April - June 2020: Writing from Southern Africa

Welcome to the Q2 thread! At the moment Reading Globally probably isn't the main thing on most of our minds, but we could probably all use a distraction.

We've covered Africa in previous theme reads, of course, but the idea this time is to have a look at the things that make the southern tip of the continent special: its rich, but not always well-recorded, pre-colonial history, its long, complicated and often unhappy experience of colonialism, and the way it is now.

See also:
Regional thread for Southern Africa: https://www.librarything.com/topic/105507
Q1 2014 Sub-Saharan Africa theme read: https://www.librarything.com/topic/162615

Geographical scope

“Southern Africa” is a term with lots of possible definitions, geographical and political. Maybe what makes most sense for this thread is to consider South Africa and its immediate neighbours, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Eswatini/Swaziland, and Mozambique. But feel free to spread the net wider!



Disclaimer
The material in the next few posts has been compiled by the usual process of trawling the internet and my TBR shelf, as well as picking the brains of a few tame South Africans (I’m hoping they will drop into the conversation as well). I don’t claim to be an expert, and I’ve never been anywhere south of Dar-es-Salaam (yet...).

Thumbnail Overview

This is just a very condensed summary for orientation: see Wikipedia and the many excellent books on African history for all the important things I’ve missed out. I've been using mostly
- A history of South Africa by Frank Welsh (excellent so far, but I'm still reading it...)
- A short history of Africa by Oliver and Fage (does what it says on the tin, but my copy is 32 years old, which isn't ideal...)

South Africa

South Africa has by far the biggest and most diverse economy in Africa, and has the highest overall standard of living; there are eleven official languages and a complicated, ethnically diverse population of around 55 million, about 9% of which currently identifies as “white”, 9% as “coloured” (mixed-race) and 2.5% as “Asian”. Black South Africans today mostly identify with Bantu-speaking groups, whilst the Khoisan people who originally lived in the Cape area (called “Hottentots” and “Bushmen” by the whites) have largely lost their separate identity.

European settlement started in 1652 with a Dutch East India Company supply base in the Cape, which attracted an influx of Dutch-speaking farmers (“Boers” or “Afrikaners” — they weren’t all Dutch, by any means, and many of the most prominent Afrikaner families are of Huguenot origin). The British took over the colony during the Napoleonic wars, and were soon faced with conflicts on the eastern frontier, where Afrikaner farmers were competing for land with Xhosa and later Zulu farmers moving in from the opposite direction.

Afrikaner objections to British interference with their way of life led the voortrekkers to head over the frontiers in disgust after 1835 and set up new Afrikaner republics, mostly short-lived except for Transvaal and the Orange Free State, whilst Natal became a second British colony. Disagreements were revived by the discovery of gold and diamonds in Transvaal at the end of the century, culminating in a prolonged and bloody British military intervention (“Boer war”, 1899-1902). The two colonies and two republics merged to form the Union of South Africa in 1910, with a constitution that left a lot of the power in the hands of Afrikaner nationalists. Black South Africans lost most of the few civil rights they had under the white-minority governments of the 20th century, and it took a long struggle to achieve a (more-or-less) peaceful transition to full democracy in 1994, when Nelson Mandela’s ANC won the first election in which all South Africans could vote.

Mozambique

Following on from Arab and Indian traders, the Portuguese set up coastal bases in the early 16th century to trade with the big Bantu states along the Zambezi and in what is now Zimbabwe. In the late 19th century Portugal granted concessions to chartered companies to develop agriculture and mining inland, and tried to construct a line of forts linking Mozambique to Angola. From 1965 there was an armed struggle for independence, which was achieved in 1975, but followed by a nasty civil war. Mozambique remains one of the poorest countries in the world, but the economy seems to be developing now. Portuguese is the main official language.

Zimbabwe

In medieval times there was one of Africa’s biggest Bantu trading and farming empires centred on the city of Great Zimbabwe, later shifting north towards the Zambezi valley.

Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company brought white miners and farmers into the area in the late 19th century, in what became the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Fierce opposition from the Shona and Ndebele people already living there was quelled with the help of machine guns.

The white minority running the colony opposed British plans for independence and broke away from Britain (“UDI”) in 1965. After a long guerrilla war the Ian Smith government collapsed in 1980, to be replaced by what soon became a new single-party state under Robert Mugabe. He finally stepped down in 2017.

Zimbabwe has a population of around 13 million, mostly Bantu Africans. About 70% are Shona and 20% Ndebele. The white settler population, about 4% at its peak in the 1970s, is now well under 1%. The (frequently shaky) economy is mostly dependent on exports of tobacco, cotton, diamonds and metals.

Namibia

This mostly-desert region, currently the second-least-densely-populated country in the world, was grabbed by Germany in the “race for Africa” in the 1880s — it was interesting mostly because of the potential for a port at Walvis Bay. It was transferred to South Africa under a League of Nations mandate after World War I. The UN recognised the independent government-in-exile of SWAPO in 1973, but de facto South African military occupation continued until 1990. The population has a similar ethnic mix to South Africa, with Bantu, Khoisan, European and mixed-race groups.

Botswana

Another thinly-populated country, 2.3 million people in a country the size of France, Botswana was created in the late 19th century (as Bechuanaland) largely as a buffer state between the Germans in Namibia and the Afrikaners in Transvaal. It did not join the Union of South Africa, remaining a British protectorate until independence in the 1960s. Like Lesotho and Swaziland it has a very serious HIV/AIDS problem.

Lesotho and Swaziland

These small, independent states (both have populations slightly smaller than Botswana) started out as tribal nations, gaining their present identity in the mfecane, the widespread disruption surrounding the rise of the Zulus in the early 19th century. They escaped white settlement, and did not join the Union of South Africa, remaining British protectorates until independence in the 1960s. Lesotho is famously the only country outside Italy to be entirely surrounded by one other country.

Big themes to think about:

• Pre-colonial cultures


• Colonialism, settler culture, and intra-European conflicts


• Changes in African society (e.g. the rise of the Zulu Kingdom)


• European/African conflict, Settler societies resisting African self-determination, Apartheid/UDI


• Independence, post-independence politics


• Environmental issues (wildlife, farming, mining…)


• HIV/AIDS

Selected writers/books by country

These are the books and writers that come to mind, a very arbitrary selection. To be completed as others join the conversation. I've divided South African literature into three posts for convenience — the flippant zoological captions are just what came into my head, they aren't meant to be disparaging in any way!

South Africa — 1. Elephants in the room:

• There’s quite a tradition of “farm literature” up to the mid-20th century. In Afrikaans C. M. van den Heever (1902-1957) is one of the best-known writers in this genre; in English The story of an African farm by Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was a huge bestseller, but with its strong feminist and anti-religious themes probably isn’t quite typical.


• Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951), who came from an Afrikaner background but wrote mostly in English, was a brilliant humorous short-story writer, and most South African schoolchildren will have read some of his Oom Schalk Lourens tales. Sadly, his work isn’t all that easy to find outside South Africa. (He is also famous for translating Omar Khayyam into Afrikaans and for having been condemned to death after shooting his stepbrother in an argument in 1926 — the sentence was eventually commuted and he spent five years in jail.)


• South Africa, especially around the time of the Boer War, inspired a lot of British writers of adventure fiction. Among the most celebrated are Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), who spent some years working in South Africa in the 1870s, and John Buchan (1875-1940) who was profoundly influenced by the time he spent there (1901-1903) as secretary to governor Alfred Milner. Kipling never actually lived in South Africa, but he spent many holidays there, usually as the guest of Cecil Rhodes. The racist (and sexist) assumptions of books such as King Solomon’s mines and Prester John are more than likely to make us cringe nowadays, but they also tell us a lot about the mentality that drove British imperialism and attitudes towards Africa. (And they are cracking good adventure stories…)


• Magema Magwaza Fuze (c.1840-1922) was a mission-educated Zulu journalist and printer, whose The Black People and Whence They Came (Zulu 1922; English 1979) was the first book by a native speaker to be published in the Zulu language.


• Sol Plaatje (1876-1932), who came from a Tswana background in the Free State, was an important early black intellectual, a well-known journalist, political activist and founder-member of the ANC. His Mhudi (written 1919, published 1930) is one of the claimants to be the first novel in English by a black South African (An African tragedy (1928), by the young Zulu writer R R R Dhlomo, was written later but published earlier)


• Roy Campbell (1901-1957) was a friend of the Bloomsburies, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and edited a magazine with Laurens van der Post. But he had an embarrassing tendency to write long satirical poems in the style of Alexander Pope:

  South Africa, renowned both far and wide
  For politics and little else beside:
  Where, having torn the land with shot and shell,
  Our sturdy pioneers as farmers dwell,
  And, ’twixt the hours of strenuous sleep, relax
  To shear the fleeces or to fleece the blacks:
  Where every year a fruitful increase bears
  Of pumpkins, cattle, sheep, and millionaires
  
  from "The Wayzgoose", 1928

South Africa — 2. Lions and springboks:

20th century South Africa produced more than its fair share of writers of world standing, most of them critical of the Apartheid system:

• Alan Paton (1903-1988) wrote the classic protest novels Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope. He’s unusual among novelists in that his professional experience before starting to write was as head of a young offenders institution.


• Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) is now mostly remembered as Prince Charles’s Jungian guru and as the travel writer who made the San people of the Kalahari unbearably fashionable for a while, but he started out as a novelist critical of the South African government and a close friend of SA-born poet Roy Campbell.


• Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) was a politician and activist rather than a writer, of course, but his memoir Long walk to freedom (1994) must count as one of the bestselling South African books ever.


• Peter Abrahams (1919-2017) was a black South African writer and journalist who lived in exile in London from 1939 and in Jamaica from 1956. He became well-known with his novel Mine boy (1946).


• Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), 1991 Nobel prize winner, was a prominent ANC activist as well as an influential writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her best-known books include The Conservationist (1974), Burger's Daughter (1979), and July's People (1981).


• Alex La Guma (1924-1985) was an important writer as well as playing a major role in communist organisations. He lived in exile from 1966. He is best-known for And a threefold cord (1964)


• Poet Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is probably remembered most for his anti-apartheid activism, in particular his campaign to keep South African teams out of international sports competitions.


• Theatre was one of the most powerful media for criticising the regime within South Africa, because it was difficult to censor and because fringe theatres for a while provided a place where people of different races could come together. Athol Fugard (1934- ) is South Africa’s most distinguished radical playwright. One of his most-banned plays was The Island (1973), written with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, which imagines a group of prisoners on Robben Island staging a production of Antigone.


• André Brink (1935-2015) was one of the young radicals of the sixties and had the distinction of writing the first Afrikaans novel to be banned by the South African government (Kennis van die aand/Looking on darkness). He wrote most of his books simultaneously in Afrikaans and English.


• Lewis Nkosi (1936-2009) was a stalwart of the legendary Drum Magazine and a long-term political exile, remembered among other things for his 1986 novel Mating Birds.


• Breyten Breytenbach (1939- ) is another Afrikaans writer from the sixties, known mostly as a poet but he’s also written novels and non-fiction, some in English. He spent five years in jail in South Africa in the 1970s as a result of his political activism.


• J M Coetzee (1940- ) is the second South African Nobelist in literature (2003) as well as having won the Booker twice; he comes from a prominent Afrikaner family, but writes in English (he describes his background in the autobiographical novels Boyhood and Youth).

South Africa — 3. Aardvarks and Dassies:

• Country of my Skull (1998) – Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog (1952- ) chronicled the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid.


• As well as his work as South Africa’s most famous drag performer, Pieter-Dirk Uys (1945- ) has written several very funny memoirs, including Elections and Erections, where he describes his work touring the country to promote AIDS awareness and democratic participation.


• The cardinals (1995), Bessie Head’s posthumously-published first long piece of fiction, is a moving account of growing up mixed-race and illegitimate in 1960s South Africa. (Before moving to exile in Botswana she was a colleague of Brutus and Nkosi on Drum Magazine)


• Kaffir boy (1986), was a bestselling memoir by tennis player Mark Mathabane (1960- ), who grew up in extreme poverty in Alexandra township, Johannesburg.


• Damon Galgut (1963- ) is one of the leading writers of the post-Apartheid generation, and has been on the Booker shortlist with The good doctor and In a strange room


• Afrikaans novelist Willem Anker (1979- ) is on the current Booker International list with Red Dog (2014), his tongue-in-cheek historical novel about the legendary Afrikaner frontiersman Coenraad de Buys. (I’ve read this in Afrikaans and it was great fun!)


• The woman next door (2016) by Nigerian-born Yewande Omotoso (1980- ) is a nice feel-good novel in which the residual tensions of South African racism are played out in the relationship between two elderly neighbours in a Cape Town suburb.


• British comic novelist Tom Sharpe (1928-2013) lived in South Africa from 1951 and his first two satirical novels Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973) mocked the Apartheid regime. But it was the London performance of his 1961 play The South African that led to his arrest and deportation from South Africa.


• TV personality Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a crime obviously has to be listed here too, even if I'm the only person who hasn't read it yet...


• Gcina Mhlophe (1958-) is a well-known poet, dramatist and storyteller who works in Zulu and Xhosa as well as English and Afrikaans.


• Farida Karodia (1942-) comes from the Eastern Cape but lived in political exile in Canada from 1968-1994. Her work often looks at apartheid and its legacy from the point of view of South African Indian women.

Namibia

Tagmash: https://www.librarything.com/tag/Namibia,+fiction

• A lot of books set in Namibia seem to be by writers from South Africa, Europe or America. Laurens van der Post is the most obvious, but other examples include the ubiquitous Henning Mankell, the German crime-writer Bernhard Jaumann (who taught in Windhoek for some years), Clive Cussler, Uwe Timm, etc., etc.


• The Purple Violet of Oshaantu (2001) by Neshani Andreas (1964-2011) is one by a Namibian writer, at least


• Born of the Sun: A Namibian Novel (1988) by Joseph Diescho (1955-) claims to be the first novel by a Namibian-born writer; he was a trade-unionist and political activist during the apartheid period, has a PhD in politics from Columbia, and now works for South African TV.

Botswana

• Botswana is most famous among readers for Mma Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, of course, but law professor Alexander McCall Smith (1948-) actually grew up in Zimbabwe and has spent most of his adult life in Edinburgh. His close association with the country started when he taught at the University of Botswana for some years in the 1980s.


• Bessie Head (1937-1986) is perhaps the best-known of the group of South African writers who worked in exile in Botswana. She lived in Botswana from 1964, and many of her books are set there.


• Unity Dow (judge, human rights lawyer, and novelist) has written novels including Juggling truths and Far and Beyon'


• Andrew Sesinyi (1952-) claims to be Botswana's first English novelist, with Love on the Rocks (1981)

Zimbabwe

• Doris Lessing (1919-2013), the 2007 Nobel laureate, was born in Iran but spent most of her first thirty years in Zimbabwe, where her parents had a farm. Many of her early books are critical of the racism of colonial society, especially The grass is singing and the first four parts of the Children of Violence sequence. She revisits Zimbabwe later in life in the non-fiction books Going home and African Laughter.


• Stanlake Samkange (1922–1988) was probably the best-known black Zimbabwean writer of colonial days, especially known for historical novels dealing with colonialism from a black perspective, such as On trial for my country (1966) and Year of the uprising (1978)


• Alexandra Fuller’s lively memoir Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight is an interesting, critical, account of the lives of white Rhodesian farmers during the guerrilla war of the 70s and 80s.


• Charles Mungoshi (1947-2019) wrote novels and poetry in Shona and English; he was active in Zimbabwean politics during the war.


• Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959- ) started out as a playwright and made waves in 1988 when Nervous conditions turned out to be the first novel in English by a black Zimbabwean woman, but since then she has been very busy with films, politics, and higher education, hence the long gaps before her second and third novels, The book of not (2006), and This mournable body (2018).


• Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) was a schoolteacher who married a Canadian, studied in Canada then returned to Zimbabwe post-independence to run the Bulawayo National Gallery. She wrote five successful, difficult novels, the best-known being The stone virgins


• Fun fact: Scottish writer Muriel Spark lived in Zimbabwe from 1937-1944, overlapping with Doris Lessing. Apparently they didn’t meet until much later (and there aren’t many obvious traces of Africa in Spark’s fiction).

Lesotho and Swaziland
https://www.librarything.com/tag/Lesotho%2C+fiction
https://www.librarything.com/tag/Swaziland,+fiction

• Thomas Mofolo (1876-1948) was the first and most famous Sotho author, known especially for his epic historical novel about the Zulu king, Chaka (Sotho 1925; English 1931)


• Singing Away the Hunger : The Autobiography of an African Woman by Mpho Matsepo Nthunya sounds interesting, even if it is "as told to" an American professor at the University of Lesotho


• Australian crime writer Malla Nunn was born in Swaziland, and some of her books are set there or in South Africa

Mozambique

• Feminist and former Frelimo activist Paulina Chiziane (1955- ) was the first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel, Balada do Amor ao Vento in 1990; her Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (2003; The first wife: a tale of polygamy) won a major prize


• Mia Couto (1955- ) seems to be one of the most important contemporary Mozambique writers. His first novel Terra Sonâmbula (1992; Sleepwalking Land) regularly makes lists of "best African novels"


• Swedish crime-writer Henning Mankell had a long association with a theatre company in Maputo and promoted writers from Mozambique; several of his books are wholly or partly set there, e.g. Chronicler of the winds (1995)

Bring on the books!

- spare post -

I'm going to take advantage of the invitation to "spread the net wider" by posting about this well-written and memorable novel I read last year that takes place in the Congo, which abuts the originally defined area under discussion this quarter. I'm going to be lazy, though, and just paste my review from last year here:

White by Deni Ellis Béchard

This is a very tough novel for me to review because its goal is unattainable. Béchard, whose previous novels and non-fiction books alike have been frequent award winners or nominees, is delving in this book into the frustrating puzzles of identity, white privilege and often violent colonial attitudes even in the "post-colonial age," and the labyrinth of unintended consequences that derive from outsiders' attempts at conservationism in Africa.

Bechard gives his protagonist his own name. Both the real and the fictional Bechard are journalists who have reported from war zones and other far flung regions across the world. As the novel begins, Bechard is off to the Congo to do an investigative piece on Richmond Hew, a corrupt and ruthless "fixer" who helps environmental agencies trying to set up preservation parkland. The goal seems noble but the agencies' presumptive ways and Hew's methodology are not. Plus there are the complaints of Hew's sexual abuse of young girls. A ruthless, mysterious white man gone rogue and dangerous out in the far African wilderness will of course bring up images of Kurtz. And, indeed, the thematic similarities to Heart of Darkness are intentional and overt. Hew is not the only character referred to during the course of the story as "another Kurtz."

The storyline moves swiftly and well, here. Each interaction adds to the kaleidoscope effects of Bechard's knowledge (and new learning) about the roles played by race, and of the ways in which all relationships are fraught with that baggage. Bechard thinks he understands the issues, or at least understands the consequences of the incompleteness of his understanding. He has, after all, reported from Africa before. But he is endlessly brought up short by still another landmine of his own lack of insight.

A man, Baraka, who is to drive Bechard on his motorcycle into the jungle so Bechard can try to solve the mystery of another conservationist who has disappeared, her truck has found riddled with bullet holes, first reads Bechard a poem he has written about UNIFCEF and asks Bechard's opinion. When Bechard replies that the poem is great but the last two lines possibly unnecessary, Baraka replies, "I'm no schoolboy and wasn't asking for corrections." A bit later Baraka says, "I have other poems. Poems of sadness for small NGOs that vanish before they start, or those that paint their acronyms on walls yet seem not to exist but for the plump white people who eat in restaurants at night with prostitutes." Later still, Bechard asks Baraka if he can write an article about him. "I do not wish," Baraka answers, "to be a sad, comic figure for one of those evaporating internet articles that always appears to be new but is always the same" and then, "I do not care to be a fraught glimpse of my people's humanity, engrossed with the sort of futile romanticism with which your people, being so self-assured, can't be bothered."

Another Congolese man tells Bechard what he knows about Richmond Hew, much of which is horrifying. Bechard observes that the man does not seem bothered by the story:

He stared at me with a level, accustomed gaze, the way a man who has worked in a misty landscape all his life will stare through he fog, already seeing the shapes that will materialize when it disperses. "If I do not appear outraged," he said slowly, as if with great fatigue, "it is because I have worked not only with many men, but with many whites."

There are frequent memorable insights and perspectives along the way, often related as Bechard's own memories:

"Years ago I'd read an online article on how to prevent conflict. It said that people reflect back to us what we perceive in them and that we should picture the child our rival had been, focus on the good and grow that. I'd done this in war zones, approaching foreign soldiers not as terrifying spectacles of male power but as sons, brothers or fathers. I'd felt how we can injure others with our fear, since it presumes their inhumanity."

Speaking of his own childhood in Virginia, Bechard writes,

I was confused as to why white people, with the passion of injured honor, spoke of the War of Northern Aggression, of the harm done to their families and communities, and the destruction wrought on their lands, but almost never of slavery. Black hardship, on the rare occasions that whites spoke of it, was discussed as if it were divorced from history, not as a contextual trait but an essential one, an innate quality of blackness rather than the consequence of violence and oppression."

I've leaned on quoting from the text here much more extensively than is my usual practice. I'll finish up by noting that while the storyline of White is very engaging, and we are brought along smartly in Bechard's continuing advance towards Hew, we do not get, nor are we expecting, an "ah ha" moment where Bechard, fictional or real, provides a sudden unraveling or escape from the issues set forth at the outset: white privilege and white foreigners' paternalistic presumptions of supremacy over the Congolese in their own country, in terms of expertise and motivation and wisdom, to offer a short list. White is, really, a novel about humanity and quicksand.

I'm looking forward to this! I probably won't have access to as big a choice of novels as usual (the library's closed and there's nothing on my TBR shelf that fits the bill), but I should still be able to find stuff. Scribd is quite good on contemporary poetry. I've bookmarked collections by Angifi Dladla, KeaOboka oora Molomo, Our Musseque by Jose Luandino Vieira and an anthology of Namibian writing, in the absence of a whole novel from a Namibian author... I thought I might try some Nadine Gordimer as well. Ngugi wa Thiong'o was going to be my main author this quarter, but Kenya is not quite southern enough to qualify...

>15 Dilara86: Well, I think Jerry has given us almost enough licence to consider anything up to An African in Greenland... :-)

I had a look on Scribd a couple of days ago, and also saw they’ve got a few Gordimer books I haven’t read, as well as quite a lot of history and politics. For the moment I’ve bookmarked Bosman’s Cold stone jug, which may well be the only South African prison memoir by a non-political offender. Don’t lets go to the dogs tonight, which I listened to a couple of weeks ago, was a Scribd audiobook.

Otherwise, what I have on my shelf, with no guarantees that I’m going to read any of it:

Lent by well-meaning South Africans:
- The story of an African farm
- Year of the uprising
- A dry white season
- Dusklands
- Dog heart: a memoir

Bought:
- A history of South Africa by Frank Welsh
- The purple violet of Oshaantu
- Coming of the dry season
- Juggling truths
- The good doctor by Damon Galgut
- Cry the beloved country

For Namibia, I'll mention Die Erstgeborenen (The Firstcomers) by Giselher W. Hoffmann, which I wrote about in another quarterly thread a couple of years ago. Hoffmann, a descendant of German colonists, published several novels in German which thematize (among other topics) the colonial past and its consequences for the local ethnic groups. He was a professional hunter who spent many years in the Kalahari living among the nomadic San people, and although his writing feels very "European", his novel portrays these people with compassion rather than exoticizing them.

I'm in the same situation as >15 Dilara86: -- reading from my TBR shelf would be ideal given the bookstore/library closures, but this isn't a quarter where my bookshelves currently have much to offer. I have, however, made note of several titles of interest; many of these seem to be from small or local publishers so would likely need to be ordered online anyway:
South Africa: Institute for Taxi Poetry by Imraan Coovadia (OK, I'll admit it, I'm seduced by the title)
South Africa: The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavić (ditto on the title)
South Africa: Wall of Days by Alistair Bruce
South Africa: A Change of Tongue by Antjie Krog
South Africa: Leap Year by Etienne Van Heerden
German Southwest Africa: Morenga by Uwe Timm
German East Africa (sort of): Hans Paasche, a Prussian naval officer and pacifist writes a satirical novel about German society in the early twentieth century, from the point of view of a visitor from Africa in Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Mukara ins innerste Deutschland.
Namibia: Bullies, Beasts and Beauties by Isabella Morris and Sylvia Schlettwein

>16 thorold: Well, I think Jerry has given us almost enough licence to consider anything up to An African in Greenland... :-)
Speaking of which, I've just realised that Angola, which is Jose Luandino Vieira's country, is not actually in the OP's list of Southern African countries. I think I'll make an exception for it as most of its territory is on the same latitude as Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia, and it means I can fit in Transparent City by Ondjaki, which has been in my wishlist for ages and is available on scribd...
I've started Our Musseque.

>18 Dilara86: There are certainly good historical, geographical and cultural arguments for including Angola, Malawi and Zambia. I left them out above mainly to keep things manageable.

>16 thorold: "Well, I think Jerry has given us almost enough licence to consider anything up to An African in Greenland... :-)"

You're welcome! Actually, I looked at the map above and saw that the Congo abutted Zambia, which I mistakenly took to be part of the originally described area. But, still, the Congo touches Zambia which touches Zimbabwe, et. al. So only a short double-jump away! Anyway, it's further south than The Republic of Chad. :)

Also, it's a really interesting novel, imho.

>17 spiphany: I didn’t know about Hans Paasche — sounds interesting. Since he places Lukanga Mukara in the royal court of Ukerewe, I wondered if he might have had Aniceti Kitereza in mind, but the dates don’t fit: Kitereza would still have been at school.

>21 thorold: Paasche does seem to have been quite a character, doesn't he?

Given the date of "Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Mukara ins innerste Deutschland" (Scientific Expedition of the African Lukanga Mukara into Inner Germany), I decided to see if it was available online (it is).

I am ... not terribly impressed. Possibly the ideas expressed in the satirical treatise would have been more shocking and radical at the time it was written. In any case, I found it rather superficial; the criticisms amount to a fairly standard catalogue of the ills of industrial society. Satire tends to work best when it is specific and pointed, whereas the depictions here were mostly to general to be effective. I did appreciate the discussion of smoking and the social pretenses surrounding it. Paasche here uses the delightful compound verb "rauchstinken" (= smoke-stinking), formed analogously with, e.g. "staubsaugen" (= dust-sucking, i.e. vacuuming).

A few things surprised me simply because I hadn't realized they were on anyone's agenda in 1912, i.e., the concern about an economy based on the principle of constant growth or the fact that it is in the interest of numerous parties to encourage tobacco consumption in spite of the health problems it causes. After despairing of German society in the previous letters, the final letter presents a group of young people in whom the writer sees hope for the future -- they are members of a back-to-nature movement known as the Wandervogel, with whom Paasche clearly sympathized. This may in part explain why the satire never really worked for me: agendas rarely make for good literature.

>22 spiphany: Yes, I had the same impulse — and a similar reaction. A few nice jokes, but it all felt very laboured. There seemed to be a lot of FKK/Rational Dress propaganda going on, which might have struck some people in 1912 as shocking, but probably not the sort of people who would be reading his book.

Anyway, back to 30 degrees South where we're meant to be...

A history of South Africa (1998, 2000) by Frank Welsh (UK, 1931- )

    

There are two books of the same title that appeared at about the same time, one by SA-born Yale professor Leonard Thompson and this one, by a former British banker who has become a specialist in history-of-empire (and triremes, apparently!) in later life. I picked this one mostly because it was easily available and seems to have been updated most recently.

Welsh takes the history of South Africa from the first recorded European contact (Bartolomeu Dias in 1488) through to the post-Mandela election of 1999 in the space of about 540 pages (plus notes, etc.). Despite this rather wide scope, he manages reasonably detailed coverage throughout (skimping a bit on the parts he expects us to know about already, like the military history of the "Zulu wars" and "Boer war" and the stuff we all saw on the TV news in the 1980s), but the core of his interest is clearly in the hundred years of British administration, where he goes into a lot of detail about how successive generations of British officials on the spot and politicians in Whitehall messed up the running of the Cape Colony and its various unwanted appendages (Natal, the Boer republics and the protectorates that became Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana).

Whilst he spends plenty of time on puncturing the core myths of Afrikanerdom (and exposes the newness of at least some glorious African tribal "traditions"), this really seems to be a book addressed at British (or English-speaking South African) readers brought up on the idea that it was benign, if somewhat paternalistic, British imperial supervision that protected the black population from the evil Afrikaners until "we" were so ungratefully chucked out. In reality, of course, British imperial policy was all about keeping the voters in the British Isles happy, which, then as now, meant spending as little as possible, protecting trade, and keeping British casualties low. Embarrassing headlines about "natives" being maltreated could be awkward, but they were rarely the top priority. The office of Colonial Secretary was not a popular one (Joseph Chamberlain seems to have been the only minister who ever volunteered for it), it had a high turnover rate, and was rarely given to anyone disqualified by practical knowledge of the world south of the English Channel. Something I hadn't appreciated was that there was always a strong rivalry between the Colonial Office and the separate India Office — to the extent that the India Secretary sometimes intervened to complain about the mistreatment of Indians in Natal, for example.

This mess of good old-fashioned British amateurishness and cynicism goes a long way to explain the real puzzle of South African history, something I never made sense of in school history lessons, that the British fought a long and nasty war against the Afrikaners, defeated them thoroughly, and then only a few years later agreed a constitutional settlement that allowed them to become the dominant parties in the new Union of South Africa, with no real guarantees for non-white people at all. One part of the puzzle is that it was a Tory government that fought the war, and it was fought to safeguard the rights not of the black people, but of the white, non-Afrikaner capitalists and workers in the gold-mining areas of Transvaal. And the other part is that the Tories were ousted by the Liberals soon after the end of the war, and their policy seems to have been to get rid of the South African problem as swiftly as possible, even if it meant letting Jan Smuts pull a fast one on voting rights...

In the discussion of the twentieth century there wasn't so much that was new to me, but it was interesting to see Welsh's — no doubt well-informed — view that it was chiefly economic factors that forced the end of white minority rule in the 1980s. Employers simply couldn't work with the crazy conditions that the apartheid system dictated, and investors were pulling out, leaving Botha and de Klerk little choice but to start dismantling the rickety apparatus their predecessors had convinced themselves they needed. (Other writers usually give most of the credit to the end of the Cold War making South Africa's "bulwark against communism" irrelevant to the US.)

All very interesting, and useful background on how South Africa got to be how it is now.

And a quick catch-up of the relevant books I naughtily started reading before the end of Q1 (reviews previously posted in my CR thread)...

First the nineteenth century classic of the region:

(Interesting to note from the Frank Welsh book that Schreiner's brother William was a liberal politician who became Prime Minister of the Cape and lobbied against the terms of the British South Africa Act; his son, Oliver, was a distinguished South African judge. South Africa is a country where everything seems to revolve around a small number of families...)

