and we took to the water in a big pirogue that held us all comfortably. A coxswain stood in front of me where I sat in the middle, and another, a lean and handsome old man, stood up aft. He was the leader of the chanting; sometimes this accompanied the drumming, sometimes followed on the beat of the drums, and sometimes was beaten into silence by the master voice of the drums. The pirogue skidded and shot across the rapids, the bodies of the paddlers jabbing and rising, and as the water became wilder the drums hammered up the energy of the men, deafening and dramatic.

We crossed the river and landed among reeds where rocks jutted out half-hidden by very fast and evil-looking rapids. Giant cornucopias of fish traps hung from an incredible catwalk of huge logs and lianas strung over the dreadful waters. Three of the fishermen shinned over the lianas and logs and, balancing like high-wire artists, pulled up the traps full of slapping fish. I found myself in a scene I recognised as identical in every detail with the sketch reproduced in Stanley’s account of the Wagenias when he founded his first river station at the Falls in 1885; they fish the wild, twisted water exactly as they did then.

Returning downstream towards Stanleyville, the going was smoother and the paddlers made a great show of speed, rhythm and drumming. We cut across the path of the ferryboat that plies between the ‘black’ town on one bank and the ‘white’ town on the other; the cranes on the dock were at work on their slow devouring and disgorging. It was an odd feeling to be the centre of a kind of floating war dance in the middle of a modern port preoccupied with political fervour; while I enjoyed the show-off of the Wagenias, I felt something was fraudulent, and could not make up my mind whether it was the modern port or the old pirogue. Yet the Congo River was not demeaned either way. The Congo, like that other stream, of time, is neither past nor present, and carries both in an immense indifference that takes them to be one. There is no old and no new Africa to the great river; it simply bears a majestic burden of life, as it has always done.

While I was travelling on the Congo River I might have forgotten for days at a time that I was in a land suffering the great political crisis of its existence. Yet all through the thousand-mile river journey from Léopoldville to Stanleyville, while the banks of the Congo showed a life regulated by other mores and even other gods than those of the contemporary world of history, a scribble, chalked by an idler in Léopoldville on one of the barges in the water caravan in which I travelled, remained: ‘Vive le Roi M. Kasavubu et l’Indépendance’. In all the traffic of the caravan’s progress, the scribble was not rubbed off. And whenever it caught my eye there was brought home to me the realisation that Africa, however troubled it may be, has never been more interesting than it is in this decade; it may never be so interesting again. The Africa the nineteenth-century explorers found — the jungle and the scarified faces that I myself was seeing on the river — and the Africa I had seen emergent in the city life of Stanley Pool are in living coexistence though centuries apart. These are the two great periods of the continent; the colonial Africa that came between them was the dullest, despite its achievements and historical necessity.

When Stanley was busy opening up the Congo River to trade in the name of Léopold II of Belgium, he met in the wilderness Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who was equally busy staking out rival claims for the French. Opposite Léopoldville, which Stanley founded, across the great width of Stanley Pool is Brazzaville, which de Brazza founded. Four years ago the Pool was French on one bank and Belgian on the other; now Brazzaville is the capital of one Congo Republic, and Léopoldville is the capital of another. The new definitions are only a little less artificial than the old colonial ones; for the people on both banks of Stanley Pool are the same people — the Bakongo — who had a kingdom of their own in the fifteenth century. The definitions are less artificial only because the people of the right bank and the people of the left bank have entered into community with the modern world under two different influences — the one French, the other Belgian — and certain approaches to life characteristic of the French, and others characteristic of the Belgians, will probably distinguish the two African peoples for ever, despite the fact that the Congolese of the former Belgian Congo have shown a fanatic revulsion against the Belgians.

On a Saturday night I took the ferry across Stanley Pool to what used to be the French side, and went to an open-air café in the Poto Poto district of Brazzaville, a vast black slum that is the real city, although its swarming existence in shacks and unlit streets goes on completely buried under an extravagant growth of creepers and palms, while the pleasant colonial town built by the French shows up more prominently through the tropical green.

Chez Faignon lay behind a dirty alley full of amiable hangers-about, a barber’s stall doing good business, and an old, blind house. Yet it turned a face to the sky as a moon-flower; there was a raised dance floor, a marvellous band panting out to the night the triumph of its return from a Left Bank engagement in Paris, a pungent atmosphere of cats and spilled beer, and a collection of women whose blatant gorgeousness is the only grand style of beauty I know of in the world today.

These ladies of joy — as many of them were — suggested all the wickedness of courtesans of the great age; they also giggled and whispered in each other’s ears like schoolgirls. They were wearing — carried to the nth degree — the form of dress that the modern women of the Congo basin have evolved for themselves, and that, though it goes by the humble French word pagne — loincloth — combines the grace of the sari with the revelations of the bikini. It consists of a décolleté, almost backless tight bodice, a bandage-narrow skirt from pelvis to ankle, and some yards of material draped to cover the gap between bodice and skirt. The ladies dance the paso doble in this outfit, and the gesture with which they unhitched and rearranged the drape recalled the business of the cape before the bull and also revealed, for quick glimpses, smooth, bare belly.

I sat at a table with French friends and pointed to various people around us: ‘Who would they be?’ There were a few white couples among the gay ladies and town bachelors.

‘Just people who like a good band to dance to on a Saturday night.’

‘And that man over there?’ He was a white-haired white man with a smooth, pink jaw, impeccably dressed in quite a different way from that of the Congolese bachelors, who were elegant in the manner of young Americans trying to look like young Italians. I was told he was Monsieur Christian Gayle, Minister of Information at the time — the only white man in Africa holding a cabinet post in an independent black government. A little later the Minister of Information left his party of African friends — which included the Minister of Finance and also a spectacular six-foot Senegalese lady in turquoise chiffon pagne and diamonds — and joined us. He was a calm, charming man who wore the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur and was once a member of the French Chamber of Deputies. The finish of Europe lay upon him invisibly but effectively; he was serenely unaware of any temptation to Africanise himself. He told me that he had come to Brazzaville seven years ago on a stopover between planes, and had lived there ever since.

‘The only way a white man in Africa keeps his self-respect now is when he is working with independent Africans. Last year, when I was Speaker, the leader of the opposition knocked me over the head with a portable radio. I remained calm. That is one of the important things left to do in Africa — to keep the peace between Africans, who don’t really understand the principle of loyal opposition — of putting the country first.’

A few weeks later Léopoldville, on the other side of the river, was a place of brutality again, with the Congolese battering a bewildered assertion of their freedom on the heads of one another, as well as on white heads, and the size of the task M. Gayle had foreseen became clear. Since then, even the United Nations has seemed less than equal to this important thing left to do in Africa.

When the river had taken me halfway across the continent to Stanleyville, I continued by road north and east through other parts of the centre of Africa, a spread of more than 900,000 square miles that was colonised by the Belgians. It is eighty times the size of Belgium itself — indeed, the whole of Western Europe could be contained within its borders. Almost the whole of the Congo River basin belongs in it, the Mountains of the Moon, many thousands of miles of tropical rain forest, and beyond the forest, rich copper, diamond and other mineral deposits. Men and animals extinct or unheard-of anywhere else still live in the Equatorial jungle, and the uranium for the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasake came from the mine at a tiny place called Shinkolobwe in the savannah.

Vive l’indépendance. There was no mud hut so isolated, no road so lost in this wilderness that the message of that scribble on the river barge had not reached it. On the way north, in a country hotel on a lonely road where men carry bows and arrows just as we carry umbrellas and newspapers, and pygmy women run like shy deer twenty yards into the forest before they turn to pause and look at you looking at them, a huge yellow American car brought a couple of party politicians to put up for the night in the room next to mine. They were urbane young black men, and after drinking French wine with their dinner, they set off to address a meeting in the village. The people round about were the Mangbetu, whose artistic sense has led them to the elegant distortion of their own skulls; they have artificially elongated heads as a result of the custom of binding them in babyhood, and the taut skins of their brows give both men and women the look of women who have had a face-lift.

I had seen one of their beautifully decorated courthouses that day. Its mud walls were covered, inside and out, with abstract designs incorporating the figures of animals and weapons in terracotta, black and white. The court was in session and a group of women were listening to the drone of somebody’s grievances and passing silently among themselves a bamboo water pipe, also decorated. They were unsmiling women who wore the negbwe, a concave bark shield, on their behinds, and little else. But their near-nakedness wore the forbidding expression that my limited experience is familiar with only on faces. Among them, I had the curious impression that I was not there.

Early next morning I passed the open door of my neighbours’ room and saw the two politicians, in shirtsleeves and bow ties, sitting on their beds counting a great pile of currency contributed to party funds by the Mangbetu, who had attended in full force at the meeting the night before.

And there was no part of the country, however remote, where you might not be startled by the sudden appearance of a group of ragged children, yelling at the car as it passed. Speed whipped the cry away; but it was always recognisable as the same one: ‘ ’dépendance!’ Perhaps, deep in the forest they had never left, they did not realise that they had got it; perhaps only when the cotton crop was gathered, and there was no one to buy it, and they were hungry, would they realise the change had come.

Once my companions and I met with an older form of African confidence, and one that belonged to a different kind of independence — a kind safe from disillusion. We had stopped to quench our thirst on warm soda water on a road that led through a neglected palm grove, old and taken over by the jungle. A Congolese with a demijohn of palm wine came over the rise towards us, his wavering progress given a push by gravity. A lot of the wine was inside him instead of the demijohn, and when he drew level with the car, he stopped, greeted us and then stood a minute, watching us with a fuddled amiability that presently turned to amused patronage. He pointed to the soda water. ‘That’s your drink,’ he said. Then he lifted the demijohn. ‘This’s ours.’

For years travel maps have shown the continent of Africa populated apparently exclusively by lions and elephants, but these maps are out of date now, and will have to be replaced with something ethnographic as well as zoogeographic. For the people have come back; they are no longer discounted by the world as they were for so long. The people have come back into their own, no matter how strife-torn they may be; and the animals have not gone yet. This, if he can dodge between riots and avoid the crash of toppling governments, is a fascinating combination of circumstances for a traveller.

Gangala-na-Bodio — the hill of Chief Bodio — is high up in the Uele district, the north-east corner of the Congo, out of the Equatorial forest and lost in the bush near the Sudan border. On the hill, in the middle of the home of the last great herds of African elephants, was the only African elephant-training station in the world. I write ‘was’ because I must have been one of the last visitors to go there, and in a matter of weeks after that, all news from this remote corner of the Congo ceased. The few white people in the district fled to the Sudan, and I imagine that the Belgian commander of the station — the only white man there — must have been among them. It is doubtful if the Congolese — even those who treated their elephant charges with such loving care — will be able to look upon elephants as anything but potential food, now, with the country’s economy in a state of collapse, and hunger general.

I arrived at Gangala-na-Bodio two weeks after the capture of two wild young elephants. Each was attended by a pair of monitor elephants, old, wise and immensely patient, who hustled them gently but firmly through the routine of the day; but there was a nightly crisis when they were led off to be bedded down in their stockades. On my first afternoon at the station I was charged by Sophie, the wilder of the two. I was standing with a couple of other visitors, watching her being eased into her stockade by the trunks and tusks of her monitors and the shouts and prods of cornacs — trainers — armed with pronged forks. Suddenly she broke through the legs of one of her monitors and hurtled straight for me, her eyes mean with infant rage, her trunk raised for battle and her ears flaring. I lost my head and ran — the wrong way, right among the immense columns of the monitors’ legs. They trumpeted, but though the sound was alarming, it was, in a manner of speaking, a mere tut-tutting — a mature deprecation of Sophie’s behaviour and mine. I scrambled up into a fodder cart, quite safe.

The majestic charm of elephants creates a wonderful atmosphere to live in. In the morning, their great shapes constantly detached themselves from and merged with the heat-hazy shapes of the bush, where they were out to pasture, or they would appear, with the pausing momentum of their gait, suddenly blocking the bright end of a leafy path at the station. Harnessed to clumsy carts, they did all the hard work of the camp. At four in the afternoon all thirty-one of them were led to the river for their daily bath. Each day I watched them career slowly past me down the riverbank and into the brown water. Some had cornacs on their backs, and they were careful not to dunk them; the men scrubbed luxuriously behind the beasts’ ears with handfuls of grass. Some linked trunks and played well out in the river, and rolled each other over with a whoosh that sent four great stubby feet waving in the air. As they came out, in strolling twos and threes, they plastered their foreheads with sand from a pile dumped there specially for them. The cornacs shouted, the laggards broke into a heavy trot to catch up, and the whole procession (wild Sophie with her tail a stiffly held aerial of alarm) trailed home through the trees while the cornacs broke raggedly, then more surely, into ‘Alalise’ or ‘Dina Dina,’ two Hindi elephant songs the Indian mahouts left behind them long ago.

From Gangala-na-Bodio I went out into the bush on one of the station elephants. A cornac in a smart trooper’s hat was up in front, and I sat behind on a hard little seat strapped to the elephant’s back. We were accompanied by another elephant and his cornac. The cornacs and I had no common language (they belonged to one of the Sudanese tribes of the north-east Congo) but they seemed to have one in common with the elephants, and as we swayed regularly through the early-morning air, first wading across the river (our elephant filled his mouth as he went, like a car taking petrol), my cornac kept up a nagging, reproachful, urging monologue in the elephant’s enormous ear. A family of giraffe crossed our path, and though I admire them, from the vantage point of an elephant’s back I felt less impressed than usual by their loftiness. Then we stopped within a few yards of a herd of bushpigs, who showed no sign of wanting to run, and passed before the serene eyes of a Thomas’s Cob — a lovely antelope — without startling him.

We saw a herd of elephant in the distance to the east, and slowly swung off towards them through the trees. I held my breath as our two elephants moved right up to mingle on the fringe of the herd of five cows, three calves and a monumental bull. But the wild elephants seemed unaware of the two who bore men on their backs, and the tame elephants showed no remembrance of the freedom from which they once came. I have often seen the wild animals of Africa from a car, or even on foot, in game reserves, but I have never expected or felt myself to be anything but an intruder among them. On elephant-back, they accepted me as one of themselves; it was a kind of release from the natural pariahdom of man in the world of the beasts — an hour, for me, that early morning, which was the reverse of that hour at midnight on Christmas Eve when it is said that beasts can speak like men.

From Stanleyville, at the end of the thousand-mile main navigable stretch of the Congo River, a road follows the old slave and ivory caravan trail through the Ituri Forest, the primeval jungle through which Stanley walked for 160 days, almost without seeing the light.

The life of the forest is an internecine existence; completely enclosed, each step, each minute sealed off from the next by a conspiracy of leaves, lianas and deadening mosses. The trees are host to all sorts of other living forms. Some are held by lianas in a deadly embrace that eventually hugs them out of existence, so that only the lianas remain, locked soaring upright; through them you can see the space where the tree used to be. Shell-shaped wasp nests stand like platforms on the tree trunks. Bunches of swordfern and fungus are stuffed in every crevice. On the floor of the forest, stiff waxy lilies are hatched out by the ancient humus.

The forest creaks like an enormous house. In the silence of the day, showers of small leaves fall from so high up you cannot see where. But most of the things that lie fallen are tremendous; pods from the beanstalk Jack might have climbed, huge silky seed cases, green on one side, silvery fur on the other.

At night the forest is as noisy as a city. Among the barks, grunts and cries there was one Greek and immortal in its desperate passion, gathering up echoes from all the private wailing walls of the human soul. It turned out that it came from an outsize guinea pig of a creature called a tree hyrax; I saw one in captivity in one of the villages where, like parrots, monkeys and pythons, they are popular pets of the few white inhabitants.

Most of the animals of the forest do not show themselves, but on the Epulu River, deep in the jungle, I visited a trapping and breeding station where I had a chance to see the rarest and most timid, the okapi, the forest giraffe. The station was simply a part of the forest enclosed, and I came upon the okapi in the cathedral light for which their being has evolved. They were the most luxurious-looking animals imaginable, as big as horses, with legs striped waveringly in clear black and white as if they were standing in rippling water, and a rich sable sheen on the rump shading into glowing auburn that changed in movement, like a woman’s hair tinted different colours at different levels.

The pygmies, who belong to the forest just as the okapis do, venture out of it hardly more. They are the only autochthonous people of the forest, and in parts they live a nomadic life, hunting, and are at home wherever they twist together the few branches and leaves that provide shelter for a short time. (These huts are not much more elaborate than the gorilla nest I saw later on an extinct volcano.) But many pygmy groups have attached themselves to other African communities, who live where the forest has been cleared for cultivation, and these have adopted a more permanent way of life and live in the villages. Pygmies have interbred, too, with full-size people, and in many villages there is a confusing variety of sizes that don’t necessarily correspond with ages. A boy of seven can be as big as his grandfather, and what looks like a man’s small daughter turns out to be one of his wives.

Driving along a road one morning where the forest had been pulled down to make way for coffee and banana plantations, we heard drums in one of these villages. A child had just been born; a small tam-tam and biggish beer-drink were in progress as a celebration. Two fine young men stood at long drums suspended over smouldering logs to keep the skins taut. Around them a company of men, women and children shuffled and sang. There were several gnomes of men with the huge eyes that pygmies have, like the eyes of some harmless night-prowling creature.

There was a tall man, small-featured and handsome, who wore at an angle, in drunken parody of his own natural dignity, a straw and parrot-feather toque exactly like the one in a sketch that Stanley reproduced, as an example of dress in the region, in one of his Congo exploration books. There were people with filed teeth and others with tattooed navels. Young girls and old crones who wore only small aprons of beaten bark were the most enthusiastic dancers, the crones inspired by drink, the girls perhaps by the wonderful intricacy of their coiffures — corrugated, helmeted, deeply furrowed as if the very cranium had been cleaved in two.

Pygmies and other forest Congolese use the road to walk on, but there is no feeling that it connects them to anything. They are complete, in and of the forest. The women peer from under the forehead band that supports a huge, papoose-shaped basket filled with bananas, wood or palm nuts; often a baby sits on top of it. The men carry their bows and arrows, pangas and hunting spears, and the great bark-fibre nets with which they trap animals. Sometimes they have with them the little Basenji dogs that look like mongrel fox terriers with wide pointed ears, and cannot bark. Often there are people playing musical instruments as they walk; harps with resonators of stiff buckskin, and the likembe, a small box with metal tongues that is heard, plaintively plangent, all over Africa.

The landmarks here are giant red sandcastles of ant heaps, carefully covered with palm leaves over a stick frame; the cover prevents the winged grubs inside from flying off, by suggesting a night which ends only when the Africans open the heap to eat them. Cars that falter on the way provide, for a while, other landmarks; the hulks of recent American and Continental models lie abandoned here and there, the creeping plants beginning to cover them within a year or two of their announcement as an innovation in motoring. Soon they disappear under the green.

Stanley almost gave up hope of emerging from the forest into the light, but after five months the day came. ‘Instead of crawling like mighty bipeds in the twilight, thirty fathoms below the level of the white light of the day, compelled to recognise our littleness, by comparison with the giant columns and tall pillar-like shafts that rose by millions around us, we now stood on the crest of a cleared mount.’ The end of the forest is just as dramatic today, from the road that leads east. Perhaps more dramatic, for you can drive in one day from the Equatorial forest to the sight of snow.

At four in the afternoon, the trees fell away before us, the green land fell away beyond that, and a great blue ghost of a mountain hung across the horizon. It was an infinity; a palm or two stood up clear in the foreground against swimming blue. Then the cloud at the top of the blue shape shifted a little, the outline neared and hardened; we saw the white glitter, the soft contour of snow on the jagged peaks of a whole range. It was the Ruwenzori — Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. And we came upon them, remote as the moon, from out of the close warm forest and the pygmies burrowing there.

Across the Semliki Plain we drove towards the mountains through elephant grass, spiked acacias and companies of royal palms. There were banana and paw-paw plantations, too, down where we were; and, up there, the alps. At the foot of the mountains there was a hotel that seemed to float in the radiance that came up from the plain. A water garden of three swimming lakes held, upside down, the snow flash of the mountains’ highest peak, 16,795-foot Margherita; and between hotel and peak there was a five-day climb, for the hardy, through every type of vegetation from Equatorial to alpine.

