Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Memmi refutes religious conversion as one of the means to keep the colonised subservient, the coloniser’s authority standing in for the Divine Will on earth. ‘Contrary to general belief, the colonialist [coloniser] never seriously promoted the religious conversion of the colonised.’ He certainly did. Indeed, missionaries preceded colonisers in most territories, conquest advanced, gun in one hand and Bible in the other. ‘When colonialism proved to be a deadly, damaging scheme, the church washed its hands of it.’ The ‘deadliness’ was that ‘conversion of the colonized to the colonizer’s religion would have been a step towards assimilation’. The facts disprove this. While the church resigned many to freedom available to them only in heaven, reinforcing the colonialist creed of no such availability on earth, it produced others inspired by the rebel Jesus’s example, rebels themselves against the colonial system, unreconciled to it. The church establishment itself was highly ambiguous in its functions of representing Divine Justice, blessing slaves to save their souls before they were shipped.

  If any such was needed, Memmi does establish eloquently that racism was not ‘an accidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism … the highest expression of that colonial system’. He takes leave of ‘The Colonizer Who Accepts’ with a sardonic salute: ‘Custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized’s ignominious darkness. The fact that this role brings him privileges and respect is only justice; colonization is legitimate … with all its consequences … Colonization is eternal and he can look to his future without worries of any kind.’

  If this coloniser who accepts to stay on in the country after liberation, living as he always did, tolerated by the independent government of the former colonised and privately retaining his old privileges – greasing a palm or two so that he may carry on farming the vast lands that were taken from the colonised – he may find he does have worry of a final kind. The land is seized back from him by those whose it was before colonisation stole it.

  ‘Colonisation is eternal.’

  Perhaps in his devastating appraisal of colonialist arrogance Memmi spoke more prophetically than he knew.

  Could one expect him in the 1950s to have looked all the way ahead to neocolonialism? Maybe it is unfair; one should be satisfied to have his deep and dread probing into the condition of people living under a unique combination of racism and greed: the colonial will to claim right to take as booty other people’s lives, other people’s lands, that was fundamental colonialism. But he might have foreseen that if colonies freed themselves of colonial governance, colonialism would not give up so easily. Mannoni did in 1947: ‘We must not, of course, underestimate the importance of economic relations, which is paramount; indeed it is very likely that economic conditions will determine the whole future of colonial peoples.’ In his 1965 preface Memmi affirms that for him ‘the economic aspect of colonization is fundamental’ but in his book he does not deal with those aspects of the economics of colonialism that were prescient when he wrote it. He remarks only that the self-appointed colonial mother complained that the colony was costing more to maintain than it was worth. What the original liens of colonialism established in trade mean in worth in post-colonial times, is plenty. There are former colonies whose natural resources, from cocoa to gold, are still bought low and sold high. One of globalisation’s immense tasks is to serve as the means of tackling this final form of colonialism. And it cannot be done for the developing countries that once were colonies (supposing there would be the will to do so …) but with them, in full recognition of their essential place in policy decisions.

  The sickness of the world, technologically boastful, humanly inadequate, cannot be healed by traditional masters of the world alone. Events are proving that they themselves are not immune to anything, from terrorist attacks to HIV/Aids. Fanon saw this from the past, went further: ‘The Third World … faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.’122 The only update necessary is the amendment: to which Europe, the USA and other rich countries have not been able to find the answers.

  2003

  William Plomer and Turbott Wolfe

  ‘I think Turbott Wolfe may have been a man of genius.’

  The first sentence boldly stakes out William Plomer’s power as a writer. He has taken you, the reader, by the scruff of the neck, for your attention. And it is up to him never to let it flag. For this is an extraordinary claim for a novelist to follow in the creation of his central character: produce the goods. How a genius? An artist? A writer? A thinker? There’s the caveat ‘may have been’, with the canny calculation that the verdict is going to be for the reader to find out, decide for him/herself. Plomer’s great gift in involving the reader controversially in his story is there, right away.

  Plomer chose for his first novel the Conradian device of having the writer be narrator at second hand. Turbott Wolfe is introduced as a kind of Marlow, telling his tale not as an old salt – Marlow in Heart of Darkness – but a sick man with little time ahead of him and much to tell.

  It turns out that Turbott Wolfe is only a leisure-time writer, an amateur artist; if he may be a genius, it is not as that sort of visionary. His vision is that which dares to venture through the blinding density of moral, political and social acceptances of the colonial era to a reality that could be obscured but not banished.

  He is telling his story late, in a reverse exile, back in the banal, rose-patterned chintz comforts of England, from where he left as a young man ‘sent out to Africa’ in the 1920s for his health and to make his colonial fortune. He was set to run a trading store in Lembuland, ‘a region neither too civilized nor too remote’, and in preparation spent his parental annuity on stocking up with books, paint, pens, ink, paper, and – unlikely provision but significant of his idea of the life he expected to lead – a piano. The baggage of a genteel ‘civilized’ European life transported to Ovuzane, in remote South Africa. He began there organising his time between ‘trade and folk-lore [research on the spot] and painting and writing and music’. What an anachronism this was is soon evident as three realities invade its superficiality: the vast, undomesticated splendour of the landscape, the pettiness, crudity, sanctimoniousness of the local white population of colonial officials, farmers and missionaries, and the unselfconscious dignity and physical beauty of the blacks whom he served in his store.

