Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The fiction that Murnane invents is a complicated piece of work, so complicated that following its ins and outs will defeat many first-time readers. One of the seminal books for Murnane has been People of the Puszta, a novel exploring rural life in Hungary published in 1936 by Gyula Illyés (1902–83). Illyés records an episode from his childhood on a country estate: the young daughter of a neighbour, raped by one of the stewards, drowned herself, and he saw the corpse. The dead girl became an inspiration to him, ‘an angel of defiance and revolt’ in his later struggles to put an end to the abuse of powerless serfs by the rural gentry.17

  This tragic story, alluded to repeatedly in Murnane’s oeuvre, comes most strongly to the fore in Inland, where responsibility for the girl’s death is taken on by an unnamed Hungarian landowner. This person narrates the early episodes of the book and is one of the avatars of Murnane-the-writer. His confession, expressed in the most veiled of terms, takes the form of an essay contributed to a journal called Mainland published by the Institute of Prairie Studies in Ideal, South Dakota, and edited by Anne Kristaly, one-time beloved of the landowner. Anne Kristaly, Hungarian by birth, is now married to a jealous Scandinavian who does his best to block communications between the two.

  The story of this trio – landowner, Anne Kristaly, husband – complicated by metafictional by-play and parodies of Hungarian authors like Sándor Márai (Murnane reads Hungarian and is familiar with Hungarian literature), takes up the first fifty pages of the book and is its least successful part. After fifty pages, the Hungarian plains and the Institute of Prairie Studies are abandoned. Murnane, as it were, takes a deep breath and plunges into the long contrapuntal composition that constitutes the rest of the book, the most ambitious, sustained, and powerful piece of writing he has to date brought off.

  The underlying narrative is about the eleven-year-old boy and the girl from Bendigo Street, their friendship and their parting, and of the man’s later attempts, Orpheus-like, to summon her back, or if not her then her shade, from the realm of the dead and the forgotten. Woven into this narrative are a number of motifs whose common element is resurrection: the violated serf girl who returns as an angel of defiance; the lovers in Wuthering Heights united beyond the grave (Inland concludes with the famous last paragraph of Emily Brontë’s novel); the great recuperative vision experienced by Marcel in Time Regained; and verses from the Gospel of Matthew that foretell the second coming of Christ.

  The horizons of the boy in Inland, defined by the state of Victoria where he dwells, may be narrow, but the inversion of seasons between northern and southern hemispheres, consequent upon the axial tilt of planet Earth, turns out to be of profound concern to him. As Messiah, Jesus prophesied that the world would soon end but then comforted his followers by telling them to watch the fig tree: when the grey branches showed shoots of green (that is, when spring was in the offing), he would return. Obedient to Rome as ever, the boy’s parish priest follows the northern calendar; thus even as he preaches on the text from Matthew and exhorts his congregation to watch, as if from the depths of winter, for the first shoots of the fig tree, the heat of midsummer is already upon them.

  The obvious lesson to draw is that the church should adapt its mode of teaching to the realities of Australia. The lesson the young Murnane draws, however, is that there are two calendars operating simultaneously, two world-times, and that unless he can find a way of living according to both, superimposing the one upon the other, he will not be saved.

  Once again we see reality being bent to fit a dual-world system. We sympathize with the plight of a boy caught in a trap of his own fashioning only because of the power of the writing in which his story is told. The emotional conviction behind the later parts of Inland is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suppress the impulse to smile, forgive the boy his imagined sins, and allow the peasant girl from Hungary and the girl from Bendigo Street to shine their benign radiance on us from a world beyond that is somehow also this world.

  On every day while I was writing on [these] pages, I thought of the people referred to or named in the book with the word for grassland [i.e., puszta] on its cover.

  At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.

  When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.

  Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write.18

  23. The Diary of Hendrik Witbooi

  One of the overarching themes of modern southern African history is the spread of European settlement into the interior of the continent. Starting from the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, colonists pushed northward and eastward in a process that went on from the mid-seventeenth century until the turn of the twentieth century, taking them far beyond the borders of the present Republic of South Africa.