This part of the Congo — the Kivu province — and the neighbouring territory of Ruanda-Urundi (still under Belgian trusteeship), is unlike any other part, not only of the Congo but of all Africa. From the Mountains of the Moon driving three days to Lake Tanganyika, the car seemed to be pulled from side to side by mountains and lakes that reduced most famous drives to the stature and duration of a scenic railway in the painted canvas of a fairground.

Tourist pamphlets, with their passion for making everywhere sound like somewhere else, used to call this the Switzerland of Africa, and no doubt will again when the country is once more open to pleasure travel, but it is not much like Switzerland, and if it were, who would bother to seek in Africa what is so handy in Europe? It is unlike the rest of Africa because it is the high reservoir — watershed of both the Congo River and the Nile — of a continent, seared through by the Equator, which is largely baked dry where there is any altitude to speak of, and steaming wet where there is none. It is unlike Switzerland because many of its green mountains are volcanoes (two are still active); its strange pale lakes have floors of lava; its cattle (my first sight of a cow in all the Congo) are long-horned beasts like the cow-god Hathor in Egyptian tomb paintings; and on the roads behind the villas that the Belgians built on Lake Kivu you see brown giants and pygmies. The giants are the Hamitic Watusi of Ruanda-Urundi, and the pygmies, not the pure forest breed, are the Batwa.

In the middle of this mountain and lake-land, enclosing three-quarters of the shores of Lake Edward (Lake Rutanzige) and reaching to Lake Kivu, is Albert Park, a wonderful game preserve on the floor of the Great Rift Valley. I drove straight through it, for I was on my way over the border of the Congo into Uganda — the frontier runs over the Mountains of the Moon, through Lake Edward and over three volcanoes — because of an animal that can only be seen outside a game preserve — the mountain gorilla. There are many on the Congo side of the volcanoes that cross the Great Rift Valley from West to East, but, under Belgian administration at least, no one was allowed to go up after them. At the Uganda frontier post of Kisoro, there is a tiny country hotel whose proprietor had permission, and himself provided the guide, to take people up the side of the extinct volcano, Muhavura, where gorillas live.

I set off up Muhavura early in the morning and climbed to 10,000 feet, well into the bamboo belt. The gorillas do venture up the full 14,000 feet of the volcano, but bamboos provide their beds — a fresh one each night — and a favoured food, and the guide felt that if we were to come upon them at all, it would be there among the bamboos that enclosed us like the bars of a vegetable prison. Progress was a matter of squeezing between them, usually on hands and knees because the glassy-wet earth gave no foothold. We were within a degree of the Equator — but it was dripping cold, up there; where there was no bamboo, there were leafless, lichen-scaly trees spun all over with a floss of moss that came against your face like a wet sponge.

A broken stalk of wild celery, a huge, knobbly-surfaced mushroom, nibbled and discarded, made a trail read by the guide. Soon he showed me five fresh gorilla beds, that had been slept in the night before. They looked more like giant nests than beds; the stout bamboo poles were bent together five or six feet above ground, and then roughly thatched with leaves. There was fresh dung, and in the wet earth, huge knuckle-marks — like us, the gorillas use hands as well as feet to get along on the mountain. This deserted bedroom had an odour that curiously matched the gorilla’s own place in creation; not quite man, not entirely beast, a compound of lodging-house back room and zoo enclosure.

I did not see the gorillas although we trailed them for four hours. Apparently people who do come upon them do so quite suddenly; the male, who may be a 600-pound six-footer, then stands his ground, beating his breast and arms and giving a blood-freezing battle cry, while the females and young make off. How the exhilarating mixture of curiosity and pure funk with which I sought this experience would have stood up to it, I shall not know until I go back one day and try again; for this time, my sense of let-down was forgotten by the surprise when I turned my back on Muhavura for the climb down, and saw before me a marvel of a plain far below, with little volcanoes set in it like cupcakes fallen in in the middle, and the grain and counter-grain of the scratchings of agriculture, and more volcanoes, ringed from base to summit with contoured planting in a pattern as ordered as the plaiting on the Africans’ heads, and the pale moonstone gleam of yet another volcano that held, instead of fire and brimstone, a lake.

Climbing down, we sank slowly, like birds coming to rest, to the level of this plain.

The white man, as a power, is fast becoming extinct in Africa; it may be that the wild animals will follow him. Africans and animals have lived together so long that one is inclined to think of them as belonging together in a natural order, but the truth is that the domain of the beasts has long been a puppet kingdom, upheld by white governments not only by means of game preserves and sanctuaries, but, more important, by stringent hunting laws outside them. Once the greater part of the continent is ruled independently by the Africans themselves, it is unlikely that they will be able to regard the beasts as anything but a supply of meat and an obstacle to the expansion of farmland. By the time the Africans have secured confidence in their place in the twentieth century, it may be too late to remedy the sacrifice of the beasts. It is just possible that this sacrifice might be avoided if the African states would agree to let the game preserves be the responsibility of an international authority, such as the United Nations.

Whatever happens, the hour of man has struck in Africa. We have swarmed over the whole of creation; it would be humbug to pretend not to hear, simply because elephants often seem so much nobler than men, buck more beautiful and even lion less menacing.

I left the Congo with men’s voices in my ears. It was in Katanga (Shaba), the rich province that was the first to secede from the central government. Katanga, with its copper, uranium, diamonds, gold, cobalt and tin, is richer in minerals than any other part of Africa (with perhaps the exception of the Union of South Africa) and once supplied more than half the national income of the old Belgian Congo. The Belgians in particular, and international mining interests in general, have managed to retain powerful influence in this prize territory, and its Congolese president, Moise Tshombe, is regarded in most other independent African states as a white man’s stooge — a puppet animated by the old colonial strings.

For the first few months after independence, in June 1960, the breakaway state of Katanga was the one part of the former Belgian Congo that remained peaceful. But later tribal fighting began there, and in certain mining and industrial centres the whites were subjected to a reign of terror just as bad as those that hit the late Lumumba’s Stanleyville, or Kasavubu’s Léopoldville.

On a Sunday morning the town square of the prosperous copper town and capital of Katanga, Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), was ready to receive President Tshombe on his return from the Brussels Conference at which the Congo had been granted independence. The day before, I had seen chiefs in leopard-skin regalia lunching at the Léopold Deux, the most elegant hotel; they had arrived from the country to welcome him. And early on Sunday morning I had been wakened by the sound of ululating cries in the streets, as less exalted supporters came into town by lorry and on foot.

The scene in the square was one of dazzling, jazzing holiday joy. Twenty thousand faces looked from the branches of the flowering trees, from the top of buildings, from a solid phalanx in the streets — all black. There were Boy Scouts and religious sects in white and blue robes and chiefs in fur, feather and beads, and young men in forage caps and party uniform. There were several hundred women whose faces and arms were painted white and whose hair stuck out like pipe cleaners in tiny plaits all over their heads. There were drummers and dancers with tribal masks on their faces, and on their feet the issue boots they wear in the copper mines. While they stamped and sang, a white man in shorts held a microphone impassively before them.

After a two-hour wait, a party official leaped on to the red and white striped official stand, stilled the drums and the din, and held up a gentleman’s overcoat, of discreet colour and the best tailoring. Like a thump on a gong, a tremendous cry rang out from the crowd and hung on the air: the coat was a sign, brought by dispatch rider from the airport, that their leader had truly arrived.

Soon Tshombe came in person, a beamish, very young-looking man, as many African statesmen tend to be, standing up in an open car, a very large pink one, as many African statesmen’s cars tend to be. It had been announced that photographing of his person was forbidden: the reason — not announced — was that no one is yet quite sure that there may not be something in the old African belief that, by sticking pins into or casting a spell over an image, you may be able to bring harm to the person it represents.

He looked afraid of nothing, nothing at all, this young man in the blue lounge suit. Yet as I watched him up there on his platform of welcome I could see that he was surrounded by everything that Africa has to fear. The faces of white men — men of prey or good will, who could tell? — were there, few and ominous, close beside him before the black crowd. And, just behind him, there was a mountainously fat chief, holding a fly whisk with the authority of a sceptre.

1961

Party of One

Americans invented the word ‘image’ in the sense in which it is now associated with consumer goods everywhere. Oddly enough, it was American writers who began the image-making. In the early days of independence, the fact that English remained the language of the Americans, even though they had won the war, was a tender place on the hide of the new nation. The mandarin prose of New England was too closely associated with England; yet the slangy vitality of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain seemed too rough-and-ready to provide an American idiom. For some generations, American writers felt about uneasily for words of their own; long after they had found them, the idea of an American idiom was taken over and blurred, changed; confused with the idea of the American image. The one was a search; the other is a gimmick. I believe the American writer’s share in it was innocent; certainly — to borrow his own idiom — he wants no part of it today.

The difference between the America of films, magazines and packaged goods, and the America of Faulkner, Hawthorne, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Melville — I stab the names with a pin, hitting on past as well as present, because the then in every country is contained in its now — is extraordinary. (It is interesting that that marvellous American invention, sick humour, is based on this very difference: life as you’ve been told to want it, and life as it is.) One can’t explain away the gap in terms of the difference between art and commercialism. For though shamelessly used by commerce, the American image is also held up by Americans in high and serious places, political ones, for example. The image exalts youth, success, unquestioning patriotism, the love of a good man/woman, the confidence of freedom and of being right. The best of American writers are concerned with the difficulty of fulfilment; the corruption of integrity; the struggle for moral standards in public as well as private life; the truth of love, whatever its form, hetero- or homosexual; the battle of the individual against the might of society; and the doubt that one is right.

I don’t mean by this that what foreigners get from American writers is an exposé of America. It is a world of real human beings grappling with real life, asking the questions instead of accepting that they know all the answers. Why do we accept the verity of this world while rejecting that of America on the back of the cereal package? For the simple reason that, being alive, we ourselves know that life is not a Happy Families game of matching sorrow with death, joy with love, freedom with a declaration of independence. It is a matter of questioning these things afresh every time they come up in individual lives; in fact, when it comes to freedom, it is a matter of measuring it by one’s right and impulse to question it constantly.

Melville wrote: ‘I love all men that dive … the whole corps of intellectual thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.’

Of course, I am speaking of the divers with bloodshot eyes — the real American writers. In the context of literature, the hacks don’t concern us except as an aside: why is it that the competent, decently written library novel, a good yarn or a nice love story, is on a much higher standard in England than in America? In fact, to most non-Americans, the run-of-the-mill American novel is unreadable. (From Gone With the Wind to Advise and Consent it’s come in thousand-page hunks, too.) We see the film, but we can’t read the book.

I think it is because although this sort of book may be expected to fill loosely the gap between the comfortable conventions and reality, advancing timidly towards one while returning, on the final page, to the other, in America the nature of the conventions — the America of the cereal package — is so remote from reality that even this is not possible. If a writer is not good enough to be able to go the whole way, he has to dream on between the genuine percale sheets. If the gap is filled in at all, it is in a different way, and by people who are not hacks but sociologists with a knack of making themselves readable to the layman. I don’t suppose the foreigner’s interest in books such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society has anything of the intensity with which Americans seize upon them for self-revelation; but, by analysing the gap, these books do fill it to the extent by which knowledge of the exact measurements of the height, depth and cubic capacity of a hole can be said to stop it up.

Apart from bringing information about the kinds and character of life in America, what does American writing mean to the outsider? There have been no American novelist-philosophers, no Camus, for example, showing man dealing with the absurdity of his position as a finite being possessed of infinite possibilities. No novelist-humanists, either: no E. M. Forster showing that the connection between individuals, though full of the sudden infuriating silences of a bad telephone line, is sometimes made. What American writers do give is the quality of life. The sight, smell, taste, feel, sound of it; from Thoreau to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, from Katherine Anne Porter to Henry Miller and Kerouac, Americans are writers of the five senses. Many of them have been journalists as well as writers, and they have brought to creative writing the feel for the immediacy of experience that journalism demands — get it down and get it straight. If you manage to do that, you won’t need any rigmarole to explain it; it’ll explain itself. This journalist’s method, used with the creative intelligence, the precision, and the time a journalist hasn’t got, has become one of the strong influences of American writing on the literature of other countries. Not only is Hemingway — its greatest exponent if not its inventor — the most famous American writer in world literature, but there is scarcely a contemporary writer in France, Italy or Germany, let alone in the English-speaking world, who does not show traces of this influence even if he supports the current sober and sour reassessment of the tough guy who ended up as Papa.

If Hemingway is the most famous American writer, then, to the non-American, Henry James is surely the greatest. James is the nearest to an American novelist-philospher, but we read him not so much for his marvellously complex moral structure in general as for the profundity of his understanding of America’s relation to Europe. Why is it that his Millys and Daisys are more American than Uncle Sam; speak to us more deeply of America than anyone we’ve met with right up until that unexpected encounter with Captain Yossarian, in Catch-22, last year?

As a matter of fact, James, who seems at first thought to have nothing in common with his fellow American writers, actually shares several literary, familial traits. One of them is the curiously maddening quality of some of the American writers who turn out to be most rewarding, even wonderful. I don’t mean just the turgidity that Faulkner, in his different way, shares with James, and ultimately with Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and others; I don’t mean the sheer fighting with briars and lianas of words which one now and then gives up in heavy-breathing despair. I mean the obstinate attraction exuded by this writing which gets one dazedly on to one’s mental feet again, set on getting into the dense, closed world that the writer has made, where landmarks can only be followed once you know your way about within it blindfolded and no longer need them. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is the obvious example; but what about the New York apartment where J. D. Salinger’s Glass family lives? Salinger’s prose is like a very clean window-pane, yet to get into the room beyond needs quite a sustained effort to suspend one’s consciousness of all terms of reference other than those that direct the life of the Glasses.

Certain kinds, and at least one period, of the literature of the English-speaking world seem to belong to America. When an Englishman thinks of the twenties, he’ll think of Fitzgerald. If (I’m told) you ask a Russian to name a ‘collectivist’ novelist in the West, he’ll name Dos Passos. And ask anyone to list the best humorous writers in the English language, and he’ll start with Mark Twain and go on to Thurber and Perelman — an all-American roster, unless he suddenly remembers Max Beerbohm. American wits — the Woolcotts and Menckens — are not much known outside. Neither are the home-spun philosophers — who is that Harry Golden man, by the way? But at least two essayists are read, beginning with Thoreau and making the logical descent in time, not quality, to E. B. White.

Philip Toynbee has recently called Edmund Wilson the most distinguished man of letters in the English-speaking world; and many people, like myself, are more than satisfied to find the term defined thus. Edmund Wilson sent the dusty blinds shuddering up and flung the door wide on the scholarly preserves of English criticism. He has made himself indispensable to English literature not by popularisation, but by bringing to criticism along with scholarship a unique range of awareness of the contemporary world, psychological, political, linguistic, philosophical and social. Under his scrutiny, a work of art does not fall apart; it flies together in a new unity one would never have discovered for oneself. Kipling becomes as interesting as Dostoevsky; and the minor writings about the American Civil War become the best insight into that event one has ever read. Other American critics — Harry Levin, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler and Harold Rosenberg — are almost indispensable too, along with the little magazines in which we first read them. And the only English-writing woman who has an international reputation in literary criticism is, of course, Mary McCarthy; her bitchy brilliance is enjoyed far beyond the confines of the literati and their appreciation of her integrity and erudition.

To us it certainly seems due to the existence of little magazines and the good commercial magazines that America has produced such outstanding short-story writers. I suppose Poe began it, followed by Sherwood Anderson, but the new life given to the short story in the New World started, so far as we are concerned, with the early stories of Hemingway. Whatever we think about his later novels, these stories put him up there with de Maupassant and Chekhov. O. Henry is half-forgotten, but still they come: very different, very brilliant — from Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter to Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike and James Purdy.

The giants T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have long been appropriated by English-language poetry in general, and one almost forgets that they belong to America.

One is inclined to forget, too, that America and not England shares with France the break with poetic tradition that came about with Baudelaire and Poe just over a hundred years ago, and resulted in what has been known since, in all its various experiments and movements, as modern poetry. America has produced some important poets in this ‘tradition of the new’ (the phrase of critic Harold Rosenberg) that is partly an American achievement, but often it is its curiously original offshoots, like Marianne Moore, that seem particularly interesting to us. Poetry means something to the few, everywhere in the world; and even among those few, there are more individual blind spots than in the appreciation of any other form of writing — I know that to me Whitman is a garrulous bore; there are some who think of American poetry as Ogden Nash, or at most, e. e. cummings. But out of a catholic admiration for the various voices of Hart Crane, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke, Archibald MacLeish, John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth — to name some of the poets most of us know — we have come increasingly to regard Robert Lowell as the most splendidly gifted poet writing in America now, and for a long time.

Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship.

William Carlos Williams’s image (I use the word in the legitimate, poetic sense, this time) posits a balance between two forces — a balance that American writers accepted long before Congress, and, indeed, beyond the way that the law and legislation ever can. The question of this balance, implying as it does the necessity of the one force for the other, is one of the themes in American writing that mean most to non-Americans. Not ‘taken up’, but integral to the being of some of the best American writers; through their writings it has been clear to us rather sooner than to Americans that this theme was not just Southern writing, dealing with a geographically and politically defined region, but with a region of the human condition. All the white world, through the ramifications of history, shares the white man’s guilt before, and fear of, the black man. All the black world shares the black man’s humiliation by, and resentment towards, the white man. That is why the cult of négritude in literature (invented by the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire and developed by Negroes in French-speaking Africa) reached English culture through the writings of American blacks, far from their origins in Africa; and that is also why the most profound attempt to draw up the account and present the balance between white man and black still comes from America, although most of Africa has found its freedom and its voice. William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison — in them we find the equivocalities, the contradictions, the whole emotional and moral muddle of colour; in James Baldwin we have terrifying sense made of it all. His is not ‘Negro writing’. It is perhaps the end of ‘Negro writing’ for good. It takes it to the point where a man is stripped of all kicks, kindness, rejection, patronage, and takes his identity as a man — or nothing.

Among American themes we are naturally drawn to those that touch chillingly or illuminatingly on the conditions of life that we have in common with Americans. Materialism, that big, glittering fake that we’ve all had come apart in our hands, may have reached its apotheosis in America, but American writers have matched this by ferociously picking up the jagged pieces as other writers have not done. This, for grown-ups if not for the university students all over the world who have Tender is the Night stuffed in their pockets, is surely the source of our admiration for Scott Fitzgerald, who, if he thought the rich had special voices, showed that they end up calling in a void. No writer has handled the loneliness and alienation concomitant with a materialist society as Nathanael West did in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. The truculent and unsqueamish honesty of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, the Rain King, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Joseph Heller’s magnificent Catch-22 last year, find no comparison in contemporary English writing, and this last book can only be matched by that extraordinary novel out of Germany, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.

Like Grass’s Oscar, Heller’s Captain Yossarian is a kind of Last Man — a sum total of humanness (‘humanity’ is the wrong word; ‘humanity’ is one of the big abstractions they’re up against) in a world where men have imprisoned themselves. The law of supply and demand grills and drills them, God is a searchlight turned on now and then by the jailers in the observation tower, and the only cry that goes up is not ‘Ecce homo!’ but ‘Why me?’

Captain Yossarian, a bombardier, opposes this world by making the extraordinary decision ‘to live forever, or die in the attempt’. It is a splendid battle cry on the side of life; it recognises the ultimate enemy, come peace or war, in Catch-22 — the clause that ‘fixes’ you so that you can’t win.

There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to: but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

This is Yossarian’s first encounter with the Catch, but he continues to run head-on against it, not only in his struggle with authority in the person of Colonel Cathcart, who keeps putting up the number of missions in a tour of duty, in order to win promotion for himself on the ground, but also in his experience of big business, in the person of the pilot turned entrepreneur, Milo Minderbinder. Milo starts a ‘syndicate’ to supply the squadron with delicacies bought in job lots all over the world and flown to Pianosa, off the Italian coast, in the squadron’s planes and those of other outfits pressed into the syndicate. Milo gets so rich and deal-drunk that he ends up accepting a reasonable offer from the Germans — cost plus 6 per cent for undertaking on their behalf to bomb his own squadron’s airfield with its own planes.

Yossarian survives Cathcart, Minderbinder and many more, and on the last page is about to attempt a getaway to Sweden. A friend asks:

‘How do you feel, Yossarian?’