The story of an African farm (1883) by Olive Schreiner (South Africa, UK, 1855-1920)

  

Elaine Showalter sums up Schreiner as "A freethinker marked to the marrow of her bones with the Calvinism of her missionary parents; a disciple of Darwin, Mill and Spencer who floated in a sea of sentimentality; a dedicated writer who could never finish a book; a feminist who hated being a woman; a maternal spirit who never became a mother — everything about her life is a paradox." Not totally straightforward then!

This is really exactly the kind of book you would expect from a complicated, clever young person who grew up in the arch-conservative back of beyond in a time seething with exciting new ideas. It's about a couple of sisters, the wild and progressive Lyndall and the placid and domesticated Em, growing up on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape together with young Waldo, the overseer's son, working as a farmhand but looking as though he is going to turn into a brilliant engineer, or possibly a poet, or a sculptor, or none of the above. Throw in an Afrikaans stepmother, an Irish con-man, a cross-dressing farm-manager, and a trunk full of our late father's radical books, and tragedy is just about inevitable.

There are glorious chapter-long feminist rants, endless agonising about what it really means to live in a world where you can't seriously believe in God any more, more symbolism than you can shake an elaborately-carved stick at, lots of lovely African scenery and weather, a bizarrely complicated series of emotional and sexual entanglements, and a large supporting cast of nameless black people treated with a curious mixture of late-Victorian "scientific" racism and semi-enlightened humanity. A book so hopelessly messy that you can pull just about anything you like out of it, but a great account of growing up in confusing times, all the same.

Then a kind of 20th century hommage to the Schreiner tradition:

Don't let's go to the dogs tonight (2001) by Alexandra Fuller (UK, Zimbabwe, US, etc., 1969- ), audiobook read by Lisette Lecat

    

This is a classic example of the good old-fashioned "I grew up on a farm in Africa" memoir, complete with beautiful African scenery and smells, frightening political upheaval, grinding ecological disaster, family tragedy and comic interludes, and featuring embittered, gun-toting, drunken white people and lovable, impoverished, unreliable, drunken black people. And a lot of very heavy drinking.

Except that it's not set in the Olive Schreiner/Karen Blixen era, or even the Doris Lessing era, but much closer to our own experience, in the 1970s and 80s. Fuller describes her childhood on her parents' farm in Zimbabwe during the guerrilla war; after Mugabe comes to power they lose their farm and move first to another less promising farm in Zimbabwe, then to the poverty and political oppression of Hastings Banda's Malawi, and finally to Zambia.

Although the Fullers are probably not people you would want to be trapped with in a restaurant, they are fun to read about, and the author's talent for vivid description and the warmth of her obvious love for Africa more than makes up for the occasional bit of overwritten purple prose. She's not Doris Lessing, and there's no deep political analysis going on here, still less any suggestion of how she thinks Africa should be run, but she doesn't hesitate to criticise the attitudes of the colonialist class she was brought up in when they are clearly wrong. But, equally, she wants us to see that farmers like her parents are not just colonial exploiters, but they are also people who have built up a lot of knowledge about how to make African land productive in sustainable ways. It's just a pity that they should invest all that effort in tobacco, a product the world would be a lot better without...

The South African version of Dutch, Afrikaans, is really a language in its own right after centuries of separate evolution (and nationalist codification around 1900), but it's just about intelligible with a bit of lateral thinking if you can understand Dutch. It comes loaded with a lot of bad stuff, as the language of the apartheid-era police and army, but it's a rich, flexible and often very funny means of expression as well. I wanted to try to read at least something in Afrikaans, so I picked this recent novel, which happened to be available as an ebook. The English translation is on the current Booker International longlist.

Buys: 'n Grensroman (2014; Red dog: a novel of the African frontier) by Willem Anker (South Africa, 1979- )

  

Willem Anker makes the seven-foot-tall hunter, farmer, cattle-thief, poacher, smuggler, mercenary, frontiersman, polygamist and general nuisance to all in authority, Coenraad de Buys (1761-1821), the narrator of this postmodern historical novel. Not the historical Buys, though, but "Alom-Buys" (omnipresent Buys), a figure outside the limitations of time and place, who can look back on his life with a certain amount of perspective and an awareness of the true and false things history has said about him.

Buys-the-narrator works on us rather like Huck Finn or Flashman: he's a totally reprehensible character in most respects, but he has an engagingly unrestrained comic voice, constantly saying things we half-wish we dared to say ourselves, he has a clear-sighted view of his own failings as well as those of everyone else around him, and he lets us look into a fascinating historical period from a rather unusual perspective. And his voice even becomes unexpectedly touching as Buys starts to get old and lose the physical ability to dominate the world around him.

Although the real Buys is obviously a hero-figure in Afrikaner culture (in a Ned Kelly kind of way), in Anker's view of him he is everything but an Afrikaner nationalist: he chooses friends, wives, allies and enemies on the basis of their personal qualities (and how many cattle and spearmen they can bring into the camp...), without any thought for race or colour. His aim is always to make a good life for Buys and his ever increasing herd of multi-coloured children and grandchildren and never mind whether his neighbours are Xhosa, Portuguese, or Dutch.

Buys with his caravan of wives, children, beasts and hangers-on constantly moving around to find unclaimed and potentially fertile corners of the veld sometimes comes over as an Old-Testament patriarch, sometimes as the leader of a pack of ravening beasts, and Anker has fun with both of these metaphors throughout. We know the mysterious dog-pack that is constantly shadowing his progress must be there for a reason, but it takes a while before we work it out.

Very enjoyable, and an interesting introduction to a period I didn't know much about.

---

https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coenraad_de_Buys (go on, try to read the Afrikaans version before you click on the English!)

Thanks, Mark. I gathered books suitable for this (no doubt there are more still hiding) and have started, after ordering them chronologically, on Mofolo's Chaka. The original publication date (OPD) is 1931 but my intro says the manuscript was completed in 1909.

At the moment I intend to read only books by black authors for this theme.

If you like short stories, have a look at http://caineprize.com/previous-winners. Every year, the Caine Prize is awarded to a short story written by an African author. Most of them are available online. Previous winners from Southern-African countries include Lidudumalingani (SA), Namwali Serpell (Zambia), NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Henrietta Rose-Innes (SA), Mary Watson (SA) and Brian Chikwava (Zimbabwe).

I've finished Our Musseque. It describes the everyday life of children, and through their eyes, adults, of a poor, mixed and very lively neighbourhood in Luanda before independence. It was published in 2003 in Portuguese (English translation published in 2015) but José Luandino Vieira wrote this novel in prison in the sixties. It's a tragicomedy full of local colour. I wasn't my cup of tea, but if you'd like to read a novel that mixes politics, social commentary, children's highjinks, farce and family drama, this is for you.

On to Greetings from Grandpa, a poetry collection by Malawian writer Jack Mapanje.

I'd really like to read Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chaka. We'll see whether I can get hold of them...

>28 Dilara86: Jack Mapanje taught at York for some time after his release from prison. I went to a reading he gave (probably when I was there for a summer school) and remember being very impressed by him. I certainly came away with his book! I have a vague idea I might also have met him earlier, in the 1980s, when I was taken to a reception in the African Studies department, but I may be confusing him with another visiting poet.

---

One of the oldies from my pile:

Year of the uprising (1978) by Stanlake Samkange (Zimbabwe, 1922-1988)

  

Samkange taught African history in universities in the US and Zimbabwe. He was secretary of the ANC for a long time, and was active in Zimbabwean politics in the 1970s. He's best-known for his first novel On trial for my country (1966) and for his history book Origins of Rhodesia (1968), which was banned by the Smith government.

‘Damn it all. This buffet from Mashonaland,’ said Grey, as Rhodes joined Jarvis, Selous, Tembu and other members of the Baden-Powell intelligence unit, ‘is most provoking.’

‘It is the devil,’ agreed Jarvis.

This historical novel deals with the conflict known to the British as the "Second Matabele War", a rising by Ndebele, and later also Shona, people in Zimbabwe in 1896-7 provoked by a combination of drought, rinderpest, locusts and wholesale abuses by the British South Africa Company and its police force.

In the preface, Samkange quotes a critic who found that "the trouble with Samkange is that you never know where his fiction ends and history begins". In this book, it seems to be fairly easy to pin down: somewhere around the end of Chapter III. We get a few opening chapters set in an Ndebele kraal in which characters are introduced and there is all kinds of interesting fictional stuff going on — a young woman loved by an outsider but assigned to a political marriage; messengers arriving, journeys being planned, conflicts of religion and politics being set up, and so on. But then we move over to the British point of view, and most of the rest of the story is told through contemporary reports and memoirs rearranged, not always happily, into the form of dialogues. The characters from the first chapters pop up again in odd corners, but they are undeveloped and always in the background, displaced by a high-profile (but constantly changing) cast of company officials, soldiers, and British colonial representatives.

It's very interesting history, but a terrible novel, and because of that it's not even very good propaganda, because Samkange can't persuade himself to be one-sided. Obviously we're meant to think of Smith whenever Rhodes is mentioned, but Samkange is too conscientious to turn Rhodes into a stage villain: he often comes across as a great deal less bad than his colleagues (not that that's necessarily saying much...). The indignities, rapes, thefts and forced labour suffered by the Ndebele are represented as the fault of unsupervised minor officials, not the policy of the Company, and Rhodes is shown as a pragmatist happy to do a deal that would preserve the dignity of the chiefs, whilst his small-minded colleagues are more interested in looking for black scapegoats to punish for the crimes committed during the rising.

Samkange's academic conscience also prevents him from brushing over the weakness of the Ndebele's claim to moral superiority over the British interlopers: they themselves had come from Natal and had taken the land they were on from the Shona and Rozwi only fifty years earlier, after being displaced north in the mfecane.

Worth reading because of the way it documents what it feels like to be on the receiving end of colonial intervention, but it would have been better as straight non-fiction.

>29 thorold: He mentions York - and Leeds - in his poems!

I am a Canadian teacher and children's book writer currently living in Cameroon, Africa.

There's a short blurb about living and writing here: https://canadianwritersabroad.com/2020/01/22/raining-books/

My recommendations (indigenous and/or women writers):

The Old Drift: (Zambia) A wonderful novel spanning three generations of two families. Most pertinent to todays world is that disembodied awareness or god that represents the Zambesi and is physically manifested in the swarms of mosquitos and the diseases transmitted by them.

Expedition to the Baobab Tree: (South Africa)

The First Wife: (Mozambique) Interesting and entertaining novel that explains how polygamy works (patriarchically) and what happens when the wives decide to even the playing field.

When Rain Clouds Gather: (Botswana) Already mentioned above.

The Stone Virgins: (Zimbabwe) A very sobering portrait of what happens when oppressive colonial governments are replaced by homegrown dictators.

Chaka: (Lesotho) Zulu history and the first novel written in Sesotho, I believe.

Soft Magic: (Malawi) Poetry is all I've been able to find so far in an indigenous writer. But I love poetry and this is a great little book of poems.

Haven't been able to lay my hands on a Namibian novel yet but I'm working on it based on the suggestions above...

>32 jveezer: Thank you for the recommendations! Is The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy by Paulina Chiziane the book you recommended for Mozambique? (The touchstone links to a novel by Diana Diamond...)

>33 Dilara86: Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed the touchstone!

>32 jveezer: Thanks! Some interesting things there. Paulina Chiziane is definitely moving up onto my reading list.

A relatively late, English prose work by Afrikaans poet (and painter) Breyten Breytenbach:

Dog heart : a memoir (1999) by Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa, France, 1939- )

  

In the late 1990s, Breytenbach returns from exile to rediscover his heritage in Boland, the region of the Western Cape where he grew up. There's a certain amount of treading on eggshells in the first part of the book, as people who twenty years earlier were calling him the worst names they could think of and ostracising his parents now start queueing up to have their photographs taken with him, but this isn't really a returning-celebrity book, it's a thoughtful, rather freeform, investigation of the Afrikaner culture Breytenbach identifies with and its place in the new South Africa.

It's a kind of mosaic of anecdotes, recollections, news items: sketches of ancestors like the formidable midwife Mrs Keet, his great-grandmother, or of local characters like the outlaw Koos Sas, constantly on the run from the law in the 1920s; lyrical observations of scenery and plants; reflections on the death of old friends; conversations with neighbours or tradespeople; stories of appalling rapes, murders and robberies. And above all it's about the one thing that seems to tie all these things together, the Afrikaans language and its ability to give things apt and witty names.

Breytenbach is obviously saddened and frightened by the crime and brutality he sees in the new South Africa, but he's also only too well aware of the injustice and brutality that white people mostly didn't care to see in the old South Africa. Probably wisely, he confines himself to reporting what he sees and doesn't try to tell us that things are better or worse. Still less to suggest how to solve the problems.

What does come out between the lines, though, is that he doesn't see how the old culture of the "white" Afrikaner families can survive as a separate identity (as he keeps reminding us, they are all more or less "brown" in fact, after centuries of living among Africans). And he doesn't really see that it needs to: a culture is defined by its past, not its future. There is value in the Afrikaans tradition, even if the next generation of children grow up wearing shoes.

A beautifully-written, seductively mournful book.

 

Chaka, Thomas Mofolo, written by 1909; first (English) translation in 1931; Daniel P. Kunene translation 1981

At the time he wrote Chaka Mofolo was a teacher who had been encouraged to write by the Christian missionaries who schooled him. It's a real pity that their unwillingness to publish this book seems to have ended Mofolo's career as a writer because he was clearly a great talent with a unique outlook. The book is fascinating as much for its central figure as for its literary marriage of African oral poetry, mythmaking, and the psychological novel.

The story relies on the oral tradition that grew around the memory and legend of the greatest of the Zulu kings, Chaka or Shaka, who expanded the territory of his people to a size "bigger than Europe" and struck terror in the hearts of hundreds of thousands.

The curious thing is that this glorious warrior seems to be a deeply ambiguous figure already in the popular legend, while Mofolo makes him a complete anti-hero. There is an early European account, from 1836, that (according to Wikipedia) describes Chaka as a "depraved monster", and it's hard not to see Mofolo's Chaka as such too. He calls him "the originator of all evil", even cannibalism (his relentless warfare having reduced people to starving wanderers), and has him kill not only masses of enemies, but the woman he loved, his brothers, his concubines, his own children (immediately on birth) and finally even his mother.

Most of this (perhaps all) is not historical fact, but Mofolo's story has the strength and beauty of all great literature, and makes the fiction truer than truth.

>36 LolaWalser: I definitely have to get hold of this. As soon as we're allowed outside again...

I started When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head, a writer born of a white South-African mother and a "coloured" father. She sought refugee status in Bostwana and became a citizen of this country. I'm enjoying this novel so far.

>37 Dilara86:

It definitely has my highest recommendation. I'd love to learn about the wider reception of the novel among the Zulu, as well as (but I'm guessing this is extremely difficult, if at all possible) the genesis of the stories about Chaka. I didn't want to dilate on things because I'm basically totally ignorant of everything about the context, so no point to my speculative ramblings. But I'd love to hear the opinions of others.

I have two Bessie Heads in the queue but not that one.

>38 LolaWalser: Well, you know what they say: "two Heads are better ..." (Sorry!)

The one Bessie Head novel I've read certainly made me want to read more.

It was nice to see that this next book actually came from a publisher in Zimbabwe, printed from masters that were nearly worn out and covered in spots and scratches. Very African.

Coming of the dry season (1972) by Charles Mungoshi (Zimbabwe, 1947-2019)

  

This slim collection of short pieces (10 stories in only 61 pages) was apparently banned by the Rhodesian censors when it originally came out, but it's not an overtly political book: obviously the authorities were so paranoid by that time that any book in which a white character was represented as stupid, prejudiced or red-faced was seen as a threat.

