V
Citizen of France, most untranslatable of Afrikaans poets, Breytenbach has published this account of his re-exploration of his African roots in English, a language of which his mastery is by now almost complete. In this respect he follows his countryman André Brink and a host of other writers (including black African writers) from small language communities.
The reason for his step is, one would guess, practical: the market for books in Afrikaans is small and dwindling. Breytenbach certainly does not resort to English as a gesture of fellowship with English-speaking South African whites, for whom he has never had much time. Nevertheless, it is odd to be faced with a book in English that is so much a celebration of the folksy earthiness of Afrikaans nomenclature, that follows with such attention the nuances of Afrikaans social dialect, and that entertains without reserve the notion that there is a sensibility attuned to the South African natural world which is uniquely fostered by the Afrikaans language.
There is a wider body of what I would call sentimental orthodoxy that Breytenbach seems to accept without much reserve. Much of this orthodoxy relates to what present-day cultural politics calls ‘first peoples’ and South African folk idiom ‘the old people’: the San and the Khoi. In two widely read and influential books, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) and The Heart of the Hunter (1961), Laurens van der Post presented the San (‘Bushmen’) as the original Africans, bearers of archaic wisdom, on the brink of extinction in a world for which their gentle culture rendered them tragically unfit. Breytenbach records moving twilight utterances of nineteenth-century San, while sometimes lapsing into Vander Post-like romanticising as well (‘small sinewy men [with] an inbred knowledge of the drift of clouds and the lay of mountains’). (p. 84) But his main aim is to suggest that the old San and Khoi myths live on today in unconscious re-enactments: a woman who bites off her rapist’s penis, for instance, is repeating the trick of the Khoi mantis-god. Passages of Dog Heart carry a whiff of hand-me-down Latin American magic realism. The case for an unarticulated psychic continuity between old and new brown people is similarly unpersuasive, while the recounting of the myths has an obligatory air about it, as if they are being copied over from other books.
Breytenbach’s current political beliefs are spelled out in the essays collected in The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (1996). Insofar as he is still a political animal, his programme can be summed up as ‘fighting for revolution against politics’.5 In Dog Heart, however, his politics is implied rather than explained. Quarrels and antipathies emerge in the form of casual sideswipes: at white liberals, at the Communist Party colony within the ANC, at the Coloured middle class which has found a home for itself in the old National Party (rebaptised the New National Party and still, after the 1999 elections, holding on to power in places like Montagu), at the ‘dogs of God’ (Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the new artistic and academic establishment with its stifling political correctness. A brief brush with Nelson Mandela is recounted, from which Mandela emerges in none too favourable a light. Thus Breytenbach keeps the promise he made in Return to Paradise: to be a maverick, ‘against the norm’.
Like Breytenbach’s other memoirs, Dog Heart is loose, almost miscellaneous, in its structure. Part journal, part essay on autobiography, part book of the dead, part what one might call speculative history, it also contains searching meditations on the elusiveness of memory and passages of virtuoso writing – a description of a thunderstorm, for instance – breathtaking in the immediacy of their evocation of Africa.
26 South African Liberals: Alan Paton, Helen Suzman
I
ALAN PATON MADE his reputation with Cry, the Beloved Country, published in 1948 at the very beginning of the National Party’s forty-five year spell of power. It was not only Paton’s first novel but his first book. It appeared when he was already in his middle years; it became a bestseller and brought him financial independence and fame. But in retrospect that sudden fame seems a mixed blessing. For from being an obscure public servant Paton was turned, not wholly unwillingly, into a sage and oracle on South African affairs. It was a role within which he remained to a certain extent trapped for the rest of his life. Its effects can be seen not only in the increasingly ex cathedra tone of his pronouncements, and in a tendency to think, speak, and write in brief, easy-to-chew paragraphs, but also in a general failure to break new ground and develop as an artist.
Paton was born in 1903, in the then province of Natal. After a decade as a high school teacher, he took over the principalship of Diepkloof Reformatory for African juvenile delinquents, where he did away with forced labour and introduced vocational education, transforming what had been a prison into a school. When he left Diepkloof in 1946, it was with the intention of studying penology abroad before returning to a career in the prisons service. But in Sweden something unplanned happened. Under the influence of what he later called ‘a powerful emotion’ he began to write a story based on his Diepkloof experiences.1 Three months later Cry, the Beloved Country was completed.
In the remaining forty years of his life (he died in 1988), Paton wrote a great deal: two more novels (Too Late the Phalarope [1953] and Ah But Your Land is Beautiful [1981], the latter an embarrassingly poor piece of work), stories, memoirs, biographies, a two-volume autobiography and a sizeable body of journalism. But he remained a one-book man. His later fiction, in particular, is vitiated by a sentimentality that Cry, the Beloved Country escapes only by the sheer power of its sentiment. Like Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, his novel gives the impression of having been written at the dictation of an overmastering daimon. In both cases the writers spent the rest of their lives fruitlessly trying to recover that first fine rapture.
