Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Merci Dieu, It Changes: Accra and Abidjan

Ghana five years after Nkrumah. I didn’t ever see it in his time, but his presence has been so omnipresent in the consciousness of contemporary Africa that one approaches — at last — the physical reality of Accra in terms of a place where he once was. Black Star Square. The first of those vast independence celebration stadia that were built in country after country, and now stand, grandiose and deserted, eternally gouged of an occasion whose historical immensity, of course, can never come again. This one is backed by the huge rough seas that ride up the coast of West Africa. The empty arena looks lonely as power is supposed to be. The famous statue of Osagyefo isn’t there; some harmless Unknown Soldier enthroned in its place. What about the victims, said to be Nkrumah’s sacrifices to witchcraft, supposed to be buried there? Did they dig them up for decent burial, after the coup? Did they dig anyway, and find nothing? Is that what such legends are: the same nothingness, whether filled by the malice of white foreigners branding Africa eternally savage, or by the projected fears of bewildered Africans themselves?

Going about the town, every day I pass Flagstaff House (army headquarters), the broadcasting station, and police headquarters. Colonial-looking entrances with white walls, flags, sentry boxes, and that ivy of Africa, splurgy bougainvillea, lounging over all. But it was here the coup took place, the young Major Afrifa and his soldiers marched in, those in power fired back or escaped out of windows, there was a few days’ confusion, a little blood, and it was done.

The airport is renamed after Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, a maker of the coup and victim of an abortive counter-coup a year later — he was taken there and shot. Accra is a lusty warren where the pressure of humanity overruns mere bricks and mortar and one hardly notices the buildings whose batteredness certainly predates the coup, but here and there are nameless edifices in Independence baroque whose expanse has no life behind it. In one, a window open, a piece of clothing hung out to dry; someone is perhaps camping within the shell. This was once the headquarters of the powerful United Ghana Farmers’ Council, which, along with the women’s movement, became the only expression of the people’s will — and it seems he made sure their will was his — Nkrumah consulted once he had become both the Head of State and chief executive, Life Chairman and General Secretary of the governing Convention People’s Party, and no longer even held party congresses. Other landmarks interest me in a detached way; this one stops me short, with a private melancholy. There are so few African countries where the people who live off the land become a power and have a real say in the direction of government policy: it was a noble beginning, even if it went badly wrong, this time. I want to accost someone, anyone, in the street and tell him: as a Ghanaian, as an African, it must be tried again. And again and again.

But to be white in the streets of Accra is to feel oneself curiously anonymous and almost invisible; one is aware of one’s unimportance, in terms of what a white face has meant and now means to people. To be white is to have been rendered harmless: a rather pathetic centuries-old monster the source of whose power-myth has been revealed to be mumbo-jumbo.

Tema is a Sunday drive up the coast from Accra. It’s Nkrumah’s city in the way that a city is the possession of the man who has a beautiful scale model, tall buildings, perfect clover-leaf flyovers, miniature trees and gardens, cars and people — just as if it were real. Nkrumah must have had such a model somewhere in Christiansborg Castle. The half-realisation of Tema — the city has never been completed — shows that it would have been like all those Brasilias that have to go through a process of attrition by humans, in accordance with obstinate local styles of life that keep making nonsense of ‘international’ architecture. Meccano giants step up at every change of the car’s perspective. They climb down to the port, carrying power from the Akosombo Dam — in terms of surface, the biggest man-made lake in the world — to the Kaiser aluminium smelter. From a long green plain away, industrial towers proclaim a new faith in place of the single steeple among the huts that used to proclaim that other white man’s religion in African towns. The splendid roads loop and bend according to plan, but often debouch into a bank of weeds. There is a slope covered with good neat houses; against the walls of the refinery a shanty town made with packing cases has cooking fires smoking away — that’s underdevelopment, it’s a way of life dictated by necessity and as difficult to put an end to as to put out the grass fires that burn up Africa.

The famous deep-water harbour is very fine, with every bolt on its straddling cranes carefully vaselined against rust, but there are few ships and no one about, the quays so neat that I notice some spilt peanuts as the only evidence of cargo. Perhaps it’s because it’s Sunday; the figures show that Tema handles more traffic than the old harbour of Takoradi. As for the aluminium smelter, the government would like the American consortium to finance the exploitation of local, if low-grade, bauxite deposits at Kibi, instead of using raw material brought in by Kaiser from Jamaica and Australia. That’s the present situation — a variation of but hardly emancipation from the colonial role in which Africa produced the raw materials and the processing into profitable finished products was the preserve of others.

On the way back to Accra, I drive down to the promontory where Christiansborg Castle has stood for three centuries. Blinding white, looking through palm trees at the sea, it appears Arab rather than Danish. If what one can see is the castle at all; it has been much built around and to various purposes through various occupancies. Now it is nobody’s castle, an administrative block. You cannot enter, but you can walk round part of the thick white walls with stopped-up cannon in their embrasures. Nkrumah, whose palace this became, passed through this gateway in state one day and did not dream he would not come back. Following the walls towards the sea, I suddenly find a grave. Dr W.E.B. DuBois, American Negro, father of Pan-Africanism, came home from his race’s long exile from Africa to die, and he lies here for ever.

Peace to the huts; war on the palaces.

The pennant that is hoisted over every revolution and every coup. Nkrumah spent £8 million to build State House for an eight-day OAU conference. When he left for Peking and Hanoi on his last journey as President of Ghana, he took £45,000 of the £51,000 left in the state treasury. The present regime, avowed as well as forced to economy by Ghana’s national debt — estimated at $850 million — has been able to build no road or bridge since 1967. While I was in Accra there was a strike of sanitary workers because they had not been issued with gloves and protective clothing, and when some formality took me to a local police station, I saw that the policemen did not have complete uniforms, either. One of the issues taken up by a fiery little Accra newssheet, the Spokesman, was the elaborate house being built by President Kofi Busia in his home village. While lack of foreign exchange means that all sorts of essential imports must be forgone, thousands of cedis worth of luxury fittings and material for Dr Busia’s house are being imported. It is no State House or Christiansborg, yet certainly it will be a palace in comparison with the yards of Accra, where children, chickens and rubble seem awash on open drains, and people are paying 20 pesewas (100 pesewas to the cedi; the cedi worth roughly a dollar) for two plantain bananas.

Although the government has just published a pamphlet on the subject of President Busia’s willingness to open a dialogue with South Africa, stressing that the Ghanaian stand differed from that of the other main supporter of dialogue, the Ivory Coast, in that Ghana intended to continue to support the Liberation Movements at the same time, most people seemed more embarrassed than anything else by the idea of the first of the independent black states talking to one of the last strongholds of white power. The issue that was preoccupying the press in general and the members of the Opposition party was the government’s proposal to change the chairmanship of the Regional Councils from an elected to a government-appointed position. Nkrumah abolished the Regional Councils; they have been reinstated and are the most important move, outside free elections, away from wholly centralised power and back to genuine contact with the needs and wishes of ordinary people.

Of course, the very fact that there is an Opposition to walk out of the House in protest over such matters, and a Spokesman exists to attack the nature of the asceticism of Dr Busia’s regime, says something for that regime. As another visiting foreigner remarked to me — ‘At least no one’s in jail.’ There are no political prisoners.

The faces in public office, like the façades of the buildings stripped of their original designation, carry still the Nkrumah image, in reverse. They are almost all men whom he denounced and discarded; the pedigree for high position is exile or imprisonment under Nkrumah. But the faces of the junta which ruled the country from 1966 to the first post-coup elections in 1969 are strikingly absent. Members of both the government and Opposition are vague about the present activities of these army (and police-) men, and meet stiffly the reasonable question: why has none of them come forward to serve, in politics, as a civilian?

So far as I could gather, all have relinquished their army careers. Ex-Colonel Afrifa is running that old West African money-maker, a transport business; nobody seemed to know what General Ankrah himself was doing these days, and at least one dignitary said with asperity that he didn’t care, either. ‘They promised to hand over to civilian government after a specified time, and they had to keep that promise.’ Only Afrifa, under forty, had gone so far as to remark that the provision that the new president of Ghana must be over forty was an insult to the youth of the country; interpret that as frustrated political ambition of the highest order, if you like.

Everyone has heard of the mammy wagons of Ghana, a chaotic unscheduled bus service that gets people dangerously where they want to go without the dreary queueing and frustration inseparable from ordinary bus services. Everyone knows that these trucks bear sayings or slogans. There is something evangelistic about even the most hedonistic of them, something exhortatory and moral, that suggests their original inspiration must have been missionary: those texts on love or sin chalked on boards outside churches. What I didn’t know before I went there was that Ghana taxis have their statements, too, in the form of stickers on the dashboards. One gets into the habit of looking for omens — a private text-for-the-day, a warning? — as one moves around in Accra. Perhaps there will be a message to be interpreted only by oneself (like letting a hotel Gideon Bible fall open where it will), in the next taxi one climbs into. One afternoon there was. Just two words that were the last word on everything I had seen and heard and done. ‘It changes.’

Ivory Coast from the Accra — Abidjan plane had a brocade texture, the crowns of thousands of palms in plantation pattern.

Abidjan: like all cities built on water it has the extraordinary quality of perpetually looking at itself. Even the stream of evening traffic, seen twice over from across one of the lagoons — once on the road, once reflected in the water — is hypnotic, narcissistic, silenced and calmed into a flow of liquid darkness and floating flares. Why haven’t I read it was like this? I decide it is one of those places you have to go to, that perhaps really don’t exist at all unless you are in them. It certainly doesn’t exist in any comparison I might try.

Abidjan is full of flowers you cannot and have no wish to identify — not merely that apoplectic bougainvillea and coarse hibiscus trumpeting ‘tropical paradise’, but huge trees pollened with yellow and pink, and verges knee-deep in delicate lilies like just-struck match flames. There are unexpected scents; not only the whiff of ‘Femme’ or ‘Je Reviens’ from one of the passing white French ladies, but the delicious sweat of warm flowers. The high-rise architecture is outstandingly imaginative, anyway, slender buildings standing on stork legs that emphasise the relation of the city to water, but the real reason why these blocks are so much more successfully rooted in their environment than is usual, is because for once the scale of natural growth within it matches them. There are trees, here, that are not dwarfed by a skyscraper. They look as if they had been waiting through centuries for men to learn how to build in the proportions of the tropical forest.

The hotel I live in, across the water from the city in the ‘diplomatic’ suburb of Cocody, has a swimming pool where wives of French businessmen spend the day watching their children; occasionally, in the outdoor bar overlooking the lagoon, a white couple entertain a rich or distinguished black man and his lady, in the way of business or diplomacy, with an air of exaggerated ease. Opposite the craftsmen’s market in town, a coffee-shop-cum-bar-restaurant is filled with Frenchmen eating a businessman’s lunch and reading the Paris papers, while pestering Senegalese traders, quick to recognise a tourist face among them, parade snakeskin sandals and indigo-dyed caftans along the terrace. In arcades and side-streets, Lebanese sit entombed by the rolls of wax-print cloth whose market they traditionally corner. Outside boutiques showing the current fantaisie of the Boulevard St Germain, black boys have their home-made stalls selling cigarettes and gum. Down in their big market Africans congregate endlessly round small purchases from the numerous petty traders, seated before a pyramid of a few tomatoes or eggs, dried fish or cola nuts, who all seem to make a living, in Africa.

In a bar where I go to escape the midday heat, the blonde patronne in hot pants and boots is making up her eyes before a mirror and the indifference of a very tall Latin wearing a handbag, while a black barman plays a worn Georges Moustaki record over and over. The tall man shoulders his handbag and leaves, and the patronne at once turns prettily: ‘What can you do, Madame? — I love him. He’s Italian, he has to go back to Rome. But when you fall in love — eh?’

Yes, Abidjan is a beautiful city. A beautiful colonial city, despite its ten-year independence. With all the colonial preoccupations, comforts and diversions. There are twice as many French here as there were before independence. In Accra you — the visitor — can’t get a decent bottle of wine or find a taxi whose window handles aren’t missing so that you can close up against the rain. But dirty Accra on a Saturday — the dinner-bells of traders ringing, the vast chatter and surge of the streets, the sense not of people on their way through the streets but of life being lived there; the bars and hotels of Accra, the female tycoons of trade and transport with flesh and finery piled up splendidly, ringed hands round glasses, voices holding forth to men puny by contrast, the dancers sauntering to the lazy pluck and thump of highlife music, the little velvety-faced tarts with narrow hands, assuming bored solitude on a bar stool or taking over the ladies’ room to adjust already exquisitely arranged turbans or hitch the angle of a breast under cloth — the Ghanaians are living their own life and all quarters of their shabby capital are theirs. Accra belongs to them in a way that Abidjan doesn’t seem to belong to the Ivoiriens.

This remains valid although in the days that follow I go to Treichville and Adjamé, the African quarters, and see for myself that the Ivoiriens are materially better off than Ghanaians. Everywhere new housing schemes have been realised, and the houses, though basic as sub-economic habitations must be, are decent and imaginative. There are schools with lacy brick walls to let in the air; and market-places covered against the sun and provided with facilities to keep them clean. These are the things that the people need; it is something of a surprise to find them here, instead of the black slums which, in Africa, usually lie behind the white men’s air-conditioned shops and bars.

Ghana and the Ivory Coast started off similarly endowed with natural resources — Ghana is the biggest cocoa producer in the world, Ivory Coast the third biggest producer of coffee — and geared economically to the provision of raw materials for the industrial powers of the developed world. For the rest, the neighbours could hardly have been more different: Ghana under Nkrumah one of the most radical, the Ivory Coast under Félix Houphouët-Boigny the most conservative of new African states. While Nkrumah has had his stool kicked from under him, Houphouët-Boigny, who has put down whatever discontents may have shivered from time to time across the lagoons of Abidjan, still lives in the tall pagoda-shaped residence among the palms and flowers of Cocody whose lack of any suggestion of a fortress surely reflects confidence. Ghana, the richer country to begin with, is hobbled by debt; Ivory Coast had a trade balance of 32 million Central African francs in 1969. She is the enfant chéri of France, showered with loans and French capital that have helped her diversify her economy, in return for President Houphouët-Boigny’s loyal promotion of French influence and interests within such important groups as his Conseil d’Entente (Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta) and OCAM (Afro-Malagasy Common Organisation) all the way up to the OAU, where he leads the call for dialogue with apartheid Pretoria, while French arms sales to South Africa are difficult to explain away to African states.

Those African states dedicated to radical change in the life of the masses rather than broadening the base of a black elite have so far achieved less for the masses than conservative states who have been content to foster a black elite, perpetuate foreign private enterprise and foreign investment, and finance social uplift out of the fringe benefits of capitalism, so to speak. It seems ironic. But it is not conclusive. It’s a blessing to be given decent sub-economic housing, schools, hospitals and markets. But will the people, particularly the people in the interior — always so different from the capital, in African countries — get any further than that, under Africanised but colonial-style capitalism? In West Africa more than 80 per cent of the people still live on the land. Will they ever be more than the beneficiaries of the charity of the elite?

There is no impudent Spokesman published in Abidjan; in fact, French journalists must take care, when reporting local issues to Paris, not to annoy the French government by criticising the Houphouët-Boigny regime. Apart from Houphouët-Boigny’s there is a palace there, though of a curious kind — indeed, a whole 100,000-acre Versailles is under construction. The part-state, part-American-owned Hotel Ivoire, with its thousand rooms, casino, theatre and ice-skating rink, was just along the lagoon shore from my modest hotel. I wandered there one day by way of a path made by servants’ and fishermen’s feet, following the shore. Someone’s little patch of maize was being cultivated; high grass touched my cheeks on either side. Once inside the movie-labyrinth of the hotel, I was still wandering — along soaring, carpet-muffled corridors, glass galleries, through lounges that reduce the human figure to a small stroke, past bars buried like Chinese boxes. There was a model of the total plan of which this place is only part: an ‘international tourist area’, ‘garden city environment’ for 120,000 people, that will encompass whole existing African villages for the diversion of those tourists for whom the attraction of golf clubs, convention halls and an Olympic sports centre palls. To ‘see’ Africa, natives and all, it will not be necessary to stir from this environment of grotesque home comforts created by the Californian architect and urban planner William Pereira and Mr Moshe Mayer, an Israeli millionaire whose family-portrait face is displayed along with a letter from President Houphouët-Boigny, welcoming the project and referring to Mr Mayer as ‘my dear friend’. This part of Africa was once known as the White Man’s Grave; now he sees it as his pleasure-ground. A shift in the angle of a timeless subjectivity? Hardly more, and little enough.

There are not many mammy wagons in Abidjan. Those that exist generally have no identification except their registration plates. But when I went to the bus station in Adjamé with a professor of philosophy who had sat marking baccalauréat papers in the open-air bar of our hotel, there was a message for me. While we talked, a mammy wagon was being loaded with passengers and bundles. It had a worn text, decorated with painted flowers, half-legible; I could just make out the words, ‘Merci Dieu’. Since I am a white South African and the professor was a black Ivoirien, it was natural that we should be discussing the idea of dialogue between our two countries. What was perhaps a little less predictable was that I was arguing against dialogue, because — as I was quick to illustrate my point — the kind of contact between two enfranchised individuals he and I were having was what was needed within my country, rather than talk between the white establishment of that country and black statesmen from other countries — and he, on the basis of how well we got on, if nothing else, was prepared to give dialogue a trial. Well, yes — thank heaven for small mercies, not everything is predictable in Africa these days — whatever else has happened, the old equations, the defined roles, national and personal, good and bad, are all in question.

1971

Pack Up, Black Man

Americans who are repelled by a colour bar, but are at least prepared to consider that the South African ‘separate development’ political philosophy of apartheid may be something other than Jim Crow legislation under another name, have told me that they did not know what to think of the South African government’s resettlement schemes for blacks. Living so far away, ignorant of local conditions, is one qualified to judge?

There are many white South Africans, living right in the country but at a distance from the conditions of the blacks no less palpable than the many thousand miles that separate New York and Johannesburg, who express similar reservations. Isn’t decentralisation vital, anyway, for industrialised countries? Isn’t it a good idea to clear rural slums? Politics aside — and in South Africa, separate development purports to aim at the eventual partition of the country, along lines laid down exclusively by the whites, between black and white — don’t the industrial planners and community development experts know best?

I would say to Americans what I have said to my fellow white South Africans. You know well enough to eat when hungry, don’t you? To turn on the heat when you’re cold? To choose a place to live at the rent you can afford, on a transport route convenient to your work, your children’s schools, and the pursuit of your interests?

That is all the expertise needed to judge the reasonable needs of any fellow human being. Forget about his colour or ‘what he was used to’; he hungers, thirsts, and must work for a living just as you do. It is too easy for us to shelter behind the analyses of the behavioural sciences, that serve to rationalise the American ‘hamlet’ system in Vietnam as the ‘restructuring’ of society rather than the waging of war, and the crypto-behavioural theory of apartheid that rationalises arbitrary resettlement in South Africa on the premise that affinity of skin colour and race overrides all other human needs.

In South Africa, in ten years, 900,000 black people have been moved from their homes because the lands on which they were living — and some had been settled up to a hundred years — have been declared ‘black spots’ in a white area. The blacks have had no choice. The moves are decreed under laws they had no voice in making, since they have no vote. They are poor people, who lived humbly where they were; do not imagine that they are set down in some sort of model village, the shell of a bright new community waiting to be inhabited.

They are usually eventually granted some sort of compensation for the houses they leave behind to be bulldozed, but where they are sent, there are no new ones: at best, some basic building materials may be supplied, and they are expected to build new homes themselves, living meanwhile in tents that may or may not be supplied. There may be water nearby, and fuel; often they must walk miles for these necessities. If they are rural people and are moved to a bit of ground classified non-rural, they must sell their cattle before they go.

The bit of ground may be near a white town where work is available, or may not — it has not proved to be part of the ‘planning’ to ensure in advance that those who lose employment by the move shall be provided with alternative employment where they are ordered to live. Some settlements consist entirely of unemployables — officially termed ‘surplus people’, ‘redundant people’, ‘non-productive people’ — swept out of the towns since they cannot serve as units of labour.

The physical conditions of resettlement are practically without exception of such desolation that confronted with them, one is almost unable to think beyond bread and latrines. The sense of urgency aroused on behalf of people whose struggle for existence has been reduced to a search for wood to make a fire, a bucket of clean water to drink, 20 cents to pay a bus fare to a clinic, is inclined to set the mind safely on ameliorating such unthinkable concrete hardships. Newspaper accounts of these conditions have led the public of Johannesburg, for example, to do what is known locally as ‘opening its heart’ to pour forth from the cornucopia of white plenty, blankets, food and medicine to warm, feed and tend the tent-and-hovel black ‘towns’.

This is done in the name of common humanity. But in the name of common humanity, how do white people manage to close their minds to the implications of the resettlement policy while at the same time ‘opening their hearts’ to its callous and inevitable results?

In the second richest country in Africa, in the new decade of the twentieth century, choosing to manipulate the lives of a voteless and powerless indigenous majority in accordance with a theory of colour preference, we in South Africa are reproducing the living conditions of nineteenth-century European famine victims allowed to labour under sufferance in another country. In a world with a vast refugee problem still unsolved from the last World War and the lesser ones that have succeeded it, we who have never suffered the destruction of our own soil and cities have created encampments of people living like the homeless refugees of Palestine, Biafra and Vietnam.

Every human life, however humble it has been, has a context meshed of familiar experience — social relationships, patterns of activity in relation to environment. Call it ‘home’, if you like. To be transported out of this on a government truck one morning and put down in an uninhabited place is to be asked to build not only your shelter but your whole life over again, from scratch. For the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are having this experience forced upon them in South Africa there is no appeal.

As for the whites — if our hearts were ever really to be opened perhaps all we should find would be, graven there, this comment from one of the inhabitants of a resettlement: You can’t say no to a white man.

1971

Unchaining Poets

A few weeks ago South African censors banned a T-shirt bearing the legend, ‘Help Cure Virginity’.

At the same time, long-standing bans on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus and Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile were lifted.

Who was it who submitted a T-shirt for the censors’ weighty consideration? Who or what made them read Ellison, Faulkner, etc., banned by their predecessors operating under South Africa’s Customs and Post Office acts before the present Publications Control Board came into existence with the Publications and Entertainments Act in 1963?

The logic behind these decisions of the board is known only to its members, government appointees all.

T-shirts aside, my concern is literature. Unfortunately, the lifting of bans on a few books is not a general indication that censorship is about to be relaxed in South Africa. On the contrary. A committee representing seven government departments has been investigating ‘new ways’ of applying the Publications and Entertainments Act, since during the last few years there have been repeated criticisms of the board, whose rulings have been upset by court decisions.

For the right of appeal to the courts against bannings by the board exists, although since the writer is first pronounced guilty of producing something obscene or objectionable, and only then gets the chance to defend the work in question, the usual processes of law are reversed. Threats of abolition of the right have been brandished frequently; the Dutch Reformed Church has been zealous with this particular sword. Now the Minister of the Interior, Dr Connie Mulder, who has received the findings of the investigating committee, has announced that the right of appeal will not be abolished but there will be ‘changes in the system of appeal’ against the board’s decisions.

Statements by the Minister himself and others in official positions do not inspire writers’ confidence in the possible nature of these ‘changes’. Dr Mulder commented that the present checkmate between judges and censors was unsatisfactory. Marais Viljoen, Minister of Labour, said that individual judges were being placed in an invidious position because ‘having to give decisions on the country’s morals was a difficult task’. And Andries van Wyk, retiring vice-chairman of the board, has predicted that censors will not relax their hardline attitude on matters involving race, sex and politics while the present government is in power.

At the same time as T-shirts are being banned, Faulkner is no longer illicit reading, and writers darkly await the censors’ new ways of dealing with their work, the quiet phenomenon of new black poets — and publishers ready to risk publishing them — continues in Johannesburg.

It began last year with the publication of Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of A Cowhide Drum, also published in New York. Fourteen thousand copies were sold in South Africa; a wide readership for any poet, anywhere. This year Yakhal’inkomo (the cry of cattle at the slaughterhouse), the remarkable poems of another young black man, Mongane Wally Serote, have appeared under the same imprint. The publishers are three young white poets, Lionel Abrahams, Robert Royston and Eva Bezwoda. Another publisher has in preparation an anthology of the work of eleven black South African poets.

Why this upsurge of poetry under censorship?

Nearly all the seminal black writers in South Africa went into exile in the 1960s, and their works are banned. This has had a stunting effect on prose writing among young blacks; it seems it has produced, perhaps subconsciously, a search for a less vulnerable form of expression. Some of the people writing poetry are very talented; some are not. For all, poetry is a dragonfly released whose shimmer censors must find difficult to pin down to any of the Publications and Entertainments Act’s ninety-seven definitions of what is undesirable. What poetry expresses is implicit rather than explicit.

1972

The New Black Poets

‘Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before … It brings people back to life.’

This was written of the contemporary Soviet Union by Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, in her autobiography, Hope Against Hope. But perhaps the same might be said of the new poetry being written in South Africa by black South Africans. Three individual collections have been published within eighteen months. I know of at least two more that are to come, this year. An anthology representative of the work of eleven poets is in the press at the time of writing. Poems signed with as yet unknown names crop up in the little magazines; there are readings at universities and in private houses, since the law doesn’t allow blacks to read to whites or mixed audiences in public places. For the first time, black writers’ works are beginning to be bought by ordinary black people in the segregated townships, instead of only by liberal or literary whites and the educated black elite.

Aspirant writers are intimidated not only by censorship as such but also by the fear that anything at all controversial, set out by a black in the generally explicit medium of prose, makes the writer suspect, since the correlation of articulacy and political insurrection, so far as blacks are concerned, is firmly lodged in the minds of the Ministers of the Interior, Justice and Police. Polymorphous fear cramps the hand.

Out of this paralytic silence, suspended between fear of expression and the need to give expression to an ever greater pressure of grim experience, has come the black writer’s subconscious search for a form less vulnerable than those that led a previous generation into bannings and exile. In other countries, writers similarly placed have found a way to survive and speak through the use of different kinds of prose forms. Perhaps, if black writing had not been so thoroughly beheaded and truncated in the sixties, there would have been creative minds nimble enough to keep it alive through something like the skaz — a Russian genre, dating from Czarist times, which concentrates a narrative of wide-ranging significance in a compressed work that derives from an oral tradition of story-telling, and takes full advantage of the private and double meanings contained in colloquial idiom. Both the oral tradition and the politically charged idiom exist in black South Africa.