The stories are quite understated, delivering their messages in unobtrusive bits of description rather than in the main line of the plot. But there's always a hefty punch there somewhere, even if what you've just been reading doesn't quite hit you until you're halfway through the next story. Mungoshi's characters are ordinary people, living in a largely-hostile world where they know poverty, family trouble, malignant ghosts, officialdom, or simple accidents can strike at any moment. Where it can be risky to stand up for what seems to be right, and where the migrant to the city has to feel an obligation to the people left in the village, even when he's out of work himself. Warm, compassionate writing, but always with a hard edge under it.

Another book by a white writer, but one that I can't really justify not having read...

Cry, the beloved country (1948) by Alan Paton (South Africa, 1903-1988)

  

This is the big daddy of all liberal South African protest novels, the first really high-profile international bestseller to draw attention to the damage done by the racism embedded in the South African system, even before the fiction of "apartheid" was created.

It's a simple, very classically-constructed novel, a tragedy built around a father's quest for his missing son, full of symbolic landscape description and stately, formal conversations, peppered with interpolated sociological observations that come at us from a Marxist-Anglican viewpoint, all of it very much more 1848 than 1948. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter: Paton gets away with it because of his obvious love for the country and the people who live in it and his passionate concern to undo the mess that it is in.

Paton sees the racism that poisons South African life in a straightforward Marxist way, as an ideology that has grown up to justify the need the capitalist system has to keep black people in poverty so that there will always be a pool of unskilled labour prepared to work at low wages to keep the mines and farms going. By taking away the best land and forcing people into inadequate "reserves", the old agricultural economy of the tribal system has been broken down, taking with it the social control and restraints on behaviour of traditional society. Young men have to leave their families to go and work in the cities — the system doesn't allow them to establish stable family homes in the cities, or to build careers or businesses once they are there, so those who are too enterprising or too undisciplined to cope with tedious work in mines and factories are more than likely to end up in crime.

For the moment, political opposition doesn't seem to offer a way out — in the absence of any real political responsibilities open to them, black leaders are vulnerable to being corrupted by the system. Well-meaning white liberals can make a difference on a small local scale, but in the end they are only giving back a part of what their community took away in the first place. The only real pillar of hope for Paton seems to be the (Anglican-) Christian church, which gives black people a new kind of community structure to replace what they have lost in the breakdown of tribal bonds. But he's clearly not expecting the revolution any time soon.

If this were a new book, it would be criticised because Paton is a white person writing from the point of view of a black protagonist, using elements of style that are clearly meant to give the book an African rhythm, but which can sometimes start looking rather Hiawatha-ish: Here is a white man's wonder, a train that has no engine, only an iron cage on its head, taking power from metal ropes stretched out above. Conversations that are supposed to be in Zulu are rendered in very formal, courteous English, which is perhaps an accurate representation of the way social relations in Zulu work, but starts after a while to look like a cliché of old-fashioned exoticising colonial fiction. It's clearly all well-meant, of course, and in the context of its time, we can't really use the "cultural appropriation" argument that Paton is stealing space in which black writers could have been selling their books. If anything, he's helping to create a demand for more African writing.

Of course, Paton wrote this for an international audience, during a stay abroad, and the book must owe a lot of its success to the self-satisfaction American readers got from discovering that there were worse things in the world than their own home-grown racism, and British readers from finding that it wasn't their responsibility any more. The South African authorities, of course, banned it. But Paton did go back home and continued to engage in South African politics, doing his best to swim against the tide and work for change.

Whatever you think of it, it's an engaging tear-jerker and an important document of its time.

A recent Zimbabwean novel I found as an audiobook on Scribd. I didn't realise when I started it that it is the sequel to Dangarembga's earlier novels Nervous conditions (1988) and The book of not (2006), which I haven't read yet, but it seemed to work as a self-contained novel as well:

This mournable body (2018) by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe , 1959- ) audiobook, narrated by Adenrele Ojo

  

Playwright Tsitsi Dangarembga made waves in 1988 when Nervous conditions turned out to be the first novel in English by a black Zimbabwean woman, but since then she has been very busy with films, politics, and higher education, hence the long gaps before her second and third novels.

At the opening of this book we meet Tambudzai, central character of Dangarembga's two previous novels, at a low spot in her life. She's walked out of her prestigious job in an advertising agency on finding that (white) co-workers are taking credit for her work, but soon finds that a new generation of bright (thin) young women has come onto the Harare job-market since she was last looking for employment, and she's rapidly losing self-confidence. Finding somewhere to live has been every bit as difficult as finding a job. But the last thing she wants to do is seek the help of her family back in the village who made such huge sacrifices to enable her to go to a good school, and she's even more determined to stay away from the aunts and cousins who were in the bush fighting for freedom whilst she was getting her "O" and "A" levels.

After a brief, disastrous, spell as a teacher, she finds herself back in the hands of her family anyway, and then she's offered a job by Tracy, the white woman who was promoted over her head at school and in the advertising agency, but still seems to think of Tambudzai as a friend. Tracy is running an eco-friendly safari company based on her parents' old farm, and for a while Tambudzai slots happily back into businesswoman mode. But sooner or later, she's got to face the ghosts of the village and the war...

This book has its irritations: I didn't like the way it's all in second-person narrative, for instance, and there are passages which are rather over-written, but it was a very interesting look at what it's like to live on that divide between tradition and globalisation in modern Africa. In some ways very similar to the themes that come up in European and American novels of fifty years ago (the child of a working-class family that goes to college and finds it doesn't fit in any more with either world), but in some ways very different (the trauma of the guerrilla war, the legacy of colonialism).

SOUTH AFRICA



Praying Mantis by André Brink
first published 2005

Cupido Cockroach did not have a father. His mother had told him many stories about how he came to be. Cupido's favourite was of an eagle swooping down to pick him up from the veld where he had been left to die, only to be flown in the eagle's beak untold miles before being dropped in the lap of the sleeping woman who would become his mother.

This eagle was not the only animal to feature in Cupido's history. That very night, the child died, and was laid out to be buried the next morning. When the hung-over villagers arrived to bury him, they saw a bright green mantis praying over the body, restoring him to life. Clearly, this child was destined for a life that would take him far beyond this farm. As his mother said, "If you ask me, he has been chosen to become a man like no other... he will be a free man."

The year was 1760 and freedom was not a likely proposition for this child of a Hottentot labourer. Cupido's childhood and adolescence did not offer much hope of fulfillment for his mother's prophecy. While he was bright and ambitious, he was not at all diligent, preferring instead to pursue those things which interested him. When Cupido was about seventeen, an itinerant pedlar turned up on the farm. Like Cupido's now disappeared mother, Servaas Ziervogel was a teller of tales and a singer, but this man's tales came from something called the Gospel. There were other stories too, of lands far beyond the horizon, places with strange and unusual names like Damascus, Vladivostock and even Pluto. Cupido absorbed them all. It was a time of learning. Ziervogel taught him to read, but also gave him a taste for arrack, women, and fighting.

Eventually the two parted amicably. Cupido wooed and won the indomitable Anna Vigilant. Anna believed true freedom was only given to white people. A soap-maker, her desire to be free had led her to put her foot in the boiling lye in an effort to whiten herself, as her soap whitened everything else. She was left lame for life. She was also left with a strong distaste for the ways of the white people, especially when it came to their religion. Cupido, on the other hand, felt its pull and succumbed.

Brink has used a straightforward narrative up to this point. Part II, covering the years 1802-1815, switches format and perspective. It purports to be written retrospectively in memoir form by the disgraced Reverend James Read. It is set against a warring background between English and Dutch for control of South Africa. It depicts more immediately the struggle for domination of all around them, be it land, animals, or souls. Read is unusual in his sympathies for, and belief in, the indigenous peoples. He happily took on Cupido as a protégé. Learning in turn from Cupido, Read developed in his mind an almost mystical feeling for the land. Travelling with Cupido, he

came to see it through our brother's eyes and be made aware of the manifold minutiae in which life can express itself: an ever renewed discovery of riches in indigenous peoples, animals, birds, insects, plants, even rocks and stones.

While continuing with some of Cupido's more extreme eccentricities, this section introduces hard reality. Brink, through Read, does not hold back on the treatment of the indigenous peoples by the Europeans.

Read's summary ended with the year 1815. Part III returns to the narrative structure of Part I. Cupido was now far in the outback, in an area prone to drought. Quoting Deuteronomy, Brink says "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness." Like many before him, Cupido was being tested in the desert by his faith. The question for him was which faith: the animist ones of the people, or the new ones brought by the Europeans.

Although Praying Mantis deals with questions of belief, it is not a book with an obtrusive religious message. Rather, it takes the reader back to a time when two groups of peoples came together with very different ideas of the world. How were new ideas to be reconciled with existing ones, or was reconciliation even possible?; would cultural clashes and their resulting wars ever be resolved?

In a note at the end of the novel, Brink suggests he may have had difficulty writing it. He started it in 1984, stopped, started again in 1992. However, it was not until 2004 that he actually finished it, after resolving to write a book for his 70th birthday. What precipitated the fits and starts he doesn't say. He does say though that Cupido Cockroach was a real person, Cupido Kakkerlak, whose story appears from time to time in records of the London Missionary Society in South Africa, and also in academic journals. Reverend Read and many others of the characters are also based on real people. Knowing this made Cupido's faults and struggles, his drive and determination, credible in a way they might not otherwise have been. As Brink says "... the enigma of another's life can only be grasped through the imagination (which is no less reliable than memory)."

>42 SassyLassy: That sounds interesting. I've got A dry white season on the TBR to read first, but I'm taking note!

--

Another Zimbabwean novel I've been listening to on Scribd: quite short, but it's taken a while, what with only spending about 45 minutes out of the house every day.

The stone virgins (2002) by Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe, Canada, 1964-2005) Audiobook narrated by Danai Gurira

  

Yvonne Vera grew up in Bulawayo and studied in Canada: she was a schoolteacher, later becoming director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo, and wrote five highly-regarded novels. This was the last she completed before her untimely death from AIDS-related illness in 2005.

A difficult novel to read, dealing with the violence around and after Zimbabwe's independence from a very direct, personal and shatteringly painful viewpoint. A young woman is murdered in a village outside Bulawayo; her sister is also attacked and left seriously injured and disfigured, and has to find a way to get back to something like normal life.

We are shown the world in which these things happen in an apparently objective, poetic way — the scenery, the buildings, the weather and vegetation, the normal lives of the people in Bulawayo and the village, the fighters who have returned from the bush, the memories and visible signs of pre-colonial heritage — and we are taken into the minds of the women to participate in a very subjective way in what is happening to them, but we are left to work out for ourselves how these things fit together, what it is in the external world that might have provoked this outburst of violence, and what the world's (limited) resources for palliating its effects might be.

A rather beautiful book, full of memorable language and images, but not really a comforting read. Vera leaves her characters living in a mental world full of jagged edges and unexploded mines, and we aren't given much hope that they will be able to avoid them for long.

...and another protest novel from the pile lent to me by my South African friends, even if the cover art makes it look more like a science-fiction dystopia:

A dry white season (1979) by André Brink (South Africa, 1935-2015)

  

Ben du Toit thinks of himself as an ordinary Afrikaner with no particular interest in politics, a simple Johannesburg schoolteacher. But he's suddenly forced to confront his illusions about the kind of country he's living in when his black friend Gordon dies in police custody, having been arrested for nothing more than trying to find out what happened to his teenage son, killed in the aftermath of the Soweto school protests. Ben's tentative attempts to get information from the police and then to help Gordon's widow with the inquest soon make him realise that the authorities have something to hide, reinforcing his stubborn wish to find out what really happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. And of course the police are soon making sure that Ben himself understands how much power they have, when nasty things start happening to him and the people around him.

In the end, of course, he can't hope to win, and he also knows only too well that he can't hope to stop being a privileged white person, but as a friend tells him, there are two kinds of madness one should guard against: One is the belief that we can do everything. Another is the belief that we can do nothing. He has to go on and fail so that it will be a little bit easier for the next person to fail less badly. And eventually the system will be overcome.

Brink sticks to a fairly detached, thriller-like type of narrative, obviously wanting this to be read by those who haven't thought about the problems of Apartheid any more than Ben had at the start of the book. And also knowing that not many people in South Africa would get to read it anyway, as long as the National Party remained in charge. But he did write both an Afrikaans and an English version of it, as he did for most of his later books.

>44 thorold: I remember the movie version of this book being pretty good, with Donald Sutherland in the main role. Hollywood-ized, no doubt.

 

Mine Boy, Peter Abrahams, first published in 1946

A young man from "up north", Xuma, comes to Johannesburg looking for work and finds friends, a job, and love... but not for long. Abrahams writes in a simple language and almost obliquely gives a picture of the horrible country in which white invaders turned the black natives into their constitutionally oppressed servants, a systematically and relentlessly discriminated-against underclass.

Xuma starts working in the mines and living in a slum, Malay Camp. He falls in tortured love with a teacher, Eliza, who nurtures ambition for "white" things in life, something that the poor, illiterate Xuma fears he cannot give her.

Abrahams writes many scenes of joy, of dancing, of people's resilience, which appear almost miraculous given the constant grind of racism. Racism sickens these lives, white people are the death and misery of black people. This is what I say, Abrahams isn't that direct and even creates a few white characters who are deemed "kind" and "good"... except there is no way to be a kind and good racist, and when you live in a racist country and profit from racism, you're a racist. There's just no way around that. The "good" whites rationalize their position by patronizing the blacks as people who are not yet ready and mature to govern in a fair way.

The only real, self-aware thing a white person says in the book is a remark by O'Shea's girlfriend (O'Shea is Xuma's "white man"--all the black men are refrred to as "boys" and every black "boy" has a white "man" to answer to). O'Shea is someone who pretends, or actually believes, that it is possible for people like him and Xuma to see each other and treat each other as equal men, and just men, persons, with no reference to colour.

O'Shea's girlfriend simply notes that for all the effort he made to befriend Xuma, O'Shea and others are not willing to be led by Xuma and people like Xuma.

And that puts paid to all the bloviation about "we are all men" etc.

In 1956, just when many Jamaicans were emigrating to the UK, Abrahams moved from South Africa to Jamaica. Sad to say, he died murdered in 2017, at 97 years old.

So many interesting reviews for interesting books! I've added Mine Boy to my wishlist. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before...
I haven't had one disappointing theme read so far this quarter. When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head was engaging and modern (read feminist and anti-segregation) in its outlook. The Heart of Redness (don't be put off by the title's nod to Conrad's book, as I nearly was) by Zakes Mda was profound, moving and funny. I've learnt a lot from both books about Xhosa and Batswana history and culture. just started The Stone Virgins.

>46 LolaWalser: Thanks! I didn't know about that book either.

>47 Dilara86: Looking forward to seeing your reviews of those :-)

Another from my South African pile:

Dusklands (1974) by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa, Australia, 1940- )

  

This was Coetzee's first novel, started whilst he was teaching at Buffalo, New York in the early seventies and active in the anti-war movement. As you would probably expect, it's not your average first novel, and as well as being a critique of US and African colonialism it also has some traces of Coetzee's unusual academic background in both computer science and literature.

There are two apparently unrelated narratives: one by Eugene Dawn, a mythographer working on a Vietnam War project for a lightly-fictionalised version of RAND Corporation, and the other by 18th-century Afrikaner Jacobus Coetzee, describing a hunting expedition north of the Orange River in the 1760s. But both are very unstable texts. Dawn has been commissioned by his boss, the sinister game theorist Coetzee (!), to write a report on the most efficient way of demoralising the Vietnamese people, but the effects of the concepts and material he has to deal with send him into a nervous breakdown and he goes off on a Nabokovian fugue to a motel in the middle of nowhere with his young son.