  Wolfe (or his creator, Plomer) is sharp-tongued but if some of his descriptions of the white locals are pitiless caricature, that stands for the total caricature of human relations that is the set-up of colonialism. His earliest experience of Ovuzane society is when he comes upon ‘Schönstein’s Better Shows’, a travelling funfair where his few darting observations, like film clips that will develop coherence later, reveal the nature of the place and people in which and among whom he finds himself. To the roar of the hurdy-gurdy ‘a gross European in one of the swing-boats’ kisses a coloured girl and she flings away from him, to jeering laughter; the fair owner has a wife ‘barefaced by day and barebacked by night’. In a mob, ‘English, Dutch, Portuguese, nondescript were the whites; Bantu, Lembu, Christianized and aboriginal, Mohammedan negroes were the blacks; and the coloureds were all colours and all races fused. It came upon me suddenly in that harsh polyglot gaiety that I was living in Africa; that there is a question of colour.’

  Then there are encounters with white neighbours given wickedly Dickensian names – Bloodfield, Flesher, mischievously label their coarse nature – who are jealous of what they see as his cultural snobbishness in having a ‘studio’, and disgusted when it is discovered that he has black people sit as models for his paintings, makes music there with them on their traditional instruments and his piano. ‘Surely you don’t have these blooming niggers in here?’

  It is at once exceptional that a young man of Wolfe’s conventional background should have so quickly shed
any illusions he must have had about his presence. Plomer makes it not only believable, but inescapable for him: ‘There would be conflict between myself and the white; there would be conflict between myself and the black.’

  Wolfe describes these whites with an undisguised loathing and pokes gentle but demeaning fun at the old missionaries, such as Bishop Klodquist, who came to save souls among the Africans with ‘a Bible and a bottle of vin ordinaire … no pyjamas, and not a word of Lembu’.

  Wolfe blurts angrily, ‘Give me a good old criminal lunatic any day, rather than ask me to breathe the same air as Flesher and Bloodfield.’

  And just when you, the reader, find Turbott Wolfe to be proving himself as bigoted as the people he despises, Plomer catches you out in too hasty a conclusion. Judgement is not as simple as that. There’s the self-searching of Wolfe’s own conclusion, ‘And seeing continually incessant lines of natives trooping in and out of the store I turned my feelings, in escape from the unclean idea of Flesher and Bloodfield, far too much into sympathy with the aboriginal.’

  So he tends, at first, to idolise the blacks in apposition to loathing the whites. With a lens of overcompensation for the local Europeans’ dehumanising image of Africans, ‘My eye was training itself to admire to excess the over-developed marvellous animal grace of each Lembu individual. I was becoming ecstatic … over the patriarchal grace of each old man … over the aged women … warm-handed tender daughters.’ But again there are no easy resolutions in the pace of this restlessly, relentlessly questioning novel. At the same time, Wolfe becomes aware ‘I was losing my balance … I suspected danger. I found myself all at once overwhelmed with a suffocating sensation of universal black darkness. Blackness. I was being sacrificed, a white lamb, to black Africa.’

  The image resurrects, from the subconscious of the young white man, colonialism’s self-justification in the concept of Christianity in battle with paganism. But as Mongane Wally Serote, the South African novelist and poet, has written, ‘You cannot fight yourself and be in an army of the people. The spirit must tear itself from the ghosts, it must sense and know its destiny. It must take care and charge of itself.’123

  It is not as a white lamb but a man in love that Turbott Wolfe gains, through pain, his equilibrium of human vision. Since he has no woman, the local name the Africans have given him is ‘Chastity Wolfe’. Now a particular young woman is among the black people who buy from his store. ‘I was very strongly attracted … by a native girl … She took away the breath of Chastity Wolfe.’ The description of the girl is exaltation: ‘An aboriginal, perfectly clean’ in contrast to the grubby spirit of the Bloodfields and Fleshers, ‘perfectly beautiful … She was an ambassadress of all that beauty … outside history, outside time, outside science.’ And the paean to the girl is interrupted by a tirade against missionary Christianity. ‘She was … of a type you will find nowhere now: it has been killed by the missions, the poor whites and the towns. There was a chance … to build up a new Christianity … But it is too late now. The missionaries brought them [the Africans] the sacrament, but I could give you more than one instance where they brought them syphilis too. They took away everything from the natives … and what on earth did they give them instead? … Christianity is dead. It is a lost cause.’ The girl ‘was a living image of what has been killed … by our obscene civilization that conquers everything’. And yet: ‘As soon as I had fallen in love with Nhliziyombi I was afraid of falling in love with her.’ This was surely the last pull of the shackles of race consciousness dragging at the freedom of vision struggling to be attained along with his growing political awareness.