Or the solution might have been found in the adoption of the Aesopean genre — as in a fable, you write within one set of categories, knowing your readers will realise that you are referring to another, an area where explicit comment is taboo. Camus used this device in La Peste, and again, Stalin’s generation of writers learned to be dab hands at it.

The cryptic mode is a long-established one; it has been resorted to in times and countries where religious persecution or political oppression drives creativity back into itself, and forces it to become its own hiding-place, from which, ingenious as an oracle, a voice that cannot be identified speaks the truth in riddles and parables not easily defined as subversive. In South Africa there are ninety-seven definitions of what is officially ‘undesirable’ in literature: subversive, obscene or otherwise ‘offensive’. They are not always invoked, but are there when needed to suppress a particular book or silence an individual writer. Seeking to escape them, among other even more sinister marks of official attention, black writers have had to look for survival away from the explicit if not to the cryptic then to the implicit; and in their case, they have turned instinctively to poetry. Professor Harry Levin defines a poem as ‘a verbal artefact’ whose ‘arrangement of signs and sounds is likewise a network of associations and responses, communicating implicit information’. In demotic, non-literary terms, a poem can be both hiding-place and loud-hailer. That was what black writers within South Africa were seeking.

There will be many people whose toes will curl at this crude pragmatic conception of how poetry comes to be written. One cannot simply ‘turn’ to poetry. It is not simply there, available to anybody with a few hours of home study to spare, like a correspondence course in accountancy or learning to play the recorder. As a prose writer, I don’t need reminding of the levels of literature, where poets sit on Kilimanjaro. That snowy crown is not within reach of everyone who wants to write; even those who can start a grass fire across the prose plain will find themselves short of oxygen up at that height.

Poetry as a last resort is indeed a strange concept; and a kind of inversion of the enormous problems of skill and gifts implied in electing to write poetry at all. Many who are doing so in South Africa today are not poets at all, merely people of some talent attempting to use certain conventions and unconventions associated with poetry in order to express their feelings in a way that may hope to get a hearing. One of them has said:

To label my utterings poetry

and myself a poet

would be as self-deluding

as the planners of parallel development.

I record the anguish of the persecuted

whose words are whimpers of woe

wrung from them by bestial laws.

They stand one chained band

silently asking one of the other

will it never be the fire next time?

(‘To label my utterings poetry’ by James Matthews)

From the Icelandic saga to Symbolism, from a Chaucer creating English as a democratic literary medium to a Günter Grass recreating areas of the German language debased by Nazi usage, writers in their place at the centre of their particular historical situation have been forced by this kind of empiricism and pragmatism to ‘turn to’ one form of expression rather than another.

There are two questions to ask of the black writers who have ‘turned to’ poetry in South Africa. In the five years since this spate of poetry began, these questions have been shown to be so bound together that I don’t know which to put first. So, without prejudice at this point: Question — through the implicit medium of poetry, are black writers succeeding in establishing or re-establishing a black protest literature within South Africa? Question — are they writing good poetry?

These questions, as I have said, seem to have demonstrated an indivisibility that I hesitate to claim as a universal axiom. Where protest speaks from a good poem, even one good line, both questions are answered in a single affirmative. When Mandlenkosi Langa, in his ‘Mother’s Ode to a Still-born Child’, writes:

It is not my fault

that you did not live

to be a brother sister

or lover of some black child

that you did not experience pain

pleasure voluptuousness and salt in the wound

that your head did not stop a police truncheon

that you are not a permanent resident of a prison island

his irony says more than any tract describing in spent emotives the life-expectations of the black ghetto under white oppression in the police state, etc. When, writing again of a newborn child already dead — symbol of the constant death-in-life that runs through this black poetry — Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali in ‘An Abandoned Bundle’ makes the image of dogs ‘draped in red bandanas of blood’ scavenging the body of a baby dumped on a location rubbish heap, he says more about black infant mortality than any newspaper exposé, and by the extension that the total vision of his poem provides, more about the cheapness of life where race is the measure of worth.

The themes chosen by the new black poets are committed in the main to the individual struggle for physical and spiritual survival under oppression. ‘I’ is the pronoun that prevails, rather than ‘we’, but the ‘I’ is the Whitmanesque unit of multi-millions rather than the exclusive first person singular. There is little evidence of group feeling, except perhaps in one or two of the young writers who are within SASO (South African Students’ Organisation), the black student organisation whose politico-cultural manifesto is a combination of negritude with Black Power on the American pattern.

The themes, like those of the poets who preceded the present generation (they were few in number and were forced into exile), are urban — although it is doubtful whether one can speak of the tradition or influence of a Kunene or a Brutus, here. Few of the young aspirants writing today have read even the early work of exiled writers: it was banned while they were still at school. The striking development of Dennis Brutus’s later and recent work, for example, is unknown except by a handful of people who may have spotted a copy of Cosmo Pieterse’s Seven South African Poets or Thoughts Abroad that has somehow slipped into a bookshop, although the statutory ban on Dennis Brutus would mean that the book itself is automatically banned.

It is axiomatic that the urban theme contains the classic crises: tribal and traditional values against Western values, peasant modes of life against the modes of an industrial proletariat, above all, the quotidian humiliations of a black’s world made to a white’s specifications. But in the work we are considering I believe there also can be traced distinct stages or stations of development in creating a black ethos strong enough to be the challenger rather than the challenged in these crises.

The starting point is essentially post-Sharpeville — post-defeat of mass black political movements: the position that of young people cut off from political education and any objective formulation of their resentments against apartheid. The stations are three: distortion of values by submission of whites; rejection of distortion; black/white polarity — opposition on new ground.

In terms of the personal, immediate and implicit within which the poems move, the first station — distortion by submission — is often demonstrated by apartheid through the eyes of a child. Mike Dues writes in his poem ‘This Side of Town’:

Rested near swinging

sliding playground

with eager-eyed-black faces

‘can we play on the swing’

a cowing no

in town the voice pleads

‘I want to pee’

a hackneyed no

leads to the edge of town.

And James Matthews in ‘Two Little Black Boys’:

Two little black boys

standing in front of a public lavatory

one not bigger than a grasshopper

the other a head of hair taller

you can’t go in there

the tall one said, pointing to the board

it’s white people only.

It is not insignificant that incidents such as this are written about again and again. Through the recurrence of apparent trivialities in a child’s life, certain objects — a swing, a public lavatory — can be seen becoming reified with the value of a sacred totem of white supremacy from whose ground the black child learns he is excluded without knowing why. But the question will come. James Matthews’s poem ends:

Puzzled, the grasshopper replied

don’t white people shit like me?

And Mike Dues, more ominously:

Later the face stronger

and voice bigger

will ask why.

A child’s three questions in one of Oswald Mtshali’s poems ‘Boy on a Swing’ — ‘Mother!/Where did I come from?/When will I wear long trousers?/Why was my father jailed?’ — illustrate by their unconscious grouping how victimisation undergoes transformation into one of the immutable mysteries of a natural order. The experience of these black children takes on a dreadful logic as preparation for their sort of future in Stanley Mogoba’s poem ‘Two Buckets’ in which two buckets side by side, one a lavatory, the other filled with drinking water, define prison as a destination. Thrown into a cell at night, a man stumbles over the buckets:

In this startled manner

I made my entry

into a dark world

Where thousands of men

Pine and are forgotten.

It is the world of the pass laws, and the pass document is not a booklet of simple identification but a hateful possession that must be cherished because one cannot live without it — another inversion of values demanded by the white man. In ‘City Johannesburg’, Mongane Wally Serote addresses the white city:

This way I salute you;

My hand pulses to my back trouser pocket

Or into my inner jacket pocket

For my pass, my life

… My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets

… Jo’burg City, I salute you;

When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,

I leave behind me my love — my comic houses and people, my donga and my ever-whirling dust

My death

That’s so related to me as a wink to the eye

The city as an environment of distortion as well as dispossession creates the image in Njabulo Ndebele’s poem:

I hid my love in the sewerage

Of a city; and when it was decayed,

I returned: I returned to the old lands.

Oswald Mtshali’s country bird is shedding his identity along with his feathers when he takes a job as a city cleaner and says in ‘The Moulting Country Bird’:

I wish

I was not a bird

red and tender of body

with the mark of the tribe

branded on me as fledgling

hatched in the Zulu grass hut.

Pierced in the lobe of the ear

by the burning spike of the elderman;

he drew my blood like a butcher bird

that impales the grasshopper on the thorn.

As a full fledged starling

hopping in the city street,

scratching the building corridor,

I want to moult

from the dung-smeared down

tattered like a fieldworker’s shirt,

tighter than the skin of a snake

that sleeps as the plough turns the sod.

Boots caked with mud,

wooden stoppers flapping from earlobes

and a beaded little gourd dangling on a hirsute chest,

all to stoke the incinerator.

I want to be adorned

by a silken suit so scintillating in sheen,

it pales even the peacock’s plumage,

and catches the enchanted eye

of a harlot hiding in an alley:

‘Come! my moulten bird,

I will not charge you a price!’

Njabulo Ndebele, one of the youngest of the new writers, is surely speaking of the same man when he writes, in ‘I hid my love in the sewerage’:

O who am I?

Who am I?

I am the hoof that once

Grazed in silence upon the grass

But now rings like a bell on tarred streets.

Ultimate submission is the acceptance of white materialist values as a goal while at the same time they are by definition unattainable. Again Mtshali has understood this incomparably. In much-imitated poems his city black wears shoes made in America, has a wife who uses lightening cream, a mistress, a car, but:

He knows

he must carry a pass.

He don’t care for politics

He don’t go to church

He knows Sobukwe

He knows Mandela

They’re in Robben Island,

‘So what? That’s not my business!’

(‘The Detribalised’)

This city black does the ‘Chauffeur Shuffle’, ‘a carving of black-wood/ in a peaked cap/clutching the wheel of the white man’s car in white-gloved hands’; he is ‘Always a Suspect’, dressed like a gentleman in white shirt and suit but trudging ‘the city pavements/side by side with “madam”/who shifts her handbag from my side to the other/ and looks at me with eyes that say/“Ha! Ha! I know who you are;/ beneath those fine clothes ticks the heart of a thief.”’

The Sartrian and Fanonist theory of realising oneself in terms of the Other, of becoming someone else’s projection rather than oneself (the orphan Genet a thief because that is the image in which society recognises his existence) reaches its apogee in the term ‘non-white’. That is the official identity of any South African who is black, brown, coffee-coloured or yellow. Mtshali’s non-white describes himself:

If I tell the truth

I’m detestable.

If I tell lies

I’m abominable.

If I tell nothing

I’m unpredictable.

If I smile to please

I’m nothing but an obsequious sambo.

(‘Always a Suspect’)

And he accepts his non-white non-value by seeing, in turn, fulfilment as the vantage point from which the white man makes this valuation:

I want my heaven now,

Here on earth in Houghton and Parktown;

a mansion

two cars or more

and smiling servants

Isn’t that heaven?

(‘This Kid Is No Goat’)

The ironic note of the last phrase — no trumpet call, but ringing in the ears just the same — serves to mark the transition to the second station in the development of the black ethos as reflected in these poets. Mike Dues uses irony both as approach and technique in a terse poem, ‘You Never Know’, that is at once also an anecdote and a wry joke. We are eavesdropping on a telephone call to a sports event booking service:

‘Hello. Duncan Taylor here.’

‘I want nine tickets for Saturday.’

‘Nine you said. Hold on I’ll check the booking.

I can give you eight in one row. One in front or back.’

‘Thank you. I’ll collect at the gate. How much?’

‘Well nine at R1.25. That is R11.25 Sir.’

‘Why the difference? A friend paid seventy-five cents last night.’

‘Oh! But that’s non-white.’

‘That’s what we want.’

‘I’m sorry, you sounded white.’

Soon the ironic note grows louder. Mandlenkosi Langa sets the scene in a ‘non-whites’ pension office with a white official behind the counter:

I lead her in

A sepia figure 100 years old.

Blue ice chips gaze

And a red slash gapes:

‘What does she want?’

I translate: ‘Pension, sir.’

‘Useless kaffir crone,

Lazy as the black devil.

She’ll get fuck-all.’

I translate.

‘My man toiled

And rendered himself impotent

With hard labour.

He paid tax like you.

I am old enough to get pension.

I was born before the great wars

And I saw my father slit your likes’ throats!’

I don’t translate, but

She loses her pension anyhow.

(‘The Pension Jiveass’)

The rejection of distortion of self, the rejection of reification, take many attitudes and forms. What has to be dismantled is three hundred years of spiritual enslavement; the poet is supremely aware that though the bricks and mortar of pass offices and prisons can be battered down, the Bastille of Otherness must have its combination locks picked from within. And this is not easy. In creative terms, there is a casting about for the right means. The reference of the metaphors of sexual love is extended to become a celebration of blackness as a kind of personal salvation, as in Njabulo Ndebele’s love poems:

I am sweeping the firmament with the mop

of your kinky hair;

… I shall gather you

into my arms, my love

and oil myself,

Yea, anoint myself with the

Night of your skin,

That the dust of the soil may stick on me;

That the birds of the sky may stick on me;

… let me play hide-and-seek

With an image of you in the

Dark, plum-dark forests of

your kinky hair,

And I shall not want.

(‘Five Letters to M.M.M.’)

(Echoes here of Leon Damas’s Rendez-moi mes poupées noires.) Another means has been a use of the blues idiom of the Langston Hughes — Bessie Smith era, resuscitated in ‘cat’ vocabulary by Black Power writers in America. Pascal Gwala uses it, writing from Durban:

Been watching this jive

For too long.

That’s struggle.

West Street ain’t the place

To hang around any more

… At night you see another dream

White and Monstrous

Dropping from earth’s heaven,

Whitewashing your own Black Dream.

That’s struggle.

Struggle is when

You have to lower your eyes

And steer time

With your bent voice.

When you drag along –

Mechanically.

Your shoulder refusing;

Refusing like a young bull

Not wanting to drive

Into the dipping tank

Struggle is keying your tune

To harmonize with your inside.

… Heard a child giggle at obscene jokes

Heard a mother weep over a dead son;

Heard a foreman say ‘boy’ to a labouring oupa

Heard a bellowing, drunken voice in an alley.

… You heard struggle.

Knowing words don’t kill

But a gun does.

That’s struggle.

For no more jive

Evening’s eight

Ain’t never late.

Black is struggle.

(‘Gumba Gumba Gumba’)

Mongane Wally Serote uses the jazz beat but with vocabulary and imagery less derivative or obviously localised — generalised definitions of blackness, or anything else, are not for him. He puts a craftsmanlike agony to making-by-naming (Gerald Moore’s and Ulli Beier’s definition of the particular quality of African poetry) in a vocabulary and grammar genuinely shaped by black urban life in South Africa. There is a piercing subjectivity in his work, in which ‘black as struggle’ becomes at times an actual struggle with the limits of language itself. He can discipline himself to the device of plain statement:

White people are white people

They are burning the world.

Black people are black people

They are the fuel.

White people are white people

They must learn to listen.

Black people are black people

They must learn to talk.

(‘Ofay-Watcher, Throbs-Phase’)

He can see the elements of an almost untainted black identity in the old people and children who are recurring lyrical motifs in his work. But when he seeks to recreate that identity by learning how it was destroyed, deeply wounded and marked himself, he wanders among the signs of signs, the abstractions of abstraction. The persona of his poems is often named ‘Ofay-Watcher’ — one who watches Whitey, a definition that has overtones of the negative non-white clinging to it like grave-clothes around the resurrected. Ofay-Watcher says:

I want to look at what happened;

That done,

As silent as the roots of plants pierce the soil

I look at what happened,

Whether above the houses there is always either smoke or dust,

As there are always flies above a dead dog.

I want to look at what happened.

That done,

As silent as plants show colour: green,

I look at what happened,

When houses make me ask: do people live there?

As there is something wrong when I ask — is that man alive?

I want to look at what happened,

That done

As silent as the life of a plant that makes you see it

I look at what happened

When knives creep in and out of people

As day and night into time.

I want to look at what happened,

That done,

As silent as plants bloom and the eye tells you: something has happened. I look at what happened

When jails are becoming necessary homes for people

Like death comes out of disease,

I want to look at what happened.

(‘Ofay-Watcher Looks Back’)

Not only to look, but to express his findings in the long expletive of ‘What’s In This Black “Shit”’, gagging on its own bile of force-fed humiliation:

It is not the steaming rot

In the toilet bucket,

It is the upheaval of the bowels

Bleeding and coming out through the mouth

And swallowed back,

Rolling in the mouth

Feeling its taste and wondering what’s next like it.

Finally he turns the term ‘black shit’ on those who coined it:

I’m learning to pronounce this ‘shit’ well,

Since the other day

at the pass office

when I went to get employment,

The officer there endorsed me to Middleburg

So I said, hard and with all my might, ‘Shit!’

I felt a little better;

But what’s good is, I said it in his face,

A thing my father wouldn’t dare do.

That’s what’s in this black ‘Shit’.

The Word becomes Weapon. At times, for this writer, there is no calligraphy capable of containing the force of resentment and he destroys his very medium by exploding the bounds of coherence:

WORDS.

Trying to get out.

Words. Words. Words.

By Whitey

I know I’m trapped.

Helpless

Hopeless

You’ve trapped me Whitey! Meem wann ge aot Fuc

Pschwee ep booboodubooboodu blllll

Black books

Flesh blood words shitrrr Haai,

Amen.

(‘Black Bells’)

You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse. Not from the political platform or the prisoner’s dock, but howling from the subconscious, hate is conjured up in Serote’s work. Yet he himself is not free to hate; he is tormented by its necessity for the black in South Africa:

To talk for myself

I hate to hate

But how often has it been

I could not hate enough.

(‘That’s Not My Wish’)

Preoccupation with the metaphysics of hate belongs to the station of rejection of the distorted black self-image: James Matthews refers to the book he has published with Gladys Thomas as a collection of ‘declarations’ and the unspoken overall declaration is that of those who have learned how to hate enough, and to survive. His is the manifesto of the black ethos as challenger, confronting the white ethos on black ground. In a kind of black nursery jingle by Gladys Thomas, entitled ‘Fall To-morrow’, it speaks to blacks:

Don’t sow a seed

Don’t paint a wall

To-morrow it will have to fall

and to whites:

Be at home in our desert for all

You that remade us

Your mould will break

And to-morrow you are going to fall.

The book is called ‘Cry Rage!’ and the theme is often expressed in terms of actual and specific events. James Matthews is not diffident about taking a hold wherever he can on those enormous experiences of the long night of the black body-and-soul that prose writers have ignored. His obsession with the subject of resettlement is no more than an accurate reflection of the realities of daily life for the tens of thousands of blacks who have been moved by government decree to find shelter and livelihood in the bare veld of places dubbed Limehill, Dimbaza, Sada, Ilinge — often poetic names whose meanings seem to show malicious contempt for the people dumped there:

Valley of plenty is what it is called;

where little children display their nakedness

and stumble around on listless limbs

… where mothers plough their dead fruit into the soil

their crone breasts dry of milk

… where menfolk castrated by degradation

seek their manhood in a jug

of wine as brackish as their bile.

(‘Valley of plenty’)

Njabulo Ndebele invokes the intimate sorrows of forced removal less obviously and perhaps more tellingly. Limehills, Dimbazas — these valleys of plenty seldom have adequate water supplies and the new ‘inhabitants’ often have to walk a long way to fetch water:

There is my wife. There she is

She is old under those four gallons of water,

It was said taps in the streets

Would be our new rivers.

But my wife fetches the water

We drink and we eat.

I watch my wife: she is old.

(‘Portrait of Love’)

And Oswald Mtshali also takes as subjects some dark current events. He uses the Aesopean mode to write devastatingly of a ghastly recent disaster anyone living in South Africa would be able to identify instantly, although its horrors are transliterated, so to speak, into Roman times. A year or two ago a prison van broke down on the road between Johannesburg and Pretoria; the policemen in charge went off to seek help, leaving the prisoners locked inside. It was a hot day; the van was packed; they died of suffocation while the traffic passed unconcerned and unaware:

They rode upon

the death chariot

to their Golgotha—

three vagrants

whose papers to be in Caesar’s empire

were not in order.

The sun

shrivelled their bodies

in the mobile tomb

as airtight as canned fish.

We’re hot!

We’re thirsty!

We’re hungry!

The centurion

touched their tongues

with the tip

of a lance

dipped in apathy:

‘Don’t cry to me

but to Caesar who

crucifies you.’

A woman came

to wipe their faces.

She carried a dishcloth

full of bread and tea.

We’re dying!

The centurion

washed his hands.

(‘Ride Upon The Death Chariot’)

James Matthews writes of the Imam Abdullah Haron, one of the number of people who have died while in detention without trial. He writes of ‘dialogue’ as ‘the cold fire where the oppressed will find no warmth’. Perhaps most significantly, he reflects the current black rejection of any claim whatever by whites, from radicals to liberals, to identify with the black struggle:

They speak so sorrowfully about the

children dying of hunger in Biafra

but sleep unconcerned about the rib-thin

children of Dimbaza.

(‘They Speak So Sorrowfully’)

And again, in a poem called ‘Liberal Student Crap!’:

The basis of democracy rests upon

Fraternity, Equality and not LSD

I should know fellows

Progressive policy the salvation of us all

You just don’t understand

There’s no-one as liberal as me

Some of my best friends are

Kaffirs, Coolies and Coons

Forgive me, I mean other ethnic groups

How could it be otherwise?

I’m Jewish; I know discrimination

from the ghetto to Belsen

So, don’t get me all wrong

Cause I know just how you feel

Come up and see me sometime

My folks are out of town.

Whatever the justice of this view of young white people militant against apartheid — and increasing numbers of them are banned and restricted along with blacks — on the question of white proxy for black protest he has a final unanswerable word:

can the white man speak for me?

can he feel my pain when his laws

tear wife and child from my side

and I am forced to work a thousand miles away?

does he know my anguish

as I walk his streets at night

my hand fearfully clasping my pass?

is he with me in the loneliness

of my bed in the bachelor barracks

with my longing driving me to mount my brother?

will he soothe my despair

as I am driven insane

by scraps of paper permitting me to live?

(‘Can The White Man Speak For Me?’)

He does not spare certain blacks, either, nor fear to measure the fashionable against the actual lineaments of the black situation. He addresses one of the black American singers who from time to time come to South Africa and perform for segregated audiences:

Say, Percy dad

you ran out of bread that you got to

come to sunny South Africa to sing soul

or did you hope to find your soul

in the land of your forefathers?

… Say, Percy dad

will you tell nina simone back home

that you, a soul singer, did a segregated act

or will you sit back flashing silver dollar smiles

as they cart the loot from your Judas role to the bank.

(‘Say Percy Dad’)

And he accuses:

my sister has become a schemer and

a scene-stealer

… songs of the village

traded in for tin pan alley

black is beautiful has become as artificial as the wig she wears.

(‘My sister has become a schemer’)

Matthews uses indiscriminately the clichés of politics, tracts and popular journalism and these deaden and debase his work. But occasionally the contrast between political catchwords and brutal sexual imagery carries a crude immediacy:

democracy

has been turned

into a whore

her body ravished

by those who pervert her

in the bordello

bandied from crotch to hand

her breasts smeared

with their seed …

(‘Democracy has been turned into a whore’)

And in the context of fanatical laws framed in the language of reason, within which he is writing, even clichés take on new meaning: they mock the hollowness of high-sounding terms such as ‘separate development’ or clinical ones such as ‘surplus people’ — the behaviouristic vocabulary that gives a scientific gloss to mass removals of human beings.

James Matthews is a paradigm of the black writer in search of a form of expression that will meet the needs of his situation by escaping strictures imposed on free expression by that situation. He is older than other writers I have discussed; more than a decade ago he was writing short stories of exceptional quality. There were signs that he would become a fine prose writer. Whatever the immediate reasons were for the long silence that followed, the fact remains that there was little or no chance that the themes from the cataclysmic life around him he would have wished to explore would not have ended up as banned prose fiction. He stopped writing. He seems to have accepted that for him to have dealt honestly in prose with what he saw and experienced, as a coloured man slowly accepting the black heritage of his mixed blood as his real identity, might be written but could not be read. He is the man who wrote the words I quoted at the beginning of this survey: ‘To label my utterings poetry/and myself a poet/would be self-deluding …’

He is indeed not a poet, although his old creative gifts, uneasy in a medium to which they are not suited, now and then transform his ‘declarations’ into something more than that. And so he is also an example of yet another distortion, this time within a black literature that expresses rejection of distortion and the assertion of new values for blacks: the black writer’s gifts can be, and often are, squeezed into interstitial convolutions that do not allow him to develop in the direction in which development is possible for him as an artist.

At its best, ‘turning to poetry’ has released the fine talents of an Mtshali and a Serote, a Dues and a young Ndebele. At its least, it has provided a public-address system for the declarations of muzzled prose writers like Matthews. But if he stands where I have put him, as the symbolic figure of the situation of black writing, the sudden ban on his book ‘Cry Rage!’ (during the very time when I was preparing these notes) suggests that black writing in South Africa may once again find itself come full circle, back again at a blank, spiked wall. This is the first book of poems ever to be banned within South Africa. If there were to be a lesson to be learned in a game where it seems you can’t win for long, it would seem to be that only good writing with implicit commitment is equal both to the inner demands of the situation and a chance of surviving publication, whatever the chosen literary form.

In terms of a literary judgement, yes, it is never enough to be angry. But unfortunately this does not hold good as an assurance that black poetry of real achievement can continue to be published and read in South Africa. Some of the best writing ever done by South Africans of all colours has not escaped, on grounds of quality, banning in the past. Black Orpheus, where now? How? What next?

1973

A Writer’s Freedom

What is a writer’s freedom?

To me it is his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he can, he must take, and be granted, freedom from the public conformity of political interpretation, morals and tastes.