‘Fine. No, I’m very frightened.’

‘That’s good,’ said Major Danby. ‘It proves you’re still alive. It won’t be fun.’

Yossarian started out. ‘Yes it will…’

‘You’ll have to jump.’

‘I’ll jump.’

Yossarian jumps. The fear; the aliveness; the jump — the first two are the situation, the last the necessity that we all recognise and that few writers anywhere have tackled, none with the wit and vitality of Heller.

Beat writing is the American writer’s other answer to a life that harries and cheats all of us, Americans and non-Americans alike. But beat writing itself, in spite of the physical free-ranging of the characters it deals with, is curiously lacking in the vigour and demand that really make the rest of us sit up. Beat books remain a kind of spirito-literary Esperanto, in which no real spiritual revolution could find expression.

Ever since Baudelaire adopted Poe for the French, non-Americans have differed from Americans in their enthusiasm for certain writers, and I think that it is most usually the theme rather than the individual quality of the writer that decides this. The name of Thomas Wolfe, for instance, is likely to bring to the eyes of a non-American the polite gaze that is produced by mention of a book that one ought to have read; or worse, that one was unable to finish. Though A Death in the Family has its following, many people produce the gaze for Agee, too. The preoccupation of these writers with childhood origins, the womb and nest of their personalities, is something that we find wearisome, however (for me, in the case of Agee) exquisitely accurate the findings may be. This obsessively personal quality of some American writing is suspect — whether it has broad, Whitmanesque overtones, or tends to the domestic cosiness that, alas, is creeping into the writing of John Updike, or the shrine-cosiness that now encloses J. D. Salinger.

Who but an American could have written Advertisements for Myself? Or, having written it, would have given it that title? Even Norman Mailer begins to show that the fatal flaw in his strong but flawed talent may be this obsessive turning in on himself, a rending apart if not a contemplation of the navel. If he is in fact attempting to be America’s first existentialist writer, this tendency points to the unlikelihood that he will succeed. Self-obsession rules out the explicit moral clarity demanded by an existentialist approach; it even rules out the dispassion needed for that existentialist offshoot, a sense of the ‘absurd’.

We turn away from inspired self-celebration not in the same way as from beat Esperanto, but nevertheless restlessly. This inner restlessness, born of our times rather than ourselves, looks back to the moral isolation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Captain Ahab, and finds its expression in its own events and time, in the bizarre, awful, funny, cruel, crazy lives of Joseph Heller’s Captain Yossarian and Günter Grass’s dwarf with the tin drum. These are the means by which the geist of contemporary life seems to be brutally best invoked. This is why, as a writer as well as a reader, I must admit that in a year that brought from America both the hollow-eyed beauty of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, as uncompromising, in its classic, profoundly disillusioned way, as Heller’s book, I would rather have written Catch-22.

1963

A Bolter and the Invincible Summer

My writing life began long before I left school, and I began to leave school (frequently) long before the recognised time came, so there is no real demarcation, for me, between school and ‘professional’ life. The quotes are there because I think of professional life as something one enters by way of an examination, not as an obsessional occupation like writing for which you provide your own, often extraordinary or eccentric, qualifications as you go along. And I’m not flattered by the idea of being presented with a ‘profession’, honoris causa; every honest writer or painter wants to achieve the impossible and needs no minimum standard laid down by an establishment such as a profession.

This doesn’t mean that I think a writer doesn’t need a good education in general, and that I don’t wish I had had a better one. But maybe my own regrets arise out of the common impulse to find a justification, outside the limits of one’s own talent, for the limits of one’s achievement.

I was a bolter, from kindergarten age, but unlike most small children rapidly accustoming their soft, round selves to the sharp angles of desks and discipline, I went on running away from school, year after year. I was a day scholar at a convent in Springs, the Transvaal gold-mining town where we lived, and when I was little I used to hide until I heard the hive of voices start up ‘Our Father’ at prayers, and then I would walk out of the ugly iron gates and spend the morning on the strip of open veld that lay between the township where the school was and the township where my home was. I remember catching white butterflies there, all one summer morning, until, in the quiet when I had no shadow, I heard the school bell, far away, clearly, and I knew I could safely appear at home for lunch. When I was older I used to take refuge for hours in the lavatory block, waiting in the atmosphere of Jeyes’ Fluid for my opportunity to escape. By then I no longer lived from moment to moment, and could not enjoy the butterflies; the past, with the act of running away contained in it, and the future, containing discovery and punishment, made freedom impossible; the act of seizing it was merely a desperate gesture.

What the gesture meant, I don’t know. I managed my school work easily, and among the girls of the class I had the sort of bossy vitality that makes for popularity; yet I was overcome, from time to time, by what I now can at least label as anxiety states. Speculation about their cause hasn’t much place here, which is lucky, for the people who were around me then are still alive. Autobiography can’t be written until one is old, can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, can’t be sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.

There is just one curious aspect of my bolting that seems worth mentioning because it reveals a device of the personality that, beginning at that very time, perhaps, as a dream-defence, an escape, later became the practical subconscious cunning that enabled me to survive and grow in secret while projecting a totally different, camouflage image of myself. I ran away from school; yet there was another school, the jolly, competitive, thrillingly loyal, close-knit world of schoolgirl books, to which I felt that I longed to belong. (At one time I begged to go to boarding school, believing, no doubt, that I should find it there.) Of course, even had it existed, that School Friend world would have been the last place on earth for me. I should have found there, far more insistently, the walls, the smell of serge and floor polish, the pressure of uniformity and the tyranny of bell-regulated time that set off revolt and revulsion in me. What I did not know — and what a child never knows — is that there is more to the world than what is offered to him; more choices than those presented to him; more kinds of people than those (the only ones he knows) to which he feels but dares not admit he does not belong. I thought I had to accept school and all the attitudes there that reflected the attitudes of home; therefore, in order to be a person I had to have some sort of picture of a school that would be acceptable to me; it didn’t seem possible to live without it. Stevie Smith once wrote that all children should be told of the possibility of committing suicide, to console them in case they believed there was no way out of the unbearable; it would be less dramatic but far more consoling if a child could be told that there is an aspect of himself he does not know is permissible.

The conclusion my bolting school drew from the grown-ups around me was that I was not the studious type and simply should be persuaded to reconcile myself to the minimum of learning. In our small town many girls left school at fifteen or even before. Then, after a six-week course at the local commercial college, a girl was ready for a job as a clerk in a shop or in the offices of one of the gold mines which had brought the town into being. And the typewriter itself merely tapped a mark-time for the brief season of glory, self-assertion and importance that came with the engagement party, the pre-nuptial linen ‘shower’, and culminated not so much in the wedding itself as in the birth, not a day sooner than nine months and three weeks later, of the baby. There wasn’t much point in a girl keeping her head stuck in books anyway; even if she chose to fill the interim with one of the occupations that carried a slightly higher prestige, and were vaguely thought of as artistic — teaching tap-dancing, the piano, or ‘elocution’.

I suppose I must have been marked out for one of these, because, although I had neither talent nor serious interest in drumming my toes, playing Czerny, or rounding my vowels, I enjoyed using them all as material in my talent for showing off. As I grew towards adolescence I stopped the home concerts and contented myself with mimicking, for the entertainment of one group of my parents’ friends, other friends who were not present. It did not seem to strike those who were that, in their absence, they would change places with the people they were laughing at; or perhaps it did, I do them an injustice, and they didn’t mind.

All the time it was accepted that I was a candidate for home-dressmaking or elocution whom there was no point in keeping at school too long, I was reading and writing not in secret, but as one does, openly, something that is not taken into account. It didn’t occur to anyone else that these activities were connected with learning, so why should it have occurred to me? And although I fed on the attention my efforts at impersonation brought me, I felt quite differently about any praise or comment that came when my stories were published in the children’s section of a Sunday paper. While I was terribly proud to see my story in print — for only in print did it become ‘real’, did I have proof of the miracle whereby the thing created has an existence of its own — I had a jealous instinct to keep this activity of mine from the handling that would pronounce it ‘clever’ along with the mimicry and the home concerts. It was the beginning of the humble arrogance that writers and painters have, knowing that it is hardly likely that they will ever do anything really good, and not wanting to be judged by standards that will accept anything less. Is this too high-falutin’ a motive to attribute to a twelve-year-old child? I don’t think so. One can have a generalised instinct towards the unattainable long before one has actually met with it. When, not many years later, I read Un Cæur simple or War and Peace — Oh, I knew this was it, without any guidance from the list of the World’s Hundred Best Books that I once tried to read through!

I started writing at nine, because I was surprised by a poem I produced as a school exercise. The subject prescribed was ‘Paul Kruger’, and although an item of earliest juvenilia, in view of what has happened between people like myself and our country since then, I can’t resist quoting, just for the long-untasted patriotic flavour:

Noble in heart,

Noble in mind,

Never deceitful,

Never unkind…

It was the dum-de-de-dum that delighted me rather than the sentiments or the subject. But soon I found that what I really enjoyed was making up a story, and that this was more easily done without the restrictions of dum-de-de-dum. After that I was always writing something, and from the age of twelve or thirteen, often publishing. My children’s stories were anthropomorphic, with a dash of the Edwardian writers’ Pan-cult paganism as it had been shipped out to South Africa in Kenneth Grahame’s books, though already I used the background of mine dumps and veld animals that was familiar to me, and not the European one that provided my literary background, since there were no books about the world I knew. I wrote my elder sister’s essays when she was a student at the Witwatersrand University, and kept up a fair average for her. I entered an essay in the literary section of the Eisteddfod run by the Welsh community in Johannesburg and bought with the prize chit War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and an Arthur Ransome.

I was about fourteen then, and a happy unawareness of the strange combination of this choice is an indication of my reading. It was appetite rather than taste, that I had; yet while it took in indiscriminately things that were too much for me, the trash tended to be crowded out and fall away. Some of the books I read in my early teens puzzle me, though. Why Pepys’s Diary? And what made me plod through The Anatomy of Melancholy? Where did I hear of the existence of these books? (That list of the World’s One Hundred Best, maybe.) And once I’d got hold of something like Burton, what made me go on from page to page? I think it must have been because although I didn’t understand all that I was reading, and what I did understand was remote from my experience in the way that easily assimilable romance was not, the half-grasped words dealt with the world of ideas, and so confirmed the recognition, somewhere, of that part of myself that I did not know was permissible.

All the circumstances and ingredients were there for a small-town prodigy, but, thank God, by missing the encouragement and practical help usually offered to ‘talented’ children, I also escaped the dwarf status that is clapped upon the poor little devils before their time (if it ever comes). It did not occur to anyone that if I wanted to try to write I ought to be given a wide education in order to develop my powers and to give me some cultural background. But this neglect at least meant that I was left alone. Nobody came gawping into the private domain that was no dream-world, but, as I grew up, the scene of my greatest activity and my only discipline. When schooldays finally petered out (I had stopped running away, but various other factors had continued to make attendance sketchy) I did have some sort of show of activity that passed for my life in the small town. It was so trivial that I wonder how it can have passed, how family or friends can have accepted that any young person could expend vitality at such a low hum. It was never decided what I should ‘take up’ and so I didn’t have a job. Until, at twenty-two, I went to the University, I led an outward life of sybaritic meagreness that I am ashamed of. In it I did not one thing that I wanted wholeheartedly to do; in it I attempted or gratified nothing (outside sex) to try out my reach, the measure of aliveness in me. My existential self was breathing but inert, like one of those unfortunate people who has had a brain injury in a motor accident and lies unhearing and unseeing, though he will eat when food comes and open his eyes to a light. I played golf, learned to drink gin with the RAF pupil pilots from the nearby air station, and took part in amateur theatricals to show recognisable signs of life to the people around me. I even went to first aid and nursing classes because this was suggested as an ‘interest’ for me; it did not matter to me what I did, since I could not admit that there was nothing, in the occupations and diversions offered to me, that really did interest me, and I was not sure — the only evidence was in books — that anything else was possible.

I am ashamed of this torpor nevertheless, setting aside what I can now see as probable reasons for it, the careful preparation for it that my childhood constituted. I cannot understand why I did not free myself in the most obvious way, leave home and small town and get myself a job somewhere. No conditioning can excuse the absence of the simple act of courage that would resist it. My only overt rejection of my matchbox life was the fact that, without the slightest embarrassment or conscience, I let my father keep me. Though the needs provided for were modest, he was not a rich man. One thing at least I would not do, apparently — I would not work for the things I did not want. And the camouflage image of myself as a dilettantish girl, content with playing grown-up games at the end of my mother’s apron strings — at most a Bovary in the making — made this possible for me.

When I was fifteen I had written my first story about adults and had sent it off to a liberal weekly that was flourishing in South Africa at the time. They published it. It was about an old man who is out of touch with the smart, prosperous life he has secured for his sons, and who experiences a moment of human recognition where he least expects it — with one of their brisk young wives who is so unlike the wife he remembers. Not a bad theme, but expressed with the respectable bourgeois sentiment which one would expect. That was in 1939, two months after the war had broken out, but in the years that followed the stories that I was writing were not much influenced by the war. It occupied the news bulletins on the radio, taking place a long way off, in countries I had never seen; later, when I was seventeen or eighteen, there were various boyfriends who went away to Egypt and Italy and sent back coral jewellery and leather bags stamped with a sphinx.

Oddly enough, as I became engaged with the real business of learning how to write, I became less prompt about sending my efforts off to papers and magazines. I was reading Maupassant, Chekhov, Maugham and Lawrence, now, also discovering O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and the stories in Partisan Review, New Writing and Horizon. Katherine Mansfield and Pauline Smith, although one was a New Zealander, confirmed for me that my own ‘colonial’ background provided an experience that had scarcely been looked at, let alone thought about, except as a source of adventure stories. I had read ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and ‘The Child of Queen Victoria’; the whole idea of what a story could do, be, swept aside the satisfaction of producing something that found its small validity in print. From time to time I sent off an attempt to one of the short-lived local politico-literary magazines — meant chiefly as platforms for liberal politics, they were the only publications that published poetry and stories outside the true romance category — but these published stories were the easy ones. For the other I had no facility whatever, and they took months, even years, to cease changing shape before I found a way of getting hold of them in my mind, let alone nailing the words down around them. And then most of them were too long, or too outspoken (not always in the sexual sense) for these magazines. In a fumbling way that sometimes slid home in an unexpected strike, I was looking for what people meant but didn’t say, not only about sex, but also about politics and their relationship with the black people among whom we lived as people live in a forest among trees. So it was that I didn’t wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my contemporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the ‘problems’ of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’.

It was about this time, during a rare foray into the nursery bohemia of university students in Johannesburg, that I met a boy who believed I was a writer. Just that; I don’t mean he saw me as Chosen for the Holy Temple of Art, or any presumptuous mumbo-jumbo of that kind. The cosmetic-counter sophistication that I hopefully wore to disguise my stasis in the world I knew and my uncertainty of the possibility of any other, he ignored as so much rubbish. This aspect of myself, that everyone else knew, he did not; what he recognised was my ignorance, my clumsy battle to chip my way out of shell after shell of ready-made concepts and make my own sense of life. He was often full of scorn, and jeered at the way I was going about it; but he recognised the necessity. It was through him, too, that I roused myself sufficiently to insist on going to the University; not surprisingly, there was opposition to this at home, since it had been accepted so long that I was not the studious type, as the phrase went. It seemed a waste, spending money on a university at twenty-two (surely I should be married soon?); it was suggested that (as distinct from the honourable quest for a husband) the real reason why I wanted to go was to look for men. It seems to me now that this would have been as good a reason as any. My one preoccupation outside the world of ideas was men, and I should have been prepared to claim my right to the one as valid as the other.

But my freedom did not come from my new life at university; I was too old, in many ways, had already gone too far, on my own scratched tracks, for what I might once have gained along the tarmac. One day a poet asked me to lunch. He was co-editor of yet another little magazine that was then halfway through the dozen issues that would measure its life. He had just published a story of mine and, like many editors when the contributor is known to be a young girl, was curious to meet its author. He was the Afrikaans poet and playwright Uys Krige, who wrote in English as well, had lived in France and Spain, spoke five languages, was familiar with their literature, and translated from three. He had been a swimming instructor on the Riviera, a football coach somewhere else, and a war correspondent with the International Brigade in Spain.

When the boy (that same boy) heard that I was taking the train into Johannesburg for this invitation — I still lived in Springs — he said: ‘I wouldn’t go, if I were you, Nadine.’

‘For Pete’s sake, why not?’

‘Not unless you’re prepared to change a lot of things. You may not feel the same, afterwards. You may never be able to go back.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I made fun of him: ‘I’ll take the train back.’

‘No, once you see what a person like that is like, you won’t be able to stand your ordinary life. You’ll be miserable. So don’t go unless you’re prepared for this.’

The poet was a small, sun-burned, blond man. While he joked, enjoyed his food, had an animated discussion with the African waiter about the origin of the name of a fruit, and said for me some translations of Lorca and Eluard, first in Afrikaans and then, because I couldn’t follow too well, in English, he had the physical brightness of a fisherman. It was true; I had never met anyone like this being before. I have met many poets and writers since, sick, tortured, pompous, mousy; I know the morning-after face of Apollo. But that day I had a glimpse of — not some spurious ‘artist’s life’, but, through the poet’s person, the glint of his purpose — what we are all getting at, Camus’s ‘invincible summer’ that is there to be dug for in man beneath the grey of suburban life, the numbness of repetitive labour, and the sucking mud of politics.

Oh yes — not long after, a story of mine was published in an anthology, and a second publisher approached me with the offer to publish a collection. The following year I at last sent my stories where I had never been — across the seas to England and America. They came back to me in due course, in hard covers with my name printed on the coloured jacket. There were reviews, and, even more astonishing, there was money. I was living alone in Johannesburg by then, and was able to pay the rent and feed both myself and the baby daughter I had acquired. These things are a convenient marker for the beginning of a working life. But mine really began that day at lunch. I see the poet occasionally. He’s older now, of course; a bit seamed with disappointments, something of a political victim, since he doesn’t celebrate his people’s politics or the white man’s colour bar in general. The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

1963

Censored, Banned, Gagged

Peter Abrahams, Harry Bloom, Hans Hofmeyer, Daphne Rooke, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and I myself are some of the South African writers who share the experience of having had books banned in our own country. Why were our books banned? If one were to judge by the monotonous insistence with which the necessity to protect pure young minds from ‘cheap filth’, etc., was invoked as justification for the new censorship bill in recent parliamentary debates in South Africa, one would conclude that these books must be pornographic. In fact, of the six writers I have mentioned, none deals sensationally or with more than passing frankness with sex, and two (in those books of theirs which were banned) do not, by reason of their subjects, touch upon sexual relations at all. Although the Minister of the Interior and the Nationalist Members of Parliament never mention political reasons for censorship, these books, and almost without exception all those books by South African writers which have been banned, have been banned for a political reason: non-conformity with the picture of South African life as prescribed and proscribed by apartheid.

I think I am the only one who has ever been favoured with an explanation for a book banning. I was informed that the official attitude to my second novel — banned in the Penguin edition in which it would have reached its widest public in my country — was that the book ‘undermines the traditional race policy of the Republic’.¹

That was the truth, for once, the truth behind pious concern for young minds: it’s not four-letter words that menace them, but the danger that they may begin to think, and, under the stimulus of certain books, come up with some doubts about the way their lives are ordered. The minds of people who can afford five shillings for a paper-cover edition of a book are apparently considered more tender (or more susceptible?) than those of people who pay eighteen-and-six for a hard-cover edition, since some books are banned in the paper-cover edition only. This is not as illogical as it seems; it assumes that more affluent people (affluent = white) are likely to be living too easy to want to see any change in the ‘traditional race policy of the Republic’ whereas poorer people (poorer = black) are likely to be encouraged by any suggestion that it is possible to ‘undermine’ it.

