It is not surprising, then, that his approach to his years of childhood should have more in common with Tristram Shandy than with Proust or Laye, although Laye’s home was also in West Africa. For the first ninety pages or so, the tone is waggish. The ‘worked-up’ anecdotal dialogue of his parents and others reads like inventions based on what are really family sayings – whose origin is germane, a whole view of life rather than a response to a single happening. It is hard to believe that a boy under five thought of his mother as ‘Wild Christian’ although the fact that everyone referred to his father as ‘HM’ (headmaster) would have made it natural for him to see that as a name for intimate use, and not a title. It is hard to accept that a three-and-a-half-year-old’s sassy ripostes were as well phrased as the supremely articulate adult now ‘hears’ them in memory. And as for rediscovering the time dimensions of childhood, the scrappy organisation of the first part of the book does not at all express the child’s extended time spans and the size of events that swell with these, measured neither by seasons nor by dates.
Perhaps this section of the book is a collection of previously written fragments. There is, at least, one good story among the usual sort of reminiscence of punishments and pleasures that adults ‘arrange’ as the pattern of early years – the delightful tale of old man Paa Adatan, who, in return for the price of a meal from a market stall, undertook to defend any property against the arrival of ‘dat nonsenseyeye Hitler one time’. His striking-force capacity ranged from drawing a magic line in the dust before a shop front (‘If they try cross this line, guns go turn to broom for dem hand. Dem go begin dey sweeping dis very ground till I come back’) to performing fearsome warrior dances. Like other wily misfits at different times and in different countries, he knew how to make of the world’s villainy an excuse for his layabout existence: ‘Na dis bastard Hitler. When war finish you go see. You go see me as I am, a man of myself.’
When the people in his village of Aké begin to be aware of the distant 1939–1945 war, the small boy Wole does seem to take over the interpretation of his own experience, maybe because by then he was just old enough to have sorted the hot and cold of sensuous impressions into some order available to memory. One forms the oblique picture of him for oneself, without the interference of the adult Soyinka’s artifice. Wild Christian and HM are no longer ideograms of idiosyncrasy, but those most mysterious beings of our lives, parents. In the loving daily battle between the mother (who dispensed Christian charity and discipline as practically as the contents of her cooking pots) and father (scholarly agnostic towards both Christian and Nigerian gods) and their unpredictable child, he emerges as original innocence; not original sin, as his parents sometimes seemed to believe. Paying a family visit one Sunday at the palace of the Odemo, the titled head of HM’s home village of Isara, the eight- or nine-year-old outraged the assembled African nobility by failing to prostrate himself before one of them. ‘Coming directly from the Sunday service probably brought the response’ to the child’s head – ‘If I don’t prostrate myself to God, why should I prostrate to you? You are just a man like my father aren’t you?’
Original innocence was still with the grown man when, knowing well, this time, he was defying the might of chauvinism and the world armaments industry, he took on his own ‘side’ as well as the Biafran ‘side’, identifying the only enemy as the war they were waging.
Parents are generally the scapegoats for all our adult inadequacies. Was there, then, something about Wole Soyinka’s childhood, some security that produced the courage both physical and intellectual, and prepared him for the outlandish demands his era was to make of him? Yet his environment is revealed not as the natural paradise lesser writers edit, out of black yearning for a pre-conquest state of being or white yearning for a pre-industrial one, from the footage of reality. To begin with, his parents were middle-class, his mother a shopkeeper and debt-collector as well as a wild Christian, his father more interested in books than traditional status possessions; and the middle, in modern African societies, is the ground of the tug between the African way of life and the European way in which, as Chinua Achebe has definitively chronicled, things fall apart.
The tally of beatings, administered by every Aké adult in every kind of authority, is positively Victorian, although there’s no suggestion that the British imported this style of punishment. In the 1940s in Nigeria even adolescent maidservants (black) were beaten by their mistresses (black) for wetting their sleeping mats; and, indeed, the high incidence of bed-wetters reported by the young Wole, who suffered creeping damp when sharing a communal sleeping mat, would in the West more likely be attributed to the beatings rather than ‘cured’ by them. Thirty-six strokes for an adolescent schoolboy who had ‘made’ a schoolgirl pregnant was regarded neither as cruel punishment nor as an injustice singling out one of the two it takes to make a baby.