Living when we do, where we do, as we do, ‘freedom’ leaps to mind as a political concept exclusively — and when people think of freedom for writers they visualise at once the great mound of burned, banned and proscribed books our civilisation has piled up; a pyre to which our own country has added and is adding its contribution. The right to be left alone to write what one pleases is not an academic issue to those of us who live and work in South Africa. The private view always has been and always will be a source of fear and anger to proponents of a way of life, such as the white man’s in South Africa, that does not bear looking at except in the light of a special self-justificatory doctrine.

All that the writer can do, as a writer, is to go on writing the truth as he sees it. That is what I mean by his ‘private view’ of events, whether they be the great public ones of wars and revolutions, or the individual and intimate ones of daily, personal life.

As to the fate of his books — there comes a time in the history of certain countries when the feelings of their writers are best expressed in this poem, written within the lifetime of many of us, by Bertholt Brecht:

When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings

Should be publicly burned and everywhere

Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books

To the funeral pyre,

An exiled poet,

One of the best,

Discovered with fury when he studied the list

Of the burned, that his books

Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table

On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.

Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!

Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out.

Have I not

Always spoken the truth in my books? And now

You treat me like a liar! I order you:

Burn me!

Not a very good poem, even if one makes allowance for the loss in translation from the German original; nevertheless, so far as South African writers are concerned, we can understand the desperate sentiments expressed while still putting up the fight to have our books read rather than burned.

Bannings and banishments are terrible known hazards a writer must face, and many have faced, if the writer belongs where freedom of expression, among other freedoms, is withheld, but sometimes creativity is frozen rather than destroyed. A Thomas Mann survives exile to write a Dr Faustus; a Pasternak smuggles Dr Zhivago out of a ten-year silence; a Solzhenitsyn emerges with his terrible world intact in the map of The Gulag Archipelago; nearer our home continent: a Chinua Achebe, writing from America, does not trim his prose to please a Nigerian regime under which he cannot live; a Dennis Brutus grows in reputation abroad while his poetry remains forbidden at home; and a Breyten Breytenbach, after accepting the special dispensation from racialist law which allowed him to visit his home country with a wife who is not white, no doubt has to accept the equally curious circumstance that his publisher would not publish the book he was to write about the visit, since it was sure to be banned.⁴

Through all these vicissitudes, real writers go on writing the truth as they see it. And they do not agree to censor themselves … You can burn the books, but the integrity of creative artists is not incarnate on paper any more than on canvas — it survives so long as the artist himself cannot be persuaded, cajoled or frightened into betraying it.

All this, hard though it is to live, is the part of the writer’s fight for freedom the world finds easiest to understand.

There is another threat to that freedom, in any country where political freedom is withheld. It is a more insidious one, and one of which fewer people will be aware. It’s a threat which comes from the very strength of the writer’s opposition to repression of political freedom. That other, paradoxically wider, composite freedom — the freedom of his private view of life — may be threatened by the very awareness of what is expected of him. And often what is expected of him is conformity to an orthodoxy of opposition.

There will be those who regard him as their mouthpiece; people whose ideals, as a human being, he shares, and whose cause, as a human being, is his own. They may be those whose suffering is his own. His identification with, admiration for, and loyalty to these set up a state of conflict within him. His integrity as a human being demands the sacrifice of everything to the struggle put up on the side of free men. His integrity as a writer goes the moment he begins to write what he ought to write.

This is — whether all admit it or not — and will continue to be a particular problem for black writers in South Africa. For them, it extends even to an orthodoxy of vocabulary: the jargon of struggle, derived internationally, is right and adequate for the public platform, the newsletter, the statement from the dock; it is not adequate, it is not deep enough, wide enough, flexible enough, cutting enough, fresh enough for the vocabulary of the poet, the short-story writer or the novelist.

Neither is it, as the claim will be made, ‘a language of the people’ in a situation where certainly it is very important that imaginative writing must not reach the elite only. The jargon of struggle lacks both the inventive pragmatism and the poetry of common speech — those qualities the writer faces the challenge to capture and explore imaginatively, expressing as they do the soul and identity of a people as no thousandth-hand ‘noble evocation’ of clichés ever could.

The black writer needs his freedom to assert that the idiom of Chatsworth, Dimbaza, Soweto⁵ is no less a vehicle for the expression of pride, self-respect, suffering, anger — or anything else in the spectrum of thought and emotion — than the language of Watts or Harlem.

The fact is, even on the side of the angels, a writer has to reserve the right to tell the truth as he sees it, in his own words, without being accused of letting the side down. For as Philip Toynbee has written, ‘the writer’s gift to the reader is not social zest or moral improvement or love of country, but an enlargement of the reader’s apprehension’.

This is the writer’s unique contribution to social change. He needs to be left alone, by brothers as well as enemies, to make this gift. And he must make it even against his own inclination.

I need hardly add this does not mean he retreats to an ivory tower. The gift cannot be made from any such place. The other day, Jean Paul Sartre gave the following definition of the writer’s responsibility to his society as an intellectual, after himself having occupied such a position in France for the best part of seventy years: ‘He is someone who is faithful to a political and social body but never stops contesting it. Of course; a contradiction may arise between his fidelity and his contestation, but that’s a fruitful contradiction. If there’s fidelity without contestation, that’s no good: one is no longer a free man.’

When a writer claims these kinds of freedom for himself, he begins to understand the real magnitude of his struggle. It is not a new problem and of all the writers who have had to face it, I don’t think anyone has seen it more clearly or dealt with it with such uncompromising honesty as the great nineteenth-century Russian, Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev had an immense reputation as a progressive writer. He was closely connected with the progressive movement in Tsarist Russia and particularly with its more revolutionary wing headed by the critic Belinsky and afterwards by the poet Nekrasov. With his sketches and stories, people said that Turgenev was continuing the work Gogol had begun of awakening the conscience of the educated classes in Russia to the evils of a political regime based on serfdom.

But his friends, admirers and fellow progressives stopped short, in their understanding of his genius, of the very thing that made him one — his scrupulous reserve of the writer’s freedom to reproduce truth and the reality of life, even if this truth does not coincide with his own sympathies.

When his greatest novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862, he was attacked not only by the right for pandering to the revolutionary nihilists, but far more bitterly by the left, the younger generation themselves, of whom his chief character in the novel, Bazarov, was both prototype and apotheosis. The radicals and liberals, among whom Turgenev himself belonged, lambasted him as a traitor because Bazarov was presented with all the faults and contradictions that Turgenev saw in his own type, in himself, so to speak, and whom he created as he did because — in his own words — ‘in the given case, life happened to be like that’.

The attacks were renewed after the publication of another novel, Smoke, and Turgenev decided to write a series of autobiographical reminiscences which would allow him to reply to his critics by explaining his views on the art of writing, the place of the writer in society, and what the writer’s attitude to the controversial problems of his day should be. The result was a series of unpretentious essays that make up a remarkable testament to a writer’s creed. Dealing particularly with Bazarov and Fathers and Sons, he writes of his critics:

… generally speaking they have not got quite the right idea of what is taking place in the mind of a writer or what exactly his joys and sorrows, his aims, successes and failures are. They do not, for instance, even suspect the pleasure which Gogol mentions and which consists of castigating oneself and one’s faults in the imaginary characters one depicts; they are quite sure that all a writer does is to ‘develop his ideas’ … Let me illustrate my meaning by a small example. I am an inveterate and incorrigible Westerner. I have never concealed it and I am not concealing it now. And yet in spite of that it has given me great pleasure to show up in the person of Panshin [a character in A House of Gentlefolk] all the common and vulgar sides of the Westerners: I made the Slavophil Lavretsky ‘crush him utterly’. Why did I do it, I who consider the Slavophil doctrine false and futile? Because, in the given case, life, according to my ideas, happened to be like that, and what I wanted above all was to be sincere and truthful.

In depicting Bazarov’s personality, I excluded everything artistic from the range of his sympathies, I made him express himself in harsh and unceremonious tones, not out of an absurd desire to insult the younger generation, but simply as a result of my observations of people like him … My personal predilections had nothing to do with it. But I expect many of my readers will be surprised if I tell them that with the exception of Bazarov’s views on art, I share almost all his convictions.

And in another essay, Turgenev sums up: ‘The life that surrounds him [the writer] provides him with the content of his works; he is its concentrated reflection; but he is as incapable of writing a panegyric as a lampoon … When all is said and done — that is beneath him. Only those who can do no better submit to a given theme or carry out a programme.’

These conditions about which I have been talking are the special, though common ones of writers beleaguered in the time of the bomb and the colour bar, as they were in the time of the jackboot and rubber truncheon, and, no doubt, back through the ages whose shameful symbols keep tally of oppression in the skeleton cupboard of our civilisations.

Other conditions, more transient, less violent, affect the freedom of a writer’s mind.

What about literary fashion, for example? What about the cycle of the innovator, the imitators, the debasers, and then the bringing forth of an innovator again? A writer must not be made too conscious of literary fashion, any more than he must allow himself to be inhibited by the mandarins, if he is to get on with work that is his own. I say ‘made conscious’ because literary fashion is a part of his working conditions; he can make the choice of rejecting it, but he cannot choose whether it is urged upon him or not by publishers and readers, who do not let him forget he has to eat.

That rare marvel, an innovator, should be received with shock and excitement. And his impact may set off people in new directions of their own. But the next innovator rarely, I would almost say never, comes from his imitators, those who create a fashion in his image. Not all worthwhile writing is an innovation, but I believe it always comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. The pursuit may stem from a tradition, but a tradition implies a choice of influence, whereas a fashion makes the influence of the moment the only one for all who are contemporary to it.

A writer needs all these kinds of freedom, built on the basic one of freedom from censorship. He does not ask for shelter from living, but for exposure to it without possibility of evasion. He is fiercely engaged with life on his own terms, and ought to be left to it, if anything is to come of the struggle. Any government, any society — any vision of a future society — that has respect for its writers must set them as free as possible to write in their own various ways, in their own choices of form and language, and according to their own discovery of truth.

Again, Turgenev expresses this best: ‘Without freedom in the widest sense of the word — in relation to oneself … indeed, to one’s people and one’s history, a true artist is unthinkable; without that air, it is impossible to breathe.’

And I add my last word: In that air alone, commitment and creative freedom become one.

1976

English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa

Speaking of South Africa, the association of politics with literature produces a snap equation: censorship. But is that the beginning and end of my subject? Indeed, it may be the end, in a literal sense, of a book or a writer: the book unread, the writer silenced. But censorship is the most extreme, final, and above all, most obvious effect of politics upon a literature, rather than the sum of the subject. Where and when, in a country such as South Africa, can the influence of politics on literature be said to begin? Politics, in the form of an agent of European imperialism — the Dutch East India Company — brought the written word to this part of Africa; politics, in the form of European missionaries who spread along with their Protestantism or Catholicism the political influence of their countries of origin, led to the very first transposition of the indigenous oral literature to the written word. When the first tribal praise-poem was put down on paper, what a political act that was! What could be communicated only by the mouth of the praise-singer to the ears of those present, was transmogrified into a series of squiggles on paper that could reach far beyond his living physical presence, beyond even the chain of memory of those who came after him. With that act a culture took hold upon and was taken hold upon by another.

Does not the subject begin quite simply, right there? And does not it extend, not simply at all, through the cultural isolation of whites who left their Europe over three centuries ago as the result of political events such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Napoleonic wars, the pogroms of Eastern Europe; does it not extend through the cultural upheaval of blacks under conquest; and the cultural ambiguity of the children one race fathered upon the other? The relationship of politics to literature in South Africa implies all of this, just as it does the overtly political example of writers forced into exile, and the subsequent development of their writings within the changed consciousness of exile. For some books are banned, and so South Africans never read them. But all that is and has been written by South Africans is profoundly influenced, at the deepest and least controllable level of consciousness, by the politics of race. All writers everywhere, even those like Joyce who cannot bear to live in their own countries, or those like Genet who live outside the pale of their country’s laws, are shaped by their own particular society reflecting a particular political situation. Yet there is no country in the Western world where the daily enactment of the law reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South Africa. There is no country in the Western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the overall social determination of racial laws.

I am not going to devote any time, here, to outlining or discussing how the Publications Control Board, the censorship system, works in South Africa. I take it that anyone interested in South African literature is familiar with the facts. But lest it be thought that I pass over that matter of censorship lightly, let me remark aside that personally, although I myself have continued and shall continue to bang my head in protesting concert against that particular brick in the granite wall, my fundamental attitude is that South Africans cannot expect to rid themselves of the Publications Control Board until they get rid of apartheid. Censorship is an indispensable part of an interlocking system of repressive laws.

There are other forms of censorship in South Africa. Anyone under a political ban may not be published or quoted; which means that the books of a number of white writers in exile, and those of a number of black writers in exile and at home, are automatically banned, no matter what their subject or form. Through this kind of censorship, the lively and important group of black writers who burst into South African literature in the 1950s and early 1960s disappeared from it as if through a trap door. A young black writer, Don Mattera, went the same way in 1973. Only those of us who care particularly for literature and writers remember; by the time the newspaper has been left behind on the breakfast table, most people have forgotten the banned authors and books listed there — the ultimate triumph of censorship.

I have said that South African literature was founded in an unrecorded political act: the writing down in Roman characters of some tribal praise-song. But the potted histories in DLitt theses always set its beginning with the writings of a white settler, an Englishman, Thomas Pringle. He was born the year the French Revolution started and came to South Africa in 1820, under the British government scheme of assisted immigration resorted to because of the agricultural depression in England that followed Waterloo. For we white South Africans may somewhat unkindly be called, as Norman Mailer did his fellow Americans, ‘a nation of rejects transplanted by the measure of every immigration of the last three hundred and fifty years’. Pringle led a Scottish party to settle on the border of the so-called Neutral Territory of the Cape from which the Xhosa people had been driven. Thus far, he is a classic white frontiersman; but this Scottish scribbler of album verse at once felt the awkward necessity to adapt his late Augustan diction and pastoral sentimentality to the crude events of Africa.

First the brown Herder with his flock

Comes winding round my hermit-rock

His mien and gait and vesture tell,

No shepherd he from Scottish fell;

For crook the guardian gun he bears,

… Nor Flute has he, nor merry song …

But, born the White man’s servile thrall,

Knows that he cannot lower fall.

Pringle was never quite to find the adequate vocabulary for what moved him to write in Africa (Coleridge deplored his archaisms), but he astonishingly anticipated themes that were not to be taken up again by any writer in South Africa for a hundred years, and longer. Unlike the majority of his fellow frontiersmen, he refused to regard the cattle raids carried out by the Xhosa as proof that they were irredeemable savages. In a poem entitled ‘The Caffer’ he asks awkward questions of the whites.

He is a robber? — True; it is a strife

Between the black-skinned bandit and the white,

(A Savage? — Yes, though loth to aim at life,

Evil for evil fierce he doth requite.

A heathen? — Teach him, then, thy better creed,

Christian! If thou deserv’st that name indeed.)

He foreshadowed the contemporary South African liberal view, obliquely comforting to the white conscience, but none the less true, that any form of slavery degrades oppressor as well as oppressed:

The Master, though in luxury’s lap he loll … quakes

with secret dread, and shares the hell he makes.

Pringle was one of the first and is one of the few whites ever to grant that blacks also have their heroes. He wrote a poem about the Xhosa prophet Makana who led an army of 10,000 tribesmen on the British Settlement at Grahamstown in 1819:

Wake! Amakosa, wake!

And arm yourselves for war.

As coming winds the forest shake,

I hear a sound from far:

It is not thunder in the sky,

Nor lion’s roar upon the hill

But the voice of HIM who sits on high

And bids me speak his will

… To sweep the White Men from the earth

And drive them to the sea.

Pringle even wrote of love across the colour line, long before miscegenation laws made it a statutory crime and the so-called Immorality Act provided the theme of so many South African novels and stories:

A young Boer speaks:

‘… Our Father bade each of us choose a mate

Of Fatherland blood, from the black taint free

As became a Dutch Burgher’s proud degree.

My brothers they rode to the Bovenland,

And each came with a fair bride back in his hand;

But I brought the handsomest bride of them all—

Brown Dinah, the bondmaid who sat in our hall.

My Father’s displeasure was stern and still;

My Brothers’ flamed forth like a fire on the hill;

And they said that my spirit was mean and base,

To lower myself to the servile race.’

And the young Boer asks,

‘… dear Stranger, from England the free,

What good tidings bring’st thou for Arend Plessie?

Shall the Edict of Mercy be sent forth at last,

To break the harsh fetters of Colour and Caste?’

Pringle himself was back in England the free after only six years in South Africa, hounded out of the Cape Colony by the English Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, for his fight against press censorship introduced to protect the British colonial regime against any mention of those controversial issues of the time, slavery, the condition of the blacks, and the anti-British feelings of the Boers …

After Pringle is packed off ‘home’ in 1826, a long colonial silence falls. Diaries are kept, chronicles are written by white missionaries and settlers, but no soundings are put down to the depths reached only by imaginative writing until Olive Schreiner writes The Story of an African Farm in the 1880s. It is a very famous book and one that, as a South African remembering it as a mind-opening discovery of adolescence, one tends to think of as all-encompassing: that is to say, that final accomplishment, the central themes of South African life given unafraid and yet non-exhibitionist expression by a writer whose skill is equal to them. But reading it again, and it is a book that stands up to re-reading, one finds that of course it is not that at all. It is one of those open-ended works whose strength lies at the level where human lives, our own and the book’s characters, plunge out of grasp. The freedom that Lyndall, one of the two extraordinary main characters, burns for, is not the black man’s freedom but essentially spiritual freedom in the context of the oppression of women through their sexual role; yet the passion of revolt is so deeply understood that it seems to hold good for all sufferings of oppression. The society Lyndall rejects is the shallow white frontier society; yet the rejection questions societal values that gave rise to it and will endure beyond it. It is a book whites in South Africa like to think of also as transcending politics; I have never met a black who has read it, with, ironically, the important exception of Richard Rive, who has just completed a book about Olive Schreiner’s life and work. Certainly no black could ever have written African Farm. The alienation of Lyndall’s longing to ‘realise forms of life utterly unlike mine’ is attempted transcendance of the isolation and lack of identity in a white frontier society; in the final analysis, this is a book that expresses the wonder and horror of the wilderness, and for the indigenous inhabitant that wilderness is home. The novel exists squarely within the political context of colonialism. Olive Schreiner’s conscience was to reject colonialism, and her creative imagination to disappear in the sands of liberal pamphleteering, many years later. Perhaps she would have written no more imaginative work, anyway. But perhaps she took the conscious decision that Jean Paul Sartre, in the context of the Pan-African struggle, has said any writer should make, to stop writing if he is needed to do any other task that, as he sees it, his country requires of him. It is certain that political pressures, in the form of a deep sense of injustice and inhumanity existing within their society, can cause certain writers to question the luxury value of writing at all, within a country like South Africa.

The establishment of South African literature in English and (so far as it existed) in African languages as a literature of dissent came in the 1920s and early 1930s. The white man’s military conquest of the blacks was over. The war between the whites, Boer and Briton, was over; the white man’s other war, in which Boer and black had fought under the British flag along with the Briton, was over. In the State of Union of the four South African countries, the British Cape Colony and Natal, the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, blacks had been deprived of such rights as they had held at the pleasure of the more liberal of the separate governments. The black man’s trusting willingness to identify his destiny with the white man’s expressed in the victory praise-song-cum-poem of Samuel Mqhayi, a Khosa poet of the time, assumed a common black — white patriotism after the 1914–18 war:

Go catch the Kaiser, Let the Kaiser come and talk with us

We’ll tell him how the Zulus won at Sandlwana

Of Thaba Ntsu where the Boers were baffled …

The assumption was met with rebuff and betrayal; only white men could be heroes, at home or in Valhalla.

Then William Plomer, aged nineteen, published in 1925 a work of genius, a forced flower fertilised upon an immature talent by reaction against racialism now entrenched under the name of a union of the best interests of all people in South Africa. Turbott Wolfe (Plomer’s hero as well as the title of the novel) trails the torn umbilical cord of colonialism; Wolfe is not a born South African but an Englishman who plunges into Africa from without. But he understands at once: ‘There would be the unavoidable question of colour. It is a question to which every man in Africa, black, white or yellow, must provide his answer.’ The colonial cord is ruptured, early on and for ever, for South African literature because Plomer’s novel does not measure Africa against the white man, but the white man against Africa. With it, a new literary consciousness was born: that no writer could go deeply into the life around him and avoid some sort of answer. Laurens van der Post’s In a Province is awake to it, concerned with modern Africans in conflict with white-imposed values rather than Africans as exotic scenic props in the white man’s story. So, fighting against it all the way, is Sarah Gertrude Millin’s God’s Stepchildren. This extraordinarily talented novel begs the question, as a kind of answer, by revealing the morality South Africa has built on colour and the suffering this brings to people of mixed blood, but nowhere suggesting that the sense of sin suffered by Barry Lindsell, play-white grandson of a white missionary and a Hottentot woman, is tragically, ludicrously and wastefully misplaced, until Barry Lindsell confesses to his young English wife that he has black blood and she says in surprised relief: ‘Is that all?’ Meanwhile, the novel has shown that it is, indeed, everything, in the life around her from which the author drew her substance.

Roy Campbell was the third of the famous triumvirate Plomer, van der Post, Campbell, who began in the 1920s the tradition of exile, often self-imposed, that has afflicted South African literature with terrible blood-lettings ever since. Although accepted and anthologised as one of those who, in his words about William Plomer, ‘dared alone to thrash a craven race/And hold a mirror to its dirty face’, Campbell provides a fascinating example of the strange and complex mutations brought about by the effect of politics upon writers and literature in South Africa.

Campbell was a writer whose work may be lifted like a transparency to show against the light certain dark and tangled motivations where politics and the psyche struggle to accommodate one another in the South African personality. It is there that South African defence mechanisms are made. We shall see them reflected in the work of other writers, too, subconsciously producing work in answer to the need for various justificatory myths of political origin. It is believed — certainly Campbell believed — that he left South Africa because the colour bar was abhorrent to him. In his poetry, he made biting and elegant attacks on white complacency. He wrote sensuously incomparable poems about blacks. But he dismissed political and social aspirations with indiscriminate contempt as ‘the spoor and droppings of … the crowd emotions’. The attributes of the brave black hunter with which he identified were elitist rather than humanitarian, let alone egalitarian; in the context of a white man’s life, employed only for play, in blood sports, not dictated by hunger, as for tribal Africans themselves.

I would say that Campbell left South Africa out of vanity; he did not think the whites capable of appreciating his genius. It was true; they were not. But his work did not ally itself in any way with the destiny of the blacks either, in whose hands the culture of South Africa must ultimately become definitive. The brilliant satirical poet South Africa has never replaced ended as the last colonial, romanticising himself as ‘African’ abroad, and irrevocably cut off from all but the white majority he rejected at home.

Campbell’s justificatory myth was tailored to an individual need. But Pauline Smith, living in the 1920s in the isolation of the Karroo as Schreiner did before her, created a justificatory myth of the Afrikaner people that continues to answer, in literature, to certain political pressures to this day. I must interrupt myself here to explain that I use the word ‘myth’ not in its primary dictionary sense of a purely fictitious narrative, but in the sense the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss does, as a psychologically defensive and protective device. A myth is an extra-logical explanation of events according to the way a people wishes to interpret them.

Pauline Smith, a writer of Chekovian delicacy, was not an Afrikaner and she wrote in English. She wrote of rural Afrikaners, in whom her stories see poverty as a kind of grace rather than a limiting circumstance. Why? I believe that she was faithfully reflecting not a fundamental Christian view, but the guilt of the victor (British) over the vanquished (Boer), and also the curious shame that sophistication feels confronted by naivety, thus interpreting it as ‘goodness’. One of the characters’ main virtues is their total unfitness to deal with the industrial society that is going to come upon them with their defeat by the British. Her famous story ‘The Pain’ shows an old man and his dying wife terrified even by the workings of a hospital; the husband’s humbleness is emphasised almost to the point of imbecility. This virtue in helplessness, in the situation of being overwhelmed by poverty, drought, economic depression, was to become a justificatory myth, in literature, of the Afrikaner in relation to the development of his part in the politics of domination. Based on it, at least in part, is the claim of Afrikaners to be a white African tribe; from Pauline Smith’s The Little Karroo stories, through the long series of stoic novels in Afrikaans that André Brink has called ‘a literature of drought and poor whites’, to the tender and witty stories of an Afrikaner writing in English, Herman Charles Bosman, are Afrikaners not shown living close to the earth and natural disasters as any black man? The measure of poverty as a positive value, and the romanticising of pre-industrialism into a moral virtue are important aspects of Athol Fugard’s plays, when these are about whites: his white characters are the children of Pauline Smith’s rural Afrikaners, forced to the towns by drought and economic depression, and their virtues lie in their helplessness, their clinging to the past, and their defeat by an ‘English’-dominated industrial society. How can such people be held responsible for the degradation that racialism imposes upon the blacks? They themselves represent victims within the white supremacist society itself; are they then not in the same boat as blacks?

Yet these are the people who, like English-speaking South African whites, conquered the blacks, who built a national pride out of their defeat by the British. These are the people whose votes gained political power and legislated, once and for all, the white man’s will to overlordship.

It is an ironic illustration of the effect of South African politics upon literature to remark that while, in the 1920s, Plomer and van der Post were writing novels exposing the colour bar, they probably were not so much as aware of the existence of two remarkable fellow novelists of the time. These novelists were black. Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, written in Sesuto about 1910, was published in English in 1931, and is as extraordinary an achievement in terms of the writer’s background, if not his age, as Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe. It is, of course, a very different novel, in a way that was to be significant of the difference between white liberal or radical writings and the work of black writers themselves. It is written not about blacks, but as a black man. It is both a historical and political novel, based on fact and legend about the great nineteenth-century king Chaka, and its theme is dealt with in accordance with the author’s own sense of the innate conflict in invoking Christian values to interpret an African power struggle. Mofolo, writing for original publication in a missionary journal, tried to approach the life of Chaka, the great despot, the Black Napoleon, as whites have called him, in the light of the Christian text: ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ But although Mofolo presents Chaka’s brutal conquering excesses against his own people as sinful blood-lust, they also represent the neurotic paroxysm of a dying nation, turning to rend itself before colonial conquest. When the spears of fratricidal assassins are meeting in Chaka’s body, Mofolo has him cry: ‘It is your hope that by killing me ye will become chiefs when I am dead. But ye are deluded; it will not be so, for uMlungu [the white man] will come and it is he who will rule and ye will be his bondmen.’