The machinery of censorship which has served to ban all these books has now been superseded by a more stringent, sinmongering, and all-devouring system under the new censorship laws, promulgated in the Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963. Among the defects of the old machinery — from the point of view of a state evidently bent on introducing thought-control — was that it did not provide for internal censorship (that is, of publications produced within the Republic itself) other than in respect of pornography. This is not quite such a gap as it sounds; English-language publishers in South Africa are few, and they stick mainly to graceful, gift-book Africana and adventure yarns; the thriving Afrikaans publishing houses draw both authors and readers from that section of the community which loyally supports the government and, so far,² has been unlikely to produce anything that undermines any government policy. At any rate, whatever is published within the country will now be subject to censorship along with whatever is imported, and the decisions as to what should be banned and what may be read will be made by a Publications Control Board, presently to be set up by the Minister of the Interior.

The Board will consist of nine members, all appointed by the Minister, of whom not fewer than six shall be ‘persons having special knowledge of arts, language, and literature, or [my italics] the administration of justice.’ The chairman (Minister-designated, again) must be one of the ‘special knowledge’ members, but a quorum is constituted by only four members and, in the absence of the chairman and vice-chairman, an ordinary member may preside. Special committees can be set up to deal with the work of the Board — which will be prodigious, to say the least, since it covers films, plays, ‘objects’, magazines, etc., as well as books. A committee is to consist of one member of the Board (not specified that this should be one with ‘special knowledge’) and at least two other persons appointed as members from a panel designated by the Minister. So that, in fact, whether South Africans will be permitted or not to read any particular piece of literature can and frequently will be decided by three persons, all appointed by the Minister, not one of whom need have even the dubious qualification, where literary judgement is required, of ‘special knowledge’ of the ‘administration of justice’.

There will be no representation whatsoever on the Board or committees outside the Minister’s personal choice; but any person may, at any time, upon payment of a nominal fee, submit for the consideration of the Board a publication which he personally thinks ought to be banned. Under the old system there was a board of censors which examined books referred to it by Customs, Post Office, or other officials under various relevant Acts, including the Suppression of Communism Act; but the old Board was not a Grundy ombudsman to whom, as well, cranks, crackpots, and political informers could take their grudges, confident, on the incredibly wide grounds on which there is provision for them to claim offence, of a hearing.

A publication is deemed ‘undesirable’ if it, or any part of it, is

indecent or obscene or is offensive or harmful to public morals; is blasphemous or offensive to the religious convictions or feelings of any section of the inhabitants of the Republic; brings any section of the inhabitants into ridicule or contempt; is harmful to the relations between any sections of the inhabitants; is prejudicial to the safety of the State, the general welfare, or the peace and good order.

The definition of what may be considered indecent, obscene, offensive or harmful to public morals includes the portrayal of:

murder, suicide, death, horror, cruelty, fighting, brawling, ill-treatment, lawlessness, gangsterism, robbery, crime, the technique of crimes and criminals, tippling, drunkenness, trafficking in or addiction to drugs, smuggling, sexual intercourse, prostitution, promiscuity, white-slaving, licentiousness, lust, passionate love scenes, sexual assault, rape, sodomy, masochism, sadism, sexual bestiality, abortion, change of sex, night life, physical poses, nudity, scant or inadequate dress, divorce, marital infidelity, adultery, illegitimacy, human or social deviation or degeneracy, or any other similar or related phenomenon.

My italics are there as a reminder that the racial laws of the country, and its traditional race policies, are such that social as well as sexual intercourse between white and coloured people could be interpreted as ‘human or social deviation or degeneracy’; and that, in the practical and ideological pursuit of apartheid, any mixing between the races is considered ‘harmful’, and criticism of or satire on this curious belief could easily be construed, by those who uphold it, as ‘ridicule and contempt’.

In determining whether a book should be censored or not, ‘no regard shall be had to the purpose’ of the author; which means that no distinction can be drawn between Ulysses and What the Butler Saw in the Boudoir, or between a revolutionary pamphlet advocating the bloody overthrow of the white man and a serious study of such aspirations. There is a provision that the Board may exempt, at its pleasure to recall the exemption at any time, a publication of a ‘technical, scientific, or professional nature bona fide intended for the advancement of or for use in any particular profession or branch of arts, literature, or science’. But how the Board will go about deciding what is bona fide and what is not, is not stated.

Much has been made of the concession of the right of appeal to the courts, not included in the Act in its earlier forms (there have been three), but now granted. An author now has the right of appeal to the Supreme Court after his book has been banned by the Board, but he must lodge notice of the appeal within thirty days of the Board’s decision. As a book may be banned, at the instigation of anyone, at any time (maybe months or years after publication) and the notice of its banning is not communicated to the author but merely published in the Government Gazette, it could easily happen that the thirty days might elapse before the author became aware of the ban. And a Supreme Court action is an extremely costly privilege by means of which one is allowed, at last, to defend a work which has already been condemned without trial.

The censorship system applies to magazines and periodicals as well as books, of course, and also to exhibitions, films, plays and entertainment of any kind. (The long list of special restrictions on films includes any scene that ‘depicts in an offensive manner intermingling of white and non-white persons’.) The daily and weekly press, both opposition and government, is exempt because the Newspaper Press (Proprietors) Union of South Africa accepted a ‘code’ — self-censorship responsible to their own organisation — as the lesser evil, when confronted with the alternative of government censorship. The radical left-wing and liberal publications — weeklies, fortnightlies, and monthlies — have been successfully decimated (the last may have disappeared by the time this is in print) without the help of the new Act, by the simple means of making them staffless — first under the Suppression of Communism Act, by prohibiting all people banned under the Act, or who were even only members of an organisation suppressed by it, from association with any organisation which ‘in any manner prepares, compiles, prints, publishes, or disseminates’ a newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, handbill or poster; second, under the General Law Amendment Act, 1962 (commonly called the Sabotage Act), by prohibiting five journalists from in any way carrying on their profession.

The special provisions governing paperbacks are making booksellers wish they had become bakers instead. For example, the importation of paperbacks that cost the bookseller less than 2s. 6d. each is forbidden. This piece of legislation was no doubt genuinely intended to keep out trash; but it failed to take into account that thousands of reputable books, including classics, reference, and handbooks prescribed for schools and universities, are imported in paperback editions. If the bookseller wants to import any particular book or series, he may apply, on payment of a fee, to have the Board examine it, decide whether it is ‘undesirable’ and, if not, grant him permission to import it. Similarly, exemptions may be granted in the case of books published by a specified publisher; or a specified class of publication from such a publisher; or if they deal with any specified subject. Of course, these blanket releases work t’other way about, too: blanket bans may be invoked for specified books, series, editions and publishers. As for magazines, presumably if one number were to be pronounced undesirable, either that particular number could be banned, or a blanket ban could descend on the magazine.

All the dreary legalese through which I have followed the writer’s situation thus far belongs to the hot war of censorship. But there is also a cold war going on all the time, outside the statute books, and as it is likely to get colder and colder with the new Act, I should like to explain it. One hears a lot (quite rightly) about the effect the new internal censorship will have on South African (virtually, Afrikaans) publishers: how they will hesitate to publish if they feel there is any risk of banning, so prejudicing the chances of existing or aspirant writers who publish in the Republic. But this censorship cold war began long ago for writers with a wider public, that is abroad as well as in their own country, whose books are published in England and imported to South Africa as part of the literature of the English-speaking world.

South African booksellers are wary of books by serious South African writers who deal with the contemporary scene. Whatever the interest of the book, whatever the selling power of the author’s name, the booksellers risk only very small orders, perhaps a third of what they know they could sell, because they fear to find themselves burdened with hundreds of copies of a book that may be banned either on arrival in the country, or later. (Some publishers ship copies on the understanding of return in the case of banning; others do not.) Publishers are afraid to risk advance publicity for the book in the Republic; the general idea is that it is better to have the book slip in quietly and sell modestly than to be unable to sell it at all. If the book is subsequently banned, the author has the satisfaction of knowing that at least it has had some chance to be read, if not widely. If it is not banned, its potential distribution and readership have been limited by the intimidation of censorship to an extent that, especially in the case of lesser-known writers, cannot easily be made up by subsequent sales. By the time the bookseller feels ‘safe’ to re-order (remember, anyone can submit the book to the Board at any time), interest in the book may well have died down.

Back to the hot war, now. As I have already indicated, not only censorship afflicts writing and writers in my country. So far as I know, only one author has been affected as yet by what one might call the Mutilation Act, one of the gagging provisions of the Sabotage Act. Tom Hopkinson — South African by adoption for a number of years — was obliged to remove from his autobiographical record of experience in Africa a statement by Chief Luthuli, who, like all banned persons, may not be quoted. Not a matter of much importance in this particular book, maybe; not enough to distort it seriously: but quite enough to establish the principle of mutilation of books through censorship. Enough to show the authors of non-fiction — the sociological, historical, and political studies, the analyses, reminiscences, and biographies — that they are no longer free to present as full a picture of South African life and thought as their subjects and talents can command. The balance has gone from the picture; and the truth, in direct proportion to what must be left out.

The links between this and the Sabotage Act are clear. Under the Sabotage Act it may be considered a crime ‘to further or encourage the achievement of any political aim, including the bringing about of any social or economic change in the Republic’. (As usual, my italics.) The gagging clauses of the Act make the incredible provisions whereby more than 102 people have been forbidden to make any communication whatsoever with the public, either in speech or in the written or quoted word. Among these people are twelve journalists and two or three creative writers — the number does not matter; so long as there were to be even one, this Act would provide an example of suppression of writers that far exceeds any restrictions suffered by any other profession. The gagged journalist and writers are prohibited from publishing any writing whatever, however remote from politics it might be. This means that Dennis Brutus, writing poetry, Alex La Guma, writing a novel while under twenty-four-hour house-arrest, cannot publish either.

Censored, banned, gagged — the writers of my country may be said to be well on the way to becoming a victimised group. They have resisted variously. So far as censorship is concerned, English-speaking writers began to oppose its growth several years ago, with vigour in the case of individuals, rather ponderously and timidly in the case of our only English-speaking writers’ organisation, pen. Nevertheless, pen did submit to the Select Committee on the Publications and Entertainments Bill an excellent memorandum that probably had a mitigating effect on the form in which the Bill finally became an Act. With the exception of a few splendidly outspoken people, such as the poet Uys Krige, the Afrikaans writers seemed to feel that censorship was none of their business until the new Publications and Entertainments Act, with its provision for internal censorship, right here at home where their books are published, changed their minds for them. Once this happened, they began the familiar round of collecting signatures for protest, etc., with which the English-speaking writers were already so familiar, and which, alas, while in the combined effort may have softened the Act a little between its first draft and final form, did not, could not hope to succeed in getting it scrapped.

The attitude towards gagged writers and journalists is more complicated, because organisations and individuals in general are inclined to be frightened off by the fact that these are leftist³ writers and journalists, some of them named Communists. The sad old paradox arises of those who will fight for the freedom to write what they want to write, but are not sure it really ought to be extended to other people who may want to write something different. Perhaps, like the Afrikaans writers, who thought censorship wouldn’t touch them, people who keep silent on the subject of gagged writers will wake up, too late, to find that freedom is indivisible and that when professional freedom was withheld from one or two little-known leftist writers, it was lost to them, too. Individual writers and pen have issued protests on behalf of gagged persons. The South African Society of Journalists is putting up a strong fight on behalf of the gagged journalists.

Within the small group of intellectuals in South Africa, writers represent an even smaller group; and for that reason perhaps the people of the country might be content to ignore what is happening to them.

But what of the readers? What of the millions, from university professors to children spelling out their first primers, for whom the free choice of books means the right to participate in the heritage of human thought, knowledge and imagination?

Yes, they still have a great many uncensored books to read, Shakespeare, Plato, Tolstoy, and many modern writers in world literature — though even the classics have been shown not to be immune from South African censorship (much of Zola; Moll Flanders; some of Maupassant as well as Marx); serious writers of all times and origins have been axed. But surely the people realise that no one can be well-read or well-informed or fitted to contribute fully to the culture and development of his own society in the democratic sense while he does not have absolutely free access to the ideas of his time as well as to the accumulated thought of the past, nor while, in particular, there are areas of experience in the life of his own society and country which, through censorship, are left out of his reading? It is interesting to note, in this context, that while the South African government is anxious to convince the world of its eagerness to raise to ‘civilisation’ the African people, it has at the same time largely suppressed the first proofs that some Africans have indeed already achieved complete emergence into the intellectual standards of the democratic world. Most of the writings of black South Africans who have recorded the contemporary experience of their people — including Peter Abrahams’s autobiography, the literary essays of Ezekiel Mphahlele, the autobiographies of Alfred Hutchinson and Todd Matshikiza, and an anthology of African writing which included stories and poems of a number of black writers from South Africa — are banned. 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 nor 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 in general 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?

1963

Great Problems in the Street

People who don’t live in South Africa find it difficult to hold in their minds at once an image of the life lived by the banished, banned, harried and spied-upon active opponents of apartheid, and the juxtaposed image of life in the sun lived by a prosperous white population that does not care what happens so long as it goes on living pleasantly. Even those of us who do live here — once out of the country, the situation we have just left and to which we are about to return seems improbable. For the gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand. The place is not on the map of human relations; but, like most unmapped areas, there is a coming and going that goes unrecorded; there is a meeting of eyes at points without a name; there is an exchange of silences between strangers crossing one another far from the witness of their own kind — once you are down there on your own two feet you find the ancient caravan trails connecting human destiny no matter how much distance a man tries to put between himself and the next man.

Of course, the committed know this — it is at the base of liberal and leftist politics, and most philosophies — but the indifferent don’t, or won’t. To them the desert seems absolutely foolproof, reassuringly impassable. Nothing can get to me through that, they are saying, when they turn to the sports page after a glance at the latest list of house arrests or banning orders. Those sort of people are black, or communist or something — they have nothing whatever to do with me, though I may be jostled among them in the street every day. If it happens to be a white person who has been arrested, the indifference may be enlivened by a spark of resentment — ‘people like that, ratting on their own kind, they deserve all that’s coming to them’.

Kindly and decent, within the strict limits of their ‘own kind’ (white, good Christians, good Jews, members of the country clubs — all upholders of the colour bar though not necessarily supporters of the Nationalist government), the indifferent do not want to extend that limit by so much as one human pulse reaching out beyond it. Where the pretty suburban garden ends, the desert begins. This ‘security’ measure brings about some queer situations when the indifferent stray into the company of a committed person, as it were by mistake. During the State of Emergency after Sharpeville, a friend who is a frequent visitor to my house was among those imprisoned without trial. A couple who had met him when dining with us, and had found him amusing and charming, heard about his arrest. (Newspapers were forbidden to publish the names of people taken into custody in this way.)

‘Is it true that D— B— is in prison?’

‘Yes, he was picked up last Thursday night.’

‘But why? He seems such a fine person. I mean I couldn’t imagine him doing anything wrong—’

‘Do you think it’s wrong for Africans to demonstrate against the pass laws?’

‘Well, I mean, that’s got to be put down, that’s political agitation—’

‘Yes, exactly. Well, D— B— thinks the pass laws are wrong and so, quite logically, since he is a fine person, he’s prepared to do what he can to help Africans protest against them.’

How could the indifferent keep at a safe distance this man whom they had accepted and who was at once the same man who sat in prison, nothing whatever to do with them? The subject was dropped into the dark cupboard of questions that are not dealt with.

But it is not in private, drawing-room encounters that indifference meets commitment most openly. Nietzsche said, ‘Great problems are in the street.’ South Africa’s problems are there, in the streets, in the tens of thousands of Africans going about their city work but not recognised as citizens, in the theatres and libraries and hotels into which the white people may turn, but the black people must pass by; in the countless laws, prejudices, ‘traditions’, fallacies, fears that regulate every move and glance where white and black move together through the city. The great problems are alive in the street, and it is in the street, too, that (until now) they have always been debated. The street has held both the flesh and the word. For the meeting-halls of African political movements have been the open spaces in the streets, in the townships and on the city’s fringe, and progressive movements in general have used the City Hall steps in Johannesburg as a platform, and also as a final rallying-point in protest marches. In the townships or down in Fordsburg the supporters gathered close to hear Mandela or Tambo or Naicker speak, while the Special Branch took notes, and idlers and children hung about; in times of a campaign the crowd of supporters swelled enormously. At the City Hall steps at lunchtime speakers from the Congress of Democrats, the Liberal Party, or some other liberatory or progressive movement would stand among their placards with a small band of supporters. Slowly their numbers would grow; the pavements thicken with silent faces, black and white, office cleaners and executives, young students from the University and old bums from the Library Gardens. The antenna of an attendant police car would poke a shining whisker out of the traffic.

Probably the meetings in the townships will prove to have been the decisive ones in the future of this country, in the long run. But the meetings on the City Hall steps made the flesh and word of great problems curiously manifest because these meetings took place in the one place where black and white participated in them together. And they happened right in the middle of the daily life of the city, under the eyes of all those people who were going about their own business — which excluded, of course, things like the Extension of University Education Act (it provided the exact opposite; not extension but restriction of the universities, formerly part ‘open’, to whites only) or the Group Areas Act (it has enabled the government to move Africans, coloureds and Indians living or trading in areas declared white). Their children were white and would have no difficulty in getting into a university; they did not fall into any racial category affected by removals; these things had nothing to do with them. Yet they were confronted with them in the street, they read the posters on the way to pick up the latest kitchen gadget at the bargain basement, they paused a moment (another face showing among the dark and light faces in the crowd) or walked quickly past to the business lunch, carrying with them a snatch of the speaker’s words like a torn streamer.

The atmosphere of these meetings hung about the city, an unease, after two o’clock. Like the more formal mass meetings called from time to time in the City Hall itself, at night, they sometimes ended in an ill-defined scuffle on the edge of the melting crowd: hooligans, in their blind and violent way giving vent to the resentment the city feels at being forced to admit the guilt and fear that lie under indifference.

The march through Johannesburg last year when the Sabotage Bill was introduced was the last for no one can say how long, since one of the restrictions imposed by the Bill itself was an end of gatherings on the City Hall steps and to protest demonstrations generally. The march was also one of the biggest there has ever been, and it drew a tension between marchers and onlookers that was an extraordinary experience. Assembling for a demonstration of this kind is always a rather foolish-making business: the individuals coming up awkwardly, craning about for the sight of friends; the shuffling and coming and going; the detachment of a figure from the watching crowd, and his sudden appearance beside you in the ranks — has a longing for freedom burst in him like a blood vessel? Is he a paid rowdy muscling in to break up the ranks? Is he merely one of those nameless, placeless pieces of city driftwood that are attracted to any stream of humanity going anywhere? Behind these nervous speculations is a fierce longing to seize the tendrils of impulse which are running, in spite of themselves, from the watchers; the desire of those within the ranks to pull on those feelers of awareness — insults, laughter, embarrassment — anything that offers a hold, a sign of life by which the onlookers might be drawn in to speak up for it.

On the day of that last march, as on other occasions, the onlookers let the hooligans speak for them. And this time, the last time before their mouths were stopped up once and for all by the accumulation of public safety bills, press bills, censorship bills, they let the hooligans speak in word and deed more uninhibitedly and wildly than ever. All the white man’s battened-down fear of the consequences of the ‘South African way of life’ he has chosen poured out in a mess of infantile regression — senseless blows, rotten eggs, foul words. As the marchers went through the city — filling the width of the street, several thousand strong — these fell upon them at intervals. In between, there was the gaze of flat-dwellers and office workers looking down silently on the passing backs. When the procession passed an elegant first-floor restaurant, five well-dressed men came out on to the balcony, whiskies in hand, to watch. An equally well-dressed man walking near me broke the ranks. The five waved to him, but he stood there in the street, legs apart, palms up, and called: ‘Why don’t you come down here with us?’

They laughed, and one of them called back, ‘You always were crazy, Reg.’

For a moment the eyes of the procession were on that balcony where the five men stood glass in hand; then the five turned and went in.

And so the last march came to its end. The meetings on Freedom Square ended long ago, with the banning of the African National Congress and subsequently the Pan-Africanist Congress, in 1960. The South African Communist Party has been banned since 1950. The Congress of Democrats is banned, too, and the Federation of South African Women, the Liberal Party and others are refused the special permission necessary, now, to hold meetings at the City Hall steps or at any other rallying point in the streets. The speakers who defended human rights against the attrition of one repressive apartheid measure after another, all committed to this over and above their varying political standpoints in the opposition — all are banned, in exile, or under house arrest. Even the posters of the newspapers will soon no longer provide any unwelcome reminders; those that are not closed down by the censorship bill will be guided by it. There is silence in the streets. The indifferent are left in peace. There is nothing to disturb them, now, but the detonations of saboteurs, and the hideous outbursts of secret society savagery.

