Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The road as a total experience filled each mile and hour, whether you were the one swirling the wheel in split-second decisions and slamming to lower and lower gear, or were simply bent on keeping your balance in the passenger seat. In parts the sand was bottomless, bedrock-less: pits covered with broken thorn and branches looked to be and were traps – the wheels of other vehicles had dug them. The company of the road was that of the marooned: great trucks beached, helpless, their passengers philosophically brewing tea and suckling infants in their shade. The code of the road, quite apart from its condition, made it impossible to say when you could hope to reach where, for you stopped to help, whether with water and cigarettes, or a tow-rope and whatever heaving manpower you could muster. There is a bush panache about the way the Batswana set out over this desert of theirs without a pump or spare wheel, calmly doubling up the human burdens of one truck upon another as they break down.

  It becomes true that it is the journey and not the arrival that matters; we forgot we had a destination. Yet at the village of Sepopa we picked up a guide from the headman and were told there were only fifty miles more to go. An unidentified track turned off abruptly left, from nowhere to nowhere. For miles we found ourselves displaced, out of Africa, still lurching over sand, yes, but through a European beechwood, flaming with autumn – we were in a mopane forest. Behind it, the first sight of a hazy blue back; and then, as the forest thinned on to a pale plain, a whale-shaped hill came out of the bush, the Male hill of the Tsodilo.

  The Tsodilo are called hills but whether a mountain is a mountain or a hill a hill is not a matter of height but presence. After hundreds of miles of the horizontals of sand, that mastodon of rock is the presence of a mountain; and the emotion one feels standing in the cold dark shadow it casts across the afternoon is the uneasy one engendered by the primeval authority of a mountain. Behind Male is Female Hill, the sheer and fall of soft chalky colours, stone flanks that are olive, rose, smoke-mauve, and behind her are a series of hidden amphitheatres, bays of heat and quiet. And as you climb in the last real luxury left, a boundless silence, years thick, you come with a strange contraction of perception upon paintings made upon the rock. It is as if, out of that silence, this place speaks. There are rhinoceros, zebra; on an umber battlement – quite clear of surrounding blocks of rock spangled with livid fish-scales of lichen – an eland and giraffe. In a cool cleft we lay on our backs (as the artist must have done, at work) to see a line of dancing men with innocent erect penises that have no erotic significance and persist as a permanent feature of Bushman anatomy, even today. Among the animals, schematic drawings and men, there were terracotta imprints of the hands of the artists, or perhaps of others, less talented, who wanted to assert their presence. They were the size of a child’s hand; inevitably, I measured mine against them, clumsily touching across the past. Nobody knows exactly how old these Bushman paintings are, but the Bushmen have wandered this part of Africa for a thousand years and the surviving ones have long lost the art and have not been known to paint within living memory. The paintings were discovered to the world only in the 1950s; new ones are found by anyone who has a few days to spend looking. But very few people have seen even those that are known; by August, we were only the eighth group of travellers to come to Tsodilo that year.

  There was a village of twenty-five or thirty people just beyond the reach of the afternoon shadow of the Male hill of Tsodilo. They were a little clan of Mbukushu, the home of whose creation-myth the Tsodilo Hills are. Nyambi (God) let people and animals down to earth from heaven on a rope to the Tsodilo, and so the world began.

  We went over to visit with our guide, who had a letter for one of the villagers. Beyond Maung there are no post offices and a letter will be carried by whatever truck happens to be making for a point nearest its destination. No one in the village could read; the old woman for whom the letter was intended handed it back to our guide and settled on her haunches to listen while he read aloud to her. It was from her son, working on a gold mine near Johannesburg, more than a thousand miles away in the Republic of South Africa. Our guide had also, as a young man, been far away to the mines; one of the changes that Sir Seretse Khama’s government is most determined on is the end of Botswana’s necessity to export her men as contract labour, but the experience of going to the mines is one that has entered profoundly into remote lives and changed for ever ancient patterns of existence – that is the furthest reach, in consequence far beyond its military might, of the White South. The letter from the mines was read through again so that – one could see the vivid concentration of response wincing across the old woman’s face – she would remember it precisely as if she could refer to the text.