The guns of white conquest are cocked over Mofolo’s novel, but there are no white characters in it. In Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, also based on historical events, and set slightly later in the nineteenth century, uMlungu makes his entry for the first time in South African black literature. The Boers appear, trekking north, travelling with their families in hooded wagons and driving with their caravan their wealth of livestock into the hinterland in search of some unoccupied territory to colonise and to worship God in peace.

‘But’, asked Chief Moroka, ‘could you not worship God on the South of the Orange River?’

‘We could’, replied Cillier, ‘but oppression is not conducive to piety. We are after freedom. The English laws of the Cape are not fair to us.’

‘We Barolong have always heard that, since David and Solomon, no king has ruled so justly as King George of England!’

‘It may be so’, replied the Boer leader, ‘but there are always two points of view. The point of view of the ruler is not always the view point of the ruled.’

Quite. Despite its stylistic crudities, the novel skilfully explores the white man’s double standard slyly posited here. Barolong and Boer find a temporary identity of interest in military alliance against the armies of another African tribe, Mzilikazi’s Matabele; but once the battle is won, the white man expects to dictate the sharing of spoils, keeping the land for the Boers and handing over the captured cattle to the Barolong. ‘What an absurd bargain,’ says the Chief; ‘will cattle run on clouds, and their grass grow on air?’

Similarly, although the white men all fight alongside the blacks, they wanted no personal relations with them. Juxtaposed with the power struggle between white and black there is in this book the sort of dream of its resolution in non-military, non-revolutionary, non-political terms that was to become the particular justificatory myth given expression by white liberal writers thirty years after Plaatje: a friendship between a young black and a young white. It is the literary wish-fulfilment of what South African society could be, would be, if only the facts of the power struggle conveniently could be ignored. The proposition cancels itself out. Ignored, the facts remain; they are not to be changed by turning to loving without changing the balance of power, to paraphrase Alan Paton’s prophetic dictum in Cry, The Beloved Country, that by the time the whites have turned to loving, the blacks will have turned to hating. The apocryphal black — white brotherhood perhaps reached its symbolical apotheosis in Athol Fugard’s tragedy as the Blood Knot between two men who are actual brothers, the skin of one reflecting the white side of their ancestry, the other the black. This friendship is a justificatory myth that embodies the yearning of many whites, and even some blacks, to escape the ugly implications of a society in which such apparently transcendental private relationships are in fact pretty meaningless, trapped in political determinism. Several of my own books explore these implications. In Occasion for Loving a young Englishwoman destroys a black man by indulging in a love affair with him and whose flouting of the power of segregation laws leaves him, once she has gone back to England, exactly where he was: carrying a pass and drinking himself to death in the black ghetto. The prototype friendship of Ra-Thaga and Viljoen, Barolong and Boer boys in Sol Plaatje’s novel, survives until Viljoen sincerely offers Re-Thaga all that a white man can, in a white-orientated society: ‘I will catch Mzilikazi alive, and tie him to the wagon wheel; then Potgieter will make me his captain, and you will be my right-hand man.’ And Ra-Thaga sincerely rejects the hand-out: ‘Oh no! … what would my children think of me if I were to be the right-hand man of a wifeless youth?’

South African literature seems to have developed by curious fits and starts; the explanation lies close to political developments in the country. In the 1930s and 1940s, of those writers whose work had been the most innovative in the 1920s, Plomer and van der Post were in exile, and Millin had turned her stridently detached attention mainly to the domestic dramas of Pauline Smith’s poor whites now becoming industrialised in town. There were no more novels from Mofolo or Plaatje. Nor did any black writer emerge to follow their bold example of how black writers might, as Claude Wauthier suggests in his The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, reaffirm their origins, and use their present position. Why?

We have to look for an answer in the situation of black intellectuals at the time. With General Hertzog’s ‘final solution’ to the ‘native question’, as exemplified in laws such as the Land Act of 1936, blacks were beginning to realise that Booker Washington faith in education as a means of gaining acceptance and a share in a common society was getting them nowhere in South Africa. The eloquence of a scholarly leader like Dr Jabavu had not succeeded in gaining a recognition of civil rights for blacks when the constitution of the South African Union had been drawn up more than twenty-five years before; the eloquence of a Benedict Vilakazi, outstanding Zulu poet of the 1930s and 1940s, did not succeed in rousing the white man to recognition of the black man’s humanity, although he had the courage to tackle subjects such as the condition of black labour. A creative apathy took over among blacks, born of frustration; and not for the last time.

By way of comparison, for Afrikaner writers, this was a period of consolidation, through literature, of the importance of their possession of a mother tongue distinct from those imported from Europe. In a movement that finds its parallel only with the negritude movement among Caribbean and American negroes, and Africans outside South Africa, Afrikaners were engaged in affirming their political claim through a cultural identity. Afrikaans had been a patois; it became a language rich enough to be a literary language, hand over fist, so to speak, with their climb to political power. Fine Afrikaner poets, such as Langenhoven, made it so; others, such as van Wyck Louw and Uys Krige, internationalised it by bringing consciousness of the literary developments of the world outside into its orbit, in the field of poetry. The novelists continued to sing the saga of the rural Afrikaner, dealing with the black man as with the elements.

From the English-speaking population, little came but some poetry, sometimes fine, but often widely generalised in emotion, rather boring ontological thoughts on the Second World War. The war years had the effect, inhibitory to the development of an indigenous literature, of throwing the country back upon cultural links with Europe.

So far as it had become a literature of dissent, although it was soon to build up to its strongest impetus ever, South African literature began again, post-war, at a position somewhere behind that of William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe. It made a new beginning with Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, which suggested the need for a Christian solution to the political problem of racialism. It was a book of lyrical beauty and power that moved the conscience of the outside world over racialism, and, what is more, that of white South Africa, as no book had before. Turbott Wolfe was too radical for them, and no piece of writing was to move them again until the advent of Athol Fugard’s plays, Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The decade and a half through the 1950s to the mid-1960s produced a paradox between English-language literature and politics. The Afrikaner Nationalists, who were to formulate, codify and implement long-entrenched colour prejudice as apartheid, had come to power in 1948, and yet it was while this final processing of racialism was in progress that a wave of new South African writers, white and black, suddenly appeared to dig deep into the subsoil of South African society and give expression, in the dimensions of the creative imagination, to the kind of answers that ‘every man, black, white or yellow’ had given to Turbott Wolfe’s ‘question of colour’. Peter Abrahams, whose talent was given initial encouragement by white leftists (for so many years the only whites prepared to take seriously the possibility of a black writer being more than a sort of quaint freak, a literary albino) wrote the first proletarian novel, Mine Boy, the story of a tribal black man confronted with the twin experience of industrialisation and race discrimination in a city. My first novel, The Lying Days, published in 1953, was essentially about an experience many young white South Africans have shared. They are born twice: the second time when, through situations that differ with each individual, they emerge from the trappings of colour-consciousness that were as ‘natural’ to them as the walls of home and school. Dan Jacobson returned South African literature to the Karoo, in his brilliant first novel, A Dance in the Sun, making of the old colonial wilderness the stony ground of self-deception, doubt and questioning. The emphasis is on what happens to whites as oppressors. White Fletcher’s attitude to black Joseph, whose wife has had a brat fathered on her by Fletcher’s brother-in-law, is shown as the whole process of action and interaction between the personality of a man and the morality within which it exercises itself. The old woman in Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope, a later novel exploring the same moral theme, this time through a variation of Thomas Pringle’s prophetic ‘Brown Dinah’ story, states a conclusion: ‘We are not as other people any more.’ Jack Cope, in a novel called Albino, made an ingenious attempt to sidestep the white writer’s problems of politically decreed isolation within his white skin, by writing a novel about a young white boy brought up as a Zulu, in the words of one of the characters, ‘a white with a black mind’.

But blacks were beginning again to write about themselves. Not in terms of the epic past but in direct terms of the present. The central experience of urban life on the dark side of the colour bar was bringing to paper ‘the stench of real living people’, as one of those writers, Lewis Nkosi, has said. The short stories of Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, carried in Mphahlele’s case by a sullen force, and in those of Themba and others jigged with a jaunty wit and self-lacerating humour, reflected survival characteristics developed by the nature of life in those human conglomerations, neither city nor suburb, now called black townships but once more accurately called ‘locations’, since they are sites chosen by whites to dump blacks outside the city limits, after work, just as they choose sites well out of the way for the city trash heap. Lewis Nkosi, in Home and Exile, a book of essays and literary criticism unique in South African literature, where literary criticism can scarcely be said to exist, wrote from the acrobatic position peculiar to African intellectuals in the 1950s, the audacious one of a young black who has a foot in the white liberal world and the other holding his place in the black proletariat of the ‘township’. None of these writers, though undoubtedly their boldness was a reflection of confidence stemming from the existence of such movements, gave direct expression to the black liberatory movements that drew mass support at the time, the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress. Subconsciously, their writings were aimed at white readers, to rouse white consciousness to black frustration. Even in the writings of the most talented black novelist since Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma, who was a political activist, and in the poetry of Dennis Brutus, both later to be political prisoners on Robben Island, there was no overt commitment to a particular political line, nor did they use the vocabulary of political clichés. La Guma’s moving novel A Walk In the Night, like his short stories set in prisons, backyards and cheap cafés, presents men and women who don’t talk about apartheid; they bear its weals, so that its flesh-and-blood meaning becomes a shocking, sensuous impact. Few South Africans have been exposed to it, however; La Guma was a banned writer before it was ever published, abroad. As the black — white political tension rose, exploded at Sharpeville and culminated in mass imprisonments and the outlawing of black political movements, all these writers and more, with few exceptions, were forced into exile.

Work by white writers who tried to trace, through imaginative insights, in terms of political, social and spiritual options open to South African whites, the motivation of the young whites who turned to sabotage against the regime in the late 1960s, was banned. My novel The Late Bourgeois World, Mary Benson’s At The Still Point, Jack Cope’s The Dawn Comes Twice, C. J. Driver’s Elegy for a Revolutionary, none of these has been read by South Africans themselves, who lived through the experience of that period. It all happened; it certainly exists within their memory; it does not officially exist in South African literature.

Again, by comparison, how was writing in Afrikaans developing in the 1960s? The changes were regarded as so fundamental that the era gave a generic term to the writers who emerged, the Sestigers (the Sixty-ers). In the words of one of them, André Brink, ‘a conscious effort was made to broaden the hitherto parochial limits of Afrikaans fiction’, to challenge certain cultural taboos in Afrikanerdom: the Calvinist taboos on uncompromising religious exploration and the challenging of old, especially sexual, moralities. Against the background events of a country that seemed on the brink of a revolution, the Sestigers preoccupied themselves with just precisely these things, and with William Burroughs-inspired experiment in literary form. They challenged with sexual candour and religious questioning, taunting the church and the Afrikaans Academy of Letters; but the evidence that not one of them published anything that was banned shows how they turned away, astonishingly, from the deepest realities of the life going on around them. The Sestigers’ outstanding prose writer, and indeed the most sweeping imaginative power in South African literature as a whole, Etienne le Roux, makes the lofty claim that his trilogy, Towards a Dubious Salvation, is a ‘metaphysical’ novel; but if a writer is part of the creative consciousness of the society in which he lives, is it not a form of betrayal, of creative as well as human integrity, to choose to turn away from the messy confrontation of man with man, and address oneself to God? In fact, reading this dazzling book, you sometimes have the feeling that Etienne le Roux is God, an infinitely detached Olympian observer, amusing himself by recording all those absurd and dirtily flamboyant little battles and copulations way, way down on earth.

Only in 1974, for the first time, has a book by an Afrikaans writer been banned. André Brink has written a novel that breaks the political taboos answering the challenge he himself published in a newspaper five years ago: ‘If Afrikaans writing is to achieve any true significance within the context of the revolution of Africa (of which we form part) … it seems to me that it will come from those who are prepared to sling the “No!” of Antigone into the violent face of the System.’ Not unpredictably, his novel suffers from the defiant exultation and relief of that cry, coming so belatedly from the Afrikaans novel, looting a newly seized freedom of expression on whose validity the seal of ‘banned’ was almost sure to be set. Perhaps it was inevitable that this novel should demand of its creator that it encompass all that is forbidden in the ninety-seven definitions of what the Censorship Act finds ‘undesirable’; that it should roll up pell-mell all the forbidden themes and many of the cliché situations written about already by others. It follows that this novel cannot do André Brink justice, as a writer. Yet its exaggeration, its stylistic piling-up of words, images, events, like a series of blows — Take that! and that! and that! — remind one of the works of certain black South African writers, in which the truth is in the excesses and even absurdities because this is the fantasy bred by our society; it is the truth as evidence of the kind of nightmares that grow out of our kind of daylight.

That ‘No!’ of Antigone has come out loud and clear from Afrikaans literature once only before, and from a poet, Ingrid Jonker. Somehow she managed, without compromising her great gifts, to write a poem of the 1960s that sets the era’s events in a perspective that takes in past and present and projects the future as no writer, black or white, has done after her. The poem refers to the pass-burning campaigns of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress, when women and children were killed in the course of police and military action.

The child is not dead

the child lifts his fists against his mother

who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath

of freedom and the veld

in the locations of the cordoned heart.

The child lifts his fists against his father

In the march of the generations who are shouting Afrika! shout the breath

of righteousness and blood

in the streets of his embattled pride.

The child is not dead

not at Langa nor at Nyanga

nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville

nor at the police post in Philippi

where he lies with a bullet through his brain.

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers

on guard with their rifles, saracens and batons

the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving

the child peers through the window of houses and into the hearts of mothers

this child who wanted only to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere

the child grown to a man treks on through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world

Without a pass.

What is the position of South African literature in the mid-1970s, the era of Bantustan independence within the country while former guerrilla movements become constitutional governments in countries round about; the era of dialogue on black — white federalism; of streaky, if not exactly thoroughly mixed sport; and of the re-emergence of mass black action in the form of striking labour forces? The series of blood-lettings over the years, writers going into exile, emphasises the enormous influence of politics on literature not only in the obvious way, that so many writers are in imposed or self-imposed exile, but also in the state of South African society as reflected in their work if they continue to live here in South Africa, as opposed to the vision of the place held by writers now removed from the actual scene. A writer as immensely gifted as Dan Jacobson, after a series of novels rooted ‘from memory’ so to speak, in South Africa, has begun to write novels thematically remote from it. A liberation, of a kind …? Alex La Guma, in the gentle, beautifully written In the Fog at the Season’s End, writes, like so many black exiles, as if life in South Africa froze with the trauma of Sharpeville. Since he is a good writer, he cannot create at the newspaper-story level, and cannot, from abroad, quite make the projection, at the deepest level, into a black political milieu that has changed so much since he left. Ezekiel Mphahlele’s novel, The Wanderers, also suffers from this lack of connection. Only the poet Dennis Brutus seems to have drawn strength from the ‘bitter bread of exile’ and to have developed his gifts fully, if perhaps differently from the way he might have at home. In a collection of poems that places him perhaps higher in achievement than any of the younger generation, Arthur Nortje, exiled and dead before his book Dead Roots was published two years ago, writes the spiritual autobiography of exile on the most harrowing level. In the end, he who has had to make do with crumbs from the white man’s table at home may find no stomach left for Europe’s bounty:

I drag my shrunken corpulence

among the tables of rich libraries.

Famous viands tasted like ash …

These are the terrors of exile, for a writer; and the decimation of a literature.

At home, significant South African drama in English has been created, single-handed, by Athol Fugard. The obvious major influence of Beckett on his work is a fascinating example of an esoteric mode, in which character is sacrificed to symbolic abstraction, and dialogue largely disembodied, returned to flesh and the individual involved rather than alienated. This is an interesting example of a writer’s methodological response to his socio-political situation.

Of the new novelists, few and far between, who have emerged lately, a black one, Bessie Head, in exile but still on the continent of Africa, expresses an indiscriminate repugnance for all political aspirations in all races, and a white one at home, Sheila Fugard, takes into the arcane realm of Buddhist mysticism the old white liberal justificatory myth of the power of love to melt racialism. One of the two most interesting newcomers, J. M. Coetzee, with his two-part novel, Dusklands, links the behaviouristic conditioning of peoples by other peoples as a congenital flaw in human nature. His first narrative, that of a South African working in 1970 as a United States government official on a ‘New Life Project’ for the people of Vietnam, posits the choice offered by the anthropologist Franz Boas: ‘if we wish to take over the direction of a society we must either guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose new structures’. It does not require much insight to understand where the reader’s eyes are being turned: to that other society, in South Africa, where both these techniques of socio-political manipulation have been tried upon the indigenous population. And this could lead us obediently to a conclusion: if white South Africans are no better, they are merely just as bad as other people with the will to follow up military with psychological conquest. Like them, they run the risk of losing their own souls in the contest; the narrator retreats into madness in which he has ‘high hopes of finding whose fault I am’.

The second narrative is a superbly written attempt of a dubious kind to which South African white writers are beginning to turn irresistibly, it seems, in unconscious search of a new justificatory myth: the explanation of the present in terms of the past; and therefore, does it not follow, a present as helplessly inexorable as the past? The narrator in this story set in 1760 goes hunting elephant and falls ill among hostile Hottentots. With a putrefying backside as the sum of his pain and humiliation, he enters the old Conradian heart of darkness. In order to survive, he must live as the people he despises as savages manage to live; he must admit, in himself, hideous instincts that he had attributed only to them. The final irony of some of his reflections would seem to make them those of a twentieth-century Coetzee, rather than an eighteenth-century one: ‘To these people [the Hottentots] for whom life was nothing but a series of accidents, had I not been simply another accident? Was there nothing to be done to make them take me more seriously?’ And again, ‘I am an explorer. My essence is to open what is closed, to bring to light what is dark. If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way.’ After his recovery and return to white settlement he goes back with a punitive expedition to the Hottentots who succoured and tortured him. He wipes them out in ‘the desolate infinity of my power over them’. The fatalism, the detachment borrowed from history in this novel are best signified by the choice of epigraph for the second narrative, a quotation from Flaubert: ‘What is important is the philosophy of history’.

Another newcomer, D. M. Zwelonke, apparently a member of Poqo, the underground wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, has written a first novel in exile after a spell on Robben Island. His book takes its title from and is set on that prison island where once Makana, the prophet who wanted to drive the white man into the sea, was also imprisoned. Much of the writing is naive and sometimes even nonsensical, but where he deals with the dreams and nightmares that spring from spare diet, solitary confinement and the repetitious labour of endless stone-breaking, no polished ‘imagining’ of the situation by anyone, even a black writer, could achieve his branding-iron impact. As for the book’s vision of the white man, here it is another new myth-making:

We have seen the mole and a curse has befallen us. There is a time-old legend that he who sees the mole shall hear of a friend’s relative’s death. An evil omen was forecast: we have seen the colonial monster in his bathroom, naked, playing with his penis and anus. In consequence he was enraged. He caught us and dragged us to Makana Island, and there we were his prisoners. A curse has fallen on us. He is like the mole because he cannot see. He gropes in the blind alley of the tragedy of history.

All this is a long, long way from the world of black writer Lewis Nkosi in the 1950s, the mixed parties where black and white argued politics, arms around each other’s necks, glass in hand … And it is the vision, too, that hovers in incantation over the resurrection of black writing after the apathetic post-Sharpeville silence induced by censorship and the relentless equation, in the minds of the Security Police, between black articulateness and subversion. I believe these new young black writers instinctively attempt poetry rather than prose because poetry is the means of literary expression least accessible to the rules of thumb employed by the Censorship Board. The deracination of their predecessors of the 1950s does not attract them; they are street-corner poets whose work reflects an affirmation of black identity aimed at raising black consciousness rather than rousing white consciousness to the black man’s plight. Blacks have seen white culture, naked, for what it has proved to be, for blacks: long posited as an absolute value, and eternally withheld from them. These writers are interpreting the assertion of a particular kind of black separatism which exists concurrently with, if discounted by, the official kind accepted in dialogue between Bantustan leaders and white leadership in and outside the South African government. Mongane Wally Serote makes the black claim to the right to dictate terms:

White people are white people

They must learn to listen.

Black people are black people

They must learn to talk.

Irony is perhaps the best literary mode of expression, where passionate assertion will not pass the censors. James Matthews’s book of poems Cry Rage! plumbs with passion not always matched by skill the hollowness of high-sounding apartheid terms such as ‘separate development’ and ‘surplus people’, but is banned. Another of these young poets, Don Mattera, has recently been picked off by being declared a banned person; one wonders how long the betterknown Adam Small, who, like Mattera, has taken the decision of many people of mixed blood to see themselves now as blacks rather than half-whites, will go on being published if along with that abandoned half-white status he also abandons the idea of love, always acceptable to whites, as a weapon of a struggle. Judging from some of his statements lately, I do not think he will again be writing in terms such as these:

You can stop me

goin’ to Groote Schuur

in the same ambulance

as you

or tryin’ to go Heaven

from a Groote Kerk pew

you can stop me doin’

some silly thing like that

but O

there’s somethin’ you can

never never do:

true’s God

you can stop me doin’

all silly things of that sort

and to think of it

if it comes to that

you can even stop me hatin’

but O

there’s somethin’

you can never never do—

you can’t

ever

ever

ever stop me

loving

even you!

In conclusion, to return to the situation in which all South African writers find themselves, whether black or white, writing in English, Afrikaans, Sesuto, Zulu, what-have-you — even if he successfully shoots the rapids of bannings and/or exile, any writer’s attempt to present in South Africa a totality of human experience within his own country is subverted before he sets down a word. As a white man, his fortune may change; the one thing he cannot experience is blackness, with all that implies in South Africa. As a black man, the one thing he cannot experience is whiteness, with all that that implies. Each is largely outside the other’s experience-potential. There is no social mobility across the colour line. The identification of class with colour means that breaching class barriers is breaking the law, and the indivisible class-colour barrier is much, much more effective, from the point of view of limiting the writer’s intimate knowledge of his society, than any class barrier has ever been. The black writer in South Africa writes from the ‘inside’ about the experience of the black masses, because the colour bar keeps him steeped in its circumstances, confined in a black township and carrying a pass that regulates his movements from the day he is born to the status of ‘piccanin’ to the day he is buried in a segregated cemetery. The white writer, aseptically quarantined in his test-tube elite existence, is cut off by enforced privilege from the greater part of the society in which he lives: the life of the proletariat, the nineteen millions whose potential of experience he does not share, from the day he is born ‘baas’ to the day he is buried in his segregated cemetery.

The black writer would seem to have the advantage here; there are only four million whites. But this compartmentalisation of society works both ways. The black writer is extremely limited in his presentation of white characters, witness the frequency with which his are no more than cardboard or caricature. What he cannot know about the white man’s life because of those large areas of the white experience he is excluded from by law, he supplies out of a fantasy distorted by resentment at the exclusion. The very force of the accusation he feels he must make against the white man sometimes loses the strength it should have. So it happens that you come across, in the work of a talented black writer, a white character so clumsily presented he seems to have no place in the work. A black South African, in exile in a nearby territory I visited recently, challenged my assertion that the presentation of white characters in work by black writers is limited by caricature: on the contrary, he countered, this is the way whites are, so far as blacks are concerned. I think he makes an interesting point. Caricature under these circumstances is perhaps not a deliberate distortion of the subject but a form of truth about those who see the subject that way. The idea relates to my own observation about André Brink’s novel.

In the work of white writers, you often get the same gap in experience between black and white lives compensated for by the projection of emotions about blacks into the creation of a black typology. Guilt is the prevailing emotion there; often it produces cardboard and unconscious caricature just as resentment does.

The eminent authority on comparative literature, Professor Harry Levin, defines cultural identity as ‘nothing more nor less than the mean between selfhood and otherness, between our respect for ourselves and our relationship with our fellow men and women’. The dilemma of a literature in a country like South Africa, where the law effectively prevents any real identification of the writer with his society as a whole, so that ultimately he can identify only with his colour, distorts this mean irreparably. And cultural identity is the ground on which the exploration of self in the imaginative writer makes a national literature.

1976

Letter from Soweto

I flew out of Johannesburg on a visit abroad two and a half months after the first black schoolchild was killed by a police bullet in Soweto. Since 16 June, when the issue of protest against the use of the Afrikaans language as a teaching medium in black schools, long ignored by the white authorities, finally received from them this brutal answer, concern had been the prevailing emotion in South Africa.

Concern is an overall bundle of like feelings in unlike people: horror, distress, anguish, anger — at its slackest manifestation, pity.

There was no white so condemnatory of black aspirations, so sure of a Communist plot as their sole source, that he or (more likely) she didn’t feel ‘sorry’ children had died in the streets. Black children traditionally have been the object of white sentimentality; it is only after the girls grow breasts and the boys have to carry the passbook that chocolate suddenly turns black.

There was no black so militant, or so weary of waiting to seize the day, that he or she did not feel anguish of regret at the sacrifice of children to the cause. Not even a mighty rage at the loathed police could block that out.

I was away for the month of September. Henry Kissinger came to South Africa to discuss the Rhodesia settlement with Mr Vorster; six children were killed while demonstrating against his presence. A day or two after I arrived home in October, a girl of fifteen was shot by police at the Cape. The six were already merely a unit of the (disputed) official figures of the dead (now 358), some adult but in the main overwhelmingly the young, in unrest that has spread from blacks to those of mixed blood, and all over the country by means of arson, homemade bomb attacks, boycotts and strikes. The fifteen-year-old girl was added to the list of fatalities; no one, I found, was shocked afresh at the specific nature of this casualty: the killing of a child by a police bullet.

Like the passing of a season, there was something no longer in the air. People had become accustomed, along with so much else unthinkable, to the death of children in revolt.

I try to recognise and set out the reasons for this acclimation before daily life here, however bizarre, makes me part of it.