Jacobus tells us in a first-person narrative about the disastrous failure of his expedition — they get into conflict with the indigenous Namaqua people, everything possible goes wrong, and Jacobus loses all his dignity and the things that differentiate him from the indigenous people (gun, trousers, shoes, wagon, servants, authority). But this story is followed by two other accounts of the same expedition, one supposedly written in 1951 by yet another Coetzee, the fictional father of the fictional J.M. Coetzee who is compiling this book, and the other the official report Jacobus submitted to the Company after his expedition. Needless to say, neither of them bears any obvious relation to what we've just read, beyond the fact that they all tell us that Jacobus crossed the Orange River (before it was known by that name).

It's a very self-consciously literary novel, and very much of its time. Bellow and Nabokov loom large in the first part, Patrick White and Beckett in the second. But it's also a very direct challenge to preconceptions about "western civilisation": if the loss of his gun and his trousers were enough to put Jacobus on the same level as the Khoikhoi, what does that tell us about the photos of US soldiers posing with the severed heads of their Vietnamese victims that Dawn has to look at in the course of his work?

>47 Dilara86:, >48 thorold:

Mine Boy

Unfortunately I can't put it in literary context for you, but the date of publication itself ought to justify curiosity. I might have added the great interest of a stunning female character in Leah, who seems modern way beyond that period--smart, independent, businesswoman, risk-taker, head of a difficult and loose "family", a leader of the slum, loving wife to a husband in prison but not depriving herself of sexual pleasure with other men--she boggles the mind even today let alone (some minds anyway) in the 1940s. Although it's clear she's not shocking to the African characters in any way--but there's a tale to be told of that vs. white perception, I'm sure.

>49 LolaWalser: And the effect of the mines and their migrant workers on society as a whole seems to come up in everything you read from the region, including this next one. I’ve got a secondhand copy on the way...

To Botswana, and a book by a distinguished human-rights lawyer and the country's first female high court judge, currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. One of those people who seems to have achieved so much in life that you can't imagine where they find the time to write novels as well...

Juggling truths (2003) by Unity Dow (Botswana, 1959- )

  

Monei is growing up in a small village in Botswana around the time of independence. At first glance, life in Mochudi seems to have little to do with the wider world, its rhythms defined by tradition and the demands of the agricultural calendar, but when we start to look closer we see the primary school, the Roman Catholic and Dutch Reformed churches, the young men going off to earn money in the Johannesburg gold mines. All of these bring along their own world-view and set of truths, and young Monei has to navigate her way through them, supported by her storytelling grandmother, her wise, pragmatic mother, and her uneducated but well-intentioned father. In the end it's the school that Monei recognises as giving her the best chance of making a life for herself on her own terms, and she sticks it out to take her exams, despite the ignorant and often sadistic teachers and the anglocentric curriculum.

Although this deals with a lot of tough facts of life — disease, cruelty, murder, unwanted pregnancy, people excluded from the community, and all the rest — it comes over for the most part as a warm and funny portrait of childhood and village life. Monei (who, despite her claims to have trained as an architect rather than a lawyer, sounds very like a self-portrait) is an endearing, lively narrator, a strong young woman who has a burning need to make sense of the world she is growing up into, but also a great respect for the traditions she has inherited from her family. And — naturally — for the importance of stories.

>50 thorold:

the effect of the mines and their migrant workers on society as a whole

One interesting tidbit I came across regards something Abrahams didn't mention, and that's the apparently widespread custom of sexual bonding among the mine workers, typically older and more experienced men taking under their wing the younger ones in a kind of "mine marriage". I had been a little surprised that Xuma would be commuting to work every day, and that doesn't seem to have been common in reality, most miners would be housed in camps next to the mines and go to the city and the girls more rarely. I expect that's a tale still waiting to be told (outside the sociological studies, I mean).

My next read made Xuma's Malay Camp slum seem luxurious.

 

And a threefold cord, Alex La Guma, first published in 1964

I hope it's just my ignorance showing when I say La Guma was completely unknown to me, because the lack of renown in this case is incomprehensible--this is a truly GREAT writer who deserves to be celebrated far and wide. If I could get on the rooftop and shout it from there, I would. New York Review of Book Classics, are you listening? Somebody needs to do right by this man.

I won't hesitate to call it beautiful despite the subject because it simply is--La Guma's language, fineness of observation, his warm yet clear-eyed embrace of his characters, are remarkably, unusually beautiful.

Yes, it's about the poorest of the poor frantically trying to survive on a heap of mud and corrugated iron in the vicinity of Cape Town--black labourers hanging onto jobs and life itself by a thread. Like human ants they scurry around picking scraps of food and stuffs as they can find them. Their shacks, their slum, its crazy crooked pathways, are "like a parody" of human dwellings, neighbourhoods, streets. But can human beings be parodies? And between the poor and the rich, who is the joke, the nightmarish joke?

Across the road from the shantytown a solitary white man with a failed business hangs onto his garage in this forlorn spot because he has nowhere and no one to go to. Sinking as he is into lonely alcoholism, he still feels, not so much superior, as the need to pretend he's superior to the poor black people who regularly come to beg off him pieces or metal and rubber for their use. He doesn't deny them, but Charlie Pauls nevertheless knows to butter him up with the right tone and things to say. There's a moment when, as a gesture of returning a favour, he invites the white man to visit the shantytown, to make a party. And this one slowly agrees, ravaged by loneliness and depression... but can't bring himself to do it. From Charlie's invitation on he will keep imagining himself going there, following the instructions to Charlie's house, he will keep imagining bringing some drinks along and being with people, but the people are "them", and so he won't cross the line, and so he deepens his misery.

The poor black people, on the other hand, don't need him. They have problems and misery of their own but they also have each other, for better or for worse. There are the ones completely broken down, like Charlie's dying father or Roman the thief and wife-beater, there are the seething adolescents like Charlie's brother Ronald, soon to hit the crossroads between good and evil, there are the staggering innocents being happy, like Charlie's not-all-there 17 year old sister and her boy husband, enjoying their marriage on the floor of a chicken coop, lurching into parenthood as oblivious as birds, there are dignified women like Charlie's mother, who can't cry but whose very words can feel like tears, and old fat Nzuba, who observes the rituals of burial and birth amid bone-crushing poverty like the honourable ceremonies they are, due to peoples' inalienable dignity, and Charlie's occasional sex partner Freda, servant to whites, who wants and deserves so much more, waiting for him to make up his mind and marry her--there is community.

It's not that La Guma wrote this book because he was a Communist, but that how could he have not been a Communist, given this?

Don't worry about preachiness, there is none. La Guma is in that marvellous society of people with a humane political consciousness who were also true artists.

It's not easy to pick out quotations from a text this unified and rhythmic--there are no "set pieces" here, no fanfare alerting us to authorial arias and "beauty spots"--the beauty is in the flow as much as in the images.

Once, long ago, Dad Pauls had been a strong, tall man, but now he was a framework of bones, a child's drawing of a man, his dark face clawed by want and sickness, hollow and ravaged, the stark bones showing under the thin skin, an outlandish mask hurriedly and roughly cut out of brown, seamed wood.

----

Dad and Charlie had scavenged, begged and, on dark nights, stolen the materials for the house. They had dragged for miles sheets of rusty corrugated iron, planks, pieces of cardboard, and all the astonishing miscellany that had gone into building the house. There were flattened fuel cans advertising a brand of oil on the sides, tins of rusty nails Charlie had pulled from the gathered flotsam and jetsam and straightened with a hammer on the stone; rags for stuffing cracks and holes, strips of baling wire and waterproof paper, cartons, old pieces of metal and strands of wire, sides of packing-cases, and a pair of railway sleepers.

----

Down a muddy trail between crooked rows of shacks came a band of children. They scrambled and hopped, spun and cavorted in a sort of dilapidated ballet of wretchedness, shrieking and cheering, laughing with mucus-smeared, goblin faces and the colourless eyes of poverty. Arms like the loosely-joined parts of a construction-set flapped and wobbled as they beat the moisture-laden air, their feet and legs lapping at the black mud as if sucking in some horrid jelly. Around them a troop of curs yelped in a shrill counterpoint.

Please excuse the serial posting, but this reminded me of another of group's themes, non-European travellers in Europe and elsewhere or something of the sort--I dimly recall questions about African travellers in particular:

https://africasacountry.com/2018/07/back-in-the-ussr

Forty years ago in 1978, Progress Publishers in Moscow released A Soviet Journey by the South African writer Alex La Guma. Today it stands as one of the longest accounts of the Soviet Union by an African writer. Yet it remains largely ignored, a non-fiction aberration within his library of politically committed fiction. La Guma was not the only African writer to describe the USSR and its personal and political meanings. Andrew Amar (An African in Moscow, 1960), William Anti-Taylor (Moscow Diary, 1967), and Richard Dogbeh-David (Voyage ay pays de Lénine, 1967) published shorter accounts that depicted their experiences studying and traveling in the Soviet Union. Fellow South African writer Christopher Hope composed a memoir of visiting Moscow (Moscow! Moscow!, 1990) toward the end of the Cold War...

And, YAY!, this I'm especially glad to see, another call to popularise La Guma:

Alex La Guma: The Greatest Novelist Whose Name You’ve Never Heard Before

October 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of one of the world’s great novelists, arguably the greatest Africa—let alone South Africa—has ever produced, a man who was not only a prodigiously talented writer but also a valiant hero of the anti-apartheid struggle.
Alex La Guma (1925-1985) is today, sadly, a forgotten colossus, but in the 1960s and ’70s, he was indubitably the black Dickens, with his fiction containing the sweep and moral power of his acclaimed Victorian predecessor. An astonishing creative artist as well as an ardent freedom fighter, he was the author of five masterful novels—A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979).
With his genius for creating vivid characters amid the brutality of apartheid, his compassion for the poor and the oppressed, his masterful storytelling technique and his unforgettably sensuous, beautifully ornate prose style, La Guma has seldom been bettered in any age or on any continent. Thirty years after his death, the name Alex La Guma as a novelist, an activist in the liberation struggle and a remarkable human being should be on all of our lips. ...

ETA:

Alex la Guma, an African hero lies buried in Cuba

Aaah, the dude is holding my edition of the novel!:

La Guma gave a voice to the voiceless

Included in the list of only six:

6 Books That Shaped Post-Apartheid South Africa

There is no higher praise:

Writer’s choice: Ngugi wa Thiong’o recommends seven novels from Africa that you must read

When even The Economist puts La Guma in the #1 spot:

https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/travellers-bookshelf/the-best-books-about-c...

>51 LolaWalser: >52 LolaWalser: Oh no, the TBR list is getting longer all the time. :-)

Actually, I'm sure I saw at least one of those lists you linked to and then forgot all about La Guma again. Thanks for writing about him!
It also reminds me that I wanted to look out for Amandla by Miriam Tlali, who got left out from my lists above...

Do you remember where you saw that about the "mine marriages"? It rings a faint bell for me, but it's not something I've seen recently.

>52 LolaWalser: Fun! You can get a reprint of A soviet journey as an ebook for a mere €99. Or on paper for about half that. Something strange there. I think it’ll wait until we have libraries again...

>53 thorold:

found the two links in my history, and there's a reference here:

Claude J. Summers notes that the book does not mention "same sex pairings among migrant laborers" in the mines, although the practice of young men and boys becoming "wives of the mine" with older men is well known, and documented back to the 1930s

Arrrgh what's with this stupid link!! This is mad, even just plain copying the link diverts to another page!

I don't know what else to do but have you type it: en dot wikipedia dot org slash wiki slash Mine_Boy_(novel)

plus

Homosexuality on South African Gold Mines

I have dim memories of reading about similar things in the "wild West" etc.

Thanks - I had a look through John Boswell and a couple of other things on my shelves and didn't spot it. It's probably something I filed away and semi-forgot 25 years ago in case it would come in useful for my final-year dissertation...

>56 thorold:

Sorry about the dumb link, maybe it's easiest to go from Abrahams' wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Abrahams

then click on Mine Boy under Works.

THEN you'll be able to see the link to the Routledge reference.

>54 thorold:

If I may digress a little, if you happen to be interested in memoirs and experiences of the USSR by non-Westerners, recently there's been translated a book from Arabic by Sonallah Ibrahim, Ice, very worthy of interest, IMO. The Anglo reviews in the liberal press are of course as stupidly predictable as can be (did he queue for stuff? Yes! Socialism sucks, QED!), but if you plunge into the book itself, there are plenty of surprises of all kinds.

I think there's an earlier French translation but it's a recent book (Ibrahim is an old guy, started publishing in the sixties).

In general, I think the time is coming when people will start paying attention more and more to these voices and experiences, everywhere. There is so much of interest and value in them. Millions of people from Africa, Asia, Latin America and even the West had travelled and lived not just in the USSR, but other countries in the Eastern Bloc--and, of course, in the non-aligned Yugoslavia. Those have got to be some of the most fascinating stories ever.

>57 LolaWalser: Yes, I've been tripped up by those Google Books links before, too...

I found a couple of essays that reference the T Dunbar Moodie article in Hidden from history as well, so I expect it's that I had in the back of my mind. 1988 sounds about right. Maybe I've even got a photocopy of it somewhere. (I thought I had Hidden from History, but apparently not, or I've lost it.)

Thanks for the Sonallah Ibrahim suggestion, I've put that on my long-term TBR list. I read a book by Sherko Fatah a few months ago - he's another example, though a younger generation (Iranian and DDR heritage).

>59 thorold:

Hmm, it's not Google Books, it's a Wikipedia page for the novel that for some reason simply won't link (keeps diverting to another page).

Here's the full reference for the sentence I copied above:

Summers, Claude J. (2014-02-25). Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (revised ed.). Routledge. ISBN 9781135303990.

And, since we're still on the topic of mines, I don't know whether you have a particular interest in them (I do recall you like railways, and there's a connection), but in case you do, I just discovered that this excellent 2017 French documentary on mining in France is available free on YouTube (I've seen it a while back and keep thinking about it):

L'Épopée des gueules noires

I was actually hoping to find some excerpts, but the whole thing is absolutely worth watching from start to finish. Lots of archive footage (including a short non-documentary sequence from an early adaptation of Germinal), and, to bring this at least a shade closer to the thread, it ends with the importation of, IIRC, 80000 Moroccans in the 1980s in the last stage of coal production in France, an effort with inglorious results as the immigrants were denied the rights of the French miners, rebelled, and the whole industry shut down anyway.

>60 LolaWalser: OK, I found the original paper this all seems to be based on, and after a slightly longer search got my alumni JSTOR access working again so that I could read it...

Moodie, T. Dunbar, et al. “Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the South African Gold Mines.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 1988, pp. 228–256., www.jstor.org/stable/2636630. Accessed 4 May 2020.

The gist of it seems to be that as long as most mineworkers were there primarily in order to send money home and build up their farms and cattle, the "mine marriage" system was a good, safe way for the high-status older men to get sexual release and cooking and laundry service at minimal expense. It was condoned, or even encouraged, by the mine authorities because it was good for efficiency and order. The younger men would earn a bit of extra cash whilst the marriage lasted, and could change roles when they got to their early twenties. Going to "town women" was much more expensive, and was considered risky because men who established mistresses in town often ended up losing their link with back home and discarding their country wives. And it also brought alcohol and disease into the equation.