1963

Notes of an Expropriator

I’ve never before thought of English (Scottish, Irish, Welsh) literature as something that didn’t belong to me as much as to any Briton. It’s quite a shock to be confronted with the old familiars — Hugh Lofting and Chaucer and Burton, Donne, the two Eliots, Lawrence, Greene, Braine and Wain — and be asked politely how they strike me, as if I were a foreigner being shown the crown jewels. I make no claim on your crown jewels; but growing up in South Africa with English as my mother tongue there was no other literature but yours for me to appropriate.

What has it meant to me? What less can I say than everything? From the day I learned to read, British writers provided my vision of the world; for it seemed, reading what living in that world was like, that I lived outside it — until later, when British literature introduced me to the world of ideas, and made me realise that to this our life belonged just as much as the life of Europe: the only difference was that so little had been thought about or written of our life in Africa.

Since I know no other language well enough to read what I want in the original, it was through British literature, as well, that I came to know other literatures. I got my Greek drama from Gilbert Murray. Constance Garnett brought me Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Spender introduced me to Lorca, and even Petrarch was first discovered strangely Irished by Synge. It seems incongruous, now, to see myself lying in our dusty garden among the mine dumps, reading aloud:

If my dark heart has any sweet thing it is turned away from me, and then farther off I see the great winds where I must be sailing. I see my good luck far away in the harbour, but my steersman is tired out, and the masts and the ropes on them are broken, and the beautiful lights where I would be always looking are quenched.

Why Synge? Well, why not? One of the freedoms of expropriating a literature from 6,000 miles away is that you do not take along with it any of the deadweight of a traditional approach — I was not coerced in my tastes by the kind of education, libraries, journals, conversation, class distinction and even ancient buildings which surround a literature in the country and among the people of its origin. Once you had got through Pooh and Dr Dolittle, Alice and the Water Babies, you were a bibliophagist on the loose. The local library had a steady traffic in novels whose uniform scuffed municipal binding was an honest indication of their unvarying content. But there were some books on the shelves that did not go out from one year to the next; one day, if all the Cronins were bespoken, you might find yourself obliged to try Samuel Butler. By such haphazard means great cracks appear in the washable plastic of daily life. To be literate is to be someone whose crucially formative experience may come just as well from certain books as from events. I know that until I was at least twenty nothing and no one influenced me as much as certain poets and writers. Most of them were British.

These writers who first set your puny ego roughly on its own feet are usually the ones you don’t remember. One ‘forgets’ them in the self-preservation of letting old ties fall away, and one doesn’t have to feel guilty about it, the way one does over old friends. What the writers did for you has long since become your own, exists perhaps, unrecognisable, somewhere in that rock-bottom on which the coal-flower of self proliferates. Lawrence was the one I can’t pretend to forget: Sons and Lovers, and the stories, and the beast and flower poems. All that was mealy-mouthed, genteelly hypocritical and petty respectable — the whole smug suet of white provincialism that covered my seventeen years, swaddling and shroud in one — became something to kick flying. What other writer anywhere could instil the confidence of a minority of one as Lawrence could? And it was not only rebellion, it was also assertion of the splendour of everything that I was already intoxicatingly drawn to — the claims of friendship rather than the local country club, the strength of the sun, the joyfulness of the natural world and the place in it of human sex. Lawrence’s peevishness and bile went unnoticed; oddly, it is only now, when I have learned for myself that you don’t get splendid anger without side-effects, that I find some of his later writings unreadable.

I was amused to discover, post-Leavis and years after my Lawrence phase was over, that the time when I was deeply under his influence was in fact the time when he was ‘forgotten’. This, again, was one of the freedoms of an expropriated literature. I had been too far away to know, and too obscure to care, whether certain authors were fashionable or not. It was quite possible for me to be, while ten years behind current taste in the literary world, at the same time ten years ahead of it…

The serendipity of the library had provided me with Pepys’s diaries at the age of fifteen or thereabouts, but soon after, Everyman’s made my acquaintance with English literature less fortuitous. I had enjoyed Pepys more than I enjoyed Dickens (regarded then, in my canon, as school-prize calibre; I grew up to know better) and I formed a great liking for egocentric and eccentric writers. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy fed my hunger for introspection, and the close-printed list of ‘other titles’ offered similar dark satisfactions. I got from English eccentrics and egocentrics not just encouragement for my own brooding, but also a sense of the hoary variety of British life, and the extraordinary contradiction of a tolerance of so many odd people with astonishing ideas, along with what British writers never tire of exposing as an awesome system of class distinction.

Perhaps because of the sort of reading I had been doing, Joyce and Ulysses did not surprise me as much as one might have expected. That great sunburst of night-flowering prose carried the inference of multiform to the ultimate. Life was tremendous anywhere, once you admitted it all. Every man his own Dublin. What you experienced in the lavatory was as relevant to the state of being as what you experienced in the pub or in church. The thin hum of your consciousness as you went about the streets was orchestrated richly with the conversation, sensations and unspoken thoughts of others. What other writer can make one as aware of the sheer range of the state of being? Virginia Woolf did as much for the texture of life, of course. Yet, fearless as she was in style and spirit, making her own prose for her own purpose, not shrinking from her own madness, even, there is a point at which all her writings seem fixed to that mark on the wall. It is the point at which the desire to grasp reality becomes the compulsion to fix one’s attention on an object in order, by assuring oneself of the details of its existence, to confirm one’s own. It is the compulsion one feels, when distrait, to stare at a chair or a light bulb on its string. By the way, why (to my knowledge) has no one pointed out to the nouvelle vague that this sort of attempt to prove existence was done so much better by her?

Most writers make their impact on one once and for all or not at all, but E. M. Forster’s novels seem to contain a series of time-fuses, for me. I am convinced I could go on re-reading them at ten-year intervals all my life, and each time find something apparently revealed specifically for the time — both the historic and personal variety. After all, when I first read him his Edwardian delicacy and his fastidious faith in the sanctity of human relationships were already dated — the war was making nonsense of both: I was also reading The Way We Live Now in Penguin New Writing. Yet after the war, after the gas-chambers and the appearance of the first mushroom cloud, where was there to turn, in the ruins of institutions and political beliefs, but back to individual personal relationships, to learn again the human A B C? And when the recovery was materially triumphant but strangely hollow, Howard’s End and A Room With a View, with their peculiar understanding of the hollowness of the Haves and the strength-without-power of the Have-nots, became newly illuminating. A Passage to India, written while colonialism was in its heyday, remained until the publication last year of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time the most truthful and far-sighted piece of writing ever done about the relationship between coloured people and whites. It is still the best novel on the theme.

What about George Eliot (Dorothea Casaubon, that priggish lioness, is my favourite female character in any fiction), Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sterne, Angus Wilson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and many other British writers I couldn’t do without? There is not space to do more than salute them, like beacons, in passing. Shakespeare presents a problem, too; does he go without saying in any context such as this? Alternatively, by halfway through this year, will anyone be able to bear to read another word about him? I should like, however, to slip in a quick word against Lamb’s Tales — like all abridgements, stories of the film. etc., they ought to be abolished. I blame Lamb for the fact that I have never been able to read the comedies with any pleasure (the ‘tale’ without the poetry killed them for me, once and for all); the historical plays and the tragedies, as legendary allegory of the human spirit, have taken for me what might be thought of as the place of the Greeks.

Shakespeare’s sonnets have never meant as much to me as Donne’s; Eliot has been my poet rather than Auden: in general, it’s the metaphysical that I respond to in British poetry. The romantics never gained much hold on my imagination. The poetry of Shelley, Byron and Keats always seemed to be as much in their lives as in their work. Yet Yeats is the British (Irish) poet who has influenced me most. More than any other poet I have read, he has been able to use, in the intensely private and personal terms of his poetic vision, the (from a poet’s point of view) curiously abstract historical events of which he was part, and even the personalities involved — the stuff of newspapers and political platforms taken into poetry. Can you imagine anyone writing something like ‘Easter 1916’ about the nuclear disarmament protest marchers, or men and women who are in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa today?

Like all former colonial subjects, I am finally ready to turn the advantages gained while under subjection to the purpose of pointing out what these have failed to provide. ‘Everything’ becomes ‘Everything but—’. In the 1960s, if one read nothing but British literature, where would one look for novels in the great nineteenth-century British tradition? Since Angus Wilson, there is no writer who has used this tradition, expanding it seriously: recently, the best novel I have read for a long time did so splendidly — but it was written by an Indian from Trinidad (A House for Mr Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul). The picaresque fantasy-novel — didn’t it originate in England? — has lately made a come-back: but in German, with The Tin Drum. The splenetic vein of Wyndham Lewis has dried up; the inheritance of Wells and Huxley is frittered away in the small change of science fiction.

These are grouses in the she-ain’t-what-she-used-to-be strain. The real gap that I am conscious of in my expropriated literature is the lack of novelist-philosophers. Among my contemporaries in British writing there is a lot of lively blind dissatisfaction — hitting out for the hell of it at telly civilisation or shying (again) at that apparently Welfare State-proof old coconut, the class barrier. From outside, however admirably well done, and sometimes witty, it all seems rather parochial. Then there are the Catholic novelists, from Graham Greene — whose marvellous laconic style, reflecting the profound pessimism that sometimes affects one who knows men to the last cell, makes him appear too unheroic, even in his despair, for greatness — to Muriel Spark, whose dialogue is the first ever to match the telegraphic brilliance of early Waugh, and whose two most recent books seem to indicate that she has chosen for good, the confines of some girls’ institution as her private vision of the world; there are stockings dangling to dry above every page. The only British novelist who is close to being a novelist-philosopher outside the limits of a religious dogma is William Golding. To me he is the most exciting and interesting of contemporary British writers.

But where is the British equivalent of a Camus — not just the individual genius, but the writer with the sense of the past (unwistfully) and the future (unprophetically) present in himself, and a cool purpose, born of real passion for life, to explore its possibilities at this stage of half-understood, totally threatened human existence?

1964

Taking into Account: Simone de Beauvoir’s Force of Circumstance

You can seize hold of this final(?) instalment of the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir and worry away at it from a number of points of view. But which is the one that will yield, wriggling, the individual herself? In the end, what does one make of her? What does she make of herself? To write an autobiography is to sum up: and to read it is to examine the process and arrive at a total of one’s own — never objective, of course, but subject to a set of opinions, prejudices and emotions that differ in kind and/or degree from those of the author. Entertained, appalled (once or twice), irritated (occasionally), enthralled (often), amused (in places where this was not the author’s intention), moved and, above all, compelled to stay with her to the last page. I stand back from volume three and, for me, this life gives purchase most clearly in three aspects and in this order: the experience of being French during the Algerian war; the position of the Leftist outside the Communist Party; woman as intellectual. Here is Simone de Beauvoir.

Being female was a precondition, yet, in order of importance, I put it third in the forces that have shaped her life because she has dealt with it, in the particular context of that life, successfully — even triumphantly — and in this last volume it crops up more in the light of reflection on these triumphs than in the glare of battle enjoined. I am referring here to the intellectual woman’s problem of being regarded as what Simone de Beauvoir calls a ‘secondary being’ rather than that of being, in the narrowest sense — sexually — a female, and so we can turn a deaf ear to that mournful cry of the ageing woman towards the end of the book: ‘Never again a man!’ Anyway, might it not just as easily come from a man — the cry: ‘Never again a woman!’?

Intellectual women have, a generation ago at least, disowned the old feminist stand that women are, so to speak, men with frills on. A woman no longer has to see herself emancipated in the image of a man; just as the black man (rather later) no longer sees himself in the image of the white man. Equal but different; that’s not only acceptable, it’s what women want and what we have had ratified (even if the law, opportunity and custom lag behind here and there) by a man’s world. It is a man’s world still, largely because men kept it to themselves so long, and because many women share in common with other oppressed peoples the development of a slave mentality and are the first to turn their red fingernails on their sisters who not only walk out on the seraglio but, worse, refuse the status of ‘honorary males’. (De Beauvoir’s phrase again.) Feminism as such — whether in this negative or in its positive aspects — has become a bore. The attacks on Simone de Beauvoir as a woman after she had published The Second Sex glanced off because she was confident of having no special inadequacies to defend. ‘No; far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of twenty on, accumulated the advantages of both sexes; after She Came to Stay, those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in the masculine world, and as a woman’ and she adds, ‘Oh how insufferable to the suffragette and the sultan! …at parties I went to the wives all got together and talked to each other while I talked to the men, who nevertheless behaved towards me with greater courtesy than they did towards the members of their own sex’. For a woman as little given to feminine glee as this one, it must take tremendous self-confidence to come out with that — the heady first success of every little small-town intellectual Bovary as well as the experience of the Simone de Beauvoirs and Mary McCarthys.

In her sexual and emotional relationships Simone de Beauvoir seems again to have managed to achieve the best of both worlds. A lifelong bond with ‘the man whom I placed above all others’, plus two deep and passionate love affairs which left the bond untouched; this compact of ‘contingent love’ has proved the best of marriages. Like any Joan sitting with her Darby (Simone de Beauvoir, in her late fifties, sees herself in old age) she wonders, now, which one of them will ‘go’ first, and how shall the survivor bear it? Apart from their lifelong dialogue, they have had a silent understanding that persisted without a break in communication even when travelling abroad in a foursome composed of themselves, her lover and his mistress. Only once does she admit to suffering fear and feeling threatened by Sartre’s relationship with a woman and soon the solemnity of the unsolemnised marriage won out for her. As for her own grand passions, both seem to have ended in special friendships and the secret consolation that although he wished it, she wouldn’t marry Nelson Algren, and Lanzmann was born a generation too late to provide more for her than, in her middle forties, a highly gratifying second spring. She is a woman who has been loved by three men; and in freedom; without yielding an inch or hour of ‘the autonomy that has been bestowed on me by a profession which means so much to me’. She has not allowed herself to be forced to assume, on the side, the domestic obligations in one form or another that follow hot on the love-talk for most intellectual women as for all others, except perhaps the wealthy bourgeoise whom she despises. That’s no mean achievement. Even the man who is the peer of an intellectual woman fails to see why he, just as well as she, should wash his shirt. Sartre must be the exception. Of course, he has lived at home with his mother quite a lot of the time.

De Beauvoir may have avoided washing his shirts, but she has constantly been accused of wearing his opinions. She gives quite a lot of space to refuting this. If, as she seems to think, the allegation comes from the old anti-feminist guard, why grant it so much attention? They have long since lost the power to ‘draw’ her when they touch upon other aspects of her life. If, on the other hand, she is accused without prejudice, as an intellectual, of being unduly under the influence of the thought of another, and one takes her refutation in this context, fair enough. We can accept that we cannot know the extent to which these two very different — we can tell that, from their books, without any explanation from her — minds have interacted; the trouble is that her autobiography provides circumstantial evidence that Words, confined to that ‘poodle of the future’, the infant Sartre, cannot. And there’s not much reason to believe, on the evidence of Words, populated entirely by Sartre himself in the many avatars of childhood fantasy (grandfather, mother, schoolmaster: chair, table, lamp, on an empty stage set for his performances), that later volumes of his autobiography will find it necessary to admit other people. (This is not a criticism, but the description of a method. With her, you are under the clock on the street corner, always at the point at which she meets the world; with him, you are in that interior being to which he has carried away the world’s phenomena.) Throughout her book, Simone de Beauvoir has an irritating habit of writing ‘we thought’, when surely, since this is her own story she is telling, her own development, however closely entwined with another’s, that she is describing, she ought to be writing ‘I thought’. For the purposes of this particular narrative. Sartre simply happens to hold the same opinion.

‘It was not of my own free will … that I allowed the war in Algeria to invade my thoughts, my sleep, my every mood.’

Almost exactly halfway through Force of Circumstance this invasion begins. By the time the last page is reached, it has established itself as the definitive experience of the writer’s life. It is a destruction, not a culmination; and that is the real reason why this woman, who can say ‘when I look back over the past, there is no-one I envy’, at the same time ends her book in despair.

For as it turned out, it has been the Algerian war and not the Resistance that has proved to be the testing-ground for de Beauvoir’s beliefs and convictions, and most of her loyalties. Looked back upon, the Resistance (with which one can’t deny she identified herself absolutely, even if, as her detractors point out, she was not herself active in the movement) was a period of blessed moral certitude; the enemy might have been in Occupation, but came from Without. There were collaborators, of course, but they were not drawn from the ranks of her friends. It still meant something to be a Frenchwoman; one did not have to repudiate one’s heritage of the nation’s whole past — from its intellectual tradition to its gastronomy — because of the present this resulted in. The touchstone of socialist principles was lodged in what a man said and did and thought then, in relation to the Germans, and not in relation to how he would think or write or act in other forms of social conflict. It was possible to belong to the Left and not be a Communist, without being reviled by the Right or scorned by the Communist, because if the Underground was a battlefield it was also an area of agreement. For those years the forces of human regression wore the same face for all: the face of the German soldier. And after the war there was a brief honeymoon of the Peace when Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, in common with others, felt that the moral force that had been put up against that face would now be hurled against all the other horrors bobbing in the human coconut-shy; there would be a new France, if not a new world.

They considered themselves socialists and the future was, by definition, socialism. Yet neither would join the Communist Party; she was ‘close to the Communists certainly, because of my horror of all that they were fighting against; but I loved truth too much not to demand the freedom to seek it as I wished’. As for Sartre, she insists that ‘a dialogue (with the Communists) was possible’; nevertheless, soon after the war he was already experiencing an ironic situation that was to continue for most of his life: the Communists used, as a stick to beat him with, the interpretation of his thought taken up by the Right — ‘the bourgeois public interpreted Existentialism as a spare, emergency ideology. The Communists took the same view.’ This classic form of punishment reserved for the fellow traveller has been the lot of both de Beauvoir and Sartre for a good distance on the long road that has led ‘the jackal with a fountain pen’ (Sartre, as once described by a Communist) finally to the accolade from Castro and (surely not so pleasant) the arms of Surkov. There have been some casualties on the way, particularly in the fields of literary judgement and private friendship. The latter are inevitable; you have to lose some friends if you want to keep your convictions. But the former make one shake one’s head: is Simone de Beauvoir really content with the political priggery of her appraisal of The Rebel as ‘a statement of his [Camus’s] solidarity with bourgeois values’?

If de Beauvoir and her man have at last won from the Communists the recognition of their position ‘close to’ but not within the Party, it hasn’t come about through that ‘dialogue’ she was convinced was possible, but as a result of their stand throughout the Algerian war. For her, at least, although she does not say so, it must be like receiving a citation whose words can hold little of what really happened. ‘…the horror my [the middle] class inspires in me has been brought to white heat by the Algerian war’: it was not that her experience of that war went deeper than her politics, but that her political convictions found their depth in her experience of that war.

Other things central to her being were put to the test by the same event — love of country, even love of life. The first did not survive; the second seems damaged beyond healing. All through the last half of this volume the record of destruction grows.

What did appal me was to see the vast majority of the French people turn chauvinist and to realize the depths of their racist attitude. Whole battalions were looting, burning, raping, massacring. Torture was being used as the normal and indispensable method of obtaining information …My compatriots did not want to know anything about all this …no-one turned a hair.

And yet

Every evening a sentimental audience wept over the past misfortunes of little Anne Frank; but all the children in agony …at that moment in a supposedly French country were something they preferred to ignore. If you had attempted to stir up pity for them [Algerian children] you would have been accused of lowering the nation’s morale. This hypocrisy, this indifference, this country, my own self, were no longer bearable to me. All those people in the streets, in open agreement [with the war] or battered into a stupid submission — they were all murderers, all guilty. Myself as well. ‘I’m French.’ The words scalded my throat like an admission of a hideous deformity. For millions of men and women …I was just one of the people who were torturing them …I deserved their hatred because I could still sleep, write, enjoy a walk or a book.

