Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  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 pape
r ‘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.