Moodie got his data mainly from interviews conducted by his research assistant Vivienne Ndatshe with old men who had worked in the mines before about 1950. He says that from at least the early 1970s the picture changes as fewer mineworkers have the opportunity to build up a homestead in their home region, and they are more likely to settle long-term around the mines and either find women locally or are followed to the mines by their wives. That was written in the 80s, and is probably completely out of date again now...

Another from the African pile, in a similar mood to the last one:

The purple violet of Oshaantu (2001) by Neshani Andreas (Namibia, 1964-2011)

  

Neshani Andreas was the first Namibian writer to be published in the Heinemann African Writers Series. She was a schoolteacher, and sadly died of lung cancer at a very young age. I found a couple of interviews online where she talks about the difficulties of being a writer of fiction in a young country where there is no kind of literary tradition.

http://www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com/interviews/199-interview-neshani-andreas-by-e...
http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/965/1/As_Honest_and_Realistic_as_Possible,_Af...

The purple violet of Oshaantu, Andreas's only novel, is based on her experience teaching in a village in the north of Namibia in the 1990s. As elsewhere in Southern Africa, the village is largely the province of women, whilst the men are away for long periods in the mines or on fishing boats. Andreas tells the story of two of these women, Ali and her neighbour and close friend Kauna. Whilst Ali considers her own marriage to be happy and successful, Kauna is trapped in marriage to the awful Shange, who subjects her to terrible domestic violence when he is at home, and openly maintains a mistress in a house he has built for her elsewhere in the village. Everyone in the village knows about Shange's bad behaviour, but no-one has been prepared to intervene. Ali goes to the church elders for help, but they are horrified at the thought of interfering in a marriage, and even her normally supportive husband warns her not to make a fool of herself. Eventually, an old woman with nothing to lose in community standing confronts Shange in public, and he moderates his behaviour a little.

But then Shange dies suddenly, probably of a heart attack, and Kauna finds hordes of Shange's family descending on her, accusing her of poisoning, witchcraft, and worse, as they strip her of her property. As a widow she might have legal rights in theory, but in practice she is powerless to assert them.

Andreas also touches on quite a number of other issues in the course of this short, simply-written and very engaging novel: another widow is accused of witchcraft when her husband dies of AIDS-related illness, Kauna's aunt makes a precarious living as a market trader, Ali's husband is injured in a collision between overloaded minibuses, and so on. At the very centre of the story is a lively okakungungu, a working party where all the women of the village come together over food and freshly-brewed beer to help Kauna finish her ploughing before the rains.

---

Irrelevant aside: as a result of this book I came across the splendid Afrikaans word for "nothing at all", fokol (Andreas spells it vokol, but this is apparently wrong). If you Google it, there's a hilarious old clip of the South African parliament arguing about whether or not it's a legitimate parliamentary expression...

Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa

  

My rating:

This short novel in fragments is a re-examination of Ngungunhane, also known as Mdungazwe Ngungunyane Nxumalo, who was the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, which lasted from 1824 to 1895 and at its height encompassed all of what is currently Mozambique and southern Zimbabwe. Ngungunhane brutally took over power after the death of his father, the previous emperor, in 1884 after he slew his brother, but he was deposed by General Joaquim Mouzinho of the Portuguese colonial army in 1895 after he refused to surrender, which allowed Portugal to claim the territory and name it Mozambique, or Moçambique in Portuguese. Ngungunhane was captured, imprisoned, and died in exile in 1906.

Ngungunhane is generally viewed as a hero and tragic figure by modern day Mozambicans, particularly by members and supporters of FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, which was created in 1962 in opposition to the colonial government, successfully gained independence for the country in 1975, and is the majority party in the country. However, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, the director of the Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco in Mozambique, portrays him as a bloodthirsty and brutal man, obese and frequently drunk, whose lust for power, drink and women only grew after he ascended to the throne. The title of the book comes from one of his most trusted warriors, and the reader learns about Ngungunhane from personal accounts from Ualalapi, others in his circle, colonial military men and governors, and a Swiss evangelical who was a respected visitor to Ngungunhane's court before his downfall. The author wrote this book in 1987 to correct the widely held narrative, and as a critique of the corrupt and brutal FRELIMO government at that time.

Ualalapi is a valuable contribution to the history of the precolonial Gaza Empire and its last ruler, although it is a mostly forgettable novella.

Dumba Nengue: Run for Your Life by Lina Magaia

  

My rating:

Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975 after a nearly decade long war between FRELIMO, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front), which was largely supported by China, the Soviet Union and non-governmental organizations in Western Europe, and colonial forces. Fearing a spread of the independence movement into their neighboring countries, the apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa created the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO or MNR) in 1975, a militant organization that won support from the conservative United States government during the Cold War as it was viewed as an anti-communist group. RENAMO joined with another rebel group, the Revolutionary Party of Mozambique, and together the two groups enacted a brutal campaign directed primarily at civilians in southern Mozambique, a formerly prosperous area of the country, by burning their fertile fields and villages, killing babies with bayonets, raping girls and women, and capturing young men in order to force them to join their campaign of evil.

Lina Magaia left the capital of Maputo to travel to the south of Mozambique, in order to return to her family, and to chronicle the suffering of her people. Reports of atrocities did reach the Western press, particularly The New York Times, but in keeping with today's far right in the United States, extreme conservatives led by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Patrick Buchanan and the Heritage Foundation dismissed these reports as fake news in the late 1980s, and the Republican led government did not act on those reports.

The term "dumba nengue" refers to a proverb that states that "you have to trust your feet," and those civilians who did so survived, although they returned to devastated homes and decimated crops and livestock, and the area has remained in deep poverty since then.

Dumba Nengue consists of 22 actual accounts of these atrocities, which are difficult to read due to their extreme brutality and Magaia's vivid descriptions, and I could only bear to read a half dozen of them.

>63 kidzdoc: >64 kidzdoc: Sounds good, especially Ualalapi!

Two more South Africans from my pile:

The good doctor (2003) by Damon Galgut (South Africa, 1963- )

  

Damon Galgut seems to be one of the most successful younger South African novelists at the moment.

I don't quite know what I was expecting from this book, but I'm sure it wasn't 21st century Graham Greene, which is what it turns out to be: a crumbling, semi-abandoned town with only one bar; a jaded narrator with a failed marriage and more sense of guilt than moral courage, who drinks too much whisky and has sexual relationships with the wrong women; a doomed young idealist; a sinister secret police colonel; and even a dodgy ex-dictator. All that's missing is the drunken priest.

What's different, of course, is that Galgut picks up a peculiarly South African context. The nameless, unfinished new-town in the middle of nowhere was the capital of one of the "homelands" created in the last years of the old South Africa as a failed alibi for apartheid, a pretend-state that only just lasted long enough for its first president, the "Brigadier", to be deposed for corruption. The narrator, Frank, is a doctor, the inadequate son of a celebrated TV medic, and is working in the pretend-town's pretend-hospital, a place with hardly any patients and no proper facilities to treat the few who do show up. But then the idealistic, newly-qualified Laurence turns up, and decides that they ought to go out and look for people to help. Which would be fine, but in the meantime it looks as though the Brigadier might be back, and Frank's former c/o from his military service days has arrived in town to run a counter-insurgency operation. Tragedy assured.

Some nice bits of observation, and an unusual setting, but Galgut doesn't really seem to do anything to take the formula beyond its well-established Greene template.

I didn't know about this one until I saw what >46 LolaWalser: had to say about it. I don't have much to add to her review, except to try to put it into the same context as Cry the beloved country:

Mine boy (1946) by Peter Abrahams (South Africa, Jamaica, 1919-2017)

  

Published two years before Cry the beloved country, this explores similar themes, but in a subtly different way. The viewpoint is that of Xuma, the young black man from the country who comes to the big city to work in the mines, and it's the noisy, lively, disorderly world of the townships — and of Leah's shebeen, in particular — where he finds solidarity and companionship, whilst the values of "civilised" white society are often made to seem strange, arbitrary, and threatening. Where Paton's African rhythms are slow, disciplined and stately, the rumble of old men's conversations, this is written to a much rougher, wilder beat. And it can't help pulling us in.

And Abrahams wrote this whilst he was mixing with the future leaders of post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean in London: Paton's young man is doomed to his tragic fate, but we leave Xuma at a point where he has seen that black people cannot rely on white liberals and have to take leadership themselves to defend their rights. Maybe he will be crushed by the system all the same, but Abrahams doesn't see that as inevitable, and the ending of the book allows us to imagine that he will be able to do something to work towards change. Although perhaps not so much if we're reading it 75 years on and know how South Africa's history progressed...

The AWS edition comes with attractive, if slightly Sunday-schoolish, illustrations by Ruth Yudelowitz. All I could find out about her on the internet is that she was an artist working for the East Africa Literature Bureau in Nairobi in the 1950s, and illustrated a lot of African school-books.

More Alex La Guma (see >51 LolaWalser:):

A walk in the night, and other stories (1967) by Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1925-1985)

  

This collection contains the novella "A walk in the night" from 1962, together with six short stories from the mid-1960s. It's full-on sixties modernist writing, with echoes of people like Joyce and Steinbeck, very urban and masculine, very direct in its descriptions of violence and squalor (but bizarrely prudish about swearwords). Everything is there to show us how racism perverts and destroys social relations in the Cape Town urban jungle: the white cop Raalte in "A walk in the night" who has been completely corrupted by the power his racial "superiority" gives him and has lost all moral compass; the coloured man Mikey who is so embittered by the hatred he's exposed to that he finds he has killed an inoffensive, weak elderly white man just because he happened to cross his path; the boxer Kenny in "The Gladiators" who "just miss being white" and whose fight with the unapologetically black boxer, The Panther, turns into an allegory of racial hatred — when they meet on equal terms in the ring, Kenny loses, because the force of his contempt just isn't as strong as the force of the black man's defence of his own integrity.

Forceful, stylish but very angry writing. Excellent.

>64 kidzdoc:

Thanks for that.

>67 thorold:

Ooh, just the one I'm most looking forward to reading--it's great to hear you were impressed.

I too am still in South Africa, reading No easy walk to freedom, and will be a while as it keeps sending me to learn about stuff (I wish I could dig up that Oxford history of SA I have somewhere...)

One interesting tidbit, from the intro by Oliver Tembo who was Mandela's law partner in the 1940s/50s, threw me back to Mine Boy's Leah:

To brew African beer, to drink it or use the proceeds to supplement the meagre family income is a crime, and women who do so face heavy fines and jail terms.

>68 LolaWalser: Good stuff, definitely. I'm looking forward to And a threefold cord.

Beer seems to be a big thing in Bantu culture altogether, beyond the simple alcohol-as-relaxation aspect: its making and consumption have come up in all the "village" books I've been reading, and there was a lot of detail about it in Mr Myombekere. (Admittedly, there's a lot of detail about everything in that book, but that's Tanzania, and it's for another thread...)

---

I got hold of a little pile of books issued in the sixties and seventies by the East Berlin English-language publisher Seven Seas Books. Three of them are relevant to this theme — here's the first:

Come back, Africa! Short stories from South Africa (1968) edited by Herbert L Shore (USA, 1922-2004) and Megchelina Shore-Bos

 

This seems to be a classic collection, reprinted many times by different publishers after it originally came out in 1968, but I couldn't find out much about the editors: Herbert Shore is described as a "writer and theatre director" who taught inter alia at the University of East Africa and the University of Pennsylvania — he seems to have come into the limelight shortly before his death when it came out that, during the McCarthy era, the university personnel department had been sharing its confidential records with the FBI, who also had a file on Shore's teenage son. Mrs Shore seems to have been an expert on Makonde art.

The fourteen stories in this collection range from hard-hitting modern writing by Drum magazine people (Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel (later Es'kia) Mphahlele, Richard Rive, William Modisane) to Herman Charles Bosman's famous late story "Funeral Earth" (1950), in which a group of late-19th-century Boers on commando is outwitted morally, psychologically and in low cunning by the inhabitants of a Bantu village. Shore's introduction makes it clear that he doesn't have much time for white liberals like Alan Paton, but there's a Paton story, "A drink in the passage," included in the collection, and it turns out to be a very good one, neatly showing us how the divisions created by the South African system are too deep for either good intentions or the transformative power of art to fix them. Other white writers include Michael Picardie and Alf Wannenburgh and the only woman in the collection, trade-unionist and left-wing activist Phyllis Altman. Alex la Guma and Richard Rive are there to represent the "coloured" community.

All the writing is of a high standard, although some of the stories (like Altman's "The paper writers") are perhaps a bit too much like straight political sermons. The ones that really stand out for me are Lewis Nkosi's "Potgieter's Castle" and Alex La Guma's "A glass of wine". They come at the problem of South Africa from opposite directions: La Guma portrays the most normal scene you could imagine, a man and a woman having a drink together, and then in the last paragraph twists it around so that we can see how totally impossible normal relations of that kind are in the world that apartheid has created; Nkosi takes an extreme situation — a group of black men arrested during a strike are being transported into the country to work in slave-like conditions for a white farmer — and helps us to imagine what it might feel like to be there by very creative use of language.

It seemed that the only language which the guards understood was violence; they used violence with an annoying precision, as though the fact of it was the most beautiful thing they had discovered about the ordering of human society.

Another from the Seven Seas pile:

Golden City (1970) by Enver Carim (South Africa, UK, 1938- )

 

According to the bio in the back of this book, Enver Carim comes from a coloured background in Johannesburg; after university there he moved to the UK and studied at Exeter University. He — or someone else of the same name — has written a number of other novels, the most recent in 2014. None seems to have made much impression on the world apart from this one.

Johannesburg, circa 1960. Haroun is a student at Witwatersrand University, a Muslim with an Italian mother and an Indian father. He's on the point of leaving for Britain with the rest of his family. Over his last few days, he roams around the city with his friends, drinking in shebeens, looking for girls ("cherries"), smoking dope in back alleys, getting into fights, going to an unlicensed jazz concert, and — at the worst possible moment, the day before they are due to travel — catching the eye of some malevolent policemen and getting arrested. It's a story full of youthful bravado and exuberance, full of local colour, also full of anger at the arbitrary cruelty of the system that sets whites over coloured people and coloured people over blacks. Carim's obviously hoping to do for Johannesburg what Alex La Guma did for Cape Town.

It's a book I really wanted to like, and it has a lot of good stuff in it. Unfortunately, Carim's ambition often runs ahead of his skill with words, and he keeps painting himself into grandiose ringing sentences that don't mean anything and leave us stranded in mid-air. Either he was typing whilst stoned (a common problem in the late 60s), or he'd been reading too much Beat literature.

The glinting brilliance of day has become opaque, the heat has subsided and cooled, the sandy lane is in shadow. It's the time the Afrikaners call skemer, the greyness in which day and night hesitate for a few minutes, before the one recedes completely and the other spreads bluely over everything.

— That comes so close to being a beautiful expressive passage, but in Carim's hands it just leaves you trying to imagine what opaque brilliance might look like, or realising that English has a perfectly good one-to-one equivalent for skemer: twilight. It's not all that bad — the fights and sex scenes are worse, but the jazz chapter near the end is rather good.

Interesting, but probably not worth scouring the secondhand shops for.

I liked the period cover art by Lothar Reher, though.

>69 thorold:

I was noticing that illegal brewing was, apparently, a typical woman's activity, and the stern punishments that were doled out. Rather reminiscent of the current US practices were even relatively minor drug offenses can land one in prison and with a criminal record for life--if the wrong skin colour.

>70 thorold:

Another new name...

I liked the period cover art by Lothar Reher

Yes, very funny. Basically... NO. NO to you, buster.

>51 LolaWalser: >67 thorold: Alex La Guma again, the third book from the Seven Seas haul (and the one Lola discussed above):

And a threefold Cord (1964) by Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1925-1985)

  

This was La Guma's second major work of fiction, written while he was under house-arrest in South Africa, but published abroad (in East Germany) because any reproduction or distribution of his writings within South Africa was banned.

