Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  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 res
ort 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 an
d 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.