  The emergence of the new, post-colonial man was not to be born through fulfilled sexual love, although love in its total sense, free of glib religious or political edicts, is the only human approach in which iconoclastic Wolfe believes. He loses Nhliziyombi after unresolved, half-enchanted, half-agonised passion marvellously conveyed. He emerges to face both the angry opprobrium of Bloodfield, Flesher and company for having descended to falling in love with a black (while they have black mistresses bearing their children – but in the back yard, not the white man’s house) and the moment of truth flung down before him by a white woman. Mabel van der Horst has the response to the question of colour that Wolfe found himself confronted with at Schönstein’s Better Shows: ‘there is no native question. It isn’t a question. It’s an answer.’

  To give the answer expression, Wolfe, Mabel, a newly arrived missionary of a different kind, Friston – who is secretly a Communist – Zachary Msombi, a half-Western-educated young black man, and his cousin Caleb, Wolfe’s assistant in the store, found an association, grandiloquently named ‘Young Africa, an Important New Movement for the Regeneration of Our Country’.

  HORROR was written on the sun.

  A moment – of insight as genius? – flashing the image in a poem Plomer chooses to attribute to Friston, not Wolfe; it is what colonialism has scrawled on the face of Ovuzane, of Africa.

  ‘Young Africa’ becomes confused and dazzled; Friston drugs himself into delirium over jealousy as Mabel makes love with Zachary in an adjoining room. Did she want to found a revolutionary movement only in order to justify her choice of a black husband? Friston recovers sufficient sobriety – or gains enough change of heart and head – to officiate at the wedding before disappearing to be arrested as a Communist in some other colonially occupied territory. As for Wolfe – hounded by the colonial commissioner, reviled by the Bloodfield cohort who demand his deportation, he pre-empts this by taking his own decision to leave. He puts the trading store up for sale and I shan’t pre-empt the author’s final, devastating laconic thrust by revealing who snaps at the opportunity to own it. Turbott Wolfe sums himself up: ‘I am an egoist,’ he tells the black man Caleb, ‘I have just enough money to go and live quietly in England … In England I shall be pointed at as an eccentric, because I try and use my brains … You will marry and settle down in your own country, among your own people … You will find happiness and I shall find emptiness.’

  Tantalising for anyone living in the post-colonial world, it is for the reader to decide: was Turbott Wolfe a failure as a man of his time? Perhaps he was in Africa too soon? The day of the answer had not yet come.

  William Plomer was nineteen years old when he began to write Turbott Wolfe. He was – yes – working in a trading store in Zululand, South Africa, in the 1920s. Only once is he identified as the author to whom Turbott Wolfe is telling his story. As Wolfe lies ‘… I know I am dying) in this cold and mothy bed’ he addresses by name ‘My good William Plomer’. A bit of an obvious ploy on the part of William Plomer to warn the reader not to assume (in fact the reader knows …) that Turbott Wolfe is William Plomer’s creation of an alternate self. As all characters a fiction writer creates are alternate selves: the people we might have been by the mysterious accident of birth.

  William Plomer was born of English parents in South Africa in 1903 but always insisted that he could not claim himself as South African ‘since nobody, if a cat happened to have kittens in an oven, regards them as biscuits’. His childhood and education were divided back and forth between England, his ancestral home, and South Africa, where his father held various posts in colonial administration and did some farming. Nor very successfully; the trading store turned out to be the sole support of the Zululand farming venture.

  Turbott Wolfe, written in pencil in school exercise books of the kind sold in a trading store, was sent to Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press in London. Knowing nothing of publishers and the unlikelihood of them wanting to take on outlandish works by unknown writers, young Plomer couldn’t have been more fortunate in his stab at finding a publisher. The Woolfs recognised the extraordinary originality of the novel, both in subject and style, in reference to what Edward Said, speaking of various literatures, terms ‘historical modes of being’.124 In this instance, the world-historical mode of colonial being, for both the coloniser and the colonised. It is an inexplica
ble lapse on the part of literary scholars and critics that Turbott Wolfe is not recognised as a pyrotechnic presence in the canon of renegade colonialist literature along with Conrad. While the work is only intermittently satire – and does not spare the narrator anti-hero, Turbott Wolfe himself, often attacked out of his own mouth, so to speak – it reveals William Plomer as that rarity, a writer brilliant enough to present deep, passionate seriousness with trenchant wit.

  Turbott Wolfe was a success in England when published in 1926; disturbing, critically acclaimed. In New York a critic wrote, ‘Look elsewhere for your bedtime story.’ In South Africa the book drew down upon Plomer’s head such outrage that the twenty-two-year-old author could not have continued to find any kind of social acceptance there, and in the context of Double Lives (title of his later autobiography) – his life already a consciousness evolved between one continent, one culture, and another – he went to try yet another culture, Japan. He learned the language, worked as a literature teacher, formed some of the most important relationships of his adulthood and stayed for several years. From that period came his second novel, Sado.

  But like Turbott Wolfe, he spent the rest of his life in England, where he wrote more fiction, autobiography and biography, and became one of the best poets of his generation, along with Auden, MacNiece, Spender, much quoted for his vivid humour and subtle critique of humbug of any kind.