While A walk in the night was set in the urban jungle of District Six, this time we move to a shanty town on the outer fringes of Cape Town, where people with no legal right to be there but with no chance of getting work anywhere else are surviving on the absolute minimum in houses they have built themselves out of whatever materials they could scrounge or salvage. Hassled by the police, fighting a losing battle against poverty and the Cape Town rainy season, they are on the very limit of survival — seen by white motorists from the main road the settlement hardly seems to exist at all — but they still manage to have a sense of community and to help each other occasionally. It's immaterial whether that's because they know Ecclesiastes Chapter 4 better than we do (as the title implies), or because they've heard a trade union activist talking on a job they were on, or just because they are human beings in a tight spot. La Guma wants us to see that people do ultimately have great collective strength, even in weakness, and even when they aren't in a position to use that strength just now.

As Lola said in her review, this is exceptionally fine writing, but it's not fine writing that's jumping up and down shouting "look at me", it's there to do a serious job of work and make us look at all the details of the way the people in the shanty town live and show us what those details should be telling us about the world we live in. It's about South Africa in the 1960s, but it's just as much about poverty anywhere, in any time.

Why does hardly anyone seem to know about this book? It should be on every syllabus. Including Domestic Science and Metalwork.

---

As in A walk in the night, I was struck by the silly period detail of the bowdlerised swearwords — it gives a really strange feeling when the author feels we are strong enough to read about dead babies left on rubbish tips to be eaten by stray dogs, but would throw the book away in disgust if anyone said anything stronger than "blerry" or "effing".

>72 thorold:

Did you enjoy the Afrikaans interjections? My edition had a glossary--some terrific expressions there.

Re: swearwords, I'm not sure whether it's self-censorship or the higher-echelon editing and pressure? It does make me curious to know what were the guidelines for the ASW series in particular... maybe I'm confusing something (the Longmans children's imprints?), I don't know where I get the idea that they'd be prim in the 1960s.

Totally sharing your sentiment, btw.

>73 LolaWalser: Yes, mine had the glossary as well. More or less the same as was in A walk in the night, and most of it fairly obvious in context — mos comes up a lot in both, and seems to be one of those wonderful words you can use for everything.

I was taken aback by the word "piesang" (banana) popping up in the "slave song", "Onder die piesang boompie" (ch.19) — that's a word I know from Indonesian restaurant menus. Had to think back and remember that the Dutch brought slaves to the Cape from Malaya and Indonesia. I had a look for the song itself, it seems to be a calypso that comes up on records of Cape Goema music. There are a couple of versions on Spotify.

1964 was post-Chatterley, I don't think there would have been any legal problem in the UK or US, and the South Africans had banned him anyway. Heinemann AWS might have been nervous about offending sensibilities in other African countries, perhaps, but I don't think they started publishing him until later. The first publication was Berlin, and whilst communist governments were often strict about sexual content, I can't see the East Germans being worried about swearwords, least of all English ones.

Most likely it's the author censoring himself. If you grow up in a world where those words could be spoken but not written down (except on lavatory walls)...

>74 thorold: Afterthought: ... I'd forgotten about Roy Campbell's famous "bloody horse" (1930), which I even used in the epigraph for my current CR thread. He didn't feel any need to say "blerry".

Well I've no idea what or who exactly conditioned the stylistic choices for La Guma, but generally speaking I always took it for granted that "self-censorship" in this respect reflects mainly the standards of the environment. They don't need to be written down rules to be enforced, or to spell out "swearing verboten". (I can't even remember if I ever saw a guideline about "appropriate" language in my work but I don't think I'll experiment with slipping in a "fuck" or two... :))

But as I said, your point about all kind of horrors being depicted while cursewords are omitted is well taken. I've argued about the same regarding other examples in the past (most memorably the edition of Tarzan of the Apes with the introduction by Junot Diaz. Someone complained to the skies about Diaz using "fuck" at one point, but the racism of the novel apparently didn't bother them one bit.)

Something slightly different. A more playful analysis of the white South African obsession with crime than Breytenbach's, amongst other things:

Portrait with keys : the city of Johannesburg unlocked (2006) by Ivan Vladislavić (South Africa, 1957- )

  

This is probably the perfect lockdown travel book: not only is it constantly playing around with ideas about locks, keys, fences and guards, it is also almost entirely focussed on a suburban area within a block or two of the narrator's house.

In 138 numbered, short pieces — which rather endearingly turn out to occupy 183 pages — Vladislavić jumps around, apparently randomly, between encounters with beggars and street vendors, crime reports, notes about art exhibitions, thoughts on writers from Elias Canetti to Herman Charles Bosman, close observation of the way the very ordinary buildings, gardens, pavements, signs, graffiti, and street furniture around him reflect the short and complicated history of the city, and extracts from an essay on the semiotics of the steering-wheel lock.

The pieces seem to be arranged in simple chronological order of writing, irrespective of their subject, but there's an appendix in which Vladislavić proposes to us a number of thematic "walking tours" of different lengths and difficulties we can take through the literary model of a city he's created. Kind of a cross between Lonely Planet and Hopscotch.

The kind of engaging, enquiring writing that spots something interesting under the most ordinary and prosaic detail. Great fun.

Two more "village" stories from Botswana (republished in one book by Virago in 2010):

When rain clouds gather & Maru (1968, 1971) by Bessie Head (South Africa, Botswana, 1937-1986)

  

Bessie Head grew up in Natal. The child of a white, institutionalised mother and an unknown non-white father, she spent her early childhood with a foster-family and was moved to a Home for Coloured Girls when she was 12. She qualified as a teacher, and later moved to Cape Town to work as a journalist and political activist. In 1964 she left South Africa to work as a teacher in Serowe, Botswana, where most of her fiction is set. She died of hepatitis at the age of 48. I've previously read her novel The cardinals, written in South Africa in the early 60s but not published until after her death, where she writes about her early life.

When rain clouds gather was Head's first published novel. Makhaya, a political refugee from South Africa, arrives in a village in Botswana and finds a job assisting the Englishman Gilbert, who is running an experimental farm and helping the villagers to try out new, more sustainable farming techniques. He has to overcome suspicion and a certain amount of xenophobia (according to the South African papers he's a dangerous terrorist) and he soon realises that the farming reforms have as much to do with circumventing the vested interests of the local chief as they do with overcoming the traditional prejudices of the conservative villagers. With the help of a couple of wise and subtle elders and the love of two dynamic, practical young women, he and Gilbert soon have most of the village behind them, and a showdown with the corrupt chief Matenge becomes inevitable.

The novella Maru is a kind of romantic comedy, dealing with the tricky topic of the racist treatment of indigenous San people by the Bantu Batswana. A newly-qualified primary school teacher comes to the village, a poised and stylish young woman called Margaret who is soon being pursued by Maru and Moleka, the two most distinguished young bachelors in town. Except that Margaret doesn't allow anyone to make the convenient assumption that she is mixed-race: she stands up proudly and says "I am a Masarwa" (Head deliberately makes her use the same offensive term that the villagers would use of her). Maru and Moleka both have San slaves working in their households and herding their cattle, so this leads to a certain amount of social awkwardness...

Both of these books sometimes feel a little bit didactic: characters have a tendency to pause in the middle of the action and give us little lectures on politics, history or agriculture. But there's also plenty of humour, some interesting offbeat characters, and couple of splendid goats who upstage everyone else whenever they appear. And a message that ordinary people can and must fight back against prejudice, privilege and conservatism, and that love, human decency and a sense of humour will get us a long way on that road.

...And I had to get around to it sooner or later — >36 LolaWalser: has already talked about the background and significance of this huge milestone in African literature, so I'll stick to subjective impressions. It might be relevant to bear in mind that I've been watching a lot of opera streams lately, and I'm in the middle of Wagner's Ring at the moment:

Chaka (1925; this translation 1981) by Thomas Mofolo (Lesotho, 1876-1948) translated by Daniel P. Kunene

  

Shaka has always been a controversial figure: a strong, successful African leader and innovative general who created a powerful new nation at the moment when Europeans were beginning to dominate the continent, or a psychotic dictator and mass-murderer who provided colonialists with a convenient stereotype of African depravity?

Mofolo exploits this tension by putting him into the centre of a tragic epic, entirely African and pre-Christian in its idiom, but also heavy with what look like biblical, Homeric and Shakespearean accents. We meet Chaka as a brave, talented, but persecuted youth whose enemies are trying to deny his royal blood. He's driven out into the wilderness, where he meets a mysterious sorcerer-figure, Isanusi, who offers him dominion over the kingdoms of this world: Chaka only pauses to ask "where do I sign?"

With the help of Isanusi's assistant demons, Ndlebe and Malunga, he is able to defeat his half-brothers and inherit his father's kingdom, and then that of his suzerain Dingiswayo. And before we know where we are, he's rebranded the nation. According to Mofolo — who may be letting his Basotho prejudices slip in here — they were previously called "People of the male organ of the dog". MaZulu, "People of the sky," does seem to have a classier touch. And he's built a capital, reformed the army, altered military tactics, killed tens of thousands of his own people and his enemies, and conquered most of the known world. Then Isanusi comes round to collect his fee, and it all starts going horribly wrong.

Kunene's translation has a very stately, Authorised Version sort of feel about it, and he has an odd kind of insistence on keeping out Afrikaans words, even when they are very familiar. Veld slips in a couple of times, but that's about it. This is the only Southern African book I've ever read in which a livestock enclosure is called a "fold" instead of a kraal. This perhaps comes from Mofolo's insistence on keeping the presence of Europeans completely out of the story until Chaka's reference to them in his ominous last words. In real life, Chaka had a few Europeans in his entourage, and his strategic situation was very strongly affected by the advancing Afrikaners pushing the Xhosa back towards his territory.

A fabulous epic, which would make a great opera...

At the time in Chaka’s life which we are describing here, there was truly no king on earth whose people loved him as much as this one. On days of national festivities, it was the custom that, before the people dispersed to their homes, the king would disrobe, so that the nation might conclude its festivities by admiring the body of their lord.

— Just be thankful that Trump never read this book!

>79 thorold:

It's a great book. Not sure I follow about the Afrikaans--presumably it's not in the translation because it's not in the original.

As for depravity, what does Chaka have on Europeans in that regard, even assuming the horror stories are true...

The putative influence of Mofolo's Christianity on shaping the story is the big enigma for me. I think I detect a Christian moralizing bent to the narrative, and it must seem logical at least from the point of view of expediency, if Mofolo depended on the missionaries for the book's publication, but there is something else besides, almost neutering the drive to condemn him. Literary instinct, or some other worldview, or love and pride in the subject...?

Just a great book.

>81 LolaWalser: Depravity — yes, Chaka’s descent into paranoia in the final chapters could be Stalin, had it been written a few decades later.

I had the feeling that there’s a kind of Paradise regained thing going on: Chaka is a potential saviour for his people but he chooses evil when he’s tempted in the wilderness, and Mofolo discovers that he’s actually much more interesting like that than he would have been if he’d resisted the temptation. Not that he’d necessarily read Milton, but I suppose it’s not impossible in a mission setting. He certainly wasn’t a naive writer.

The language thing is just that I would expect to see the translation using the words for common landscape and farming terms that are usual in South African English, rather than Thomas Hardy...

BTW: did you notice how Isanusi convinces Chaka of his supernatural powers by channeling Sherlock Holmes in the temptation scene? Very 1909.

>82 thorold:

could be Stalin

Well, no, not to Chaka's contemporaries, the Europeans making those judgements about his "African" depravity.

But could be the Roman emperors, could be Torquemada, could be Gilles de Rais, could be any Anglo/Dutchman/German ever waltzing into Africa with the idea it's there for his superior-race takin' and rapin'.

The language thing is just that I would expect to see the translation using the words for common landscape and farming terms that are usual in South African English, rather than Thomas Hardy...

*shrug* To my ears, an Afrikaans term within English has specific connotations. It's not neutral. If Mofolo's language situates the tale in the past, before the white invasion, there's no special reason why he or his translator would use the invaders' language and not some more neutral one.

Another major figure in South African literature — and one of the contributors to Come back Africa (>69 thorold:). This was another book published by Seven Seas in East Berlin, but it's not in my current Seven Seas haul; I read it as an ebook from Penguin:

Down Second Avenue (1959) by Es'kia Mphahlele (South Africa, 1919-2008)

  

In this memoir, Mphahlele describes the first 38 years of his life, up to the moment when he went into exile in 1957 to teach in Nigeria. He talks about his early childhood living with his father's parents in a village in a "tribal area" of northern Transvaal, then his teens when he lived with his mother in Marabastad township ("Second Avenue") outside Pretoria, the most detailed section of the book, and the part that reads most like a novel. We move on to his difficult struggle to get an education, always haunted by the knowledge of the sacrifices his single mother was making to pay his fees (she works as a domestic servant, does white people's laundry, and brews and sells illegal beer), and his determination not to fail at any point. He qualifies as a teacher, and, after a spell in a clerical job at an institution for the blind, goes to teach at Orlando High School just in time to get swept up in the campaign against the Bantu Education Acts of the 1950s. As secretary of the Transvaal Teachers' Association, he is sacked and blacklisted by the Education Department, and eventually finds work on Drum magazine until he can get permission to leave South Africa.

Although this is the story of an ambitious self-improver who is transformed by circumstances into a community activist who comes close to destroying his family's livelihood through the work he is doing for others, Mphahlele's modesty (plus perhaps legitimate concerns for colleagues still in South Africa) means there isn't much emphasis on how this transformation in his character happened, or on the actual political work he was doing. We have to follow his political development indirectly, through the many little descriptions of incidents in his life that make clear the nastiness of the mid-20th century South African system and the way it made internalised racism inevitable for both black and white South Africans.

A wonderfully-written, warm, sympathetic account of growing up in difficult conditions in a lively, dangerous community, but also a chilling, clear-sighted indictment of the racism, self-interest and inequality that underlay that situation.

A Jack Mapanje piece is this week’s poem of the week in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/08/poem-of-the-week-skipping-without-...

More from Bessie Head:

The lovers : A collection of short stories (2011) by Bessie Head (South Africa, Botswana, 1937-1986)

  

The posthumous publishing history of Bessie Smith's short fiction is complicated. This 2011 AWS collection, The lovers, is a slightly revised edition of the collection of short pieces previously issued as Tales of Tenderness and Power in 1989: the pieces that were also in A woman alone have now been left out, and a few pieces not previously available in book form have been added, leaving us with twenty pieces in all, all from the last 20 or so years of her life.

About half the pieces in the book, including the title story, are short stories set in the same kind of Botswana village setting as Head's main novels; the remainder are essays or fables on political/historical themes, mostly dealing with the South African situation or with African colonialism more generally. "Son of the soil", a concise, hard-hitting ten-page summary of South African history and where it went wrong, is the piece that really stands out from this second group.

The village stories deal with similar themes to the novels When rain clouds gather and Maru: the difficulty of scraping a living from the arid land; the rigid traditionalism of village society with its unreasonable, damaging suspicion of everything and everyone that is strange and new; the exploitation of this by corrupt chiefs; and the strong affection that Head obviously had for the place and the people despite all those negative things. Sometimes she is also provoked to attack what she sees as Botswanan political smugness, the way people present their humiliating buffer-state condition as though it is a triumph of cunning diplomacy. But mostly, these are stories about people dealing with the challenges of ordinary life, things like hunger, sickness, wayward or violent spouses, rebellious children, or oppressive parents. The tone tends to be a bit less cool than in the novels: Head allows herself to show us her emotional engagement with her characters, and this brings out some very powerful and original writing.