Not all readers of Cry, the Beloved Country may remember where the strange title comes from. Here is the relevant passage:
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply . . . For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.2
Though overtly the novel takes up a confident liberal stance, calling for greater idealism and commitment to Christian and democratic values, the experience it deals with beneath the surface is, as Paton’s best critic, Tony Morphet, suggests, more troubling. The ‘powerful emotion’ out of which Paton’s novel emerged was fear for himself and his humanity, fear for the future of South Africa and its people. Fear was the emotion that had held Paton in its grip in the hotel rooms in Sweden and England and the United States where he did his writing; and the book that emerged, with its anxious ending, cannot be said to have settled his fear.3
Back in South Africa, Paton did not confine himself to writing. His most practical and most immediately effective act was to found, in 1953, the Liberal Party, a non-racial political party that survived in the face of continual official harassment for thirteen years, until it was legislated out of existence.
Though a committed Christian, Paton confessed that the ‘deepest fellowship of [his] life’ was felt not in the Church but in the Liberal Party. Liberalism, to him, was not only a political philosophy but a creed embracing ‘a generosity of spirit, a tolerance of others, an attempt to comprehend otherness, a commitment to the rule of law, a high ideal of the worth and dignity of man, a repugnance for authoritarianism, and a love of freedom’.4 In view of the forces of sectarianism, racism and nationalism ranged against it, this was, as Morphet rightly says, ‘a politics of innocence’. (p. 8) Yet, though it never commanded the allegiance of more than a small minority of the white electorate, the Liberal Party did keep alive a certain spark of non-racial idealism as the fortress of apartheid began to be erected on all sides.
After the forced dissolution of the Party, Paton became a more lonely figure on the South African scene. He shared the common and perhaps blessed inability of liberals to sympathise with or indeed even understand how deep sectional passions can run. He had always feared and disliked Afrikaner nat
ionalism; and one senses in him little welcome for black nationalism. He continued to hope, with less and less conviction, that fellow citizens of British descent would emerge from their slumber and exert themselves on behalf of such old-fashioned British values as respect for the rule of law (something, by and large, they never did).
He was little attracted by the prospect of a unitary, centrally administered state such as the African National Congress envisaged. Though he conceded that a unitary state would be ‘right and inevitable’ if that was what the majority of South Africans wanted, and though a unitary state had in fact been part of the platform of the Liberal Party, he felt more and more that the price to pay for it would be too high: ‘grief and desolation’ on a huge scale. He therefore pleaded the case for a federal constitution based on universal suffrage, with effective power devolved to regions and communities. He pinned his hopes for the future on Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whom he called ‘one of the most powerful figures on [our] political stage, fluent, extremely knowledgeable, impossible to buy’, and on the kind of accommodation with whites that Buthelezi seemed to stand for. (SBC, p. 104)
When it came to the question of what kinds of pressure Western states should exert to end apartheid, Paton took a cautious stance. In 1979 he counselled then US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to exert pressure on the South African government, but to do so ‘with the greatest skill and wisdom’ lest the government, concluding it had everything to lose and nothing to gain by co-operating, decided to go its own way, taking the country to destruction. But he was utterly opposed to economic sanctions. ‘I hereby solemnly declare’, he wrote, ‘that I will never, by any act or word of mine, give any support to any campaign that will put men out of jobs.’ No goal could be grand enough to justify turning South Africa into ‘a starving nation’. On the other hand, he did call in 1985 for ‘the greatest moral and pragmatic pressure’ to be brought to bear on the South African regime in the interests of its ‘re-education’. (SBC, pp. 220, 6, 9)
On the issue of sanctions Paton had more than one exchange with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. ‘I don’t understand how your Christian conscience allows you to advocate disinvestment,’ he wrote in an open letter: ‘I do not understand how you can put a man out of work for a high moral principle.’ In the same letter he congratulated Tutu on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, then added, ‘I have never won a prize like that. I am afraid my skin is not the right colour.’ The comment is petty and does not reflect well on Paton. Yet at a human level it is understandable: little honoured in his own country, Paton was jealous of the standing he enjoyed in the outside world and unhappy when the invitations stopped flowing in his later years. (SBC, pp. 180, 179)
Though it may seem from his public statements that Paton moved to the right as he grew older, it would be more accurate to say that he stood still while the entire South African opposition, both black and white, moved left. His politics, in which a Christian-inspired commitment to non-violence coexisted not entirely easily with implacable detestation of apartheid and hawkish anti-Communism, never really changed. In the 1950s he had been denounced as a liberal from the Right; in the 1980s the Left freely used ‘liberal’, as well as ‘humanist’, as terms of abuse. Through it all he remained a liberal and proud of it. As a political force, old-style liberalism had missed the boat, he knew. But in the creed itself he saw nothing dishonourable. If blacks sneered at liberals, he said, it was not because liberals had ever been hypocritical or cowardly but simply because they had proved themselves powerless.