  Meanwhile, the women and children had gathered and I had doled out the remains of a packet of sweets I happened to have. Not enough to go round; but the asceticism bred of a begrudging environment has its own pleasures. These babies who never get sweetmeats exhibited the very opposite of lust for them. One sweet fed four, scrupulously divided from mouth to mouth. The wrapping paper was sucked. Fingers were licked so lingeringly that the pinkish-brown skin came through the dirt. A young Tannekwe Bushman girl and her small brother got their share – a shy yellow pair with oriental eyes and nostrils delicate as shells. They were probably the children of a family enslaved by the Mbukushu.

  The black, round, pretty Mbukushu mothers had a queen among them, standing tall and a little apart, with a turned-down amusement on her sardonic mouth. She perversely wore an old striped towel half-concealing her kilt of handmade ostrich shell beads and hide thongs, and her long legs with their calf-bracelets of copper and hide, but her slender, male youth’s shoulders and the flat breasts her body seemed almost to disdain, the assertion of her long neck and shaven head, resolved all aesthetic contradictions. The prow of Male hill rose behind her. Sometimes one comes across a creature, human or animal, who expresses that place in which it has its being, and no other. In the Kalahari, she of the Mbukushu was such a one.

  When her ancestors migrated from the north in the early nineteenth century they gained among the Tswana tribes the reputation of great rainmakers. They practised human sacrifice to make rain; today rainmaking is being replaced by water conservation schemes, such as the Shashe River one in the south, and plans to water the desert from the Okavango, but the Mbukushu still speak for Botswana when their rainmaker asks of Nyambi, in the old formula: ‘Do not make too much lightning; just give us quiet water so that we can have food.’

  1979

  The 1980s

  The Prison-House of Colonialism

  Ruth First’s and Ann Scott’s Olive Schreiner

  Who is qualified to write about whom? Subjects very often do not get the biographers their works and lives demand; they are transformed, after death, into what they were not. There must be a lot of fuming, beyond the grave.

  Olive Schreiner has been one of the worst-served, from her spouse’s version of her life, in accordance with what a husband would have liked his famous writer-wife to be, to the hagiographic selectivity of two or three other biographies which have appeared since her death in 1920. At last, the perfectly qualified candidates have presented themselves: two people who represent a combination of the dominant aspects of Schreiner’s character; her feminism and her political sense; and each of whom corrects the preoccupational bias of the other.

  Schreiner’s feminism followed the tug of colonial ties with a European ‘home’, it was conceived in relation to the position of women in late nineteenth-century Europe; through her tract, Woman and Labour, she is a Founding Mother of women’s liberation in Britain, and one of her two new biographers, Ann Scott, is a young English feminist. Schreiner’s political awareness was specific, through her understanding of the relation of capitalist imperialism to racialism in South Africa; and Ruth First, her other biographer, is a South African radical activist,9 thinker and fine writer who went into exile in Britain years ago but is now close to her – and Olive Schreiner’s – real hom
e again, teaching at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique.

  First and Scott make a superb combination and one is curious about how they overcame the tremendous differences between their two ideological approaches. Take the statement: ‘We have tried to create a psychologically believable woman of the late 19th Century largely on the basis of the psychoanalytic language of the 20th.’ Was Ruth First able to follow this basic approach because of the new attitude to psychoanalysis that has been penetrating Marxist thinking through the work of Jacques Lacan and others since the failure of the 1968 student uprising in Paris? The book is a model of disinterested collaboration and scholarship, and the reconciliation it achieves between the viewpoints of the authors and their subject brings great rewards for the reader.