When striking children met the police that Wednesday morning in June in the dirt streets of Soweto and threw stones that promptly drew bullets in return, who would have believed that the terrible lesson of white power would not be learned? The lesson for these children wasn’t free, any more than their schoolbooks are (white children get theirs for nothing); they paid with the short lives of some of their number. No one could conceive they would ever present themselves again, adolescent girls bobbing in gym frocks, youths in jeans, little barefoot boys with shirts hanging out as in a wild game of cops and robbers — to police who had shown they would shoot real bullets. But the children did. Again and again. They had taken an entirely different lesson: they had learned fearlessness.

Of course, white attitudes towards them began to change, even then. It was immediately assumed by the government and the majority of white people that since the issue of the Afrikaans language had been quickly conceded, and the children now demanded the abolition of the entire separate educational system for blacks, and then bluntly ‘everything whites get’, such intransigence must be the work of agitators. Among black people — among the outlawed liberation organisations inside and outside the country, and those perforce confined to balancing cultural liberation on a hair’s breadth of legality within it — all began to claim credit for the first popular uprising since the early sixties. No one will know, for years perhaps, how to apportion the influence of the banned African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress — their leadership in prison and exile — in the development of schoolchildren’s defiance into the classic manifestations of a general uprising.

Neither can one measure how much of the children’s determined strategy was planned by older students of the black university-based South African Students’ Organisation. There surely were — there are — agitators; if agitators are individuals able and articulate enough to transform the sufferings and grievances of their people into tactics for their liberation. There surely was — there is, has never ceased to be — the spirit of the banned political movements in the conceptual political attitudes and sense of self, passing unnamed and without attribution to their children from the tens of thousands who once belonged to the mass movements.

What neither the accusations of the white government nor the claims of black adult leadership will ever explain is how those children learned, in a morning, to free themselves of the fear of death.

Revolutionaries of all times, who know this is the freedom that brings with it the possibility of attaining all others, have despaired of finding a way of teaching it to more than a handful among their trained cadres. To ordinary people it is a state beyond understanding. We knew how to feel outrage or pity when we saw newspaper photographs of the first corpses of children caught by the horrible surprise of a death nobody believed, even in South Africa, would be meted out by the police. Blacks still burn with an anger whose depth has not yet been fathomed — it continues to show itself as it did at the Soweto funeral of Dumisani Mbatha, sixteen, who died in detention. Seven hundred mourners swelled to a crowd of 10,000 youths that burned 100,000 rands worth of the Johannesburg municipality’s vehicles and buildings. Yet — not without bewilderment, not without shame — black people have accepted that the weakest among them are the strongest, and thus by grim extension also accept the inconceivable: the death of children and adolescents has become a part of the struggle.

We whites do not know how to deal with the fact of this death when children, in full knowledge of what can happen to them, continue to go out to meet it at the hands of the law for which we are solely responsible, whether we support white supremacy or, opposing, have failed to unseat it.

When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war …

Olaudah Equiano, eighteenth-century black writer

White people have turned away from concern to a matter-of-fact preoccupation with self-protection. A Johannesburg parents’ committee has a meeting to discuss whether or not teachers at a suburban school should be armed, as they might once have planned a school fête. I bump into a friend who tells me, as if he were mentioning arrangements for a cattle show, that he and fellow farmers from a district on the outskirts of Johannesburg are gathering next day to set up an early warning system among themselves — one of them uses a two-way radio for cattle control, the gadget may come in handy.

Now it is not only the pistol-club matrons of Pretoria who regard guns as necessary domestic appliances. At the house of a liberal white couple an ancient rifle was produced the other evening, the gentle wife in dismay and confusion at having got her husband to buy it. Gunsmiths have long waiting lists for revolvers; 50 per cent of small arms come illegally from Iron Curtain countries who call for a total arms embargo against South Africa at the UN.

Certainly, in that house a gun was an astonishing sight. Pamphlets appear with threats to whites and their children; although the black movements repudiate such threats, this woman feels she cannot allow her anti-apartheid convictions to license failure to protect her children from physical harm. She needn’t have felt so ashamed. We are all afraid. How will the rest of us end up? Hers is the conflict of whites who hate apartheid and have worked in ‘constitutional’ ways to get rid of it. The quotes are there because there’s not much law-abiding virtue in sticking to a constitution like the South African one, in which only the rights of a white minority are guaranteed. Gandhi had our country in mind when he wrote, ‘The convenience of the powers that be is the law in the final analysis.’

My friend Professor John Dugard, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Witwatersrand University, says that if whites do not show solidarity with blacks against apartheid, their choice is to ‘join the white laager or emigrate’. Few, belonging to a country that is neither in the Commonwealth nor the Common Market, have the chance to emigrate. Of the laager — armed encampment — my friend David Goldblatt, the photographer, says to me: ‘How can we live in the position where, because we are white, there’s no place for us but thrust among whites whose racism we have rejected with disgust all our lives?’

There is not much sign that whites who want to commit themselves to solidarity with blacks will be received by the young anonymous blacks who daily prove the hand that holds the stone is the whip hand. They refuse to meet members of the Progressive Reform Party, who, while assuming any new society will be a capitalist one, go farther than any other white constitutional group in genuine willingness to share power with blacks. They will not even talk to white persons (there are still no white parties that recognise the basic principle of Western democracy although they would all call themselves upholders of the Western democratic system) who accept one man one vote and the rule by a black majority government as the aim of any solidarity, and understand, as John Dugard puts it, that ‘the free enterprise system is not the only system’ to be discussed.

The black moderate Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, whose position as a Bantustan leader fiercely attacking the government that appointed him has made him exactly the figure — legal but courageous — to whom whites have talked and through whom they hope to reach blacks, lately is reported to have made a remark about ‘white ultra-liberals who behave as though they are making friends with the crocodile so they will be the last to be eaten’. He also said, ‘Nobody will begrudge the Afrikaner his heritage if it is no threat to the heritage and freedom of other people.’ It seems old white adversaries might be accepted but white liberals will never be forgiven their inability to come to power and free blacks.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the whites he referred to would be those with the outstanding fighting record of Helen Suzman, let alone radical activists like Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute, and others, of the earlier generation of Bram Fischer, who have endured imprisonment and exile alongside blacks in the struggle.

If fear has taken over from concern among whites, it has rushed in to fill a vacuum. In nearly six months, nothing has been done to meet the desperate need of blacks that seems finally to have overcome every threat of punishment and repression: the need, once and for all and no less, to take their lives out of the hands of whites. The first week of the riots, Gatsha Buthelezi called for a national convention and the release of black leaders in prison to attend it. As the weeks go by in the smell of burning, the call for a national convention has been taken up by other Bantustan leaders, black urban spokesmen, the press, the white political opposition. After five months, the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, answered: ‘There will be no national convention so far as this government is concerned.’ Most of the time he leaves comment to his Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons, Mr Jimmy Kruger. The only attempt to deal with a national crisis is punitive. It is Mr Kruger’s affair. He continues to project an equation that is no more than a turn of phrase: ‘South Africa will fight violence with violence.’

Three hundred and sixty people have died, of whom two were white. The police, who carry guns and still do not wear riot-protective clothing but army camouflage dress and floppy little-boy hats that could be penetrated by a slingshot, have not lost a single man.

Neither the Prime Minister nor his minister in charge of black lives, M. C. Botha (Bantu Administration, Development and Education), has yet talked to urban black leaders more representative than members of the collapsed Urban Bantu Councils. (They do not have normal municipal powers.) On their own doleful admittance, these are dubbed ‘Useless Boys’ Clubs’ by the youths who run the black townships now.

Of the black leaders whom the vast majority of urban blacks would give a mandate to speak for them, Nelson Mandela and his lieutenants Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, of the banned African National Congress, are still imprisoned for life on Robben Island. Robert Sobukwe of the Pan-Africanist Congress is banished and silenced.

Black intellectuals who might stand in for these have been detained one by one, even while whites of unlikely political shades continue to affirm a fervent desire to talk to blacks, just talk to them — as if 300 years of oppression were a family misunderstanding that could be explained away, and as if everyone did not know, in the small dark room where he meets himself, exactly what is wrong with South African ‘race relations’.

The government leaders refuse to meet the Black People’s Convention, perhaps in the belief that by not recognising Black Consciousness organisations the power of blacks to disrupt their own despised conditions of life and (at the very least) the economy that sustains the white one will cease to exist. Fanonist theory of the black man as an image projected upon him by the white man takes a new twist; the white man goes to the door of his shop in central Johannesburg one September morning this year and fails to recognise the black man marching down the street shouting, in his own image, ‘This is our country.’

The government won’t speak to the Black Parents’ Association, formed originally to finance the burial of Soweto children in June. In this ghastly bond, the association moved on under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie Mandela, and Dr Manas Buthelezi, an important Black Consciousness leader about to be consecrated Lutheran Bishop of Johannesburg. It became a united front combining youthful black consciousness inspiration with the convictions of older people who followed the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress.

Finally, the government does not consider speaking to the militant students themselves who are still effectively in leadership, sometimes preventing their parents from going to work (two successful strikes in Johannesburg). Daily and determinedly, they pour into the gutters the shebeen liquor they consider their elders have long allowed themselves to be unmanned by.

Meanwhile, since June 926 black schoolchildren have received punishments ranging from fines or suspended sentences to jail (five years for a seventeen-year-old boy) and caning (five cuts with a light cane for an eleven-year-old who gave the black power salute, shouted at the police and stoned a bus). They are some of the 4,200 people charged with offences arising out of the riots, including incitement, arson, public violence and sabotage. Many students are also among the 697 people, including Mrs Winnie Mandela, detained in jail for ‘security reasons’; the other week one hanged himself by his shirt in the Johannesburg prison, an old fort two kilometres from the white suburban house where I write this.⁶ Several students, not twenty years old, have just begun that reliable apprenticeship for African presidents, exile and education in Britain. When, in September, Mr Vorster met blacks with whom he will talk — his appointed Bantustan leaders — he would not discuss urban unrest or agree to a national conference of blacks and whites to decide what ought to be done about it.

There is a one-man commission of inquiry into the riots, sitting now. Mr Justice Cillie, the white judge who constitutes it, complains that few people actually present at these events have volunteered evidence. In fact, the schoolchildren and students themselves boycott it, and for the rest, South Africans’ faith in the efficacy of commissions to lead to positive action has long gone into the waste-paper basket along with the recommendations the government steadily rejects. The Cillie Commission keeps extending the period in which it will sit, as the riots continue to be part of the present and not a matter of calm recollection. 27 January next year is the latest limit announced. Historical analogies are easily ominous. But a commission of inquiry was Tsar Nicholas II’s way of dealing with the implications of the ‘unrest’ of Bloody Sunday, the beginning of the 1905 revolution. A chain-store owner whose business has been disrupted by strikes and the gutting of a store has burst out of the conventions of his annual report to shareholders to say, ‘Decades of selfishness and smugness by South African whites is the principal reason for widespread unrest among blacks.’

Yet most changes suggested by whites do not approach a call for a national convention, with its implication of a new constitution and the end of white supremacy. Black certainty that nothing will bring equality without power is dismantled by whites into component injustices they can admit and could redress without touching the power structure. The Federated Chamber of Industries calls for job ‘reservations’ discriminating against blacks in industry to be ended, and has the support of the most powerful trade union group and the opposition parties. The National Development and Management Foundation goes further and calls for the ending of business and residential apartheid as well. Afrikaner big business, government supporters all, in their Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut ask for blacks to be given ‘greater’ rights in their own urban areas and training to increase their skills.

Although the Progressive Reform Party has demanded a national convention and the release of all people from detention, it was still necessary, before its 1976 congress agreed to change its education policy to enforced desegregation, for Helen Suzman to remind rank-and-file members that the separate-but-equal dictum for education had been ‘thrown out by the United States twenty years ago’.

With unprecedentedly strong criticism of the government coming from its own newspapers and prominent Afrikaners as well as the opposition, it is baffling to read that at the same time 60 per cent of whites — an increase of 5 per cent over the majority gained by the government in the 1974 election — support Mr Vorster’s National Party. The reliability of this particular poll is in some doubt; but perhaps the contradiction is not so unlikely after all. It is possible to see a dire necessity for change and fear it so greatly that one runs to give oneself to the father figure who will forbid one to act.

For months the white political opposition parties — Progressive Reform, United Party, and Democratic Party — have been trying to agree to some sort of realignment. If a liberal front comes about, it will trample the old sandcastle fort of the United Party, the conservative official parliamentary opposition, already eroded by the departure of most of its politically vigorous members to the Progressive Reform Party.

The numerical strength of such a front cannot be measured until it is known whether a major part of the United Party, which still polled 31.49 per cent in the 1974 elections, will enter it alongside the Progressive Reform Party, in the last few years grown from a pressure group to a real presence in parliament, with twelve seats and 6.25 per cent of the vote. (The crankish Democratic Party has a minute following.) Only when the extent of United Party commitment is revealed will it be possible to estimate roughly what percentage of the 40 per cent who voted against the government in the last election are liberals. There are rumours that some disaffected verligte (‘enlightened’) National Party MPs may defect to the front too.

The declared aim of the front is to protect the rights of whites while giving blacks, coloureds and Indians a direct say in government — which careful phrasing suggests its policy will be to the right of the present Progressive Reform Party. The spectral raison d‘être of such a realignment is surely not the chance of ousting Vorster’s government but of getting ready a white ‘negotiating party’ to treat with blacks on a shared-power basis when he finds he can no longer govern. The viewpoint of enlightened white politics now includes urgently the wide angle of acceptability to blacks, although they have no vote to be wooed. When Mr Vorster can no longer govern, it is not likely any other white government will be able to.

No one knows whether the Bantustan leaders are, in their different circumstances, preparing themselves for a particular role on that day. They meet at a Holiday Inn at Johannesburg’s airport, exactly like Holiday Inns all over the world, down to its orgy-sized beds and cosy smell of French fried potatoes piped along with muzak, but deriving its peculiar status as neutral country outside apartheid from the time when it was the first hotel here to be declared ‘international’: not segregated — for foreign blacks, anyway.

From there the Bantustan leaders demand ‘full human rights for blacks and not concessions’. With the exception of the Transkei and Bophuthatswana — the former having celebrated the homeland brand of independence on 26 October, the latter soon to do so — they reject ethnic partitions of South Africa. Which means they walk out on the many-mansions theory of apartheid, abandoning the white government which set them up inside; and they identify themselves as part of the liberation movement for an undivided South Africa. They present themselves to the black population in general as black leaders, not tribal leaders. Is this a bid for power? If Nelson Mandela were to come back from the prison island, would they step aside for him? Has the most imposing of them, Gatsha Buthelezi, a following cutting across his Zulu tribal lines?

Whites believe so. He attracts large audiences when he speaks in cosmopolitan black townships. Many blacks say no; and the African National Congress in exile continues to deride the Bantustan leaders as collaborators, making no exceptions. Other blacks imply that the best of the Bantustan men are keeping warm the seats of leaders in prison. Among politically articulate blacks, this year is their (Southern hemisphere) hot summer of brotherhood. Tsietsi Mashinini, the student leader who fled the police to exile in Britain, suggests that the tremendous force his movement shows itself to represent is loyal to Mandela. It does not seem to matter to blacks whether it is a Gatsha Buthelezi or anyone else who is the one to say to whites, as he has, ‘The future is a Black future and we Blacks want our future now.’

From the Market Theatre, newly opened in what was the Covent Garden of Johannesburg, comes a strange echo — Cucurucu, Kokol, Polpoch and Rossignol, asylum clowns in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, singing: ‘Give us our rights … and we don’t care how — We want — our re-vo-lu-tion — NOW.’ The author granted performances on condition everyone could see the work and has donated his royalties to a Soweto riot victims fund. His play has never been performed before in a city atmosphere such as ours, it has never been heard as we hear it.

During the ‘quiet’ years of successful police repression, before the young emptied the Dutch courage of shebeens down the drain and sent through people’s veins the firewater of a new spirit, there have been political trials in progress continually in South Africa. Not only those of blacks who have left the country for military training and re-entered illegally, but also those reflecting aspects of the struggle against apartheid carried on by an intellectual elite.

While the riots have been taking place, two young white university lecturers in Cape Town have given the black power clench and, avowing ‘no regrets’, have accepted long sentences under the Terrorism and Internal Security Acts; their uncompromising personal suffering serves as proof of solidarity with blacks that must be granted even by those whites who abhor the white far left. In Johannesburg I have been to hear the trial of four white university students and a lecturer accused of trying ‘to change South Africa’ by organising black workers, who have no recognised trade unions. The five were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the state’s principal evidence consisted of papers read at a seminar.

The backs of these young men in blue jean outfits suggested a pop group; but when they turned in the witness stand it was not to greet fans but to smile at the wife of one of them, whose hands, while she followed the proceedings, were working at a complicated length of knitting — the danger of active dissent does make risk of imprisonment part of the daily life of courageous people. Yet I felt events had overtaken them. The segregated public gallery was almost empty of white and black spectators. The struggle was a few miles away in the streets of Soweto.

But it is another trial, which has gone on almost two years, that seems to have the opposite relation to present events. Four years ago, the nine black members of the South African Students’ Organisation accused under the Terrorism Act seemed to the ordinary public, black and white, to represent a radical fringe movement on the far side of the generation gap. The state’s evidence against them was literary and clumsily esoteric — it consisted of black plays in the idiom of New York black theatre of seven years ago, mimeographed Black Consciousness doggerel that couldn’t compete with comic books, poetry readings that surely could appeal only to the educated young.

The paper flowers of literary rhetoric have come alive in the atmosphere of tragic exaltation and discipline that can’t be explained.

In the city streets of Johannesburg black people go about their white-town working lives as they always did: the neat clerks, waiters in their baggy parody of mess dress, dashing messengers in bright helmets on motor scooters, shop-cleaners, smart girls who make tea in offices or shampoo the clients’ hair in white hairdressing salons. Polished shoes, clean clothes; and most of the time, when the youngsters don’t stop them from boarding township trains, people get to work every day.

How do they do it? Daily life in Soweto is in hellish disruption. One-third of the country’s school-leavers may not be able to write the final exams of the school year that ends in December; not all schools in the Johannesburg area have reopened. Those that have function irregularly, either because militant pupils stop classes, or teachers suspected of sympathetic alignment with them are detained. Buses and trains don’t run when stoning and burning start; commuters crush into the big old American cars that serve as taxis or walk to stations outside the area. No one knows when his neighbour’s house may cave in, set alight because he is a policeman. If he himself owns a precious car, it too may burn, should he be suspected of being, or even be mistaken for, some less obvious form of collaborator.

While we white people picnic, Sundays are the most dreadful days of all in Soweto: funerals, the only category of public gathering not banned, have become huge mass meetings where the obsequies of the riot victim being buried are marked by new deaths and fresh wounds as the police attack mourners singing freedom songs and shaking black power salutes. A black intellectual whose commitment to liberation no one would question, although he risks the violent disapproval of blacks by still having contact with whites, tells me, ‘When I go home tonight, I don’t know which to be more afraid of — the police getting me when they shoot at anything that moves, or my own people getting me when I walk across the yard to the lavatory.’

White Johannesburg appears as it always was. Across the veld to the south-west Soweto has been severed from the city, to drift in its fury and misery. Refuse, carted away in municipal vehicles that are vulnerable symbols of white rule, is collected when it can be. The Johannesburg medical officer of health has warned of possible outbreaks of measles and diphtheria in Soweto, and the reappearance of poliomyelitis; the white doctors and nurses who staffed most clinics have had to be withdrawn. It is no longer safe for any white to enter there. Only the white police go in; stand guard, their chrome whiplash aerials giving away the presence of riot-squad cars and men in leaf-spattered jumpsuits at the crossroads where Soweto leads to Johannesburg. And the black workers come out every morning and go back every night, presenting faces that won’t distress the white city.

What may the clean, ironed clothes and calm faces carry concealed, of disease and violence, to a city that has cut such things loose from itself?

Postscript: A Johannesburg newspaper asks if I will accept nomination for the ‘Woman of the Year’. I decline. Someone else will have that honour, perhaps even a black woman from the small black professional elite. But this year the only candidates are surely Winnie Mandela, who came out of house arrest to stand between the police and the schoolchildren and be imprisoned, or any one of the black township women who have walked beside their marching children, carrying water to wash the tear gas from their eyes.

1976

What Being a South African Means to Me: Address at the University of Cape Town

What does it mean to be a South African? Who decides?

What does it mean to me to be a South African? Do I qualify? Of course, only white people in South Africa ever feel the need to ask themselves or each other such questions. And this leads to the last one we shall ever have to find the answer to: Is there such a being as a white African? Who decides?

You will have had, or will have before these sessions are over, many criteria set up in answer to the first question. The geographical criterion will be generally taken for granted as inadequate; living here under Capricorn is not enough. The circumstantial one also is inadequate: living here under apartheid is not enough. The evidence is in a state of being that has passed, from some people of my grandfather’s generation of locals who called Europe ‘home’ to some people of your generation who feel so detached from our ideologically dense environment that they are again no longer at home. There is an internal emigration that can be said to have lasted for four generations. A section of the white population has lived from conquest to decline without ever becoming South African-conscious.

But you don’t want generalisations; you will want to garner your own, from various views. What does being a South African mean to me? First of all, what are my objective claims to be one?

I was born here, yes, and to me that is a fact of deeply emotional importance, because I not only believe along with the Jesuits and Freud that the early years of a child’s life are carried within that child for always, he may live and discard many phases of experience, but that one, never. I also believe that the shock of confrontation with the physical world, the first landscape you open your eyes on, the first piece of earth you stagger to your feet on, the first faces that bend over you, although they pass beyond conscious recall, put a certain stamp on your perception and interpretation of the world. When I am in Europe or America, or anywhere away from Africa, my vision of home — in that half-waking state when time and distance don’t exist — is burned veld round mine-dumps and coal-mine slag hills. Not a romantic vision. Not one that most Europeans would recognise as Africa. But Africa it is. Although I find it harsh and ugly, and Africa and her landscapes have come to mean many other things to me, it signifies to me a primary impact of being; all else that I have seen and know is built upon it. Many questions to which I shall die while still working out my answers began there.

I have found that my claim to regard myself as South African by virtue of the pre-memory perceptions of birth and infancy are sometimes contested — by fellow whites. I may have been born here more than fifty years ago, but that does not mean I have been here long enough. I am the daughter of immigrants, my mother from England, my father from Lithuania. They weren’t the sort who called Europe ‘home’, but that doesn’t help. In the opinion of some whites, it is necessary to be able to trace one’s ancestry back to the Voortrekkers or the 1820 British Settlers in order to be accepted as South African.

Potato-famine Irish or pogrom-Jewish lineage is parvenu. As time goes by, and the tenure even of whites who can trace their family lines to van Riebeck is challenged by blacks, who for so long would not have been thought to have any say in the matter at all, the question of how many generations a white must have behind him in order to qualify as a South African seems quaintly irrelevant. I have an urbane Afrikaner intellectual friend, educated at Oxford and Leyden, who used to like to annoy me by clinching an argument with the observation, ‘How European you are, Nadine!’ Whereas he, of course — his covered-wagon pedigree and free-running childhood on a farm among black children who now live not in South Africa at all but shunted off to Gazankulu or Bophutatswana — was a real South African. I wonder how he feels about being polarised, along with the parvenu, as white, simply white, to the proposition of black consciousness …

Having staked a territorial claim that goes further and further than a mere birth certificate, how does it seem to me my consciousness of being a South African took shape? Well, to go back to childhood: subconsciously, and innocently — by which I mean that the subconscious was storing impressions and experiences that were taken at face value. When you are a child, whatever is around you, in terms of human behaviour as well as physical environment, is the way the world is. Immutable. Adults present you with a manner of life; you know of no other. For this child there is a four-roomed house with a red stoep, a lawn in front and in the back yard a pepper tree, a room where a black servant lives. The father goes on a bicycle every day to open his shop. The child walks through the suburb of bungalows across the veld to school. Once a week she wakes to the sound of drumming and knows it is Sunday because the mine-boys are dancing at the compound. They are black, wear blankets and sometimes white ladies’ church hats that have been thrown away; they pee by the roadside, they are always wandering between the mine and the town. A schoolfriend is the daughter of the mine secretary and invites the child to the Christmas party for staff children. The children are white, like her, like all the children at school. A pet dog is run over by a neighbour; the black servant goes to see a sick brother. That is the way things are.

There is another place where things are different: overseas; snow and robins and cowboys, a king and queen, read about in children’s books. That place — the faraway — is a mystery; everything here is exactly what it is: the given facts are perfectly congruous, none stands out of category, the way an object would catch a bright child’s eye in one of those puzzle pictures, meant to train the power of cognitive distinction, where a tool must be singled out among toys, or a fish on land. A long time goes by before the facts of daily life in that small Reef town begin to be sorted into heaps, in a tentative taxonomy. The dead pet will never reappear. The mine-boys are in fact men (there’s evidence of that) although they don’t know men don’t wear ladies’ hats, and although they aren’t members of the Mine Recreation Club. The servant is a woman with a brother — another life — she’s not only ‘our Lettie’ who embroiders pillowcases in the sun on the step of her room. The men and Lettie are black. They don’t belong to clubs, they don’t come on picnics, their children don’t go to the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, across the veld. The fact-sorting process speeds up; the little heaps mount, some merge. In the principle of selection, a norm is the set of facts governing the life of the child herself: if you are white, you begin from the premise of being white. Are they different because they are black? Or are they black because they are different?

To be born a South African is to be presented with given facts of race on the same level of reality as the absolute facts of birth and death. Perhaps that is what whites mean when they speak of the unfairness of black resentment against even ‘innocent white women and children’ (women being honorary children); and perhaps it is what blacks mean when they argue that every white is guilty, by birth, of oppression of blacks. I have spoken and written often, in my life, of the second or rebirth many South African whites go through. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back. From the childhood memories of black friends and from the writings of blacks I gather that, until very recently, and no doubt still, in vast areas of the country, young blacks have a converse emergence into a second consciousness — when they realise that it is not in any natural and immutable order of things to call the white children’s father ‘Baas’ and ‘Master’.