…I had been labelled, along with several others, anti-French. I became so. I could no longer bear my fellow citizens …At the cinema we had to swallow newsreels showing the fine work the French were doing in Algeria …Just having coffee at a counter or going into a bakery became an ordeal …I had liked crowds once; now even the streets were hostile to me. I felt dispossessed as I had when the Occupation began. It was even worse, because, whether I wanted to be or not, I was an accomplice of these people I couldn’t bear to be in the same street with. That was what I could least forgive. Or else they should have trained me from childhood to be an SS, a para, instead of giving me a Christian, democratic, humanist conscience: a conscience …I was seeing myself through the eyes of women who had been raped twenty times, of men with broken bones, of crazed children: a Frenchwoman.

If hell is seeing horrors done in one’s name, then many of us have been down there with her. ‘I’m French.’ ‘I’m German.’ For me, a South African, ‘I’m white.’ As a testament of the shaking of the foundations of individual existence in this situation, this autobiography has no rival I have read. Simone de Beauvoir’s sorrowful sense of disgust with life is surely not so much the inability to accept an ageing body, as the other kind of self-loathing that comes from having to accept that for years one has no longer been able to bear one’s fellow citizens. Let this stand against the judgement of some French critics that the sorrow is the confession of the failure of a philosophy, and against the world’s jealous insistence that a woman so brilliant, celebrated, and (by now) even rich, ought to arrive at a different reckoning.

1966

One Man Living Through It

My memory for the sequence of events in getting to know people is bad — the preliminaries tend to run together into the colour and quality of the relationship that develops. But I do remember clearly the first time I met Nat Nakasa. It was perhaps seven years ago and I was expecting Lewis Nkosi. He brought with him that day a round-faced boy who, faced with the prospect of being left alone to amuse himself while Lewis and I went off for a private talk, said, just as if there were not plenty of books and papers in the room — ‘Haven’t you got any records I can play?’ He was not ill at ease, but carried the youthful confidence in his own interests that marks the city-bred. Here was someone who would skid through the conventions of white houses as nippily as, a few years earlier, he would weave a bicycle in and out of the stream of Durban’s big cars.

I knew he must mean jazz records, and felt he would find mine meagre and ‘commercial’, but I gave them to him. And when Lewis and I came back to the room he was stretched full-length in a chair, attentive to the music and inoffensively indifferent to both our absence and return.

That was Nat, newly arrived in Johannesburg. That was Nat at the beginning of the period he describes in an essay ‘Johannesburg, Johannesburg’. That was the period of no fixed abode. And yet he was going somewhere; by the very nature of the way he was living, he was set upon the only course that was valid for him: the course of independent self-realisation. Although I barely recognise that boy sitting in the chair stirring his toes inside his shoes to the beat, just as I barely recognise the man who ended his own life early one summer morning in New York, both were part of the young man who became my close friend. So do the limits of human relationships constantly fling us back; so do one’s hands fall, helpless, before the quintessential loneliness of each human being. It is keeping this in mind that I write of him, respecting the ultimate despair that took him beyond the understanding of friends, aware that what each of us knows of him was only part of what he was, and lived, and suffered, and that even when we have put it all together there will always be something — perhaps the unbearable sum of the total in itself? — that he kept to himself and died of.

I saw quite a lot of Nat at parties or when friends simply gravitated together to talk, but it was when he launched out into the founding of the Classic, a defiant literary journal, and I became a member of the small committee formed to help him run it, that he was drawn into the working life of our house. He heard squabbles and learned private jokes. He lost his fear of the bulldog and endured its smelly presence at his feet; he was asked to pick up a schoolboy from the bus stop or to buy a pint of milk while on the way from town. The process is known as becoming one of the family and it implies chores as well as privileges. He and I found that one of the times that suited both of us best, if we had Classic matters to work on, was about two o’clock in the afternoon. Very often he would rush in then, carrying his bulging attaché case, and we would eat bread and cheese on the verandah in the sun, laughing a lot (he was a brilliant mimic) and getting on with the work at the same time. His social instincts were sure, and even in easy friendship he never lost his precise judgement of exactly the time to get up and go. He always seemed to sense when you had work or some other preoccupation that you must get back to. This leads me, only now, while writing, to realise that I never ever remember him being a bore. He didn’t even have those moments of recurring tediousness on pet subjects that most of us have. Sensitivity is a term whose mention may itself cause a suppressed yawn, but the fact is that he was too sensitive to be a bore. Too conscious, in the best and most open way, of the feelings of other people. And this reminds one how, on the last evening of his life, when in all his final anguish of mind he talked until late with his friend Jack Thomson and his wife, he had still some instinct that made him shrink from burdening them with the mention of his impulse to suicide.

Nat’s approach to the Classic was serious and yet light-hearted, candid and unflustered. He was a clever young newspaperman but had no literary background or experience — yes. There was not enough money for the venture and there were endless practical difficulties — yes. But he felt that day-to-day journalism floated, like oil indicating the presence of a submarine, on the surface of African life, and he wanted to make soundings of his own. He asked for help, and what’s more, he did so aware that help more often than not must take the form of criticism, and in the self-knowledge that he could take that, too. As for money, he managed as best he could with what there was; and as for the other difficulties, he dealt with them with what I am prepared to say is a particularly African resilience, vigorously born of harsh necessity, early on.

One of the practical difficulties was that it was hard to get white printers (our first one, certainly) to accept that this black man was the editor and not a white editor’s office boy. Nat’s manner with the man was amusing and highly successful — he treated him kindly but firmly as someone who has had a nasty shock, but really not so bad, after all, and wasn’t he getting used to it, wasn’t he feeling better already? Nat did not do as well with the wife, an ink-haired, flour-faced lady sitting up among her invoices on a high stool, like a grim madame in a late-nineteenth-century French painting, but he had the husband confiding his business troubles to him, and almost calling him ‘Mr Nakasa’…

He would bring to me a manuscript that he liked particularly, to share the pleasure of it, and he brought me those whose interest or quality he felt uncertain about. If he was strongly in favour of something, he would publish it anyway, no matter what anyone thought of it. He had read no poetry outside a school primer and I often told him that some poems he considered publishing in the magazine were rubbish.

He would say, ‘Oh. Well, why?’ And would force me to state the grounds of my attack, line by line. Sometimes he would come back days later — scratching down through the nest of dog-eared manuscripts in the attaché case — and dig out one of the same poems over again.

‘What about this line here? — you said it was meaningless but I think what he’s getting at here —’ And so he sometimes caught me out.

Once he plonked down a poem — ‘Now that’s really got something!’

I read it over; ‘Yes, but what it’s got is not its own,’ and I fetched down the Lorca and showed him the poem from which the other had borrowed the form and imagery that distinguished it.

He was not at all touchy about gaps in his knowledge and experience; he had none of the limitations of false pride. He sat down to Lorca with the pleasure of discovery. One of the reasons why he hoped to go to Harvard was because he wanted time to read the great poets and imaginative writers; he felt strongly that he needed a wider intellectual context than the day-to-day, politically orientated, African-centred one in which he had become a thinking person, and on which, so far, even his artistic judgements must be empirically based. I wonder if he ever found that time to read; somehow, I don’t think he did. Too many well-meant invitations to speak here and there about Africa, too many well-meant requests to appear on television programmes about Africa, too many requests to write articles about how an African looks at American this and that. Nat remained trapped in the preoccupations of his time — the time measured by those multiple clocks in airports, showing simultaneously what hour it is at Karachi, Vladivostok, Nairobi and New York, and not the dimension in which one can sit down and read. There seems to be no fellowship that provides for that.

Nat was a good talker and had the unusual ability to tell an anecdote in such a way that he himself was presented as the ‘feed’, and the bright lights illuminated the character of someone else. The oblique picture that emerged of him was one of wit and calm, sometimes in bizarre situations. He was given to analysis — of himself and others — rather than accusations and self-pity, and so did not react with self-dramatisation to the daily encounters with white laws and prejudices. White people used to say of him that he, unlike others, was not ‘bitter’; I don’t know quite what they meant by this — because he was as bitterly hurt by the colour bar as the next man — unless they mistook for resignation the fact that he managed to keep his self-respect intact.

In the years I knew him fragments and segments of his life came out in talk, without chronology, as these things do between friends; he was telling me, one Sunday, how as a small boy he used to be up at four in the morning to be first on the streets with the newspapers. He was not telling me about his hardships as a poor black child, but of how mysterious and exciting Durban was at that hour, for a little boy — the deserted city coming up with the sun out of the mist from the sea. Then, last year while I was in London, I met his younger brother, who was about to go up to Oxford. When I told Nat — who had helped to pay for the boy’s schooling — how impressed I had been by his brother’s keen mind, he told me how he had been in the room when the boy was born, and how, since the mother became ill soon after and was never again able to look after her children, he had simply ‘taken the baby around with me until he could walk’. Again, it was the quality of the experience he was conveying, not a hard-luck story presenting himself as a victim. Of course, he was a victim of this country; but never accepted the character of the victimised in himself.

I always hoped that one day he would write about these things — the child in Durban, the life he and Lewis Nkosi shared, homeless and yet, curiously, more at home in Johannesburg than those behind their suburban front doors. I think that the writing in his weekly column in the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail was a beginning, and is the best writing he did. It was journalism, yes, but journalism of a highly personal kind; all the news came from inside Nat. He dredged into his mind and feelings as he had never done before, he wrote only of what was real to him, throwing away all the labels conveniently provided by both protest writing and government handouts, accepting without embarrassment all the apparent contradictions in the complexity of his reactions to his situation — and ours, black and white. (He didn’t even balk at coming out with the pronouncement that he felt sorry for young Afrikaners!) ‘Bitterness’; ‘resentment’; ‘prejudice’; these terms are as easy to use as the airmail stickers free for the taking in post offices. Nat presented the reality, in daily life and thought, from which these abstractions are run off. He showed us what it was all about, for one man living through it.

This writing — reflecting the gaiety of a serious person — came from his central personality and, in giving himself the fullest expression he had yet known, during the year that he was writing his column and concurrently running Classic he developed amazingly. It was a strange time, that last year in South Africa. On the one hand, he was making a name for himself in a small but special way that no African had done before; his opinions and ideas were being considered seriously by white newspaper-readers whose dialogue across the colour line had never exceeded the command, do-this-or-that, and the response, yes-baas. On the other hand, he had been awarded a fellowship to Harvard and was involved in the process of trying to get a passport — for an African, a year-long game in which the sporting element seems to be that the applicant is never told what you have to do to win, or what it was he did that made him lose. Knowing the nature of the game, Nat had to consider from the start how the refusal of a passport would affect his life. He had to decide whether the place he had made for himself, astride the colour bar, merited electing to stay, should the passport be refused; or whether he should, like others, accept exile as the price of a breath of the open world. It was not a decision to be dictated only by personal ambition; part of his development was that he had come to the stage, now, when he had to weigh up the possible usefulness to his people of the position he had gained. It was not, of course, a political position, and its value was not something that could easily be measured; there is no scale for the intangibles of the human spirit.

Quite suddenly, he made the decision to go, although he had been refused a passport. He took what every other young man of outstanding ability — but of a different colour — takes for granted, and gets without the necessity of an agonising decision to exile himself from home, country, friends and family — a chance to travel and seek education. I saw him off at the airport — twice. The first time he missed the plane (no, it was not what white people call African time; it was a hitch over the issue of traveller’s cheques) and the crowd of friends who had come to say goodbye dispersed rather flatly. Not all could come back again next day; but this time it went without a hitch, weigh-in, customs, finally passport control and the exit permit open on the counter. I looked at it; it was valid for one exit only, and the undersigned, Nathaniel Nakasa, was debarred from ‘entering the Republic of South Africa or South West Africa’ again. There was the printed admonition: ‘This is a valuable document. Keep it in a safe place.’

Nat was gone. He never came back. But he was the beginning, not the end of something. In so many ways he was starting where others left off. I have heard that shortly before his death he made an impassioned anti-white speech before a Washington audience; but the report comes third-hand and I do not know whether this interpretation of his address is a true one. Similarly, if in direct contradiction, I have heard it said that through his association with white friends he had become a ‘white’ black man. The truth is that he was a new kind of man in South Africa — he accepted without question and with easy dignity and natural pride his Africanness, and he took equally for granted that his identity as a man among men, a human among fellow humans, could not be legislated out of existence even by all the apartheid laws in the statute book, or all the racial prejudice in this country. He did not calculate the population as thirteen million or three million, but as sixteen. He belonged not between two worlds, but to both. And in him one could see the hope of one world. He has left that hope behind; there will be others to take it up.

1966

Why Did Bram Fischer Choose Jail?

In South Africa on May 9 1966, Abram Fischer, Queen’s Counsel, a proud Afrikaner and self-affirmed Communist, was sentenced to imprisonment for life. The main counts against him (conspiring to commit sabotage and being a member of, and furthering the aims of, the Communist Party) were framed under the Suppression of Communism Act, but anti-Communists could take no comfort from that: this Act is the much-extended one under which all extra-parliamentary opposition to apartheid, whether inspired by socialism, capitalism, religious principles, a sense of justice or just plain human feeling, is at least under suspicion in South Africa.

In his address to the court a few days before, Fischer himself had pointed out, ‘The laws under which I am being prosecuted were enacted by a wholly unrepresentative body …in which three-quarters of the people of this country have no voice whatever.’ He went on to say, ‘These laws were enacted not to prevent the spread of Communism, but for the purpose of silencing the opposition of a large majority of our citizens to a Government intent upon depriving them, solely on account of their colour, of the most elementary human rights.’

All through his trial, Fischer listened and took notes — even when some erstwhile friends turned state witnesses stood a few feet away, testifying against him — with the same composed alertness that had been his demeanour when appearing as counsel in this same Palace of Justice at Pretoria. The smile, beginning in the brilliant, flecked blue eyes, was his familiar one, as he turned from the dock to face the public gallery, and sought the faces of family or friends. The panoply of the court, the shouts drifting up from the cells below, the press tiptoeing restlessly in and out, his colleagues in their robes, Mr Justice Wessel Boshoff on the bench — all this was the everyday scene of his professional working life as an advocate. But he stood in the prisoner’s dock. Hemmed in by the intimidating presence of plain-clothes security men and scrutinised by uniformed policemen, the spectators in the gallery stared into the well of the court as into Fischer’s private nightmare, where all appeared normal except for this one glaring displacement.

Yet it was clear that Abram Fischer recognised the reality of his position, and knew it to be the climax of the collision course upon which he and his countrymen were set, nearly thirty years ago, the day he rejected his student belief in segregation. He told the court:

All the conduct with which I have been charged has been directed towards maintaining contact and understanding between the races of this country. If one day it may help to establish a bridge across which white leaders and the real leaders of the non-whites can meet to settle the destinies of all of us by negotiation and not by force of arms, I shall be able to bear with fortitude any sentence which this court may impose on me. It will be a fortitude strengthened by this knowledge at least, that for twenty-five years I have taken no part, not even by passive acceptance, in that hideous system of discrimination which we have erected in this country and which has become a byword in the civilised world today.

Not even those Afrikaners who regard Abram Fischer as the arch-traitor to Afrikanerdom would deny that if he had been able to stomach white overlordship and the colour bar there would have been no limit to the honours and high office he might today have attained in the republic his forebears won from British imperialism. He comes from the right stock, with not only the brains but also the intellectual savoir-faire coveted by a people who sometimes feel, even at the peak of their political power, some veld-bred disadvantage in their dealings with the sophistications of the outside world.

He was born in 1908 in the Orange River Colony — formerly the old Boer republic of the Orange Free State — grandson of its only Prime Minister before Union in 1910. His father became Judge-President of the Orange Free State — after Union a province of South Africa. The Boer War defeat at the hands of the British remained a bitter taste in the mouth of the grandfather; as a school cadet, it is said that the grandson refused to be seen in the British conqueror’s military uniform.

He was a brilliant scholar, and when he had taken his law degree at Bloemfontein, won a Rhodes scholarship to New College, Oxford. At twenty-nine he married the daughter of another distinguished Afrikaner family, Susannah (Molly) Krige, and began a thirty-year career at the bar in Johannesburg. He reached the top of his profession and was regarded as an expert on mining law. His services were engaged by the insurance companies, the newspaper consortiums and the big mining houses.

His success coincided with the growth of Afrikaner political power, but his recognition of the subjection of the black man on which this power was built precluded him from taking any part in it. While he saw his people as the first in Africa to win liberation from colonial domination and therefore well able to understand and fitted to encourage African aspirations, they were busy codifying the traditional race prejudice of white South Africans, whether of Boer, British or any other descent, as an ideology and the ‘South African way of life’.

It was within this situation that Fischer, as a young man, had become a Communist. The rise of Fascism in the world at that time was turning many of his contemporaries in other countries to the left. In England, for example, his counterpart would have gone off to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. But Fischer’s battle was to be fought at home. His instigation was not youthful idealism, but the injustice and indifference to injustice that he saw around him every day, and that, indeed, as the first Nationalist prime minister of a student parliament, and a segregationist, he had been party to. It was Hitler’s sinister theory of race superiority, combined with a ‘strange revulsion’ that Fischer experienced when, as a formality at a philanthropic meeting he had to take a black man’s hand, that had opened his eyes. Since the days when, as a child, he had made clay oxen with black children on his family’s farm, he had been conditioned to develop an antagonism for which he could find no reason. He came to understand colour prejudice as a wholly irrational phenomenon.

At his trial in Pretoria, he told the court why he had been attracted to the Communist Party. There was this

glaring injustice which exists and has existed for a long time in South African society …This is not even a question of the degree of humiliation or poverty or misery imposed by discrimination …It is simply and plainly that discrimination should be imposed as a matter of deliberate policy, solely because of the colour which a man’s skin happens to be, irrespective of his merits as a man.

Three decades ago there was certainly not much choice for a young man looking for participation in political activity unequivocally aimed to change all this. The Communist Party was then, and for many years, the only political party that observed no colour bar and advocated universal franchise. (Today, more than thirty years later, there is only one other white political party advocating universal franchise — the Liberal Party, founded in 1953.) At his trial Fischer explained:

My attraction to the Communist Party was a matter of personal observation. By that time the Communist Party had already for two decades stood avowedly and unconditionally for political rights for non-whites, and its white members were, save for a handful of courageous individuals, the only whites who showed complete disregard for the hatred which this attitude attracted from their fellow white South Africans. These members …were whites who could have taken full advantage of all the privileges open to them because of their colour …They were not prepared to flourish on the deprivations suffered by others.

But apart from the example of white members, it was always the Communists of all races who were prepared to give of their time and their energy and such means as they had, to help …with night schools and feeding schemes, who assisted trade unions fighting desperately to preserve standards of living …It was African Communists who constantly risked arrest …in order to gain or retain some rights …This fearless adherence to principle must always exercise a strong appeal to those who wish to take part in politics, not for personal advantage, but in the hope of making some positive contribution.

Fischer’s contemporaries among the angry young men in the Western world of the thirties have lived to see a peaceful social revolution in England and the vigorous pursuit of civil-rights legislation against segregation in the United States. Within the same span, in South Africa, Fischer has seen the deeply felt grievances of the non-white population of his country increasingly ignored, their non-violent campaigns against discriminatory laws in the fifties ruthlessly put down, in the sixties their Congresses banned, responsible leaders jailed and house-arrested, along with white people of many political beliefs who have supported them, and a year-by-year piling up of legislation — Bantustans, job reservation, ghetto acts — increasing restriction by colour in every aspect of human activity.

Those contemporaries who shared what now seems to them a hot-headed youth may sit back in good conscience and ask why Fischer did not leave behind leftist beliefs, as they did, in the disillusion of the Stalinist era. One can only state the facts. Though Fischer never proselytised, he was and remains a doctrinaire Marxist; South Africa, in her political development in relation to the colour problem, has never offered him an acceptable alternative to his socialist beliefs.

At his trial he affirmed in orthodox Marxist terms the theory that political change occurs inevitably when a political form ceases to serve the needs of people who are living under new circumstances created by the development of new economic forces and relations. He obviously sees the colour problem in South Africa as basically an economic one: the white man’s fear of losing his job to the overwhelming numbers of Africans, the black man so insecure economically that the numbers of unemployed Africans are never even recorded accurately. Fischer said, ‘South Africa today is a clear example of a society in which the political forms do not serve the needs of most of the people’, and pointed out that ownership of factories, mines and land used for productive purposes is becoming more and more concentrated — in the hands of whites, of course.