  Expansion toward the east brought the settlers into conflict with Bantu-speaking peoples; northward expansion brought them into conflict with the far less numerous Khoisan. It was on the northern frontier that the Witbooi dynasty emerged, of which Hendrik Witbooi (1830–1905) was to become the pre-eminent member.

  As Dutch-speaking farmers moved northward toward the Gariep (Orange) River, they took over the pasturage and watering places of Khoi pastoralists and reduced those who did not flee to the status of serfs. Since the capacity of the authorities in the Cape to exercise their powers at a distance was severely limited, the northern frontier had become a haven for runaway slaves and other escapees from the law, who coalesced into armed bands living by hunting, plundering, and cattle-rustling. These bands were in time joined by numbers of disaffected Khoi serfs. Soon they were making regular raids into the lands of the Nama across the Gariep. By the early nineteenth century a half-dozen such bands had established themselves north of the river in Great Namaqualand, the Namaland of present-day Namibia, and were penetrating further north into Hereroland.

  In relation to the indigenous Nama and Herero peoples, these raiders behaved as colonizers in much the same way that the Dutch Boers behaved elsewhere on the frontier. By dint of superior military technology (firearms, horses) and organization (the so-called commando system) they broke the power of the tribal owners of the land. They established their hegemony, exacted tribute, and destroyed indigenous culture, imposing new codes of language, dress, and behaviour.

  A key fact about these colonists – known as Oorlams to distinguish them from the Dutch on the one hand and the tribal Khoi on the other (the origin of the word Oorlam is uncertain) – is that, in the terminology of nineteenth-century racial science, they were ‘mixed’. In culture they are hard to distinguish from ‘white’ Boers (they spoke Dutch, they wore European-style clothes); but then, the Boers of the frontier had adopted so many of the elements of migratory native pastoralism that their way of life had become as much African as European.

  In the Oorlam colonization of Namaland, the numbers of people involved were, by today’s standards, tiny. A typical Oorlams band would consist of no more than a few hundred people, including women and children; while the entire indigenous Nama population was of the order of 10,000 souls. Between Oorlams and the subjected Nama concubinage and marriage took place; in photographs taken in the 1880s, it is hard to detect any physical difference between the two, though certain Oorlams, like the group that settled around Rehoboth, the so-called Baster
s, continued to assert their European descent.

  The Oorlam invasion brought the peoples of southern Namibia into the modern world. In the case of the Nama, it destroyed their traditional culture, imposing a new economy which turned out to be unsustainable and bringing about the impoverishment of their land. In the case of Hereroland, Oorlam overlordship was less secure and the impact on Herero institutions correspondingly less severe. Both the Nama and the Herero had over the centuries evolved flourishing and stable cattle-based economies for which the key skills lay in providing pasturage and water for their beasts. The economy of the Oorlams, which formed part of a larger frontier economy that brought in manufactured goods from the Cape, as well as luxury items (sugar, alcohol, coffee), and – crucially – arms and ammunition, was likewise based on cattle. For their side of the trade, however, the Oorlams relied less on the rearing of their own stock than on stock-raiding or – what amounts to the same thing – exacting tribute in the form of livestock. As young Nama men were drawn into the exciting life of the Oorlam militias, the old cattle-tending skills of the Nama grew to be despised, and as these skills were lost the sizes of the herds declined. To make up for falling revenues, the Oorlams turned their energies to commercial hunting, first for the trade in ivory, later for ostrich feathers; but within another generation the game was hunted out too.

  The semi-legendary founder of the Witboois was Kido (Cupido) Witbooi, who led his people across the Gariep into Namaland. Kido was succeeded by his son Moses. Moses was murdered in 1886 and his place as kaptein (chieftain, military leader) of the Witboois usurped. The usurper was challenged and killed by Hendrik Witbooi, grandson of Kido, who thus became kaptein.