I date the development of my consciousness of being South African rather than having any other social identity from the birth into that second consciousness. The process is essentially the discovery of the lie. The great South African lie. In disagreement with popular beliefs, I myself don’t equate this consciousness with guilt — that famous guilt white-anting the South African personality comes later, with the age of reason and the shame of consent … What comes of the immediate discovery of the lie is revelation: you cannot feel guilt for being conned. From the time I discovered that what was being concealed by my society was that blacks were people — not mine-boys, not our Lettie, but people, I had the opportunity to become what I think of as a South African. I had the responsibility to accept what I now knew. Which is to say that I believe that is where the identity is to be formed: working one’s way through the central, definitive experience of black and white as people, with undifferentiated claims on life, whatever else — skin, language, culture — makes them differ from one another. Of course, I don’t have to say that it is not as brusquely attainable and clear-cut as it sounds. When I reached the awkward age of reason, I sought ideological and political explanations and formulations for what whites were doing to blacks. To be a South African is to be one for whom none of these theories is abstract; long before you or I are old enough to read politics and economics we have demonstrated in ourselves capitalist exploitation of a peasantry and proletariat, lived this in our lives, going to a free school while our black siblings caddied for our fathers on the golf course or herded their cattle on the farms; long before we have heard of the race theories of a Gobineau or a Hitler, we have been part of a demonstration of the counter-Marxist, Western democratic theory that race discrimination and not class exploitation is the basis of oppression in our country.

For me, the black mine-workers were in the compound before the term migratory labour was stored in my mind. I heard in the mouth of a grown-up in that small town the words ‘white kaffir’ as an ordinary term of abuse between two quarrelling whites before complex analyses of the projection of fears, before the concept of the Other who epitomises one’s own obstreperous idea came my way. Now I began to interpret. I began to understand that I was, as a white South African, in terms of social evolution, and to ask how — if — one might break out into another social role. Most important, contact with blacks as people and equals, sometimes very close and personal contact, shaped my consciousness through their ideas about whites, about me; rounded it out through their demands upon me and my dependencies upon them.

In this period of intense give-and-take between idea and flesh, between the theory and the daily reality not only of aspiring to something called justice but of aspiring to become human in the ways South African society was and is not, I was beguiled by the charm of a ‘free society’ within four walls, so to speak. But outside that room the iron colour bar remained on black backs, not mine. Like many others, I granted too much counterweight to the groups where there was no ‘they’ and ‘we’, only Us.

During this period — and it lasted more than a decade — I also had new relationships with whites that developed my awareness of what might be involved in being a South African. In particular there was my close friendship with a woman who already lived in a way that seemed to be evolved in particular response to the situation. She was an Afrikaner, but there were others like her, Jewish or of English descent. She was a white prepared to take full responsibility for the past that can’t be changed and the future that must be. Through her I came to understand that we whites are not European and that in order to be anything we must change profoundly. It was in the 1950s, long before we had been frightened by the concept of black consciousness and before the concept of white consciousness had begun to be considered as anything but white supremacy. At the time it was still possible to work with blacks; she did just that: not for them. She considered proxy a crippling thing to those on whose behalf concessions were asked. She believed no one could assess black needs but blacks themselves: no one could decide for them how they could free themselves from white oppression: only they knew what it really was. She would argue political tactics passionately with blacks, but she did not expect to prevail by assumption of white-knows-best, if not out of despotism then out of an equally despotic compassion. I watched her in her daily life, as an organiser of a mixed trade union, then running a co-operative, willing and able to work under blacks in political activities on their terms, astonishingly free of any sense of self-sacrifice or nobility in the risks she ran, the naming and banning and periods of detention — in simple, unshakeable acceptance that if she suffered it was as much to remake the meaning of being a white South African as to remake that of being black.

A lot of cant is talked in the context of whites like you and me suffering on full stomachs the psychic damage of over-privilege; but if we are to try to discover if there is any validity in a concept of white consciousness, we have to examine how privilege subconsciously hampers the will to change. And it still seems to me that people like my friend saw the real aspects of this and took their own hard way towards curing it.

Today men and women such as Beyers Naudé and some young people who have been student leaders show that same courage.

Jean Paul Sartre, as an old man in his middle seventies, says his only regret in life is that he was not more radical; I think it is likely that I, too, from that safe shore, may say the same. Certainly I am aware that I have not been nearly as brave as being a South African has turned out to require, and it so happens that active radicals and bravery have gone together, in South Africa.

How much can I blame on the tumbril of history, whose destination is unlikely to be that rendezvous where there is room for all? How much must I blame on the lingering sloth of privilege, convictions not matched by courage; the writer’s fiercely exclusive sense of his existence through his work? It is hard to be honest about these things, even with oneself.

‘Only connect’ was a fragile bond. Part of my continuing consciousness of being a South African has been to accept, quite long ago, without sneering at the limited but undoubted value it had, that that bond between black and white has broken, defiled by ‘dialogue’, the zoo tea party at which noises remarkably like human exchanges are made. That bond has been rent like gossamer by brutish removals, medieval detentions, and finally, the shooting of children.

At no time in my life has my sense of being a South African been final and definitive, and it is not, now. Being a South African is a constant state of response to demands; continuing and changing demands. I often mark how different is the social state of being of American or English friends. They begin to seem to me a protected species; in one way, I could define my South Africanness by the extent to which they differ from me in their secure sense of what they are. Once mature, they may have to make adaptive changes to outward circumstances, they may have to face slumps and unemployment, changes in the standard of living, even the possibility of atomic annihilation together, but they will never have to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to their country.

This is exactly what is being demanded of whites in South Africa now: to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to South Africa now. After more than three hundred years, blacks are demanding it of whites; whites such as the students who have organised this series of discussions and inquiries are demanding it of themselves. In the political parties’ understanding of the nature of the demand, there are varying degrees of sincerity and realism; what we have to keep foremost in our South African consciousness, there, is that although some wild things have come out of the mouth of Mr Andrew Young, and although the diplomatic notes of protest from the big powers as well as those of Mr Pik Botha fell thick upon Mr Andrew Young’s head when he said South Africa’s government was illegal, only legalistic, sophistic arguments can prove him wrong. Morally, our government is illegal. When our Nuremberg comes — and the trials go on in private, inside us, already — no one will be able to deny that the ‘legality’ of our government consists in its being legal in our country for a parliament representing only a white minority to make the laws …

I don’t think the public platform is the place for me, but I am here because I take seriously the Student Representative Council’s intention to examine the feasibility and validity of a white consciousness concept as a response to our present situation, psychological and practical. I am not prepared to dismiss white consciousness out of hand as merely the acceptance, black-dictated, of racialism in reverse. The rejection by young and not-so-young blacks of the white spectrum from liberal to radical is a traumatic experience, make no mistake about it, for whites. For myself, I can say that rationally I understand it and consider it necessary, but as individual experience I find it as wounding as anyone else does. It is not easy to take as a new starting point. Black thought insists that, beginning again from rejection, whites must work out a social and psychic route based on the idea that they will arrive so changed back at the point of departure that it will be possible, then, for there to be equality of acceptance. For blacks will emerge from their great pilgrimage into full selfhood; and the thread that leads out of the labyrinth of struggle will turn out to have been in the hands of both and to have brought them to a meeting place, not some hall where the petty apartheid signs have been hastily taken down.

Is this just a ghastly mirror-version of ‘separate development’? I fervently hope not. I don’t think so. Mongane Serote once wrote a little poem: ‘White people are white people, they must learn to listen; black people are black people, they must learn to talk.’ It has happened. But we must not expect blacks to tell us what we must do, or even what they want of us. It is frustrating that they will not, cannot.

If we declare an intention to identify fully with the struggle for a single, common South African consciousness, if there is such a thing as white consciousness as a way to human justice and honest self-realisation, whites will have to take their attitudes apart and assemble afresh their ideas of themselves. We shall have to accept the black premise that the entire standpoint of being white will have to shift, whether it is under the feet of those who loathe racialism and have opposed it all their lives, or those to whom race discrimination is holy writ.

One of the most difficult things of all to face is that black thinkers talk at the moment as if they prefer, in principle, white racialists and conservatives, those who have decreed and pursued the persecution of blacks with pious cruelty and detached hubris, to those whites of the liberal-to-radical spectrum who have pursued the cause of black liberation, at worst, yes, out of self-interest disguised as paternalism, at best out of commitment to destroy self-interest as whites have known it, along with apartheid. There is no objective reason why the ugly sincerity of white racialists should be regarded as more ‘sincere’ than the sincerity of whites who want to ditch racialism. But the thing is those whites failed: failure in the ranks of those who have power is not forgiven by those without power. Yet this failure of whites has become one of the most important factors in black consciousness — in the form of the realisation that liberation cannot be gained on one’s behalf, by others. Could white consciousness — once you have decided what it is and how to put it into practice — provide a means for whites to participate in the legal and economic and spiritual liberation of blacks? Will it find a way in which whites themselves may at the same time be liberated from the image of the Janus Oppressor, the two archetypal stereo-faces, grinning racialist or weeping liberal, of the same tyrant? Is this what consciousness is? You are making a Pascalian wager on it; and that’s the only way to find out.

1977

Transkei: A Vision of Two Blood-Red Suns

Coming into the new ‘black republic’ of Transkei² from the north, I was out of it again almost at once and then in again. The road leads through an area and town ‘excised’ for whites. On the map these blobs and trickles of black and white, marking off the 87 per cent of the Republic of South Africa reserved by 4 million whites for themselves from the 13 per cent offered to 18 million blacks, are an ethnic Rorschach test whose logic is to be understood only by initiates of the political ideology of apartheid; from the road, it’s suddenly easy for anyone. Passing before one’s eyes, the perfect contours of vast lands ploughed and crops reaped by machine, the barns full of bright farming equipment, the pedigree stock, the privacy of trees and gardens drawn round the fine farmstead of the white area change abruptly to the black area’s uneven strips cultivated by hand-plough, the bare hills with their discs of mud huts and squares of spiky agave enclosures for motley beasts herded by children. The only machinery is the occasional wrecked car, dragged off the road and picked clean.

A torchlight procession of hundreds of winter-blooming aloes — red-flame, blue-flame, white-flame — passes a church upon a hill in an infinity of empty hills. A range of shadows — the Drakensberg Mountains that form Transkei’s north-east border — fades with the light that is leaving a feminine landscape of classical curves broken here and there by ravines intimately furred with virgin forest. Where this has been replaced by afforestation already there is the inappropriate European dusk gathered by Northern pine. A slope is a football field because racing youngsters are using it for that purpose, and marks one of the ‘rehabilitation’ villages established to control landless people and soil erosion caused by random grazing: several hundred rounds of mud and thatch instead of hilltop crowns of two or three, the new tin flash of a windmill, kilometres of wire fencing. Many women carrying across their heads loads of wood twice their height, and one or two elderly men in old business suits on horseback are making their way along concourses undefined as the football field. Broad tracks made by ox-drawn sleds lead only to sources of firewood and water. For me, on the way to places with onomatopoeic names, Tabankulu, Lusikisiki, there is the one fierce road. Stones and ruts; no signposts. As if to confuse an invader — but the invader is merely one who doesn’t know the signs of the terrain so firmly staked within the lifetime range of the people who live here that they walk alone, in the dark, old, female, as surely as and much more securely than Western contemporaries find the way home from a suburban bus stop.

Great space; and human intimacy. To think one has found it even here is an illusion, so far as the sense of space is concerned. This 1976 creation of a country (4.4 million hectares) larger than Switzerland is so overcrowded in terms of agricultural potential that it cannot survive unless enough industry can be established to take half the people off the land.

But the human intimacy is no illusion. These people are innocent; innocent of alienation, our crime against ourselves. One midday I was received in the empty round mud room that was the home of a woman so poor there were not even any of the usual home-made utensils to be seen. Her children had the peculiar, still sad air of malnutrition. She apologised with social grace for not being able to offer food to her white guests, as if home freezer supplies just happened to have run out — but no, I am projecting my own kind of situation on one I couldn’t conceive of: she assumed, without loss of pride or self-respect, perfect understanding of shared circumstances. Like the majority of families, hers had no adult male living at home — the men are away working on the mines or canefields of South Africa — but three youths had dropped in to visit. She was animated and charming in her rags. The youngsters shared a cigarette rolled from a piece of newspaper none of the company could read, but tranquil communication was strongly present as the smell of grass-thatch and woodsmoke that comes from the skin and hair of these people as you sit among them.

On a mountain-top with a view no multimillionaire could secure to himself in Europe, I found three little girls alone in possession of two huts, a tethered calf, a hen coop made of woven branches and a field where mealies had been reaped. A figure out of Grimm climbed into view with a load of wood and a bunch of wild asparagus fern she had cut to make a broom. A child ran off reverently to fetch a tin of water. The quizzically intelligent old woman quenched her thirst. What did white people want to visit a dirty homestead like hers for? A confident, welcoming joke. To submit at her invitation to the dim, wide, conical engulfment of her hut was to find the order of good housekeeping. Apart from the grindstone and pestle for maize and the huge clay pot for brewing maize beer that are the standard furnishings, there were gourd dippers and enamel store plates; the careful luxury of a bottle of paraffin hung among the hoe and scythe hooked under the eaves of the thatch. Around one curve the base of the wall extended to make a low clay bench like a window seat, and there were a couple of stacked carved stools: the men’s side of the house. The grandmother and the children sank at once into a calm unit, close together, on the sleeping mats of the women’s side. In place of the ticking of a clock, in these houses silence is the piping chip-chip of chicks whose tiny blur carries the light from the single source of the doorway as they pick grains of meal from the smooth mud-and-dung floor.

The old woman’s son is in the mines; she provides and cares for the grandchildren out of her yearly R144 old age pension. What about the money her son earns? That pays taxes and supports his wife and their smallest children. A relative comes to plough the grandmother’s steep field; she cultivates and harvests herself, just as she walks the mountains to fetch wood and water. The ideal love between women and children I see everywhere here — that is what it is made of: that great burden of toil. The sturdy little girls each find some surface of their grandmother’s body to make tender contact with; this thin woman with the blue-black darkening of age in the wrinkles of capability is their bedrock. Grimmest facts of economic hardship are the ugly secret of such love.

The biggest contribution to the national income of Transkei is still the sale of men as migratory labourers. In the first elections that symbolised independence, 55 per cent of the people at the polls were women. After 300 years of white rule in South Africa the men of Transkei cannot earn a living at home. The land allotted them under the division of South Africa into white and black areas of occupation is not sufficient to support their families, and the cities and industries they have given their labour to build over generations, the gold and coal mines they have manned, are hundreds of kilometres from the poor portion they have been persuaded to accept of South Africa, which could not have realised its rich potential without them.

Govan Mbeki is a man of the Transkei, educated, politically capable, but not honoured by any chieftainship or cabinet appointment in the new black government. He is imprisoned for life on Robben Island off Cape Town for political activities that asserted the right of South African blacks to share non-racial government over the whole of South Africa. I keep remembering how he has written of the Transkei as a ‘breeding camp’ where the men come home for three months a year to procreate, in these round huts, the next generation of cheap labour for whites.

The white man had hardly set his spoor of boot and wheel upon this part of Africa before visions of how to rid themselves of his overlordship began to come to the indigenous people.

A hundred and twenty years ago a black Jeanne d’Arc saw and heard the African ancestral dead. To Nongqause they foretold that if her Xhosa people gave up witchcraft, killed their cattle and razed their maize crops in sacrifice, on 18 February 1857 two blood-red suns would rise and a hurricane would sweep the whites back into the sea by which they had come. New fields of maize and new herds of cattle would appear, and Xhosa warriors dead in frontier wars would live again.

The Xhosa were fighting a battle that could not be won. Not only was it the oxhide shield and assegai against the gun, but ultimately man’s masterful technological attitude to his environment — acquired in Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolutions — against the compact with his environment that is the ancient pastoral society’s solution to the problem and mystery of our place in creation. The need of a miracle was the Xhosa reality: they did as Nongqause’s vision bid.

On 18 February 1857 the two blood-red suns did not rise, and the whites were not swept into the sea. Sixty-eight thousand Xhosas starved to death and those who survived did so by making their way to the Cape Colony to beg food and work from the white man.

In Transkei’s capital, Umtata, among the rows of traders’ stores and under the glass and steel mirrors of fine administrative blocks built with the South African government’s money, there is a building unique in the history of all that was and is South Africa. The Cape Dutch-style colonial stateliness suggests perfectly what it was intended it should: a parliament just like the white man’s. It was here that the vision of driving the white man into the sea underwent a transformation to become the constitutional vision of getting the vote and direct representation for blacks, along with whites, in the government of South Africa.

In the mid-nineteenth century the British of the Cape Colony controlled the Transkei through magistracies, and blacks had a qualified vote in the Cape legislature. The paring-down of the black franchise was successive until 1894, when the annexation of all chiefdoms of the Transkei to the Cape Colony was completed. Then Rhodes, the Empire-builder who wanted to see all Africa draped in the Union Jack, introduced an act that established a system of African representation outside a common society of black and white. A pyramid of councils, part elected, part white-government-nominated among chiefs, conveyed the Transkeians’ needs to the white government; the black councillors had no powers of legislation and the government had no obligation to act on their advice.

The South Africa Act of 1909, which unified the country in the wake of the Boer War, took away from those blacks who still managed to qualify for the vote the right — never yet exercised — of electing a black to parliament. While that same act entrenched the African franchise in the Cape, the long-term process was clear. In the early thirties an unqualified franchise was given to all whites; by 1936 black voters in the Cape were removed from the common voters’ roll. The Transkeian supreme council had moved into this elegant doll’s house of power where, on a budget that ten years later did not yet amount to more than half the money spent by the South African government on printing and stationery, the council was allowed to deal only with local education, roads, agriculture, limitation of stock and tribal law.

The quaint ‘natives’ parliament’ was called — both institution and building — the Bunga, derived from a Xhosa word meaning ‘a discussion’. Apart from placating chiefs for their loss of authority to white magistrates, the Bunga incidentally gave educated Transkeians a chance (unique for South African blacks) to learn by frustration the workings of Western government administration.

The Bunga asked for direct representation for blacks in the South African government year after year; at the same time, it asked for greater administrative powers within the Transkei. These aims were never accepted by the Transkeians as mutually exclusive. In the 1950s apartheid made them so. The ‘self-government’ the new laws prepared for applied only to the eight ‘Bantustans’ — nascent black statelets — of which the Transkei was one. ‘Self-development’ was carried out by government-appointed and even government-created chiefs (the present Prime Minister was made a Paramount Chief) functioning as ‘Tribal Authorities’ whose decisions could be vetoed by the white government in Pretoria.

The Bunga as an institution dissolved itself in 1955. In 1976 the Bunga doll’s house with its solemn panelling and gilded citations of democracy became Transkei’s National Assembly, in return for the surrender of any claim for Transkeians ever to sit in the parliament of South Africa, or take any part in the central government of South Africa, where more than a third of the Transkei’s people live and work.

Both private reception rooms at the Umtata Holiday Inn are called the Kaiser Matanzima Room. If this is caution, it isn’t lack of imagination. Prime Minister Kaiser Matanzima gives no chances to rivals who might qualify to have their names honoured. One of the new administrative blocks is named after State President Chief Botha Sigcau, rewarded with that high office for his politically strategic importance as Paramount Chief of the rebellious Pondo people; but President Sigcau’s portrait does not hang in the Cabinet Chamber with Kaiser Matanzima’s, and Matanzima has not repealed the preventive detention act that, under South African rule, kept the leaders of the opposition party in jail during elections for the country’s first independent government. (The leader of the opposition was jailed again, by Matanzima, while I was in Transkei.) George Matanzima, Minister of Justice, now, but once struck off the lawyers’ roster for professional misconduct while practising in South Africa, seems content to be the closest of siblings. The Brothers Matanzima have the same Roman senator heads. Their family name means ‘strong saliva’; the taste of power turns venomous when Kaiser Matanzima attacks those who call him a stooge of the white South African government, a man who has betrayed the black man’s right to share all South Africa. From time to time, venom flickers even at the government that set him up.

Kaiser Matanzima’s cousin, Nelson Mandela, and his other compatriots Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki are serving life sentences. The constitutional vision has receded further and further. It is not difficult to see why Nongqause’s vision of ridding the blacks of white overlordship would be transformed, yet again, into a third avatar. To some blacks, 13 per cent of the land seems better than nothing; a beggarly black state within South Africa could be regarded as a Trojan horse from which liberation could overrun white domination.

Matanzima is the man, as well as the opportunist, of his time. He carries within his personality the contradictions of the vision transformed. He has opted for tribal nationalism, accepted and approved apartheid; on occasion he lifts the black power fist and declares solidarity with blacks in South Africa who reject apartheid and hold out for full rights in a unitary state. He pledged he would not take independence until the South African government fulfilled Transkei’s claims to additional land and guaranteed such citizenship rights as there are for blacks in South Africa to those Transkeians living and working there. He has got part of the white-owned land he claimed — some of it as a gift of farms to the Brothers Matanzima personally. But he has given up the right to South African citizenship of the 1.3 million Xhosa-speaking people who do not live in Transkei. Thousands of them were not born in, nor have they ever seen Transkei. The language they speak is declared by the South African government as proof of Transkei nationality; in this way apartheid ‘keeps South Africa white’ by making ‘foreign’ sojourners of the majority of South Africa’s urban black population. If they refuse to accept Bantustan citizenship, they become stateless. While I was in Transkei a vast settlement of squatters near Cape Town was bulldozed and 70 per cent of the inhabitants, Xhosa-speaking, were ordered to go ‘home’ to Matanzima, who had neither welcome, land nor work to offer them.

No foreign dignitary attended the Transkeian ‘independence celebrations’ in 1976: the countries of the world have not officially recognised the existence of this one.

The single gain Transkei made in the independence deal is the abolition of South Africa’s lower standard of schooling for blacks. A scholarly Transkeian of the missionary college old boy network castigates UNESCO for refusing educational aid, now: couldn’t I influence anyone — the Americans, West Germans — to give young Transkeians scholarships abroad? Even Amin’s Ugandans get them! ‘Everyone sneers at us for taking orders from Pretoria — why won’t they help us train people to make our independence real? Orders … it’s not true … Well, what can we do? D’you know that the library here in Umtata was opened to blacks only after the celebrations in ’76! We’re not stooges … we need teachers, librarians …’

His eyes move about his government office as if to catch out a filing cabinet listening and observing. Yet he gabbles indiscreet asides. His son has ‘disappeared’; I know what that means? — yes, from South Africa where he was studying — fled abroad after detention during the riots in 1976. These young people want nothing to do with this independence … Out in the street he accompanies me courteously but I am merely a presence from which his preoccupation echoes. Pretoria, Pretoria, he murmurs — a ringing in his ears.

In the bar at an Umtata hotel a group of attractive black men wearing young executive clothes meets heartily every evening: a lawyer, an insurance man, ‘reps’ (travelling salesmen) from South African firms, and functionaries in the para-governmental Development Corporation, financed by South Africa. The Corporation is concerned with getting blacks into business as well as attracting white foreign industrialists by the inducement of tax remissions, no minimum wage and no trade unions. A game of cards is slapped down among the beer bottles, banter flies in a mixture of Xhosa and English, a tray of fried fish goes round in place of peanuts. The insurance man has just won his company’s citation for the month’s highest average of life insurance sales; the cosmetic ‘rep’ swaggers: ‘A gold mine, I’m telling you, this country’s a gold mine.’

To whom does one sell life insurance here?

To the grandmothers whose worth could not be compensated by any premium? To the men who tell me they don’t know where to find the new R2.50 livestock tax payable on each head of cattle — their only capital?

In two years Umtata’s population has risen from 25,000 to 31,400. Apart from imported skilled workers and administrators employed on the R20-million university, the hydroelectric scheme, the industrial and housing developments, the new affluent class is a bureaucracy and its hangers-on. R37.5 million invested in the country by South African and foreign industrialists, and R59.5 million from the South African-financed Development Corporation have provided only 12,500 jobs for Transkeians. Unless he works for the government or has the minimal education and maximum good luck to be able to take over a white store on finance borrowed from the Corporation, the Transkeian has little choice but to labour for low pay at home or hire himself out to the mines across the border.

The Umtata Town Hall clock has stopped and not even independence sets it measuring a new era. At noon by my watch old women in their tribal petticoats and turbans settled like huge black snails on their heads are watering the public gardens from cans; cheaper for the municipality than the outlay for a hose, I suppose. Life down the road at the end of York Street remains the reality of the capital for most people. Taxi drivers tout custom along the bus queues; some vodka ‘rep’ has been zealous: all buses bear the huge legend — SMIRNOFF, THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM. In the market a medicine man dressed like a respectable farmer sells potions from bead-covered gourds which are his apothecary’s jars, and among business women sewing braided print skirts there is one who sells teaspoons of snuff from a tin which she also uses to mark out the circumference of the women’s anklets she cuts from the tubes of old tyres. And all along one side of the street are the recruiting offices, with their neat and cheerful, fresh-painted façades like white suburban houses, and their cajoling signs. The older ones tell a picture-story: assegais and shields invoking manliness, the homecoming of the beaming miner stepping off the train into a company of admiring women and children. The latest recognises that tribal black men have entered the kind of contemporary world offered them, abandoning hope of anything but money: no human beings, no smiles — a miner’s helmet, shown as a cornucopia filled with notes.

In the yards of the offices are small buses and Land-Rovers that pick up recruits from their villages. Men are waiting about with their cardboard suitcases and blankets. Some look very young; there is an atmosphere of detachment and silence in the stoicism of an unavoidable destination, very different from the strutting confidence of government officials running up the broad steps of new ministries, and the free-riding pleasure of the Rotary Club candidates on their nightly spree in a hotel bar their colour would have excluded them from in South Africa.

‘If I were to get a telex from Johannesburg asking me to send a thousand men this week, I’d have no difficulty.’ The white recruiting officer for South Africa’s biggest gold-mining company, a group of coal mines, a construction company and a sugar-cane growers’ association, says that more men than ever are prepared to go off for a nine-month stint as a contract labourer. Black miners’ wages have been raised considerably lately; but the wage gap between white and black average monthly earnings on the mines continues to grow — at present it is a staggering R700 in favour of whites. Blacks are housed in barracks and nutritiously fed, free, as units of labour, in the interests of efficiency that take no account of further, human needs.