  This biography establishes a level of inquiry no previous biographer was perhaps in a position to attempt. So far ahead of her own times, Schreiner was obscured in succeeding ones by the kind of critical assessment then prevailing. Now First and Scott can write:

  We see Olive Schreiner’s life writing as a product of a specific social history. We are not only looking at what she experiences but at how she, and others, perceived that experience; at the concept with which her contemporaries understood their world, and, again, at the consciousness that was possible for her time – after Darwin, before Freud, and during the period when Marx’s Capital was written.

  Olive Schreiner was born in South Africa of missionary parents, and as a twenty-one-year-old governess in 1886 wrote The Story of an African Farm, a novel which brought her immediate world fame that has lasted ever since. In her work and life (she had the missionary sense of their oneness), it becomes clear from this study, she was hampered crucially by the necessity of fighting the ways of thought which imprisoned her and others, equipped only with the modes available within those concepts. Only once did she invent a form to carry her advanced perceptions: a literary one, for The Story of an African Farm. Her short novel about the conquest of Rhodesia, Trooper Peter Halket, shows as true an interpretation of historical realities, re-read during the week of Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations, as Schreiner claimed it did when she wrote it, during Rhodes’s conquest of Mashonaland: but it has the preachy, nasal singsong of a sermon. When she wanted to find a way to express her political vision, she took up the form of allegory typical of the hypocritical Victorian high-mindedness she had rejected along with religious beliefs.

  About sex, she lied to herself continually – protesting to her men friends that she wanted ‘love and friendship without any sex element’ in letters whose very syntax paces out yearning sexual desire. She recognised the sexual demands of women in a period when they were trained to believe that their role was merely to ‘endure’ male sexual demands, but she used Victorian subterfuges (on a par with the ‘vapours’), disguised as feminism to hide a sense of shame at the idea of her own sexual appetite. The spectacle of the rebel dashing herself against the cold panes of convention is that of a creature doubly trapped: by a specific social history, and by the consciousness possible to her in her time.

  First and Scott suggest further that Schreiner’s reputation as an imaginative writer has suffered by the ‘persistent view that her social comment is obtrusive and damaging to her work’; the novel – The Story of an African Farm – on which that reputation rests has been acclaimed, sometimes by people who would not share even her liberal views, let alone the radical element in them, as having its genius in ‘transcending politics’, and by extension, Schreiner’s political fervour. The present biographers will be interested to know that a reverse trend is now appearing in South African criticism; Schreiner is no longer praised for soaring above politics, but attacked for turning out to be nothing but the broken-winged albatross of white liberal thinking. C. I. Hofmeyer, a young white lecturer at an ‘ethnic’ university for South African Indians, said at a conference recently:

  Although Schreiner was cognisant of the power of the speculator and capitalist to triumph because of their access to power, she none the less continued to harbour a tenuous optimism that justice, equality and rightness of the liberal democracy would come to triumph via the operation of the ‘enlightened’ liberal remnant of the English community. Of course, it did not, and the bourgeois democracy that Schreiner had hoped for soon developed into the repressive colonial state. This development is significant in so far as it shows the weaknesses in the thinking of Schreiner and her class.

  If Schreiner was a ‘genius’, the lecturer continued, this was ‘a critical category that obscures the extent to which she was rooted in nineteenth-century assumptions’.

  Whether or not one can swallow this (old) view of genius as a class-determined concept rather than an innate, congenital attribute – and whether Schreiner had it or not – the tension in her relationship to these nineteenth-century assumptions, so brilliantly conveyed in this book, was the source of her achievements and her failures.