Perhaps the trauma of all these beatings was dissolved in the witness that accompanied them? They did not take place in camera, between victim and castigator, alone with sin, but in the tumble of crowded households and even in a kind of dance through the streets. The purpose may have been public humiliation, but since every spectator had been or next time might be victim, there must have been a balm of fellow feeling flowing towards the wounds even as they were being inflicted. At any rate, the child never doubts that he is loved, which means that although he chafes against incidences of parental lack of understanding and a kind of sadistic, cock-fighting adult playfulness (setting him against his younger brother), he never seems to regard himself as unhappy, or rather seems never to have expected to be happier. Again, this may have something to do with the strong sense of community, not only with other children but with the particularly wide range of relationships the society provided – ‘chiefs, king-makers, cult priests and priestesses, elders …’
Like a piece of etú, the rich locally woven cloth, social relations were a garment whose ceremonial weight was at the same time cosily enclosing. The child was never overawed by it; could snuggle up there just as the bedbugs (to the amused surprise of this middle-class white reader) had their own homely interstices in the Soyinka middle-class household with its servants and library. The different coordinates – which style of life goes with which class, which conventions with which kind of respect, which snobbishness with which pretension – are the source for non-Africans, who (of course) know only the styles of life that go with their social categories, of a fascination that takes hold with the hand of the child.
When the not-quite-heaven that was Wole’s natal village of Aké extends, along with the parental relationship, to his father’s natal territory at Isara, the fascination becomes complete. The grandfather, with a painful scarification ceremony, puts the boy in the care of the god Ogun just as Wild Christian has put him in the care of Christ. Again, the result is not a trauma but greater security for the child. And the writer finds his way to him with a felicity of evocation and expression on the ‘axis of tastes and smells’ along which the preparation of foods provides a family genealogy, a wonderfully sensuous first sense of self, other and belonging. The whiff of identical flavour in dishes prepared by different hands, different generations, is the child’s own historiography and system of kinship. Just as the visitors and supplicants to HM’s yard, despite the particular ‘tang of smoke and indigo’ they bring, remind one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father’s court in the Polish ghetto, so the patterns of living perceived through the tastebuds evoke Günter Grass’s culinary interpretation of Europe’s disasters and survivals. The pleasures of entering Wole Soyinka’s childhood, for a stranger, consist not only in differences but in correspondences as well.
1982
Living in the Interregnum
Police files are our only claim to immortality.
Milan Kundera
I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of the demonic dance is accurate, not romantic: a
n image of actions springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa, and the time the last years of the colonial era in Africa.
It’s inevitable that nineteenth-century colonialism should finally come to its end there, because there it reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalised land- and mineral-grabbing, open in the labour exploitation of indigenous peoples, open in the constitution-alised, institutionalised racism that was concealed by the British under the pious notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. An extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, English, French in the South African white settler population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone’s refined white racism: the flags of European civilisation dropped, and there it was, unashamedly, the ugliest creation of man, and they baptised the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country could see its semblances there; and most peoples.
The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa. Since the black uprisings of the mid-seventies, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe, the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it. Historical coordinates don’t fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my most lately written novel a quotation from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.’
In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living. I am going, quite frequently, to let events personally experienced as I was thinking towards or writing this paper interrupt theoretical flow, because this interaction – this essential disruption, this breaking in upon the existential coherence we call concept – is the very state of being I must attempt to convey. I have never before expressed so personal a point of view. Apart from the usual Joycean reasons of secrecy and cunning – to which I would add jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction – there has been for me a peculiarly South African taboo.
In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white: it has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world press, itself overwhelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and congresswomen come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites; they rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel bedroom to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning the whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes.
I have shunned the arrogance of interpreting my country through the private life that, as Theodor Adorno puts it, ‘drags on only as an appendage of the social process’ in a time and place of which I am a part. Now I am going to break the inhibition or destroy the privilege of privacy, whichever way you look at it. I have to offer myself as my most closely observed specimen from the interregnum; yet I remain a writer, not a public speaker: nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction.
There is another reason for confession. The particular segment of South African society to which I belong, by the colour of my skin, whether I like it or not, represents a crisis that has a particular connection with the Western world. I think that may become self-evident before I arrive at the point of explication; it is not the old admitted complicity in the slave trade or the price of raw materials.
I have used the term ‘segment’ in defining my place in South African society because within the white section of that society – less than one-fifth of the total population now,14 predicted to drop to one-seventh by the year 2000 – there is a segment preoccupied, in the interregnum, neither by plans to run away from nor merely by ways to survive physically and economically in the black state that is coming. I cannot give you numbers for this segment, but in measure of some sort of faith in the possibility of structuring society humanly, in the possession of skills and intellect to devote to this end, there is something to offer the future. How to offer it is our preoccupation. Since skills, technical and intellectual, can be bought in markets other than those of the vanquished colonial power, although they are important as a commodity ready to hand, they do not constitute a claim on the future.