Outside the banned Communist Party, there is no group or party open to whites that, however it proposes to go about removing colour discrimination, also visualises radical change in the ownership of the means of production which underpins the present system of white supremacy. Fischer openly told the court: ‘I believe that socialism in the long term has an answer to the problem of race relations. But by negotiation, other immediate solutions can be found …Immediate dangers [a civil war which he visualised as dwarfing the horrors of Algeria] can be avoided by bringing our state at this stage into line with the needs of today by abolishing discrimination, extending political rights, and then allowing our people to settle their own future.’

In prison or out, Abram Fischer maintains a dramatic position in South African life. For some years, circumstances surrounding him have been extraordinary. If Afrikaner Nationalist propagandists present him as the anti-Christ, then, curiously moved to lay aside his socialist rationalism, he has taken upon himself some of their sins in an almost Christlike way. In addressing the court he returned again and again to statements like

What is not appreciated by my fellow Afrikaner, because he has cut himself off from all contact with non-whites, is that …he is now blamed as an Afrikaner for all the evils and humiliations of apartheid. Hence today the policeman is known as a ‘Dutch’ …When I give an African a lift during a bus boycott, he refuses to believe that I am an Afrikaner …All this has bred a deep-rooted hatred for Afrikaners among non-whites …It demands that Afrikaners themselves should protest openly and clearly against discrimination. Surely there was an additional duty cast on me, that at least one Afrikaner should make this protest actively…

Those people, including Afrikaner Nationalists, who know Fischer personally have a special affection and respect for him, no matter how anti-Communist they may be. He himself has always shown respect for the right of anyone to work for social reform in his own way, just so long as the obligation is not smugly ignored. No other figure is at once so controversial and so well-liked. Even people who have never been able to understand his adherence to, let alone accept, his socialist views will add: ‘But he is a wonderful person.’ This is due to nothing so superficial as charm — though Fischer has plenty of that; there has been, about Abram Fischer and his wife and children, the particular magnetism of deeply honest lives. Paradoxically, the pull is strong in a country where so many compromises with conscience are made by so many decent citizens.

In his profession, as well, Fischer has borne something of a charmed life. From the fifties, when political trials got under way in South Africa, he would refuse conventionally important briefs in order to take time to defend rank-and-file Africans, Indians and whites on political charges. Such was his professional prestige that the financial Establishment continued to seek his services as before. From 1958 to 1961 he devoted himself to the defence of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, and twenty-nine other accused in the first mass political trial that, because it represented so many shades — both skin and ideological — of political thought, became known as ‘the Opposition on trial’. In 1964 Fischer was leading defence counsel at the trial of the ‘High Command’ of combined liberation movements, which had been based at Rivonia, north of Johannesburg. Later that year, his invisible armour was pierced for the first time; he was imprisoned, briefly, under the ninety-day-detention law. And then, in September of 1964 he was arrested, with thirteen others, on five charges including those of being a member and furthering the objects of the Communist Party.

Because of the esteem in which Fischer was held, his request for bail was supported by many of his legal colleagues and granted by the court, although he had been named chief accused. During the course of the trial, he was even given a temporary passport to enable him to go to London to represent an internationally known pharmaceutical company at the Privy Council. He could expect as much as a five-year sentence at his own trial: would he come back? He had given his word, and he did. Having won the case, he returned discussing the new plays he had seen in the West End, just as if he had come home to face nothing more than the letdown after a holiday.

He had been in South Africa a month or so when, on 25 January 1965, he disappeared overnight, leaving a letter to the court saying that he was aware that his eventual punishment would be increased by his action, but that he believed it was his duty both to remain in South Africa and to continue to oppose apartheid by carrying on with his political work as long as he was physically able. He referred to his career at the Bar, in relation to the injustice of apartheid upheld by the law: ‘I can no longer serve justice in the way I have attempted to do during the past 30 years. I can do it only in the way I have now chosen.’

For ten months he eluded a police hunt that poked into every backyard and farmhouse in the country, and brought into detention anyone suspected of being able to blurt out, under persuasion of solitary confinement, Fischer’s whereabouts. On 11 November last year, he was arrested in Johannesburg, thin, bearded, his hair dyed. Except for the eyes, he was unrecognisable as the short but well-set, handsome man with curly white hair that he had been — and was to be again, by the time he appeared in court on 26 January of this year to face fifteen instead of the original five charges against him.

Why did Abram Fischer abscond? What did he achieve by it? So far as is known, he does not seem to have managed to initiate any significant new political activity while in hiding.

His fellow white South Africans, the majority of whom are indifferent to the quality of life on the other side of the colour bar, living their comfortable lives in the segregated suburbs where, once, he too had a house with a swimming pool, and among whom, last year, he lived as a fugitive, express strong opinions about what he had done with his life. His colleagues at the Bar, taking the position that absconding from his original trial was conduct unseemly to the dignity of the profession, hurriedly applied within days of his disappearance to have him disbarred. Some people assure themselves that he acted in blind obedience to ‘orders from Moscow’ — the purpose of which they cannot suggest. Well-meaning people who cannot conceive that anyone would sacrifice profession, home, family and ultimately personal liberty for a gesture affirming what he believed to be right, say that the tragic death of his wife, Molly, in a motor accident in 1964, must have disorientated him. Others, who have themselves suffered bans and lost passports as a result of courageous opposition to apartheid, feel that Fischer’s final defiance of the law was a gratuitous act, ending in senseless tragedy: ‘Why has Bram thrown himself away?’

While Fischer was ‘at large’ for those ten months, some people were saying, ‘Now he is our Mandela.’ (The reference was to the period when Nelson Mandela escaped a police net for more than a year, travelled abroad, and worked among his people from ‘underground’.) In the jails last year (where there were more than three thousand political prisoners), when African politicals were allowed to see anybody, their first question was commonly not about their families but whether ‘Bram’ was still ‘all right’. And a few days before sentence was to be passed on him, an African couple begged his daughter to let them borrow one of his suits, so that a witch doctor might use it in a spell to influence the judge to give a deferred sentence.

For the Fischer family, 1964–5 was a year to turn distraught any but the most tough and selfless minds. It has since become clear that, as defence counsel at the Rivonia Trial, Fischer had to muster the nerve and daring to handle evidence that might at any moment involve himself. Directly after the trial, he and his wife were driving to Cape Town to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of their daughter Ilse, a student at the University of Cape Town, and to enable Fischer to visit Mandela and the other convicted trial defendants imprisoned off the coast on Robben Island, when his car plunged into a deep pool by the side of the road and Molly Fischer was drowned.

The Fischers have always been an exceptionally devoted family, sharing as well as family love a working conviction that daily life must realise in warm, human action any theoretical condemnation of race discrimination. In Molly Fischer the very real tradition of Afrikaner hospitality triumphantly burst the barriers it has imposed on itself; her big house was open to people of all races, and, unmindful of what the neighbours would say, she and her husband brought up along with their own daughters and son an orphaned African child.

Molly Fischer taught Indian children, worked with women’s non-racial movements and spent five months in prison, detained without trial, during the 1960 State of Emergency. At her huge funeral people of all races mourned together, as if apartheid did not exist. No one who saw him at that time can forget the terrible courage with which Fischer turned loss into concern for the living; neither could they confuse this with the workings of an unhinged mind. Almost at once, he set out again for Cape Town to visit the men on Robben Island.

If one wants to speculate why he disappeared in the middle of his trial and yet stayed in South Africa, fully aware that when, inevitably, he was caught he would incur greatly increased punishment, one must surely also ask oneself why, when, he was allowed to go abroad while on bail, he ever came back. Some friends half hoped he wouldn’t; a government supporter nervously remarked that there was nothing to stop Fischer turning up at The Hague, where, at the time, the World Court was hearing the question of South Africa’s right to impose apartheid on the mandated territory of South West Africa (Namibia). There would have been no extradition, but a hero’s role for him there.

People of different backgrounds who know Fischer best seem to agree that what brought him back from Europe and what made him turn fugitive were one and the same thing, the touchstone of his personality: absolute faith in human integrity. It seems reasonable to conclude that he came back because he believed that this integrity was mutual and indivisible — he believed he would never be betrayed by the people with whom he was working in opposition to apartheid, and, in turn, he owed them the guarantee of his presence.

As for the ‘gesture’ of the ten months he spent in hiding, he has given, in court, his own answer to those fellow citizens — legal colleagues, firms, enemies, the white people of South Africa — who seek to judge him:

It was to keep faith with all those dispossessed by apartheid that I broke my undertaking to the court, separated myself from my family, pretended I was someone else, and accepted the life of a fugitive. I owed it to the political prisoners, to the banished, to the silenced and to those under house arrest not to remain a spectator, but to act. I knew what they expected of me, and I did it. I felt responsible, not to those who are indifferent to the sufferings of others, but to those who are concerned. I knew that by valuing, above all, their judgment, I would be condemned by people who are content to see themselves as respectable and loyal citizens. I cannot regret any such condemnation that may follow me.

The judge sentenced him to prison ‘for life’ and, while others wept, Fischer himself received the pronouncement with fortitude. No one can guess what goes on in a man’s mind when he hears such words; but perhaps Abram Fischer, sitting it out in prison, now, may ask himself, taking courage, ‘Whose life? Theirs — the government’s — or mine?’

1966

Postscript: In prison Fischer suffered terminal cancer and when the news became public there was a campaign for his release. He left prison in 1975 under house arrest at the home of a relative as permission was refused for him to abide by this restriction at his daughters’ home. He died on 8 May that year and his ashes were forbidden to be given into the daughters’ possession lest they would become an object of political pilgrimage.

The Short Story in South Africa

Why is it that while the death of the novel is good for post-mortem at least once a year, the short story lives on unmolested? It cannot be because — to borrow their own jargon — literary critics regard it as merely a minor art form. Most of them, if pressed, would express the view that it is a highly specialised and skilful form, closer to poetry, etc. But they would have to be pressed; otherwise they wouldn’t bother to discuss it at all. When Chekhov crops up, it is as a playwright, and Katherine Mansfield is a period personality from the Lady Chatterley set. Yet no one suggests that we are practising a dead art form. And, like a child suffering from healthy neglect, the short story survives.

‘To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefer movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact”,’ Gore Vidal wrote recently (Encounter, December 1967). If the cinema and television have taken over so much of the novel’s territory, just as photography forced painting into wastelands which may or may not be made to bloom, hasn’t the short story been overrun, too? This symposium is shop talk and it would seem unnecessary for us to go over the old definitions of where and how the short story differs from the novel, but the answer to the question must lie somewhere here. Both novel and story use the same material: human experience. Both have the same aim: to communicate it. Both use the same medium: the written word. There is a general and recurrent dissatisfaction with the novel as a means of netting ultimate reality — another term for the quality of human life — and inevitably there is even a tendency to blame the tools: words have become hopelessly blunted by overuse, dinned to death by admen, and, above all, debased by political creeds that have twisted and changed their meaning. Various ways out have been sought.

In England, a return to classicism in technique and a turning to the exoticism of sexual aberration and physical and mental abnormality as an extension of human experience and therefore of subject matter; in Germany and America, a splendid abandon in making a virtue of the vice of the novel’s inherent clumsiness by stuffing it not with nineteenth-century horsehair narrative but twentieth-century anecdotal-analytical plastic foam; in France, the ‘laboratory novel’ struggling to get away from the anthropocentric curse of the form and the illusion of depth of the psychological novel, and landing up very much where Virginia Woolf was, years ago, staring at the mark on the wall. Burroughs has invented the reader-participation novel. For the diseased word, George Steiner has even suggested silence.

If the short story is alive while the novel is dead, the reason must lie in approach and method. The short story as a form and as a kind of creative vision must be better equipped to attempt the capture of ultimate reality at a time when (whichever way you choose to see it) we are drawing nearer to the mystery of life or are losing ourselves in a bellowing wilderness of mirrors, as the nature of that reality becomes more fully understood or more bewilderingly concealed by the discoveries of science and the proliferation of communication media outside the printed word.

Certainly the short story always has been more flexible and open to experiment than the novel. Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known — and solved by nature of their choice of form — what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped of human reality. How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of — the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. How the characters will appear, think, behave, comprehend, tomorrow or at any other time in their lives, is irrelevant. A discrete moment of truth is aimed at — not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn’t deal in cumulatives.

The problem of how best to take hold of ultimate reality, from the technical and stylistic point of view, is one that the short-story writer is accustomed to solving specifically in relation to an area — event, mental state, mood, appearance — which is heightenedly manifest in a single situation. Take fantasy for an example. Writers are becoming more and more aware of the waviness of the line that separates fantasy from the so-called rational in human perception. It is recognised that fantasy is no more than a shift in angle; to put it another way, the rational is simply another, the most obvious, kind of fantasy. Writers turn to the less obvious fantasy as a wider lens on ultimate reality. But this fantasy is something that changes, merges, emerges, disappears as a pattern does viewed through the bottom of a glass. It is true for the moment when one looks down through the glass; but the same vision does not transform everything one sees, consistently throughout one’s whole consciousness. Fantasy in the hands of short-story writers is so much more successful than when in the hands of novelists because it is necessary for it to hold good only for the brief illumination of the situation it dominates. In the series of developing situations of the novel the sustainment of the tone of fantasy becomes a high-pitched ringing in the reader’s ears. How many fantasy novels achieve what they set out to do: convey the shift and change, to and fro, beneath, above and around the world of appearances? The short story recognises that full comprehension of a particular kind in the reader, like full apprehension of a particular kind in the writer, is something of limited duration. The short story is a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness — which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference.

These are technical and stylistic considerations. Marxist criticism sees the survival of an art form in relation to social change. What about the socio-political implications of the short story’s survival? George Lukács has said that the novel is a bourgeois art form whose enjoyment presupposes leisure and privacy. It implies the living room, the armchair, the table lamp; just as epic implies the illiterates round the tribal story-teller, and Shakespeare implies the two audiences — that of the people and that of the court — of a feudal age. From this point of view the novel marks the apogee of an exclusive, individualist culture; the nearest it ever got to a popular art form (in the sense of bringing people together in direct participation in an intellectually stimulating experience) was the nineteenth-century custom of reading novels aloud to the family. Here again it would seem that the short story shares the same disadvantages as the novel. It is an art form solitary in communication; yet another sign of the increasing loneliness and isolation of the individual in a competitive society. You cannot enjoy the experience of a short story unless you have certain minimum conditions of privacy in which to read it; and these conditions are those of middle-class life. But of course a short story, by reason of its length and its completeness, totally contained in the brief time you give to it, depends less than the novel upon the classic conditions of middle-class life, and perhaps corresponds to the break-up of that life which is taking place. In that case, although the story may outlive the novel, it may become obsolete when the period of disintegration is replaced by new social forms and the art forms that express them. One doesn’t have to embrace the dreariness of conventional ‘social realism’ in literature to grant this. That our age is thrashing about desperately for a way out of individual human isolation, and that our present art forms are not adequate to it, is obvious to see in all the tatty dressing-up games, from McLuhan’s theories to pop art, in which we seek a substitute for them.

This symposium is also concerned with the short story as a means of earning a living. I’d like to say here that I have never understood why writers are always asked bluntly what they earn (as if we were children, whose pocket money must be flatteringly exclaimed over) while businessmen would never be expected to reveal the intimacies of tax return and bank balance. I’d like to think that this is because they know we’re after something more than money; and it’s that they’re not old enough to know about …Snobberies aside, writing stories is generally regarded as the most unlikely way of earning money, only just less hopeless than writing poetry. It goes without saying that publishers nurture their short-story writers mainly in the hope that they will write novels sooner or later. And yet I believe that writers of short stories (I’m not talking about popular hacks, of course) have more chance of working without compromise than novelists have. The novel that doesn’t sell represents anything from one to five years’ work — years that, economically speaking, then, the locusts have eaten. If a short story doesn’t find a home (and sometimes one’s more interesting stories must wait until the particular review or anthology, in which their quality is recognised, comes along), it does not represent the same loss in terms of working time. Other stories have been written within the same few months or the same year that enable the writer to go on eating. The novelist whose book sells poorly may have to turn to some other means of earning, during the next few years while he is writing (or would like to write) another novel — the journalism, teaching, etc., that takes him away from the only work he really cares to do. The short-story writer, with less capital tied up over a long period of time, as it were, has a better chance of keeping the integrity of assiduity to his own work. Also, once out of the best-seller class (and this would include a majority of serious novels, and virtually all experimental ones) a novel is dead, so far as sales are concerned, after a year. A short-story collection often represents stories that before book publication have earned money through individual publication in magazines, and which will continue to earn, long after publication and sale of the book, through individual publication in anthologies. I know that certain stories of mine are still earning money for me, fifteen years after they were written.

Although my novels have always sold better, initially, than my story collections, and now and then I have had unexpected wind-falls from novels (mainly through translations), I think I can say that my short stories have provided my bread-and-butter earnings. (And this despite the fact that there are two of the highest-paying American magazines to whom my work is not offered, because I should not like to see it published in them.) Of course, part of the reason is that quite a large number of my stories have been published in The New Yorker. My living as a short-story writer has been earned almost entirely in America. In England, only Encounter and London Magazine regularly publish stories of quality, for which the payment is meagre. Sporadically — apparently for prestige — one of the Sunday newspaper colour magazines buys a story for a more realistic sum — say £80 or £90: about the level of an American literary review. No story-writer could write only what he pleased and continue to eat, in England. In my own country, South Africa, both the limited size of the publishing industry and the limited size and tastes of the reading public would make it impossible for any serious writer to live off local earnings. And yet — such is the resilience and obstinacy of short-story writers — almost all the interesting fiction written by local Africans (not white South Africans) has taken the form of short stories.

In literature, the short story has always been a small principality. If threatened, it seems to me still remarkably independent, gloriously eccentric, adventurous and free. After all, in the last few years, Ingeborg Bachman wrote ‘Among Murderers and Madmen’, Borges wrote ‘The Handwriting of God’, and LeClézio wrote his ‘little madnesses’, including ‘It Seems to Me the Boat Is Heading for the Island’.

1968

Madagascar

A four-letter word brought me to Madagascar. Not the usual sort. A single word in the local tongue. I read that in the Malagasy language the world ‘lolo’ means both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’, identifying the chrysalis with the shrouded corpse, and the butterfly that emerges from it with the soul from the body of the dead. A people who could express the concepts of resurrection and the eternal renewal of life in a single image conjured up by one short word — they took a hold on my mind. That was why I went to their island in the Indian Ocean, which otherwise had attracted me neither more nor less than the dozens of others floating about the warm seas of the world under the general heading of Island Paradise: a time-spotted Gauguinesque romanticism that seems to survive for all except the inhabitants themselves, now flying the flags of their doll-sized independent nations and hoping for the discovery of offshore oil or on-shore uranium.

Island Paradise sources of information labelled Madagascar the Great Red Island; home of the gryphon; fourth biggest island in the world. Flying over it at last, I was not surprised to find that it was, of course, not red at all: a deep, contused glow in the skin of mountains and hills cosmically wrinkled below, a flush the colour of purplish jasper that came up under the thinning grass of the dry season. Amber rivers opaque with mud moving strongly in U-curves along the valleys, roads (where there are any at all) following the same line of looping low resistance, the colour of powdered rust. As for size — while I zigzagged about the island either on land or by air (a thousand miles from end to end, three hundred and sixty across at the broadest point) with climate and landscape constantly changing, what became a reality for me was a pocket continent. And as for the poor giant gryphon bird whose last known egg, holding more than two gallons of omelette ingredient, was taken to Paris for exhibit in 1850 — the present wild-life population of lemurs proved so elusive that they might just as well have been extinct along with her. But the people were there. The Malagasy, of whose language I went knowing just one word, were not at all elusive and very much alive in the tenth year of their independence both as one of the former French colonies still under the skirts of the French Community, and as a member state of the Organisation of African Unity.