In most old trading villages there are no whites now except those left behind under marble angels in the abandoned European cemeteries (the Xhosas mourn elaborately but plough and plant over their last season’s dead). The trading stores, the butchery and the single hotel have all been taken over by blacks, and so have the recruiting concessions that used to be as much part of the white trader’s turnover as the sale of sugar and blankets. In one of these villages I watched young black men in earrings, sniffing and hawking against the early morning cold, led into the magistrate’s office by the local recruiting agent — a brisk black girl loud on platform shoes. The magistrate read to forlorn closed faces the terms of the agreement whereby they would go to the mines; the men touched a clerk’s ballpoint in symbol of the illiterate’s signature to the document. The girl wrote bus and rail passes for the journey. They were led out, launched on their career in a place where they are not permitted to stay longer than nine months at a stretch, and are forbidden to have wife, child or family come to live and make a home with them.

The Transkeians are people of twelve tribal clusters, each with its strong sense of identity and named terrain, although they all speak Xhosa dialects.

In the 1880s Pondoland was still an independent country governed by its own chiefs when a colonising party of Germans from South West Africa (Namibia) — then already annexed by Kaiser Wilhelm I — landed on its wild coast and obtained grandiose concessions for mineral and commercial exploitation from an ancestor of the present President of the Republic of Transkei, Chief Botha Sigcau. In return, two sons of the tribe were taken to Germany to be educated. It would have been a good bargain for the Germans if the British had not ridden in to remind the Pondos, with a military escort, that Pondoland had already been given away — to the British, by Sigcau’s father. The Germans left; no one can tell me if the two young Pondos achieved their Abitur.

Pondoland was the last Transkeian territory to come under white rule and it seems it will be the last to accept the apartheid dispensation of independence. In the fifties at a meeting called to persuade Pondos to accept ‘Tribal Authorities’ as a form of self-government, a man literally turned his backside to Botha Sigcau, its protagonist-in-office, and was cheered: Umasiziphathe uya Kusubenza sifile — Bantu (tribal) authorities will operate over our dead bodies!

They did. A vast popular movement of resistance arose in Pondoland in 1960, concurrent with the general uprisings in South Africa that culminated in the police massacre of blacks at Sharpeville. Thousands of Pondos came down from their mountains on foot and horseback to demand, among other things, the removal of Paramount Chief Botha Sigcau. Tanks and guns from South Africa met them. Thirty Pondos died for their part in the revolt, 4,769 were held in preventive detention.

All this is not entirely in the past. Everywhere, burned-out huts, baked to rough pottery by fire, stand among occupied ones: oh yes, I am told, it happened last year, in ‘the fighting’. Vendettas between chiefs and their people opened during the revolt continue, in forms dictated by the new status of the country. Every time the subject of the new livestock tax is mentioned there is, in the company of ordinary men smoking their pipes and women sorting grain from grit for the next meal, a flash of resistance taken for granted — ‘No one will pay.’ An interpreter extrapolates: ‘They want to kill Sigcau.’

If it’s true it would not be the first time he has had to flee for his life in this exalted landscape. Pondoland is at once peaceful and dramatic beyond reconciliation. On high terrible roads you move through the sky by way of mountains that set you down only when they reach the sea. Looking from mountains on to mountains: dark ploughed land cast like nets, there; velour of light on contours of rose, blond and bronze grasses. Where the grass has been burned, coal-blue shapes; where the first rains have fallen on these, stains of livid growth spread as the shadows of the clouds do. The lovely chimera’s torso of the earth reclining; black, gold, brown, green markings of its pelt; and down into the broad flow of a valley that is scratched by reaped mealie fields where red cattle are stumbling, the great paws of mountains stretch and flex. Rivers searching through to the sea are too far below to be heard. They disappear for kilometres behind mammoth slopes; suddenly, when it is almost night, shine up from the dark clutches of the land.

The Pondos seem always to be seen in silhouette against the sky. At a high snake-bend near the Umzintlava River, young men are come upon, gathered on a rock. Behind them valleys fall sheer and they live somewhere in what, to them, is the neighbourhood: this or that mountain-top group of blind-backed huts whose doors — and windows, if they have any — all face the same way, not at some town-planner’s dictate, but out of the older logic that a habitation must turn its back to the direction from which bad weather blows. Goats are shaking out their cries across space. There’s a tiny store balanced nearby but nobody is buying. The young men are not going anywhere. They are merely out to be appreciated by each other and anyone else who comes along. My inventory of what they were wearing will be extraordinary but there is nothing outlandish about it, here. Not only because this is as much local men’s gear as blue jeans and T-shirts are elsewhere in the world, but also because Pondos have mastered an esoteric law of aesthetics, along with dandies and Dadaists — style is a combination of incongruities.

They wear some of the endless varieties of headgear devised among Transkeian men and women — a striped towel can be as intricate and dashing as a piece of hand-beaded cloth or a beaded diadem and locks. They wear long skirts not stitched but draped skin-tight. Their midriffs are bare and suck in and out with sexually self-confident male laughter. All carry knobkerries (home-carved truncheons) and the pointed staffs that are a thinly disguised substitute for the spear of warrior days, and still can and do kill, if used in anger. One has glittering expanding watchstraps all up his slim black arms; another wears dangling earrings. All wear golfer’s sleeveless cardigans with the air of starting a fashion. One has a flowered tablecloth knotted nonchalantly round the wrist of the hand he gestures with, and when the sun goes down he flounces the cloth loose and it becomes a cloak arranged to fall in Grecian folds from his shoulders. It’s taken his fancy to carry a child’s plastic handbag. No matter. What is tribal dress? Something in a constant state of change since Africans began to wear anything. A plastic handbag is no more inauthentic than a turban introduced by Arab slavers. You just have to know how to make it your style.

These young men have the Vogue model’s saunter. But names of mines they have worked in come quickly to their tongues: Stilfontein, Grootfontein, Durban Deep. On their mountain-top piazza it is difficult to imagine, crouched under a weeping rockface, enclosed in dank dark with several kilometres of earth above them, their steel-helmeted heads.

The centres from which life is ordered for the people living in the round huts that seem to have come spinning to rest, like counters in a game, everywhere round the mountains, are not made out at first sight. But each airy community has its chief’s Great Place. The weekly court is in session in one. Horses are tied in the traditional clearing under trees which was the original form of an African court where chief and tribal elders deliberated; there is a little schoolhouse-type building, broken panes patched with cardboard, an assembly squeezed close on benches and the floor, the well of the court demarcated by a barrier and witness stands of imposing carved wooden solidity certainly representing the justice of the early British magistracy.

The prosecutor is the only fat man I encounter in the Transkei, a black Orson Welles, skilled in sarcastic showmanship. Before the court are two striped blankets. The case is a charge of adultery, and these the husband’s evidence that another man came to sleep with his wife and forgot his blankets when he left. The tribal elders of the jury pass remarks about the cuckold that need no translating. When the next case is called I find that the composed, handsome woman whose Maillol feet beside mine jingle columns of brass anklets, whose profile and long hair braided with clay and beads I have been aware of close to mine, is the plaintiff in a divorce. Her husband up in the dock is much older, with irritable veins raised in sunken temples. The jury take snuff and go in and out as their attention waxes or wanes. The young magistrate in sports jacket and shined shoes — a Tribal Authority appointee — who takes down his own court record in longhand, asks how many children the couple have. The woman says ten. The husband: ‘I see eleven.’ Her blanket hides that evidence. Now I understand the secret source of her confidence; a woman with a lover. She is unembarrassed and unrepentant. The husband wants her back to take care of the children, anyway. Her brother is there to tell the court that not only will she not return but the husband must pay her family a debt of bride-price still outstanding.

Now a witch doctor takes the stand. Barefoot, a dark raincoat; and all I can detect that is not entirely unremarkable in this face is deviousness. He claims he cured an epileptic child by a herbal inhalation and cuts in the skin, and was not paid the cow that was his fee. He has a shrewd, loyal, consciously modest wife who knows how to please the court but then contradicts a vital piece of evidence and loses her husband’s case for him.

Lawyers are not allowed to plead in a chief’s court and criminal cases are heard in the common law courts in trading towns. In this Great Place a one-eyed headman prods witnesses to attention with either malice or humour — he has a different expression on each side of his face, and it depends from which side I see him. The reason why the prosecutor is so well fed may be because people holding this position, I am told, can ‘arrange’ a verdict at a price. Yet for me something of the intangible truth about our lies has been arrived at in his cross-examination …

The sea into which the Xhosa’s ancestral dead promised whites and their world would be swept is the southern boundary of Transkei. A long coastline has at every river-mouth a small resort created by the patronage of ordinary middle-class white South Africans who enjoy the luxury of nature not yet polluted by themselves.

The bungalow hotel at Umgazi River Mouth has been taken over by the Transkei Development Corporation, but it employs a white manager, and for the time being the habitué birdwatchers and fishermen still come. The dining-room walls are collages of glued paper fish recording catches. Oysters are 60c a dozen. You sleep in a thatched hut and don’t need to lock the door for fear of any intruder, yet you have a private bathroom. The rush hour heard in the night is the splendid traffic of the Indian Ocean tide coming in. The pure, single sound at the bottom of the well of sleep at dawn is the ferryman’s oarlocks as he rows to work from across the wide Umgazi; he will take hotel guests back and forth to the beach at their pleasure throughout the day. Like him, all the people who work as hotel servants come from the village on the hills on the other bank of the river. White resort and black village face each other. Sitting on the hotel terrace under coral-branch flowers of great erythrina trees people drink beer and follow without moving, like an idle tune they don’t know their fingers are drumming, the rhythm of other lives, over there; the procession of bowed oxen under the whip of the boy taking the three-cornered sled to gather fuel from the beaches’ sculpture galleries of driftwood; the women setting out and trailing back with on their heads the sacks of mussels, black as their wet legs, that change their gait. At night, dart games and after-dinner liqueurs in the bar; crowns of fire are suspended in the thick darkness — over there, the people are burning their steep pasture.

I went across with the hotel’s night-watchman going home in the early morning. Kingfishers squabbled a cockfight in mid-air and the tide was so far out the huge Indian Ocean rollers were the sea’s horizon, smoking like a waterfall. It was a long walk to his house in the village; over riverain fields, then through a forest of yellow-wood and milk-wood trees laced by butterflies, up a path it would have been easier to swing through, from branch to branch. Mussel shells littered the way like peanut husks cast by people nibbling while they walk. Friends of the watchman caught up with us; I was reminded that all my life, in Africa, has been lived among people who apologise when you trip and stumble.

The watchman’s family was not put out by the early intrusion of a stranger. Always the same question: from Egoli? — ‘place of gold’, Johannesburg’s African name, but to Transkeians it means the gold mines, anywhere over the border. The hut door is open before the black pigs belching by, the tattered dogs still stiff from the night’s cold; it breathes quiet smoke. Inside, two women, both young and beautiful, are suckling babies — his wives. His mother, another one of those spare, authoritative old women who never give up the femininity of some adornment, sups tea from a saucer and the young mothers sip theirs slowly above the babies’ heads. There is no food set out. No furniture in the hut except an iron bedstead and a small kitchen dresser, made of boxwood in crude imitation of one someone has seen in a white man’s house. The wood fire that never quite dies in the shallow hearth round which everyone centres, smells sweet. A day has begun in poverty, without the alarm clock, radio, coffee and eggs, commuter’s train that doesn’t wait. It won’t do to romanticise, but there is something here I have to formulate for myself: respect and wholeness. The watchman takes out a very small mandarin (he must have filched it from the hotel garden) and presents it to his elder child. The tiny fruit is brilliant and luxurious, in this house.

About 27,000 new jobs a year have to be found for Transkeians. Agriculturally, there are two irrigation schemes under way which could help to feed the people a little better, but there will be no surplus for export. Unless traces of nickel, copper and platinum, of which geologists so far have no great hopes, turn out to be extensive deposits, the region has none of the primary products the world needs. Coffee, tea, pyrethrum, nuts — beginning to be grown and processed under state schemes — and forestry with its corollary development of sawmills and furniture factories, provide an opening into modern productive activity that has some relation to what the country has and the people know. Most of the new factories in Butterworth, the nineteenth-century town designated the most important ‘growth point’ for the establishment of industry, have no relation at all. Factories owned by South African industrialists manufacture products such as those derived from coal, rubber and plastics imported duty free from South Africa under conditions of a new domestic colonialism. These plants have their cut-rate workers living literally outside their gates; row upon interchangeable row of identical brick cabins in barrack formation without any architectural reference points to community — add or subtract a row here or there, nothing would be noticed. I recognise the model at once: Soweto, the dreary paradigm of black segregated townships in South Africa. With all the world’s experience of humanising low-cost housing at their planners’ disposal, Transkeians are passing from their round thatched huts to this.

In the end, you have to look for people in their times of release — festivity or sorrow — in order to approach their identity with yourself. It comes while you stand back from the mystery of exotic mores: rooted, like your own, in myths without which the inevitable progression from birth to death would be a chain gang of mortality.

The people of the Transkei do not debar an outsider from places where their ceremonial rites still heavily underscore adaptation to those of church, court and industrialisation. In the dimness of huts, I had made out the Cross painted or the miner’s badge nailed on the wall; but there were also circumcision retreats all over the countryside if one knew how to recognise the sign, a ragged yellow flag on a stick. I was allowed to enter one in Bomvanaland, although only mature men and pre-pubertal girls may visit the initiates who, for three months after being ritually circumcised, are isolated there; as a white woman whose sexuality is not codified under the same sanctions as blacks, I was to all intents unsexed, I suppose.

Two men rolled in blankets smoking at the roadside were doing their shift of the twenty-four-hour vigil kept over the retreat. The hills they led the way into on foot showed no human being or house; then there, in a groin of forest where I guessed there would be a hidden stream, there was also hidden a large, blind, woven grass hemisphere at the bottom of a clearing ringed by stakes fluttering scraps of coloured rag and plastic. There was something quietening about crossing that symbolic boundary. But from the lair of contorted trees their movements over months had hollowed out, three or four young men burst, sociably painting their faces with the gestures of women and actors. The cosmetic was ngceke, ground from a chalky white stone and mixed with water from the stream in the little gourd each wore dangling braceleted from his wrist. Each clutched a drab blanket around himself against the wind. There is nothing much to do all day for three months except keep repairing this make-up of white that covers the whole body from head to toe, as well as the face. The feminine gestures and the rough fooling-around and showing-off of any group of young males were confusing — an atmosphere of a harem and army camp, combined and yet out of place in this context for which I had no precedent or name.

Inside the grass shelter (not a hut or house; its feeling was unlike that of any habitation I have known) the frivolous mood fell away with the blankets discarded. These beings were naked except for the paint and a little sheath over the tip of the penis from which a long straw tassel hung stroking thighs as they moved. White lips made for oracles and the liquid dark of eyes, eyes so movingly, overwhelmingly alive in ghostliness and gloom suddenly asserted the yearning faculties of communication and comprehension — spirit and mind glowing against the presence dominated by bodies. If I was not a woman, among them, we were so fully human, there together.

Four of the eight young men had already been to the mines. They lay on the primitive shelf of branches that had been their communal bed for many weeks; there was a log to which they bent to light cigarettes; the fighting-sticks that recall old conflicts and the cursed-at dogs who have been companions through them all. No other possessions. Nothing in this straw cave but the shadows, in these beings’ minds, of the world outside they will emerge into when their time is up and they wash off the white paint and burn, with the straw, the era before they were qualified to enter into the fullness of life, as men.

What is that going to mean, what will be open to them in the third avatar of Nongqause’s vision?

1978

Relevance and Commitment

There is a question that bursts with the tenacity of a mole from below the surface of our assumptions: Do men and can men make a common culture if their material interests conflict?

Don’t let us ignore the mole; though blind it knows instinctively where the daylight is.

The nature of art in South Africa today is primarily determined by the conflict of material interests in South African society. A philosophy of spiritual liberation requires, among other fundamentals, frank appraisal of the institutions and policies of the white communities that affect the arts in South Africa. We are all paradox. We have all the questions and few answers. Yet there is left to us no less embattled ledge from which to speak honestly and meaningfully about the arts. We must face the fact that the Appollonian brotherhood is no safer from fratricide than any other, where divided loyalties are demanded by immediate survival. We have to challenge ourselves, without cant.

For I take it we acknowledge that as racial problems, both material and spiritual, can hope to be solved only in circumstances of economic equality, so the creative potential of our country cannot be discussed without realisation and full acceptance that fulfilment of that potential can be aimed for only on the premise of the same circumstances.

Equal economic opportunity, along with civil and parliamentary rights for all 26 million⁸ South Africans, is rightly and inevitably the basis for any consideration of the future of the arts. Man has no control over the measure in which talent is given to this one and withheld from that; but man, through the state, controls the circumstances in which the artist develops. Innate creativity can be falsified, trivialised, deflected, conditioned, stifled, deformed and even destroyed by the state, and the state of society it decrees.

‘Courage in his life and talent in his work’ is the artist’s text, according to one of the greatest of them, Albert Camus. Every artist, in any society, has to struggle through what the poet Pablo Neruda calls the ‘labyrinths’ of his chosen medium of expression; that is a condition of his being. As to his place in the outer world, I doubt if any artist ever finds himself in the ideal condition of Hegel’s ‘individual consciousness in wholly harmonious relationship to the external power of society’. But there can have been few if any examples in human history of the degree, variety and intensity of conflicts that exist between the South African artist and the external power of society. That external power is at its most obvious in the censorship laws, running amok through literature and lunging out at the other arts. But it is at the widest level of the formation of our society itself, and not at any specific professional level, that the external power of society enters the breast and brain of the artist and determines the nature and state of art. It is from the daily life of South Africa that there have come the conditions of profound alienation which prevail among South African artists. The sum of various states of alienation is the nature of art in South Africa at present.

I am not invoking the concept of alienation in the Marxist sense, as the consequence of man’s relation to the means of production, although that undoubtedly has its appositeness in the industrialisation of blacks under apartheid and therefore our society as a whole. There are many ways in which man becomes divided from others and distanced from himself. Alienation as such is a condition of rejecting and/or being rejected. The black artist lives in a society that rejected his culture for hundreds of years. He has turned his alienation in the face of those who rejected him and made of his false consciousness the inevitable point of departure towards his true selfhood. The white artist belongs to the white culture that rejected black culture, and is now itself rejected by black culture. He is the non-European whose society nevertheless refused to acknowledge and take root with an indigenous culture. He is the non-black whom blacks see as set apart from indigenous culture. He does not know as yet whether this is a dead end or can be made a new beginning.

Any homogeneity in the nature of the work produced by these artists is brought about by what shackles them together rather than what they share. South African artists belong to the Dionysiac ‘disintegrated consciousness’ that Hegel defines by its antagonism to the external power of society — if by nothing else, they are united in the wish to be free of imposed social circumstances, although they would define these in accordance with a widely differing experience of circumstantial reality. From a disintegrated consciousness, all seek wholeness in themselves and a reconnection with the voltage of social dynamism. Opposition to an existing society implies a hunger to create and identify with another and better one. The abjuration of a set of values implies an intention to create and relate to another set. For the artist, these implications become part of the transformations of reality which are his work.

‘Relevance’ and ‘commitment’ are conceptualisations of this movement. They become the text claimed by artists who, individually, understand different things by them; they also become the demands made upon the artist by his people. Relevance and commitment pulse back and forth between the artist and society. In a time and place like this one, they have become, in the words of Lionel Trilling, ‘the criteria of art and the qualities of personal life of men that may be enhanced or diminished by art’.

How close are these terms that question the existence of the painter, sculptor, writer, composer, photographer, architect, in South Africa today? In fact, they are juxtaposed as much as cognate. And in this, again, they are a signification of the tension between the artist and his society in which his creativity is generated. For relevance has to do with outside events; and commitment comes from within.

For the black artist at this stage in his development relevance is the supreme criterion. It is that by which his work will be judged by his own people, and they are the supreme authority since it is only through them that he can break his alienation. The Black Consciousness thinker, Bennie Khoapa, states that the black artist’s only option is personal transformation; he must be ready to phase himself out of the role of being carrier to what the poet, Mafika Pascal Gwala, calls white official ‘swimming pool and caravan culture’. The external reality to which relevance paces out the measure of his work is not a step away from him: another writer, Njabulo Ndebele, says ‘blacks are operating’ from within ‘a crushing intellectual and educational environment’. Sartre’s philosophical dictum sums up: ‘The exploited experience exploitation as their reality’ — the artist has only to do what every artist must in order to become one: face his own reality, and he will have interiorised the standard of relevance set up outside. Then, theoretically, he has solved the aesthetic and social problem, put himself in meaningful relationship to his society.

But relevance, in the context of the absolutes placed upon the black artist by the new society to which he is dedicated, has another demand. Struggle is the state of the black collective consciousness and art is its weapon. He accepts this as the imperative of his time. Weapons are inevitably expected to be used within an orthodoxy prescribed for the handling of such things. There is a kit of reliable emotive phrases for writers, a ready-made aesthetic for painters and sculptors, an unwritten index of subjects for playwrights and list of approved images for photographers. Agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. It licenses a phony sub-art. Yet the black artist is aware that he is committed, not only as a voluntary act, but in the survival of his own being and personality, to black liberation. It is at this point that, as an artist, commitment takes over, from within, from relevance, and the black artist has to assert the right to search out his own demotic artistic vocabulary with which to breathe new life and courage into his people. His commitment is the point at which inner and outer worlds fuse; his purpose to master his art and his purpose to change the nature of art, create new norms and forms out of and for a people recreating themselves, become one aim.

For the black artist, the tendentiousness of the nature of art goes without question. He cannot choose the terms of his relevance or his commitment because in no other community but the predicated one which blacks have set up inside themselves are his values the norm. Anywhere else he is not in possession of selfhood. The white artist is not quite in the reverse position; that would be too neat for the complexity of the state of art, here. He can, if he wishes, find his work’s referent in an aesthetic or ontological movement within the value-system traditional to whites. White South African culture will not repudiate him if he does. Even if he were to decide to be relevant to and find commitment only to himself, he could still find some kind of artistic validity so long as he were to be content to stay within the kind of freedom offered by that closed value-system. Yet the generally tendentious nature of art, overwhelmingly so in writing, if less consciously so in painting and the plastic arts, in South Africa, shows that few white artists take up these options. One could reverse the proposition and say they don’t ‘opt out’ — if it were not for the fact that the rejection of whites-only values by no means implies a concomitant opting in: to black culture. The white artist, who sees or feels instinctively that exclusively white-based values are in an unrecognised state of alienation, knows that he will not be accepted, cannot be accepted by black culture seeking to define itself without the reference to those values that his very presence among blacks represents. Yet for a long time — a generation at least — the white artist has not seen his referent as confined within white values. For a long time he assumed the objective reality by which his relevance was to be measured was somewhere out there between and encompassing black and white. Now he finds that no such relevance exists; the black has withdrawn from a position where art, as he saw it, assumed the liberal role Nosipho Majeke defined as conciliator between oppressor and oppressed.

If the white artist is to break out of his double alienation, he too has to recognise a false consciousness within himself, he too has to discard a white-based value-system which it is fashionable to say ‘no longer’ corresponds to the real entities of South African life but which in fact never did. But unlike the black, he does not have a direct, natural, congenital attachment to these entities. We are not speaking of artistic modes and forms, here, but of the substance of living from which the artist draws his vision. Exploitation, which the blacks experience as their reality, is something the white artist repudiates, refuses to be the agent of. It is outside himself; he experiences it through a moral attitude or a rational empathy. The black creation of new selfhood is based on a reality he, as a white, cannot claim and that could not serve him if he did since it is not his order of experience. If he is to find his true consciousness, express in his work the realities of his place and time, if he is to reach the stage where commitment rises within him to a new set of values based on those realities, he has to admit openly the order of his experience as a white as differing completely from the order of black experience. He has to see the concomitant necessity to find a different way, from that open to the black artist, to reconnect his art through his life to the total reality of the disintegrating present, and to attempt, by rethinking his own attitudes and conceptions, the same position the black artist aims for: to be seen as relevant by and become committed to commonly understood, commonly created cultural entities corresponding to a common reality — an indigenous culture.

I suppose I shall be accused of using the schema of a Black Consciousness philosophy. It is an indication of the rethinking, remaking needed in South African cultural contexts that for years no one, not even blacks, ever questioned the exclusive use of white cultural analyses. In my view, this conference should not be afraid of having kick-me political labels pinned on its back; it should assert the urgent need and right to use whatever ideas, from whatever source, that may reflect the facts of life here and penetrate the cataract of preconceptions grown over our vision. This is consistent with an abandonment of the old positions of white and black in culture and the scrapping of the assumption that white-based culture is the mean, for white as well as black.

What I have outlined so far is a brief analysis of the imperatives laid upon South African artists by their society. Of course it is all not so clear-cut as that. When we turn to the nature of the work the artist produces, we become aware of the terrible problems in which the artist is enmeshed while following those imperatives, even if, as in the case of black artists, he feels sure he knows his way. The nature of contemporary art here, in the aspect of subject matter, is didactic, apocalyptic, self-pitying, self-accusatory as much as indicting. Apartheid in all its manifestations, the petty jigger that niggles under the skin, the bullet that reaches the heart, informs the ethos of what is produced even by a non-objective painter or an architect seeking an aesthetic for cheap housing to replace a demolished crossroads. As Pieyre de Mandiargues says in one of his novels, ‘When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?’