That claim rests on something else: how to offer one’s self.
In the eyes of the black majority which will rule a new South Africa, whites of former South Africa will have to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures. From the all-white parliament to the all-white country club and the separate ‘white’ television channels, it is not a matter of blacks taking over white institutions, it is one of conceiving of institutions – from nursery schools to government departments – that reflect a societal structure vastly different from that built to the specifications of white power and privilege. This vast difference will be evident even if capitalism survives, since South Africa’s capitalism, like South Africa’s whites-only democracy, has been unlike anyone else’s. For example, free enterprise among us is for whites only, since black capitalists may trade only, and with many limitations on their ‘free’ enterprise, in black ghettos.
A more equitable distribution of wealth may be enforced by laws. The hierarchy of perception that white institutions and living habits implant throughout daily experience in every white, from childhood, can be changed only by whites themselves, from within. The weird ordering of the collective life, in South Africa, has slipped its special contact lens into the eyes of whites; we actually see blacks differently, which includes not seeing, not noticing their unnatural absence, since there are so many perfectly ordinary venues of daily life – the cinema, for instance – where blacks have never been allowed in, and so one has forgotten that they could be, might be, encountered there.
I am writing in my winter quarters, at an old deal table on a verandah in the sun; out of the corner of my eye I see a piece of junk mail, the brochure of a chain bookstore, assuring me of constantly expanding service and showing the staff of a newly opened branch – Ms So-and-So, Mr Such-and-Such, and (one black face) ‘Gladys’. What a friendly, informal form of identification in an ‘equal opportunity’ enterprise! Gladys is seen by fellow workers, by the photographer who noted down names, and – it is assumed – readers, quite differently from the way the white workers are seen. I gaze at her as they do … She is simply ‘Gladys’, the convenient handle by which she is taken up by the white world, used and put down again, like the glass the king drinks from in Rilke’s poem.15 Her surname, her African name, belongs to Soweto, which her smiling white companions are less likely ever to visit than New York or London.
The successfully fitted device in the eye of the beholder is something the average white South African is not conscious of, for apartheid is above all a habit; the unnatural seems natural – a far from banal illustration of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. The segment of the white population to which I belong has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood; and we are aware that with the inner eye ‘we have seen too much ever to be innocent’.16 But this kind of awareness, represented by white guilt in the 1950s, has been sent by us off into the sunset, since, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, ‘guilt saps modern man’s belief in the value of his own perceptions and judgments’, and we have need of ours
. We have to believe in our ability to find new perceptions, and our ability to judge their truth. Along with weeping over what’s done, we’ve given up rejoicing in what Günter Grass calls headbirths, those Athenian armchair deliveries of the future presented to blacks by whites.
Not all blacks even concede that whites can have any part in the new that cannot yet be born. An important black leader who does, Bishop Desmond Tutu, defines that participation:
This is what I consider to be the place of the white man in this – popularly called – liberation struggle. I am firmly non-racial and so welcome the participation of all, both black and white, in the struggle for the new South Africa which must come whatever the cost. But I want to state that at this stage the leadership of the struggle must be firmly in black hands. They must determine what will be the priorities and the strategy of the struggle. Whites unfortunately have the habit of taking over and usurping the leadership and taking the crucial decisions, largely, I suppose, because of the head start they had in education and experience of this kind. The point is that however much they want to identify with blacks it is an existential fact … that they have not really been victims of this baneful oppression and exploitation. It is a divide that can’t be crossed and that must give blacks a primacy in determining the course and goal of the struggle. Whites must be willing to follow.17
Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen – wrote the black South African poet Mongane Wally Serote, in the seventies. This is the premise on which the white segment to which I belong lives its life at present. Does it sound like an abdication of the will? That is because you who live in a democracy are accustomed to exerting the right to make abstract statements of principle for which, at least, the structures of practical realisation exist; the symbolic action of the like-minded in signing a letter to a newspaper or in lobbying Congress is a reminder of constitutional rights to be invoked. For us, Tutu’s premise enjoins a rousing of the will, a desperate shaking into life of the faculty of rebellion against unjust laws that has been outlawed by the dying power, and faculties of renewal that often are rebuffed by the power that is struggling to emerge. The rider Desmond Tutu didn’t add to his statement is that although white support is expected to be active, it is also expected that whites’ different position in the still-standing structures of the old society will require actions that, while complementary to those of blacks, must be different from the blacks’. Whites are expected to find their own forms of struggle, which can only sometimes coincide with those of blacks.
Telling Times Page 41