Wherever you fly in from, you alight on Madagascar at the capital, Antananarivo, four thousand feet up on the high plateau among the ribbed shapes of shining rice paddies. The island lies 250 miles across the Mozambique Channel from the south-east coast of Africa and was once probably joined to it; no one really knows. No one knows either where exactly the inhabitants came from and when, although ethnologists presume it was from the south-west Pacific in the succession of migrations from some centuries before the birth of Christ until the fifteenth century. The first thing you notice in Antananarivo is how strikingly Polynesian as opposed to African their descendants, the people in the streets, the Merina, look, and the Merina’s language, which over the centuries and through their long political dominance has become the language even of the coastal tribes who have an admixture of negroid and Arab blood, is a Malayo-Polynesian dialect full of repeated syllables and long names beautiful to look at but hellish to remember. The first Merina king recorded by colonial history has a prize one: Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka. Known now as Andrianampoinimerina, it was under his rule in the eighteenth century that the Imerina kingdom began to extend its sovereignty over lesser tribal kingdoms of the island. Among the portraits of the Merina dynasty I saw hanging in the palace complex that is still perched above Antananarivo city, his picture is the only one that shows a ‘native’ king — naked except for a loin-kilt, feather in hair, spear in hand. When he died in 1810 his son Radama I welcomed the English and French, primarily in the hope of using the white man to help him complete the Merina conquest of the island. The portraits of all succeeding monarchs show dark-skinned queens and princes in Napoleonic satin and Victorian hour-glass velvet: the white man, in the form of the rival influences of France and England, had begun to use them.

Of course the riff-raff of the white world — pirates such as John Avery and William Kidd — had found the Madagascar coast a useful base, the Portuguese had discovered it in 1500 and abandoned their trading posts there two hundred years later, the Arabs had made foot-hold settlements as early as the seventh century and the French chartered companies of Louis XIV’s reign had unsuccessfully attempted to colonise the south-east coast. But on Madagascar just as on the continent of Africa itself, it was in the nineteenth century that Europe’s acquisitive scramble for colonies really began. France and Britain bristled at each other half-heartedly for years over ‘influence’ with the Merina; neither seems seriously to have wanted to take on the place. Their fortunes at the Merina court rose and fell, often promoted unofficially by eccentric individuals like the extraordinary Jean Laborde, a shipwrecked blacksmith who became Queen Ranavalona I’s favourite and taught the Merina to make cannon, textiles, paper and sugar, and Cameron, a Scot, who is responsible for having fossilised the charming wooden palace in its present stone carapace. The French and English were alternately welcomed and rebuffed. Which power would take over the island finally was decided in the casual way European powers handed out other people’s countries among themselves in those days of piously professed concern for the poor heathen: England swopped her chances in Madagascar in exchange for a hands-off Egypt on the part of France.

Nobody asked the Malagasy how they felt about being disposed of by this gentlemen’s agreement; there were several Franco — Malagasy wars before France annexed Madagascar in 1896.

Tsihy be lambanana ny ambanilanitra — Men form one great mat

For nearly a century before the French conquest, the Merina had ruled the greater part of the island from Antananarivo. Now that the French have gone, unlike so many capitals on the African mainland it is not a white man’s town from which the inhabitants have decamped; it’s what it always was, long before the white man came — the island’s own metropolis. It has grown more in the last ten years than in the preceding fifty, and in the new quarters of Ampefiloha there are the big apartment blocks of international middle-class living, but the lifestyle of the city radiates from the daily market — the zoma — of the Analakely quarter to which the splendid boulevard of the Avenue de l’Indépendance leads theatrically, overlooked by the haute ville, the hill faced with tall houses in smudgy pastels all the way up to the queen’s palace. A wide flight of steps debouches into the blue and white umbrellas of the market from either side of the city; walking down the Escalier de Lastelle from my hotel on my first morning, I felt I was making an entrance of some sort. Indeed, it was Friday and the show was on. Every Friday the zoma bursts out and spreads down the entire length of the Avenue de l’Indépendance for the full width of the sidewalks and the arcades of the conventional shops.

No wonder the Merina — those makers of enviable imagery — visualise human interdependence in terms of weaving. Although the zoma stalls sell everything from furniture to horoscopes and rose quartz, from delicious oysters to dried octopus like stiff old gloves, and medicinal ingredients that looked as if they might quite possibly be the tongues of newts, what most people were selling was made of straw. Impossible to catalogue so many different objects woven in so many ways out of different kinds of straw — rice, maize, palm, banana-leaf, raffia. There’s nothing more satisfying to buy than something made of straw; it’s beautiful, cheap, and cannot last — thus gratifying the eye, the desire to get something for nothing, and leaving one free of the guilt of laying up treasures less ephemeral than the flesh.

And picking a way through the weavers’ stalls was also to become threaded into the great mat of people who were trading or buying. A quarter of a million live in Antananarivo; most of them seemed to be in the streets, but it was not noisy and nobody jostled — if anyone did, nobody lost his temper. The Merina, whether or not they have adopted Western dress (all the women have), still wear the lamba, a long cloth, usually white but sometimes a surprising saffron, draped Mexican-style across the shoulders. It looked very fine with ordinary trousers and jacket, and on women with babies enveloped the baby head and all against the mother’s body. Malagasy babies must feel extremely secure in this intermediary stage between the womb and the world.

Every man was wearing a hat, and everyone who wanted to look a man — that is, every little barefoot urchin. A straw hat of course, and usually sombrero-shaped. The sombrero and the poncho are a dashing combination: but the Merina are not dashing at all, on them this outfit confers a sombre dignity. If there is anything definitively un-African about them apart from their looks, it is this quiet demeanour. In place of black ebullience, brown calm.

I was in a taxi one day when it was almost run down by another. The two drivers, eye to eye through glass, paused for a long moment. No word, no gesture from either. We drove on. Are there no curses in Malagasy? Even if there are not, neither driver resorted to the riches of French invective. In place of temperament, withdrawal.

Zanahary ambonin’ny tany — Gods on earth

It turned out that the one word I knew was a key one. For the Malagasy, both the Merina of the high plateau and the côtiers — the coastal tribes — the dead are part of life. Lolo is dead soul ghosting the earth, and living butterfly. The lamba is precisely the same garment as the shroud. In ancient times there was a civilisation stretching from the Indian Ocean to Melanesia, based on the cult of the dead and the cultivation of rice. The ancestors of the Merina brought from the Pacific the art of cultivating rice in irrigated paddies, and possibly the cult of the dead along with it. Both have survived into the present day. The dead are believed to be the sole source of happiness, peace, and above all, fertility. The greatest virtue for a Malagasy lies in actual physical contact with the corpse; during the dry season from May to September, as often over the years as they can afford it, the family gathers, sometimes from great distances, at the family tomb to exhume the bodies, give them fresh shrouds and a breath of air, and celebrate their presence with drinking and feasting. Christian conversion (about 40 per cent of the population practise Christianity) and conversion to Islam (about 5 per cent are Moslem) have been accommodated to the custom by the Malagasy instead of resulting in its abolition. President Philibert Tsiranana’s democratic government, which would prefer people’s energies to be directed to raising production as a means of attaining peace, happiness, fertility, etc., has to tread delicately in its efforts to discourage it.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to join the party at an exhumation. But I did want to see the tombs, whether the occupants were taking the air or not, because the cult has given rise to an extraordinary religious art — grave sculptures in wood. I knew that the best examples were to be seen far from Antananarivo, in the south, near the west coast ports of Tuléar and Morondava. The charming and helpful Malagasy in Antananarivo were unexpectedly discouraging when I said I would go by car — why not fly? I would settle for Morondava, then, if Tuléar was too far to drive. I was a bit puzzled when it was calculated that Morondava — only 250 miles — would take as long to reach, but didn’t want to listen to any more objections, and set off in a new hired French car with a skilful Malagasy driver on a route marked as a national highway. We did get there — after two days, the second a knuckle-whitening climb over the spine of the island and down through the mountains by way of stony gullies, carrying our own petrol and always hoping the next bridge wouldn’t be down. My apprehension was put to shame by the fairly frequent appearance of small shoe-box-shaped buses, marked taxi brousse (bush taxi) that rocked by, crowded with serene faces. Anyway I had jolted into me unforgettably that the greatest need of the island is roads. It has one of the best networks of internal air services in the world — used by foreign businessmen, government officials and visitors. Air tickets are far beyond the pocket of the average Malagasy, and apart from the line connecting Antananarivo with the principal port, Tamatave, there are only a few strips of railroad. If half the country’s 1963–73 development plan funds have been earmarked for the improvement of transport, there’s not much to show for the money so far on Highway 24.

Down on the other side of the mountains was flat country with the peculiar hot silence of the bush invested, like power, in the monolithic growth of baobab trees; forms from the sophisticated imagination of a Miró, planked down in the nowhere. Morondava was a one-street town of Indian and Chinese shops, an old colonial hotel enclosed by jalousies, and a lovely beach with the Indian Ocean rolling in. I set off for the grave sites. First a visit to the chief’s village at Maravoay; this part of the island was once the kingdom of Sakalava and is still inhabited by Sakalava tribes, who are negroid, so the old man in a loincloth was unmistakably African. He refused permission to view the graves: recently somebody had sawn off grave figures and taken them away. While the driver protested my honest intentions, I was watching a woman making-up in a cheap store mirror, drawing a dotted pattern in white clay across her cheekbones and down her nose. Better housewives were occupied threshing rice. We had to return to Morondava to buy a bottle of rum; then the chief stiffly relented. We drove through dry winter bush from the village of the living to the village of the dead. In a clearing among paper-bark trees with livid trunks sloughing tattered parchment, were the small fenced allotments the dead occupy. These were all about six by eight feet, and the shoulder-high palings were decorated with finial carvings of birds and humans, and tall, totemic geometrical cut-outs, so that the place seemed peopled above ground as well as below. It was very quiet; I saw that butterflies were hovering everywhere.…

The tombs I had seen in other areas were blind cement or stone structures, some with a kind of doll’s house on top, and the form that grave sculptures take also varies according to region. The Mahafaly sculptures farther south are totems, sometimes surmounted by miniature tableaux from the dead man’s life — his cattle, his house, his family; the horns of sacrificed Zebu cattle are part of the monument. The Vezo (a Sakalava tribe) sculptures around Morondava are unique in their eroticism. At Maravoay, among the representations of colonial messengers in de Gaulle caps, ladies in European blouse and skirt complete with high-heeled pumps and dangling handbag, there was a single couple shown in The Act, he, still wearing his messenger’s cap, peering rather nervously from behind her intimidatingly female body as if caught in an irresistible indiscretion while on duty.

But at Ambato, a site a few miles up the coast among deserted sand dunes within view but not sound of the sea, the first sight of the village of the dead was of a village petrified in orgy. On the fifty-odd graves, couples — and an occasional threesome — are represented in almost all the common and uncommon variations of sexual intercourse. In this desolate place the sight comes as a statement rather than a spectacle: through the moment of man’s most intense experience of his own body, the assertion of his fecundity against nothingness. It has the audacity of a flag stuck on the moon.

Of course, for a non-believer (in the context of ancestor-worship) it’s tempting to see the fierce joy of coupling as defiance of the loneliness of the grave, Andrew Marvell’s fine and private place where none embrace. But this is as subjective as my driver’s explanation that these dead had been ‘very fond of women’. Apparently the truth has little to do with either the grave occupants’ sexual capacity or resentment against death; the skilful lovers symbolise the fertility that, like all good things, comes to the living from the dead.

While the clothed and painted figures are naive in conception and execution, and the partly-clothed couples lean towards caricature, many of the naked couples are works of extraordinary beauty and technical achievement. Since they are embellishment first and faithful representation only second, artistic licence is dictated by the necessity to show all positions as vertical. The way in which the sculptor has solved problems of form and volume in dealing with the interplay of limbs and bodies is often masterly. Some of the sculptures have a classical tenderness rather than the expressionism or symbolism associated with other ‘primitive’ sculpture. And there was one grave in particular where the total conception showed a complex creative vision: human couples were alternated with pairs of mating birds, the sacred ibis with their slender beaks affectionately intertwined, one pair linked by a small fish, its tail in the one beak, its head gripped by the other.

Malagasy sculptors often hand down their art, not only from father to son but also from mother to daughter. A family tree of the sculptors of Iakoro hangs in the ethnological museum in Antananarivo. But the artistic tradition is dying out, the grave sites are not protected, and not one of the magnificent grave sculptures from Morondava is preserved in a museum in Madagascar. I righted a grave-post topped by a lovely bird that was being ground to dust by the jaws of ants; there were so many others, powdering into the sand. I suppose soon the only ones left will be those that appear, mysteriously (export is forbidden) in the rich art collections of Europe and America. There was that story of the old chief at Maravoay: ‘some people had sawn off figures and gone away…’

Out of the cult of the dead, the oligarchy of the Merina, the oligarchy of the French that followed — the lolo of the Malagasy Republic that emerged in 1960 has had time to dry its wings in peace. President Tsiranana and his PSD (Social Democratic Party) — extremely conservative, despite the name — stay comfortably in power while on the mainland of Africa coups and counter-coups come and go. Tsiranana (of the Tsimihety tribe) and many of his top men are côtiers, and although they are anxious to prove that they stand for a democratic, non-tribal government and have largely succeeded, they represent the final defeat of the aristocratic Merina as well as independence of white rule. Yet the Merina with their monopoly of the capital province, their lingering caste system, their educational superiority and natural aloofness remain an overwhelming presence when you are on the island — their palace may be empty, but they are Madagascar as no other single element is. The French presence also remains in evidence, particularly in Antananarivo; the governor’s rose-coloured, tin-roofed palace becomes the French Embassy, the work of Boris Vian and Malraux being presented at the Centre Culturel Albert Camus, French food and wine in every restaurant (if you have to be colonised at all, how lucky to be colonised by the French). French culture ‘takes’, and survives political bitterness in her former colonies. Jacques Rabemananjara, Minister of Foreign Affairs, once one of the famous rebels exiled from Madagascar after the bloody 1947 uprising against France, is a Malagasy poet who writes in French, just as Senghor, poet and President of Senegal, belongs also to French literature. Whether due to French influence or the traditional oral culture of the Malagasy with its ankamantatra (riddles), ohabolana (proverbs), and anatra (good advice), often combined in short, sometimes erotic poems called hain-teny, Antananarivo publishes more newspapers than any place I’ve ever been. On the Escalier de Lastelle, among the booths selling cheap sunglasses and the island’s semi-precious stones, I counted fourteen Malagasy newspapers pegged up for sale round a cigarette stall; but there are, in fact, about 155, some in French, for a total population of six million people. Writing poetry seems to be a prestigious pastime; among the papers were privately printed booklets of amateur verse with the dim picture of a bespectacled teacher or civil-servant author on the cover.

President Tsiranana, who needs only a lei round his neck to look like a welcoming Polynesian host in a travelogue, was a particularly close friend of General de Gaulle and no doubt will now embrace Pompidou as warmly. France remains the island’s main source of economic aid and biggest customer for its products, mainly stimulating, nourishing, sweet or fragrant — coffee, tobacco, rice, manioc, sugar, cloves and vanilla. The United States is next best customer; the trade began in pirate days when an American buccaneer vessel introduced Malagasy rice to North Carolina. The Malagasy I talked to were disappointed at the smallness of American investment and aid, though. In five years after independence the US gave only $13 million.

The island can feed itself abundantly, but apart from nickel on the eastern side — and of course there is the inevitable oil-prospection going on — has none of the important mineral discoveries that bring the white world flying in to promote development. For this reason it is making a late and hasty entry in the Island Paradise lists, and has begun a jet service that links it with the regular tourist run down Africa. Nossi-bé, a tiny island off the north-west coast of the main one, has been decided on as the main draw outside Antananarivo itself. And no wonder — you don’t have to drive to get there, and a short flight lands you in a place that really does seem to have escaped debased Gauguinism. Brilliant sugar cane lying stroked back, silky, in the breeze, sudden dark walls of tropical forest, coffee bushes flowering white rosettes, ylang-ylang perfume trees weirdly espaliered, great glossy-leaved mango trees ivied with pepper vines — the whole island rustles softly and breathes sweet. The government-owned hotel in a coconut grove on one of the beaches has a tiny casino under a banana-leaf roof where you can play baccarat (why is it presumed that at the end of getting away from it all, as at the end of the rainbow, there’s got to be a pot of gold?) but the real action was down the beach on Sunday morning, when two busloads of Sakalava arrived for some occasion I’m sure was more important than a mere picnic. On this shore of Madagascar, nearest to the East Coast of Africa and African and Arab influences along the ancient trade routes of the Indian Ocean, the lamba becomes a brilliant cotton robe worn by women — I could see the restless pollen-yellow, purple, red, orange, from afar. They wore elaborately filamented Arab-style jewellery on ears and necks, turbans, flowers picked from the forest that shaded the edge of the sand, and some used lipstick as well as sophisticated variations of the clay-patterned maquillage I had seen down south, at Maravoay. Drums, flutes and clappers entertained the company. They drank and ate from enormous black boarding-house pots that were then scrubbed clean in the sea by the painted ladies with their robes hitched up. The men put on smart nylon trunks from France and went in for a swim. Then the whole party was drummed, piped and clappered back into their taxis brousse.

At the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963, President Tsiranana hopefully suggested that the Organisation’s title should include the words ‘and Malagasy’ after ‘African’; he was curtly told that if the Malagasy didn’t consider their state African, they had no place in the Organisation at all. But Merinas and côtiers alike, the islanders privately don’t really regard themselves as Africans even now, when for political and economic reasons as well as ancient geographical ones, their destiny is lumped in along with that of the Third World. Tsiranana, in addition to his natural conservatism, fears the proximity of the Chinese-Communist-controlled island of Zanzibar, and places Madagascar ‘without any bad conscience’ among the moderate African states in the OAU and not the revolutionary ones; but he also allows himself to have no bad conscience over the fact that the new jet service is run in collaboration with South Africa, and Madagascar is receiving trade missions from there, while the OAU condemns any contact with the country of white minority rule and colour bar. Of course, the agricultural machinery Madagascar buys from France would be so much cheaper, imported from nearby South Africa…

It was only in my last two hours on the island that I went up to the queen’s palace that I had seen from my bathroom window in Antananarivo every morning. One of those neck-dislocating rides to see the sights: here the Presidential Palace (once the Royal Prime Minister’s) with its onion turrets and central glass dome of a steam-age exhibition building, there the old Royal tribunal, a Greek temple of pillars and pink stone — and then the group of strange mansions, large and small, that crowns the town and is known collectively as the rova. Beside the Manjakamiadana, the palace that Cameron turned to stone, is the Tranovola, the Treasury Palace, an enormous Victorian wooden doll’s house, its white verandah arches of cathedral proportion, and inside, delightful naive murals in which fruit, flowers and people’s eyes have the same open gaze. Beside the Tranovola, two tiny yellow-and-green pagodas on a stone platform — the royal tombs, to which the last Queen, Ranavalona III, was brought back from her exile’s grave in Algeria in 1938. Her palace is like a country house built by one of those decadently Europeanised Russians in Turgenev: partly English, partly Swiss cuckoo-clock, with an Italianate touch.

Hidden among the decorative and architectural mannerisms of nineteenth-century England and Europe is Andrianampoinimerina’s original royal Great Place; I use the African term for a king’s quarters because ‘palace’ is too cheaply grandiloquent for this lofty shelter with tall crossed lances at either end of its steep roof. A dwelling like a tent made of thick black wood, divided internally only by the differentiation of the hearth from the rest of the tamped-earth floor. Round the walls are his carved wooden shields, his spears and muskets, and his drinking vessels made of clay given a pewter patina with graphite.

The museum curator (we showed off to one another, agreeing that some of the palace murals were pure Douanier Rousseau) apologised for rushing me, but there was a Japanese trade delegation in town, and she was due to escort them through the palaces any moment; they arrived just as I left, very small and neat and alert with the magpie curiosity they carry everywhere. What had they come to Madagascar to sell? What had they come to buy?

An hour later, waiting for the plane to take me away, I bought a newspaper and read an announcement that work had started in Antananarivo on the Madagascar Hilton. I remembered reading how President Tsiranana had once said, expressing the detachment of the Malagasy as well as a sly dig at Africa’s troubles, ‘If the Bon Dieu proposed to me that Madagascar should be rejoined to the African continent, I would ask him to let it remain an island.’

Well, we all know that no man is an island; but no island is an island, either — not now. Can’t afford to be. From among the corpses and butterflies, the crook’d finger is beckoning, and sooner or later, for one reason or another the continents will close in.

1969