  Born in 1830, Hendrik Witbooi (or, to give him his Nama name, /Khobesin) was, by the standards of the day and of his people, well educated. He could read and write Dutch; he had a more than passing knowledge of history, as well as of manual trades like carpentry; while with the missionary Johannes Olpp he had studied the Bible. Whereas to other indigenous leaders church affiliation seems more often than not to have been a means to an end (the missions provided an entry point into the colonial trade network and more generally into the Western knowledge system), Witbooi took the Bible seriously and had a sense of himself as a visionary leader of his people on the model of Moses. His literary style shows the influence of his Bible reading.

  Witbooi’s Dagboek (Diary) consists of a large leather-bound journal purchased from a stationer in Cape Town. Some 189 pages are covered in the handwriting of Witbooi himself and of various scribes and secretaries. The text, consisting mostly of copies of correspondence relating to the affairs of the Witboois, is written in Cape Dutch; the spelling of words is sometimes phonetic. Witbooi clearly intended it to constitute the annals of his reign. This unique document was taken as booty during a German raid in 1893 and found its way to the Cape archives. A transcript was published in Cape Town in 1929.1 There is no evidence that Witbooi continued with his diarizing after 1893.

  The Diary opens in 1884, with the Witboois locked in armed struggle with the Herero. In these early entries, Hendrik Witbooi’s pleasure in a life of skirmishing and cattle-raiding comes across clearly. Indeed, but for an unforeseen irruption of history one might have predicted for him the life of a typical Oorlam kaptein, competing for wealth and power with other Oorlam groups, with the Herero, and with the indigenous Nama: a charismatic leader with a core of able-bodied men with guns and horses under his command, and a group of families under his protection who owed him their loyalty.

  In fact, however, the fate of Witbooi and his people was decided from afar. Since 1870 the European powers had been blocking the import of Prussian goods, and pressure was mounting in Prussia to find markets elsewhere. In 1882 the German trader Adolf Lüderitz established a station at what is now Lüderitz Bay on the Namibian coast, and appealed to Berlin for official backing. Chancellor Bismarck acceded. From his fellow European powers he demanded and obtained control, in the form of a protectorate (‘German South-West Africa’), over the hinter-land of this trading post. Thus Germany acquired its first overseas colony, 835,000 square kilometres in extent. Other colonial claims soon followed: in Togo, Cameroon, Tanganyika, Samoa.

  Bismarck himself was not in favour of a full-blown takeover of the new territory, which would have entailed the creation of a local administration and, eventually, the building of expensive infrastructure for settlement. His intention, rather, was to grant charters on the Lüderitz model that would allow private entrepreneurs to exploit the territory. But colonialism has a dynamic of its own. Under Bismarck’s more ambitious successor, German expeditionary forces followed the German flag, and then German settlers arrived to occupy the land wrested by those forces from the native peoples. Within twenty years the southern half of South-West Africa had been subdued, with great brutality and loss of life, and its peoples had lost their land and their cattle. On 29 October 1905 Hendrik Witbooi died of wounds received while fighting the Germans. The site of his grave, somewhere near Vaalgras, is unknown. There is a memorial to him in Gibeon, the main settlement of the Witboois.

  After Hendrik’s death the demoralized Witboois sued for peace. However, sporadic resistance against the Germans continued until 1907, when the last of the guerrilla leaders, Jakob Morenga, was shot by British colonial police near Upington in the Cape Colony.

  In hindsight we can see that if the peoples of the territory had come together early to resist the colonizers, they might have been able to make the enterprise too expensive for Germany to sustain. They were, after all, experienced in small-scale warfare; they were armed with Western weapons and knew the terrain as the Germans did not. Regrettably, however, inter-group feuding continued unabated, and was exploited by the Germans to split the opposition. Indeed, between 1894 and 1904 the Witboois contributed fighting men to various German campaigns against the Herero. The last-ditch uprising of 1904, initiated by Samuel Maharero and joined belatedly by the aged Witbooi, though widely supported, was doomed to fail against the superior forces that the Germans had by then assembled.

