Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  Black and white get to know each other in spite of and under the strain of a dozen illegalities. We can never meet in town, for there is nowhere we can sit and talk together. The legal position about receiving African guests in a white house is unclear; we do have our friends in our houses, of course, but there is always the risk that a neighbour may trump up a complaint, to which the police would always be sympathetic. When you offer an African guest a drink, you break the law unequivocally; the exchange of a glass of beer between your hands and his could land you both in the police court on a serious charge. Officially, you are not supposed to enter an African ‘location’ without a permit, and when we go to visit friends in a black township we take the chance of being stopped by the police, who are looking for gangsters or caches of liquor, but will do their duty to apartheid on the side. Three days ago I was one of a small group of whites who had to get up and leave the table at the wedding reception of an African medical student; a white official of the gold-mining company for whom the bride’s father worked, and on whose property his house was, drove up to inform us that our invitations to the wedding were not sufficient to authorise our presence in living quarters provided for Africans.

  No friendship between black and white is free of these things. It is hard to keep any relationship both clandestine and natural. No matter how warm the pleasure in each other’s company, how deep and comfortable the understanding, there are moments of failure created by resentment of white privilege, on the one side, and guilt about white privilege on the other.

  Another life altogether.

  Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: Do you want to be overrun by blacks?

  I bump an African’s scooter while parking, and before he and I have a chance to apologise or accuse, there’s a white man at my side ready to swear that I’m in the right, and there are three black men at his side ready to swear that he is in the right.

  Another life altogether.

  Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: Are you prepared to see white standards destroyed?

  A friend of mine, a dignified and responsible African politician and an old man, is beaten up by white intruders while addressing a meeting of dignified and responsible white people.

  Living apart, black and white are destroying themselves morally in the effort. Living together, it is just possible that we might survive white domination, black domination, and all the other guises that hide us from each other, and discover ourselves to be identically human. The least we could all count on would be the recognition that we have no more and no less reason to fear each other than other men have.

  —Africa Seminar

  Washington, D.C., 1959

  HOW NOT TO KNOW

  THE AFRICAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —1966

  A MORNING IN

  THE LIBRARY: 1975

  Recently I spent a strange morning in a library.

  It was the Reference Section of the Johannesburg Municipal Library; I had entered, made my request to a solicitously-attentive librarian, followed her to a glass-fronted case, waited while she unlocked it and removed a large, looseleafed volume for me.

  Now I sat down with the other users of the library at one of the drawing-room-glossy tables. It was good to find myself among people of all colours, absorbed in their reading; faded and ridiculous, those days not long ago, when to work here and take advantage of the courteous and knowledgeable help of the librarians whites kept for themselves. A crumbling at the edges of the apartheid fortress had at least taken place. Now all my fellow Johannesburgers were surrounded by books. Some had piled a lair against distraction; some stared at an array set out like a hand of patience. A young girl opposite me was making notes, hovering from source to source above spread volumes. Quietly, with the creaking of boots or the lisp of crepe rubber, the offices of this temple of learning were performed as people went back and forth between the shelves, taking and replacing books, more books.

  I alone had only one before me. It occupied me the whole morning; it was, in a sense, the Book of Books, whose word is set up against that of all others. My book was jacobsen’s Index of Objectionable Literature, the bible of South African censorship. And so, while the search for knowledge, know-how, spiritual enlightenment, and the pleasures of poetry went on about me—like most writers, I am as practised a squinter as I am an eavesdropper, and I noted Wittgenstein, Teach Yourself Accountancy, Pascal’s Pensées, Seventeenth Century English Verse—I read on down the lists of banned books in Jacobsen.

  There is a great deal of trash, of course. Paperbacks of the kind that are twirled round on wire stands in chewing-gumand-smokes shops and airports; the titles of the banned ones don’t sound any different from those I see on sale everywhere. The sheer volume of sub-literature swamps the resources of censorship, in that category. And there are books I suppose we could be said to be lucky to do without? Dr Rubin never gets a chance to tell us Everything We Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Were Afraid to Ask.

  The ‘highest literary judgment’ South Africans are constantly assured is a qualification of the government-appointed censors who consider literature, plays, and films apparently is just as good for extra-literary purposes: the censors are expected to bring this judgment to bear upon and indeed have banned T-shirts bearing saucy legends, a black fist, and even the peace sign. Let us not bother to recall the famous pantyhose packet; there was also a glass that, on being filled with liquid, showed the figure of a nude woman. There they are, listed in Jacobsen.

  But it’s easy to laugh at the South African censors. Our amusement, their solemn ridiculousness—these have not undermined their power. Indeed, as we know, the renewed and tightened censorship legislation (it was first imposed in the sixties) that came into force on April 1 this year protects the newlychosen personnel both from ridicule and from exposure should their decisions be challenged. The right of appeal to a court of law against bannings has been taken from writers, and it is now an offence against the law to criticise members of the special Appeal Board set up within the censorship organization to hear appeals against decisions made by its own regional censorship committees.

  Most titles my finger was running down, page after page, were banned by the old Publications Control Board, before April. They constitute virtually the entire oeuvre of black South African fiction writers, essayists, and some poets, including Lewis Nkosi, Alex La Guma, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Dennis Brutus, and individual works by myself, Jack Cope, Mary Benson, C. J. Driver, Andre Brink, and others, black and white.

  Bans on British, American, and European writers include works by Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, John O’Hara, John Masters, James Baldwin, Edna O’Brien, John Updike, Frederic Raphael, Joseph Heller, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Han Suyin, James Purdy, William Burroughs, Erica Jong, Langston Hughes, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Truman Capote, Alan Sillitoe, Sinclair Lewis, William Styron, Alison Lurie, Phillip Roth, Jakov Lind, J. P. Donleavy, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. Translations include books by Joseph Kessel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, Alberto Moravia, Carlos Fuentes, Roger Peyrefitte, Jean Genet, Francoise Mallet-Joris, Junichiro Tanazaki, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Colette, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jean Cocteau, Alfred
Jarry, Vasco Pratolini, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marguerite Duras, Guy de Maupassant, and Pierre Louys.

  Among contemporary thinkers there are works by Herbert Marcuse, Oscar Lewis, Salvador Allende, Wilhelm Reich, Louis Althusser, and Leszek Kolakowski.

  Some of the bannings of the new censorship organization were too recent yet to have found their place in jacobsen’s Index. Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince was one. Wopko Jensma’s Where White Is the Colour, Black Is the Number, Mary Benson’s The Sun Will Rise, and Breyten Breytenbach’s latest work, were others. And the day after I spent my morning in the library reading about what we may not read, our new and greatly enlarged team of censors showed nothing if not extraordinary breadth of literary judgment—at one eclectic stroke they banned George Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and thirteen pairs of men’s underpants bearing legends such as ‘Long John Silver’.