  Olive Schreiner, like other South African writers (William Plomer, Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post) up until after the Second World War, when writers both black and white became political exiles, looked to Europe and went to Europe. Some went permanently, after the initial success of work born specifically of their South African consciousness. Some went ostensibly because they had been reviled for exposing the ‘traditional’ South African way of life for what it is (Plomer, Turbott Wolfe). But the motive generally was a deep sense of deprivation, that living in South Africa they were cut off from the world of ideas; and underlying this incontestable fact (particularly for Schreiner, in her time) was another reason which some had a restless inkling was the real source of their alienation, although they could express it only negatively: that the act of taking the Union Castle mailship to what was the only cultural ‘home’ they could conceive of, much as they all repudiated jingoism, was itself part of the philistinism they wanted to put at an ocean’s distance from them. Even Sol Plaatje, one of the first black writers, had this instinct, since he was using Western modes – journalism, the diary, the novel – to express black consciousness.

  They went because the culture in which their writings could take root was not being created: a culture whose base would be the indigenous black cultures interpenetrating with imported European cultural forms, of which literature was one; and because the works they had written – or would have found it imperative to attempt, if they were to express the life around them – were solitary contradictions of the way in which that life was being conceptualised, politically, socially and morally.

  Olive Schreiner felt stifled (the asthma she suffered from is a perfect metaphor) by the lack of any questioning exchange of ideas in the frontier society in which she lived. I suppose one must allow that she had a right to concern herself with a generic, universal predicament: that of the female sex. During her restless, self-searching years in England and Europe, and her association with Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, Karl Pearson, women’s suffrage and English socialism in the 1880s, she studied intensively theories on race and evolution, and participated in progressive political and social movements; but feminism was her strongest motivation. Yet the fact is that in South Africa, now as then, feminism is regarded by people whose thinking on race, class and colour Schreiner anticipated, as a question of no relevance to the actual problem of the country – which is to free the black majority from white minority rule.

  Her biographers point out that, once living again in South Africa, she resigned from the Women’s Enfranchisement League when its definition of the franchise qualification was changed so as to exclude black women. But in the South African context, where she always felt herself to belong, and to which she always returned, in the end to die there, the women issue withers in comparison with the issue of the voteless, powerless state of South African blacks, irrespective of sex. It was as bizarre then (when a few blacks in the Cape Colony had a heavily qualified vote) as now (when no black in the Republic of South Africa has a vote) to regard a campaign for women�
�s rights – black or white – as relevant to the South African situation. Schreiner seems not to have seen that her wronged sense of self, as a woman, that her liberation, was a secondary matter within her historical situation. Ironically, here at least, she shared the most persistent characteristic of her fellow colonials (discounting the priorities of the real entities around her) while believing she was protesting against racism.

  First and Scott give a fascinating account of the neuroticism of this amazing woman, in whose tortured, heightened sense of being all the inherent contradictions of her sex and time existed. One enters into their biography as into a good discussion with people better informed on the subject than oneself.

  For myself, I am led to take up the question of Olive Schreiner’s achievement exclusively as an imaginative writer, in relation to the conceptual determinants within which she lived, even while warring against them. First and Scott quote the argument – and I think they see her wronged by it – that after African Farm her creativity disappeared ‘into the sands of liberal pamphleteering’. The observation was originally mine. Their book confirms, for me, that whatever else she may have achieved, Schreiner dissipated her creativity in writing tracts and pamphlets rather than fiction. This is not to discount her social and political mission; neither is it to attempt to nail her to the apartheid Tendenzroman. It is to assert that, by abandoning the search for a form of fiction adequate to contain the South African experience, after her abortive experiments with a ‘distancing’ allegory, she was unable in the end to put the best she had – the power of her creative imagination – to the service of her fierce and profound convictions, and her political and human insight. It is true that, as First and Scott claim, ‘almost alone she perceived the race conflicts during South Africa’s industrial revolution in terms of a worldwide struggle between capital and labour’. But she wrote about these insights instead of transforming them through the creation of living characters into an expression of the lives they shaped and distorted. This could have achieved the only real synthesis of life and work, of ideology and praxis, for Olive Schreiner, raising the consciousness of the oppressed from out of the colonial nightmare, and that of the oppressor from out of the colonial dream, and telling the world what she, uniquely, knew about the quality of human life deformed by those experiences.