Nevertheless, Paton was plainly shocked by the scale of violence that erupted in black townships in 1985–6. His rather wistfully expressed hope, a hope against hope, that a booming economy and a gradual mellowing of the Afrikaner would allow a black middle class to come into being and make revolution unnecessary, was shattered; he called 1985 ‘the unhappiest year of my life’. All around him he saw attitudes hardening. President P.W. Botha, whom he had at one time considered an improvement on his predecessors and with whom he had exchanged what he calls ‘firm but courteous letters’, veered between dictatorial rages and dogged inaction. Afrikaner nationalism, once ‘an arrogant and relentless juggernaut’, Paton wrote, had now become ‘a shambling giant who doesn’t know where he is going’. (SBC, p. 292)
Here and there in Save the Beloved Country one encounters comparably pithy and perceptive observations. Of the ‘half-emancipated’ Afrikaner of the 1980s Paton writes: ‘He wants to be more just, but he wants to remain the boss. It just cannot be done.’ On the black leaders Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Z.K. Matthews, Albert Luthuli: ‘One cannot say that the [ruling] National Party destroyed their lives, because, in fact, it made them immortal.’ On the death of Steve Biko: it was not so much the brutality of the police that was disturbing, but the nonchalance with which the government treated an historic calamity. ‘The death of Mr Biko . . . will be remembered when . . . the Anglo-Boer War has been forgotten.’ (pp. 183, 170)
But overall Save the Beloved Country is a thin and disappointing book. It is made up, for the most part, of short pieces originally written for newspapers, which are reproduced verbatim. Many of these pieces are about wholly ephemeral political infighting. Nevertheless, these Lilliputian and eminently forgettable squabbles are laboriously footnoted. Translations from the Afrikaans are often stilted and sometimes misleading.
The brevity of the pieces (few are more than five pages long, some only a few hundred words) does not allow Paton to develop his ideas. Among topics he mentions that he would have liked to expand on had he had the time (why did he not have the time?) are the inward effects of living in exile, and the damage to the moral lives of the South African security police caused by their work of torture. These are interesting and substantial questions, points of intersection between the human and the political: one would have welcomed the insights of Paton the novelist.
One would have welcomed, too, his insights into Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa in the 1960s, a man who cherished a particular animosity for Paton and was personally responsible for the undoing of all Paton’s work at Diepkloof Reformatory. What does Paton think, in retrospect, of Verwoerd? Surprisingly, the question Paton chooses to take up is whether Verwoerd was a great man. His conclusion (unsurprisingly) is that Verwoerd was not great, that ‘it was the very fervour of his loyalty to a narrow creed that prevented him from attaining greatness’. I would have thought it more important to ask the question of whether a man whose works were so unremittingly evil in their effects could escape being evil himself. (SBC, p. 21)
Paton’s rather baffling treatment of Verwoerd provides a clue to his strength as well as his weakness as a judge of men. His weakness is a certain lack of curiosity about people in themselves. His strength is that he does not rush to judgement. Paton believed in what he believed in, but believed in it with less than white-hot singleness of conviction. There were always, to Paton, two sides to a question. If Paton was not a great man, he was at least greater than Verwoerd in his less-than-fervid loyalty to a broader and more human creed.
In his foreword, Paton observes that in the twenty years (1967–87) covered by Save the Beloved Country he had written about little but South Africa, and asks himself whether this will make the book ‘boring and monotonous’. The answer he gives his own question is, no: South Africa is not just another country, it is a theatre for an age-old struggle between good and evil, a microcosm of the world.
The correct answer to his question is, sadly, yes. As a whole the book is indeed boring and monotonous, not because it is limited to South Africa but because of the quality of Paton’s writing and thinking. The names of many significant actors on the South African stage crop up, but Paton has little that is new or penetrating to say about them. One begins to suspect that in the course of the years he lost interest in other people: in what they were in themselves, in what they thought. As in his novels, in which characters tend to be ethical rather than psychological beings, there is a certain blank
ness in these essays about what makes people tick. Neither his friends nor his foes are brought to life by his words.
As for the writing itself, one soon grows tired of Paton’s Churchillian mannerisms (‘There are those who ask, what good has [protest] done? It has done a lot of good. It enables us to say, South Africa is a land of fear, but it is a land of courage also’). As a novelist, Paton had no particular gift for narrative. His novels are statically constructed, depending for their effect on character and emotion and, in the case of Cry, the Beloved Country, the intensity of the driving passion. In his late writings there is even less opportunity for the novelist’s art, and they are the worse for it. Perhaps the most memorable piece in Save the Beloved Country is a report on a trip Paton made in 1978 to a small country town to attend the funeral of Robert Sobukwe; and this piece draws its strength not only from the strong emotions of grief and outrage that the funeral evokes in him, but from being cast as a narrative. There are certain authors whose every scrap of writing, no matter how occasional, it is important to save. Paton is, alas, not of that stature.
II
Helen Suzman was born in South Africa, the daughter of parents who at the turn of the century had emigrated from Lithuania to a then British colony whose burgeoning economy and liberal administration promised a future of prosperity and security. They belonged to a wave of Jewish immigrants whose children and grandchildren, duly anglicized by their education, were to become the backbone of South Africa’s liberal intelligentsia, playing leading roles in commerce, the professions and the arts, as well as in progressive politics.
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 31