But when we posit a post-apartheid art — and we must, right now, out of the necessity implied by the facts examined so far, and forth-rightly expressed in the white artist Andrew Verster’s question: ‘Is there a South African art or is it still to happen?’ — we switch off the awful dynamism of disintegration and disaster. The black artist is aware of a great force ready to charge him, the Yeatsian drive to ‘express a life that has never found expression’, his part in the recreation of his people in their own image. For him, the new orientation may be already psychologically established; but it is by no means fully formulated. The important cultural debate that was taking place, in the early and mid-seventies in publications like the yearly Black Review and the publications of the Black Community Programmes, has been cut off by the banning of organisations and individuals concerned. Black art has not really visualised itself beyond protest. It has not even dealt with aspects of present-day art that do a disservice to the very purpose relevance imposes upon them — for example, the commodity-maker of ‘black image’ sculpture and painting, the production of artefacts of protest that the white man hangs on his wall as he keeps a carved walking stick in his hall. These aspects may have grave effects on the future of art, carry over a distortion of the moment of identification between the artist and his subject that Proust defines as style. In the dragon’s breath heat of the present, this neglect is more than understandable. But understanding does not shift aside problems that will confront the new black culture. Black thinkers are aware of them. Ezekiel Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi began an inquiry twenty years ago, and their essays were banned. In this decade, it is a continuingly shameful and criminally stupid action on the part of the South African government to have reduced the black cultural debate to a clandestine affair showing itself here and there in white and/or literary journals.

Black artists are primarily concerned with a resuscitation of the pre-colonial culture as a basis, concreted over by the interruption of a purely white-based culture, for an indigenous modern African culture. They break through the concrete with the drums and folk epics that celebrate the past and effectively place the heroes of the present liberation struggle — Mandela, Sobukwe, Biko, Hector Petersen — in a parthenon of inspirational culture-heroes along with Plaatje and Mofolo, but to embody the objective reality of modern blacks they must synthesise with all this the aspirations of people who still want TV and jeans — what George Steiner calls ‘the dream-life and vulgate’ of contemporary, individual lives. It is comparatively easy to create a people’s art — that is to say an aesthetic expression of fundamentally shared experience, during a period when the central experience of all, intellectuals, workers and peasants alike, is oppression: the pass laws are a grim cultural unifier. It is quite another matter when the impact of experience breaks up into differing categories of class-experience. The avowed black aim is a culture springing from and belonging to the people, not an elite. This new orientation involves turning away from Europe but at the same time setting up an essential relationship between the past and the technological present recognised as something distinct from the inherent threat of all-white culture, something that cannot be denied and is with blacks in Africa for ever. Post-apartheid, beyond liberation in the political sense, and moving on within the total context of liberation in which black culture sees its future — unless black artists can achieve a strong, organic synthesis on these lines their art will be nostalgic, there will be a hiatus between modern life and art, for them. They will be in danger of passing into a new phase of alienation. The questions of relevance and commitment will come up again. This may not seem much of a concern in the fierce urgency of present dangers, but it is one of the many that make the black artist’s struggle towards true consciousness a continuing one, and the future of art in South Africa uncertain.

If the white artist is to move on to express a life that has never found expression, this presupposes, on the one hand, that white culture will remake itself, and on the other that black culture will accept him as one who has struck down into liens with an indigenous culture. That remaking could inform his vision, it could replace the daemonic forces of disintegration which both drove him into alienation and were his subject. But unless this happens he will know less and less and see less and less, with the deep comprehension and the inner eye necessary to creation, of the objective realities he came to recognise when he rejected the false consciousness constituted in traditional white-based culture. In the post-apartheid era, the white’s position will depend much more on external forces than will that of the black artist. Having changed his life, the white artist may perhaps stake his place in a real indigenous culture of the future by claiming that place in the implicit nature of the artist as an agent of change, always moving towards truth, true consciousness, because art itself is fixed on the attainment of that essence of things. It is in his nature to want to transform the world, as it is a political decision for those who are not artists to want to transform the world. The revolutionary sense, in artistic terms, is the sense of totality, the conception of a ‘whole’ world, where theory and action meet in the imagination. Whether this ‘whole’ world is the place where black and white culture might become something other, wanted by both black and white, is a question we cannot answer; only pursue.

Although I am white and fully aware that my consciousness inevitably has the same tint as my face, when I have spoken of white attitudes and opinions I have not taken it upon myself to speak for whites, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by whites themselves, or manifest (in my opinion) in their work. When I have spoken of black attitudes and opinions, I have not taken it upon myself to speak for blacks, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by blacks themselves or (in my opinion) manifest in their work. It’s difficult to end on the customary high note; the state of culture in South Africa does not encourage it. Yet when I go so far as to use ‘we’ to speak for our culture, the pronoun in itself expresses some kind of obstinate collective intention to assume that there is at least the possibility of a single, common, indigenous nature for art in South Africa. Any optimism is realistic only if we, black and white, can justify our presence by regarding ourselves as what Octavio Mannoni, in his study of the effects of colonialism, terms ‘apprentices of freedom’. Only in that capacity may we perhaps look out for, coming over the Hex River Mountains or the Drakensberg, that ‘guest from the future’ that Nadezhda Mandelstam calls upon, the artist as prophet of the resolution of divided cultures.

1979

Pula!: Botswana

Pula. In the middle of southern Africa there is a country whose coat of arms bears, instead of some Latin tag boasting power and glory, the single word: rain.

On the map Botswana appears as a desert big as France. And sometimes, in Botswana, looking at the figures of men, the bole of thorn tree or palm, a single donkey, breaking the white light, it seems a vast sand-tray in which these are lead toys stuck upright. But they are rooted there. This Kalahari sand nourishes them — grasses, thorn bush, mopane forest, birds, beasts and 600,000 people. They live on it, in it and off it. In places it hardens into a crust of salt; it swallows, in the north-west, the waters of a great delta. But even the final desiccation of the south-west provides harsh sustenance for those — beasts and men — who know where to find it, and for those who know how to space their thirst, there is water if you dig for it.

A desert is a place without expectation. In Botswana there is always the possibility of rain. The hope of rain. Rain is hope: pula means fulfilment as well as rain. As a political catchword, the cry has a less muffled ring than the many variants of the word ‘freedom’.

From the days of the late-nineteenth-century conquest of southern Africa by whites until 1966, Botswana was the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland and, except for parties of anthropologists for whom it was a trip back to the Stone Age culture of the Kalahari Bushmen, it meant the ‘line of rail’ connecting the Republic of South Africa with Rhodesia that ran up inside its border along the strip of fertile farmland settled by whites. The Line of Rail is still there, the two or three frontier towns — one street with hotel verandah and shops facing the railway station — but as a way of life it no longer sums up the country, only the colonial past. Botswana’s railway was — and is — owned and operated by a neighbouring country, Rhodesia, and Botswana’s capital was until recently a town just outside its borders, in South Africa. The brand new capital, Gaborone, is only just inside; the pull of economic gravity remains unavoidably towards the south, where are based the international mining companies whose discoveries of copper, nickel and diamonds beneath the sand will mean, ten years from now, the doubling of the per capita income, at present on the poverty line. Gaborone is set down on the Line of Rail but not of it, complete and ready-to-use: an Independence Expo in whose pavilions, after the celebrations, people stayed on. Flagwaving consular residences, a national museum, churches with contemporary bell-towers, the hotel/cinema/national-airline/shopping complex which even includes an American Embassy — one-stop urban civilisation. In the piazza of the shopping mall a few thorn trees have been left to assert the empty savannah outside, but the barbers, beggars and vendors of an African town are too overawed to set up business under them. Emancipated black girls drink beer among the men in a hotel bar, now, at midday. Out of the cheerful exchanges in the Tswana language there comes suddenly, in English, the authentic tone of Gaborone: ‘I give it three years, and I buzz off.’

More than twenty years ago Seretse Khama, Chief-designate of the Bamangwato and Paramount Chief-designate of all the Botswanaian tribes, married a white girl while studying law in England and was exiled by the British colonial administration from his ancestral home in Serowe. It was one of the biggest political scandals in Africa, with all the private intrigues of an African dynasty, the Khama family, to complicate the issue. Sir Seretse Khama, knighted by the British, elected by democratic vote, is now first President of Botswana; the Bamangwato remain the biggest and most distinguished tribe; Serowe remains the seat of the Khamas as well as the capital of the wealthiest province and probably the last nineteenth-century African — as opposed to colonial — town south of the Equator.

In their Great Place where the Khamas lie when they die, they are not so much buried as set on final watch over the Bamangwato. You reach the Great Place by a steep walk up behind the swept, stockaded kgotla, the open-air tribal court and meeting place beneath a big tree, and the silos where communal water or grain are stored. On a hill that gives out upon the whole town and beyond is a pink stone terrace of graves — the Grecian urns, marble scrolls and infant angels of ‘funerary art’. The real monument is the one the earth has spouted and tumbled in an outcrop to one side, Thataganyana Rock. Little humpy dassies dart fussily in and out its petrified burst-bubble holes.

Thataganyana is a superb vantage place for the living as well as the dead; we leaned upon the warm wall of the terrace and looked down over the entire life of this town like no other town, a town ordered garland by garland, not in streets or blocks, loop after loop of green rubber plant hedging circular houses grouped round cattle stockades made of stony grey tree trunks. Far away, the square of a sports field marked in the same green, and then the fuzzy plain overlaid, by the eye, with thickness upon thickness of blond grass and grey bush until it laps a few hills, one flat-topped, that are exactly the single woolly hills drawn on ancient maps of Africa. A God’s-eye view; you can also see into everyone’s clay-walled, decorated back yard. A woman whirrs at her sewing machine. Gossiping men lean against walls. A baby staggers about in a G-string; an old man in a parson’s black suit, with hat and stick, pays a visit. You can hear everyone’s life as well: it is Saturday afternoon and those people who have decided to kill a goat, brew some maize beer and throw a party — a popular way of making money, since an entrance fee is charged — amplify African jazz above the hollow knock of wood being hewn. We stayed on while the moon came up and only the little bronze buck, symbol of the Bamangwato on top of the grave of Khama III, stood out clear. Just before the light went, a tiny girl ran from the houses and squatted to relieve herself in the security of the Great Place’s shadow.

Down in Serowe in a gaunt cool house with the drinks and the guns ready on the verandah lives Sekgoma Khama, graduate of Dublin University and cousin of the President. He is a princely young man, almond-eyed and handsome, with a strangely fateful laugh — when a gun went off among us while we were jolting in a truck over the veld after eland, the bullet searing the ear of his close friend, he broke the shock with that laugh, not in callous amusement but as a kind of baring-of-teeth at the hazards of life. The hunt itself was in the nature of a quest: as Tribal Authority (the democratic title for Chief; he is acting in that capacity in place of an elder brother studying the problems of developing countries, abroad) he has the right to bag himself a single head of the rare species a season. He set off early with us among a house-party of friends — a Jamaican, an African geologist (rarer even than the eland), a pretty Swedish girl who was helping to found a cottage textile industry in the town, and a whole entourage of gun-bearers. Half an hour out of Serowe the red hartebeest with their tarnished copper coats stood, not recognising death when one among them fell, but a small herd of eland were as elusive as any unicorn. Their broad light flanks always seeming to be presenting themselves one-dimensionally, just the way they look in ancient bushman paintings; they led us a dance from the grassland into the scrub forest, where they threaded away between screens of trees while even Sekgoma’s crack shots fell short.

When his brother returns, Sekgoma Khama will take up again his full-time occupation of managing the Khama family’s lands and cattle, and serving on the Land Boards that, as much as the switch to a money economy, will change the structure of Botswana society. He sees change not as abandonment but transposition of traditional institutions: cattle as wealth not capital — which was the basis of the economy — becomes ‘a ranching operation’; the tribal monopoly of land loosens as allocation becomes a matter of applying to a government board instead of the local chiefs. He felt at home in Joyce’s Dublin; lucky man, it has not made him feel any the less at home when he sits under the tree at the kgotla, settling some dispute among the 36,000 people of Serowe. He shows disquiet over only one thing: ‘The mineral discoveries so far are all in our Central Province … it could be a delicate situation, politically …’

The Bamangwato, it seems, cannot escape being a favoured people; for them, the cry Pula does not go unanswered.

Like the ownership of cattle, hunting has always been the way of life of the people here, whereas in other parts of Africa in colonial times it quickly became only the privilege of whites. In a country without billboards (or even road signs) a pair of horns on a tree marks a turn-off or the way to a cattle post, and in every place of habitation bones and the skins of game pegged out to dry are homely as a front garden in the context of other lives.

In spite of this, Botswana is one of the few countries in Africa that still has great herds of game left, not only in reserves but living alongside men. The Kalahari, hostile to agriculture, is what has saved the animals, and they have learned to subsist sleek-coated through the dry months upon the heavy desert dew condensed on tough vegetation. There is conflict now between, on the one hand, the Government’s reflection of the Western world’s concern to preserve wild life in the Third World and, on the other, the curious unconscious alliance of interest between the Africans who’ve always shot for the pot and whites who have shot for trophies and fur coats. The fashionable vocabulary of environmental studies is invoked these days by people in the skin-and-bone trade. In Francistown on the Line of Rail, while walking through a ‘game industry’ past mounds of lopped-off elephant feet and vats of impala and zebra skins soaking, we were given an erudite lecture on the ecological viability of the whole highly profiable business — indigenous people continuing to live off indigenous animals, rather than the development of agricultural and industrial employment for the people and protection for the animals. The very balance of nature was being preserved, our cultured white informant said, by buying from Africans the skins of only plentiful species, and utilising every scrap of the product — and by this time we had left the sickish smell of the curing sheds and were in a workshop where beautiful and noble creatures like those we had pursued on the plain outside Serowe were emerging finally: as elephant-foot umbrella stands, ostrich-foot lamps and zebra-skin bar stools. In the taxidermy department, some white safari hunter’s lion was being tailored into his skin, with little strips of cosmetic tape to hold it in place over the stuffing. A ghastly ecological situation given dubious scientific licence to continue colonial hubris in the beauty of wild animals owned as kitsch.

There is only one road to the west and it leads three hundred miles from Francistown to Maung, the last place on the map that signifies more than a store, a well and a mud village. Early on the way the earth gives out, the Kalahari begins, then the road skirts the rime of the Makgadikgadi salt pans and the heads of ilala palm stand up like broken windmills. As if all their sundered parts had flown together again, we encountered along the road impala, gemsbok crowned with antennae-straight horns, kudu bulls with elaborately turned ones, ostriches with legs like male performers in ballet drag.

Maung reached has the unreality of any oasis; no relation between the deep blue and green of the Thamalakane River shining between towering wild fig trees and the monotonous village of grey huts on endless grey sand not a hundred yards away. Riley’s Hotel (the old London Missionary Society mission station converted by an Irish pioneer adventurer, now dead and legendary) and Riley’s Garage are the fount: the big pub behind mosquito screening where white-collar Africans have taken up darts among hefty white habitués, the grease pits where trucks and Land-Rovers are relieved of the sand that clogs their innards. Lumbering four-wheel-drive vehicles are to Maung what ships are to a port — their image of power and freedom not only demarcates road from sand by the impress of their tracks, it also dominates the imagination of the black children: their toys are model trucks home-made of bent wire on condensed milk-tin wheels.

Walking through the village we read a ‘Wanted Man’ notice of a new kind. Reward was offered for Diphetho Monokrwa, ‘last seen following a herd of buffalo’. We came upon, at nine in the morning, a party of women in Victorian dress embellished with jewellery and eastern turbans, sitting like telephone-cover dolls in the sand, making a leisurely meal of tea and porridge. Before the 1914–18 war Herero people fled from German genocide in South West Africa (Namibia); here they live still, their extraordinary women peacocking it among the Tswana hens. These are the women who played the Lysistrata act without ever having heard of her — they refused to bear children while the men submitted to German oppression. Only that sort of female spirit could sustain a vanity colossal as this, trailing wide skirts through the sand, boned up to the throat in the heat, ironing flounces with a flat-iron filled with burning coals, creating in poverty a splendour constantly remade out of bits of what has worn out. After the meal they passed round a cup of salt and a pocket mirror; each cleaned her teeth with a beringed finger, and took a critical look at today’s face.

Maung is the last place you can buy a loaf of bread for many hundreds of miles. It is also the plenitude of the Okavango delta and you can skip the desolation and fly there in a few hours to canoe and fish and bird- and game-watch. The Okavango, misnamed a swamp, is really a vast system of clear bayous created by the Okavango River and seasonal flood-waters that come down from the highlands of Angola each May. At least one of the safari camps that are setting up business has its own airstrip. Just outside the Moremi Game Reserve, in a self-styled ‘game kraal’ built of reed and thatch to house a wealthy species of tourist, each suite has its pastel-coloured portable thunder-box and each guest his personal servant. For the hard-living Francis Macombers are being replaced by wildlife worshippers, and the white hunters, pushed as far south as Botswana, have gone about as far as they can go, and many are themselves turning for survival to leading photographic safaris and mugging up ornithology to please bird-watching clients. Derek ‘Kudu’ Kelsey is one of the adaptable ones, as ready now to aim the amateur photographer’s camera so that he may bring back the trophy picture as once the white hunter was to put his client into the position where his gun couldn’t miss. But while Mr Kelsey is a perfectionist, filing the wicked cat’s-nail thorn off every knob of the magnificent mukoba trees of his ‘kraal’ lest a guest might suffer so much as a scratch at Africa’s hands, he retains a dash of endearingly uncalculated zaniness from wilder, colonial times. In the morning he took us by canoe expertly along the water-paths made by hippos through papyrus that lead on for many days’ journey up the Okavango; in the evening he appeared in dinner jacket and trousers worn above bare ankles and veldskoen shoes, and had arranged for ‘dinner music’ to be provided by the grandfathers, wives and babies of a nearby village, who sat round the fire clapping and singing their narrative chants. Later, there were dancing girls, in the form of the six- or seven-year-old daughters of the waiters, abandoning a sweet bashfulness to shake their little bodies frenziedly in grass skirts.

We bought that last bread in Maung.

Carrying our water and petrol as well as food we struck out west again, into the Kalahari. There are roads marked on the map, but a loose hank of tracks ravels the sand out of Maung and it doesn’t much matter which spoor you choose, provided it fits the wheel-gauge of your vehicle, and you stick to it.

We arrived at Lake Ngami at night, put down sleeping bags on anonymous sand in an anonymous dark. Our headlights showed weirdly that the cabs of trucks had worn topiary tunnels in thick thorn trees. We didn’t know which side the lake was, only that the few lights in the bush were the village of Sehithwa. One cannot always be sure if the lake will be there at all: when Livingstone saw it in 1849 it was seventy miles long, but there are years when it disappears altogether; it is one of the farthest points where the delta is quaffed by the desert.

This year it is there, about eight miles of it, in the morning. Like a long gleam seen between the slit of eyelids, at first. No trees on the banks; there are no banks. Sometimes for minutes, when nothing is flying, it looks empty of life. But again, from a certain angle, the skimming birds and the crenellations of the water are the same, so that the whole surface is made of grey wings. What appear to be verges of water and ooze are thousands of gliding duck, quiet and close; a white sandbank in the distance is really solid flamingo. The bush stands withdrawn, half a mile from the water. Suddenly I see silent explosions of dust puff from it, and as I watch, herd after herd of cattle, black, russet, white and dappled, stippled and shaded variations of these colours, burst out of the bush and advance in slow motion, because of the heavy wet sucking at their hooves; across horizontals of grass, sky and water. Herdsmen on horseback with skinny dogs pushing rodent noses into every scent ride by now and then; among all these cattle, one of the men comes up and asks me for milk. Horses, knee-deep, shake their manes like vain girls bathing. Pelicans on the water turn the lake into a child’s bathtub filled with plastic toys. The flamingoes will not stir until late afternoon, when the colour under their wings as they rise seems to leak into the water like blood from a cut finger. As the day moves on heat hazes interpose — between land and water, between one layer of birds or beasts and another — new glassy surfaces of a water that isn’t really there. The peace, born of the passive uncertainties of this beautiful place, one year a lake, another a dried bed of reeds! Over the trembling horizon you can just make out two nubile hills — The Breasts of The Goat. In shallow years, they say, you can drive across through the lake and pass straight between those hills. It is the way to Ghanzi, where the great cattle drives going south pass; and on, deep in the desert, to the non-places where the Bushmen withdraw from the threat of other men.

No one had been able to agree where petrol or potable water would be available on the two hundred miles to the Tsodilo Hills. But then no one had told us, either, of the existence of Marcos’s bar, suddenly come upon in the ash-pale desert of Sehithwa village, where we sat disbelievingly drinking iced whisky and arguing over the mathematical problem in a correspondence study course the young village barman was following.

Villages were more austere even than uninhabited stretches, scoured down to shadeless mud houses, a single store, in an emptiness cleared of thorn by the appetites of goats and the need for fuel. Austere but not desolate: the store was always full of people buying scoops of sugar and maize meal before wire-netted shelves offering blood tonics and gilt earrings, and racks where dusty dresses were chained together. There was no green thing to buy; only the chestnut-shiny fruit of the ilala palm, arranged in frugal pyramids on the sand. When I ate an orange from our supplies, I found myself tasting each suck and morsel down to the pith; the bright skin cast away was an extravagance of fragrance and colour.

The road as a total experience filled each mile and hour, whether you were the one swirling the wheel in split-second decisions and slamming to lower and lower gear, or were simply bent on keeping your balance in the passenger seat. In parts the sand was bottomless, bedrock-less: pits covered with broken thorn and branches looked to be and were traps — the wheels of other vehicles had dug them. The company of the road was that of the marooned: great trucks beached, helpless, their passengers philosophically brewing tea and suckling infants in their shade. The code of the road, quite apart from its condition, made it impossible to say when you could hope to reach where, for you stopped to help, whether with water and cigarettes, or a tow-rope and whatever heaving manpower you could muster. There is a bush panache about the way the Batswana set out over this desert of theirs without a pump or spare wheel, calmly doubling up the human burdens of one truck upon another as they break down.

It becomes true that it is the journey and not the arrival that matters; we forgot we had a destination. Yet at the village of Sepopa we picked up a guide from the headman and were told there were only fifty miles more to go. An unidentified track turned off abruptly left, from nowhere to nowhere. For miles we found ourselves displaced, out of Africa, still lurching over sand, yes, but through a European beechwood, flaming with autumn — we were in a mopane forest. Behind it, the first sight of a hazy blue back; and then, as the forest thinned on to a pale plain, a whale-shaped hill came out of the bush, the Male hill of the Tsodilo.

The Tsodilo are called hills but whether a mountain is a mountain or a hill a hill is not a matter of height but presence. After hundreds of miles of the horizontals of sand, that mastodon of rock is the presence of a mountain; and the emotion one feels standing in the cold dark shadow it casts across the afternoon is the uneasy one engendered by the primeval authority of a mountain. Behind Male is Female Hill, the sheer and fall of soft chalky colours, stone flanks that are olive, rose, smoke-mauve, and behind her are a series of hidden amphitheatres, bays of heat and quiet. And as you climb in the last real luxury left, a boundless silence, years thick, you come with a strange contraction of perception upon paintings made upon the rock. It is as if, out of that silence, this place speaks. There are rhinoceros, zebra; on an umber battlement — quite clear of surrounding blocks of rock spangled with livid fish-scales of lichen — an eland and giraffe. In a cool cleft we lay on our backs (as the artist must have done, at work) to see a line of dancing men with innocent erect penises that have no erotic significance and persist as a permanent feature of Bushman anatomy, even today. Among the animals, schematic drawings and men, there were terracotta imprints of the hands of the artists, or perhaps of others, less talented, who wanted to assert their presence. They were the size of a child’s hand; inevitably, I measured mine against them, clumsily touching across the past. Nobody knows exactly how old these Bushman paintings are, but the Bushmen have wandered this part of Africa for a thousand years and the surviving ones have long lost the art and have not been known to paint within living memory. The paintings were discovered to the world only in the 1950s; new ones are found by anyone who has a few days to spend looking. But very few people have seen even those that are known; by August, we were only the eighth group of travellers to come to Tsodilo that year.

There was a village of twenty-five or thirty people just beyond the reach of the afternoon shadow of the Male hill of Tsodilo. They were a little clan of Mbukushu, the home of whose creation-myth the Tsodilo Hills are. Nyambi (God) let people and animals down to earth from heaven on a rope to the Tsodilo, and so the world began.

We went over to visit with our guide, who had a letter for one of the villagers. Beyond Maung there are no post offices and a letter will be carried by whatever truck happens to be making for a point nearest its destination. No one in the village could read; the old woman for whom the letter was intended handed it back to our guide and settled on her haunches to listen while he read aloud to her. It was from her son, working on a gold mine near Johannesburg, more than a thousand miles away in the Republic of South Africa. Our guide had also, as a young man, been far away to the mines; one of the changes that Sir Seretse Khama’s government is most determined on is the end of Botswana’s necessity to export her men as contract labour, but the experience of going to the mines is one that has entered profoundly into remote lives and changed for ever ancient patterns of existence — that is the furthest reach, in consequence far beyond its military might, of the White South. The letter from the mines was read through again so that — one could see the vivid concentration of response wincing across the old woman’s face — she would remember it precisely as if she could refer to the text.

Meanwhile, the women and children had gathered and I had doled out the remains of a packet of sweets I happened to have. Not enough to go round; but the asceticism bred of a begrudging environment has its own pleasures. These babies who never get sweetmeats exhibited the very opposite of lust for them. One sweet fed four, scrupulously divided from mouth to mouth. The wrapping paper was sucked. Fingers were licked so lingeringly that the pinkish-brown skin came through the dirt. A young Tannekwe Bushman girl and her small brother got their share — a shy yellow pair with oriental eyes and nostrils delicate as shells. They were probably the children of a family enslaved by the Mbukushu.

The black, round, pretty Mbukushu mothers had a queen among them, standing tall and a little apart, with a turned-down amusement on her sardonic mouth. She perversely wore an old striped towel half-concealing her kilt of handmade ostrich shell beads and hide thongs, and her long legs with their calf-bracelets of copper and hide, but her slender, male youth’s shoulders and the flat breasts her body seemed almost to disdain, the assertion of her long neck and shaven head, resolved all aesthetic contradictions. The prow of Male hill rose behind her. Sometimes one comes across a creature, human or animal, who expresses that place in which it has its being, and no other. In the Kalahari, she of the Mbukushu was such a one.

When her ancestors migrated from the north in the early nineteenth century they gained among the Tswana tribes the reputation of great rainmakers. They practised human sacrifice to make rain; today rainmaking is being replaced by water conservation schemes, such as the Shashe River one in the south, and plans to water the desert from the Okavango, but the Mbukushu still speak for Botswana when their rainmaker asks of Nyambi, in the old formula: ‘Do not make too much lightning; just give us quiet water so that we can have food.’

1979