  Not the least attractive feature of Witbooi’s letters, both to his German foes and to traditional rivals like Samuel Maharero, is their antique courtesy. Witbooi adhered to a code of honour which included doing no violence to women and children, treating prisoners humanely, and giving the enemy dead a decent burial. It also included not attacking until first attacked (though Witbooi is sometimes driven to tortuous feats of sophistry to prove he was not the aggressor).

  Because an officer’s code of honour was important to his concept of soldiering, he was shocked by the attack on his base at Hoornkranz in 1893, when German soldiers deliberately slaughtered women and children. A similar contempt for African life, backed by pseudo-Darwinian racial science, which classified the Khoisan, including the Nama, as one of the inferior races, was exhibited in the course of the suppression of the 1904 uprising. General Lothar von Trotha, who led the German forces, arrived in South-West Africa with a well-merited reputation for ruthlessness gained in campaigns in China and Tanganyika. He was by no means ashamed of the barbarities he practised. ‘[Africans] submit only to force,’ he wrote. ‘To exercise such force with undisguised terrorism [Terrorismus] and even with atrocities [Grausamkeit] has been and is my politics [Politik]. I destroy rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money.’2

  Witbooi’s illusion that European military officers adhered to a code of chivalry had been encouraged by his dealings with Major Theodor Leutwein, the most humanly attractive of the series of German commanders whom he faced on the battlefield. The letters exchanged between the two have an old-world charm: ‘My dear Captain,’ writes Leutwein on 8 July 1894, ‘I am not planning to open hostilities before the contractually agreed date [of 1 August]. Your people may come and go in your camp without fear of harassment, as well as visit my own men. [However] from 1 August we will be at war … I will first send you notice of the commencement of hostilities. Until such time I shall no
t shoot.’3

  After the above-mentioned hostilities had commenced, and after Witbooi had been forced into retreat, he writes as follows to Leutwein: ‘My dear Friend, I received your letter [of 4 September] on the run and note that you are willing to negotiate. I agree to a ceasefire … I shall reply to your letter from the water-hole. Be patient … It would be best for you to await my reply at Naukluft … In good hope and with friendly greetings, Your Friend Captain Hendrik Witbooi.’ (pp. 144–5)

  But his gentlemanly relations with Leutwein should not create the impression that Witbooi was naive about the realities of war. On the contrary, he was a canny political operator and a gifted guerrilla commander who used the mobility of his forces and the marksmanship of his men to compensate for their small numbers (his forces never numbered more than six hundred, and were usually much smaller). The bitter quality of Witbooi’s wit was probably lost on Major Curt von François, Leutwein’s predecessor and the officer responsible for the atrocities at Hoornkranz: ‘I beg you again, dear Friend,’ he writes to François on 24 July 1893, ‘to send me two cases of Martini Henry cartridges so that I can fight back … Give me arms, as is customary among great and courteous nations, so that you may conquer an armed enemy: only thus can your great nation claim an honest victory.’ (pp. 120–1)

  Witbooi’s letters rise to eloquent heights in his denunciation of the concept of land ownership that the new colonizers seek to impose. ‘This part of Africa is the territory of Red chiefs,’ he writes in 1892 to a fellow kaptein.*

  We are one of colour and custom. We obey the same laws, and these laws are agreeable to us and to our people; for we are not severe with each other, but accommodate to each other, amicably and in brotherhood … [We] do not make prohibiting laws against each other, concerning water, grazing, or roads; nor do [we] charge money for any of these things. No, we hold these things to be free to any traveller who wishes to cross our land, be he Red, or White, or Black … But with White people it is not so at all. The White men’s laws are quite unbearable and intolerable to us Red people; they oppress us and hem us in in all kinds of ways and on all sides, these merciless laws which have no feeling or tolerance for any man rich or poor. (pp. 80–1)