It doesn't quite belong here, but I always enjoy Dervla Murphy's very down-to-earth style of travel writing, and realised that I'd never read her South Africa book:

South from the Limpopo : travels through South Africa (1997) by Dervla Murphy (Ireland, 1931- )

  

The celebrated Irish travel writer describes three visits to South Africa, before, during and after the 1994 elections. In the winter of 1993 she cycled right across the country from the Zimbabwe border on the Limpopo to Johannesburg and Cape Town, then back east through the Cape into Natal; in April 1994 she was in Cape Town for the election and Mandela's inauguration; later in 1994, after recovering from an accident in her home in Ireland, she is back in the saddle to see the parts of Natal and Transvaal she wasn't able to get to earlier.

As we would expect, Murphy heads for the most interesting-seeming spots, whether or not she's been warned to avoid them for her own safety, and manages to get into conversation with people of just about every possible cultural background and variety of political opinion (always provided that they can speak some English). Interviewees range all the way from ANC comrades in townships to Eugene Terre'Blanche's horse. Whilst Murphy evidently does her best to give everyone a fair hearing and not get into arguments, she doesn't hesitate to share her positive or negative reactions to what she sees and hears with the reader.

Everything is reported diary-fashion, thus with as little intrusion of hindsight as possible: she wants us to share her on-the-spot reactions: the uncertainty and danger of the lead-up to the elections (especially around the Chris Hani assassination, which happened whilst she was in Cape Town), the general euphoria when they passed off peacefully, and then the realisation six months later that electing a black president was just the first step on a long journey and that there would be a lot of difficult readjustment before all the injustices of apartheid could be put right.

Lively, opinionated, committed: wonderful travel-writing, as always.

I'm getting some new furniture so was working frantically to make pathways and space in this awful sea of stuff, and I put the Mandela book somewhere extra-special to guarantee I don't lose sight of it and so of course promptly it disappeared for more than a week, until today. *much cursing of self*

This article in the Guardian drew my attention in relation to the thread because it concerns the legacy of Cecil Rhodes ( and the British empire in general) in South Africa and Oxford.

As one of Oxford's few black professors, let me tell you why I care about Rhodes

It is this same outrage at institutional racism that ignited the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign in South Africa in early 2015.

>88 LolaWalser: I put the Mandela book somewhere extra-special to guarantee I don't lose sight of it

We've all been there! And the old dodge of repeating the operation with another book never seems to work, you just end up losing two and then finding them again at the wrong moments.

---

This is another little book I've been meaning to get to for a few years...

Beethoven was one-sixteenth black : and other stories (2007) by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, 1923-2014)

  

Gordimer published short stories throughout her career, something like twenty collections in all; this was one of the last.

The stories in it range from fairly conventional adultery plots to the first-person narrative of a tapeworm and a whimsical piece about a cockroach that got stuck in her typewriter (she was reading Kafka's diaries at the time, so it inevitably became "Gregor"). There's quite a bit about the New South Africa, although the political messages are characteristically oblique, as in the title story, where a biology professor infused with white guilt sets out to see if he can find any black cousins who might have resulted from his great-grandfather's time in Kimberley during the diamond rush, then realises the absurdity of what he is doing. There are also a couple of rather touching pieces obviously written in reaction to the death of Gordimer's husband in 2005, including "Dreaming of the dead", a dreamed dinner party with the ghosts of Edward Said, Susan Sonntag and Anthony Sampson at which "you" (presumably the narrator's deceased partner) fails to turn up. In "Allesverloren" a widow tries to grasp something of her lost husband that has been closed to her when she goes to see the man who had been his partner for a while before she met him.

Maybe not especially challenging and experimental, but very sharp, clear-thinking writing.

The screaming of the innocent (2002) by Unity Dow (Botswana, 1959- )

  

Dow tackles a very tricky subject: the ritual murder of children to harvest body parts for use as muti, ingredients for "traditional medicine". We all know how (false) accusations of killing and torturing children have been used in the past to discredit whole cultures, so it's something you have to approach with extreme caution as an outsider, but of course Dow is very much an insider in the Botswana legal system, so we have to assume that this is based on real experience.

And the approach she takes is a very clever one: from the start, the crime is presented as a particularly nasty and perverted way that privileged members of society abuse the power they have over the poor and weak, to increase their own strength. The question of whether it is a genuine part of traditional tribal culture becomes irrelevant. The muti is effective because its existence gives confidence to the people using it and strikes fear into the hearts of their opponents. Even if you don't believe in magic, you're going to be scared of messing with someone that you suspect of being involved with this kind of thing. The more so if you are a government official in a country where everything runs on hierarchies of influence and patronage.

The very tangible horror of what has happened is always there in the background, but the main storyline focusses on the semi-comic story of the campaign to reopen the crudely buried police investigation into the disappearance of a young girl five years ago. The residents of the village where the girl lived are helped by Amantle, a student who has been assigned to them for a period of community service. Her selection for this out-of-the-way spot seems to have been due to a reputation for being a trouble-maker, gained during an earlier brush with the police over their inappropriate response to a protest march, but her experience of the way the police mind works — and her contacts in the legal system — that help the villagers to use their people-power to push the authorities into action. Dow puts what's obviously meant to be a comic version of herself into the story, the sophisticated Gaborone human rights lawyer scared out of her wits at the prospect of spending the night in a tent in the bush.

Dow's message is clear: as long as we accept that society should be run by powerful men who exercise patronage and influence on all those below them, we can't claim to respect human rights and the rule of law. True for eighteenth century England, equally true for twentieth century Africa.

SOUTH AFRICA



In a Strange Room: Three Journeys by Damon Galgut
first published 2010

Two men, travelling in opposite directions, met each other on the road between Mycenae and Sparta. They chatted a few minutes as walkers on an empty trail do, and then each continued on his way. That night, the unnamed South African found the German, Reiner, in his room at the hostel. They spent two days together before continuing on their separate journeys.

They wrote each other for the next two years, and then decided to embark on a walking trip together. Lesotho was the country chosen. In this first of the three recorded journeys, the narrator, whom we come to know as Damon, is young, unsure of himself. For this journey, he calls himself 'The Follower'. As they walked, Reiner took more and more control of the trip, slowly and oh so assuredly. Damon, furious, repressed his growing rage. Can there be conflict if one side refuses to engage? "... in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.".

A few years went by and a more mature, more assured Damon was now travelling in Zimbabwe, but still just as lonely. This trip was more promising, but there was a restlessness, a constant need to move on. Zambia, Malawi, small groups of travellers forming and reforming. "It's all touching and happy, but he's the odd one out here, he keeps a distance between himself and them, no matter how friendly they are." He is, after all, South African, and they all know how messed up that is.

Like the first journey, this trip offers promise, so much so that looking back, Damon will eventually see himself as 'The Lover.' He eventually found a trio with whom to travel: Swiss twins and an older French man. Here too though nothing can be said directly. The limitation this time was language. Damon could never speak directly to Jerome. His words were always translated and mediated through the French man. Once again there is the matter of external control as the older man only once left Damon and Jerome alone together. Damon, still suffering from paralyzing self doubt, could not overcome his fear of forming any kind of bond. In Tanzania, the trio invited him to Greece. "He shakes his head, his voice won't work properly. 'I must go back.' "

Arrangements were made for the future; "There is always another time, next month, next year, when things will be different."

By the time Damon embarked on his third journey, he was middle-aged. Over the years his travel pattern had changed: less restless, more focussed. However, for a man like Damon, this presented a new problem, that of forming connections with people and places he had visited before. This time he was travelling back to India, in the role of 'The Guardian'. His companion was a good friend, Anna, taking a time-out from her lover and her job. Damon knew of her mental health problems, knew he was to keep her on track with medications and away from alcohol and recreational drugs. What he was not prepared for was full blown psychosis and India's health care system. Rage once more, confrontation. Another parting, more letters.

Galgut's writing is powerful. The reader sees Damon through both his own narrative voice and that of Damon writing as a third person narrator, sometimes using present tense, sometime past. Over time, this allows Damon to grow and mature. His decisions and actions may not always be those a particular reader would choose. Some will be frustrated with him. Despite that, In a Strange Room is nevertheless compelling reading. All readers can recognize Damon's lament: "... in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did..."

_________________________

Galgut is South African, but unlike other books I have read by South African writers, politics and identity related to the country itself played a very small part in the novel, which was somewhat of a surprise. His travels through Africa gave a glimpse of the situation, but for good or ill, I did not get a strong sense of a particular national identity from his writing.

This is the first book I have read by Galgut, and as I said above, it was compelling reading. Luckily there are more on the TBR.

>91 SassyLassy: I didn't get on very well with The good doctor (>65 thorold:), but that one sounds a bit more interesting. Maybe I should give Galgut a second chance...

---

Another famous early South African novel:

Mhudi (1930) by Sol T Plaatje (South Africa, 1876-1932)

  

Sol Plaatje was one of the most important and conspicuous black intellectuals in South Africa in the early 20th century. Eye-witness of the siege of Mafeking, editor of the first black-owned newspaper in the country, translator of Shakespeare into Tswana (he's known to have spoken at least nine languages), founder-member of the ANC, member of the delegation that went to London in 1912 to lobby against the Native Lands Act, and so on. If Thomas Mofolo is remembered mainly for having written Chaka, with this novel it's the other way round: Mhudi is remembered mainly for having been written by Plaatje (and for having some claim to be the first English novel by a black South African, although there are other claimants for that). Despite his Dutch-sounding name, Plaatje was a member of the Barolong tribe (one of the Tswana peoples) and grew up in Thaba Nchu, where he was educated by Wesleyan missionaries.

Mhudi is — like Chaka — a historical novel, but set a generation later, in the 1830s, against the background of the mfecane and Mzilikazi's rule of the Matabele kingdom. Like Chaka, it had to wait some time before finding a publisher: Plaatje seems to have finished it around 1917, but it didn't come out until 1930. It's not clear why: probably Plaatje simply had too many other things going on in his life.

The central characters, Mhudi and Ra-Thaga, are among the few survivors of a Matabele massacre of the Barolong town of Kunana (revenge for the killing of two of Mzilikazi's tax-collectors). They set up house together in the bush for a while, before making contact with other people from Kunana who have moved in with the other Barolong branch in Thaba Nchu.

When Sarel Cilliers and his caravan of Voortrekkers turn up, the Barolong see the potential in their guns and horses, and offer to let them settle in exchange for an alliance against Mzilikazi. Initially they are charmed by the Boers' manners, piety and cooking skills, and Ra-Thaga forms a hunting friendship with a young Boer man, but Mhuti sees the brutal way they treat their Hottentot (Khoikhoi) servants, and has her reservations about them from the start. The Barolong and the Boers manage to drive the Matabele off to the north (where Mzilikazi establishes a new kingdom around Bulawayo), but we're left with the feeling that the Dutchmen aren't going to be very good at sharing the land with black people...

In his introduction, Tim Couzens suggests that Plaatje wants us to read the fate of the early 19th century Matabele as a warning to the Afrikaners of his own time: a powerful, oppressive minority risks being overthrown if it pushes the majority of its subject-peoples too far. He also draws a parallel between the way Plaatje introduces the Europeans as minor characters part-way through the story and the similar structure Achebe used thirty years later in Things fall apart. Both seem like useful insights.

Although the setting and theme has a lot of parallels with Chaka, it's quite a different kind of novel. The focus on the "ordinary people" Mhudi and Ra-Thaga, caught up in the middle of the big events, makes this feel much more like Walter Scott than the kind of epic drama Mofolo was going for. Mhudi's role as a strong, independent-minded woman determined to save her man is right out of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Also, of course, Plaatje wrote in English: he has a lot of fun with different kinds of English, modulating unexpectedly (but quite deliberately) between echoes of the Authorised Version, Bunyan, Shakespeare, and contemporary barrack-room or newspaper idiom. Not a million miles from the sort of things contemporaries like Kipling and P G Wodehouse were doing, but Plaatje adds multilingual elements from Zulu, Tswana and Afrikaans into the mix as well. It sometimes feels a bit overdone, but most of the time it works very well. And there are enough jokes buried in the text to make you confident that Plaatje knows exactly what he is doing (he was a skilled journalist and propagandist, of course).

I was slightly taken aback by the unexpected appearance of an African tiger in the story, but it turns out that Afrikaans in those days didn't bother itself too much with petty zoological niceties, and the word tier (tiger) was routinely used for a leopard, and obviously strayed across into local English as well.

MOZAMBIQUE

The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy (2002) by Paulina Chiziane (1955-), translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw

  

This superb novel, written by Mozambique's first published female novelist and expertly translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, is narrated by Rami, a modest southern Mozambican woman who has been faithfully married to a police chief in the capital of Maputo for the past 20 years, but is disturbed by the increasing frequency of Tony's nights spent away from home and his inattention to her. She soon learns that he has taken on another lover, which is not uncommon in this patriarchal society that accepts and celebrates male infidelity, permits polygamy as a cultural norm, and looks the other way when wives are abused and beaten by their husbands, while expecting these women to serve their men the best parts of their homecooked meals while kneeling in servitude and gratitude. Rami encounters her rival, and after a violent argument they become allies. Soon Rami finds out that Tony has taken on three other lovers, none of whom are completely satisfied with their lot. After he refuses to give up his lovers Rami befriends these four women, who come up with a plot to confront Tony as one, and shame him into becoming a respectable provider and lover to all of them. Tony, however, has other ideas.

The First Wife portrays the repressed lives of women in modern Mozambican society while also being easily readable and often lighthearted and humorous, and demonstrates the power of collective action of women in a society that falsely claims that it respects and values them. Despite being nearly 500 pages in length this was a quick and very enjoyable and educational novel, and I hope to read more of Paulina Chiziane's work.

>93 kidzdoc: Sounds good! — I really must get to Mozambique in my pile...

This was one I bookmarked on Scribd when I was planning what to read for this theme — it kept getting postponed in favour of writers I didn't know about yet:

Cold stone jug (1949) by Herman Charles Bosman (South Africa, 1905-1951)

  

A prison record seems to be almost de rigueur for great colonial short-story writers: O. Henry did his stretch for embezzlement, Henry Lawson was in and out of Darlinghurst in his later years, and there are doubtless lots of other less distinguished examples. South Africa's greatest short story writer of the early 20th century, Herman Charles Bosman, was no exception: during a visit to his mother and his new stepfather in July 1926, when he was 21, an argument got out of hand and he shot and killed his stepbrother, with the result that he was convicted of murder, which carried an automatic death sentence. After a period on death row — which he claims to have rather enjoyed, but that sounds like hindsight — his sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment. He remained in Pretoria's Central Prison until August 1930, when he was released on parole.

Cold stone jug, written nearly twenty years later, when he was a successful journalist and short-story writer, is his prison memoir. It's written with his characteristic dry humour, but it's often indirectly very moving when he talks about the psychological effects on himself and others of being locked up, and the damaging social effects of the "indefinite sentence" system that put offenders into a vicious circle of ever-increasing periods of imprisonment it was almost impossible to break out of. And there's lots of fascinating period detail about the way the prison is organised, the social hierarchy, the sometimes surprisingly subtle acts of resistance or protest, and some great thumbnail stories from the lives of his fellow prisoners, artfully chopped about and left incomplete to reflect the fragmented nature of opportunities to talk to other prisoners.

One thing that struck me is that this is a book set in an all-white fragment of South African society: black people only appear very peripherally — in an opening scene, Bosman is in a basement holding cell at the police station, and the prisoners can see the legs of passers-by, "mostly natives"; later on he mentions that the bodies of men who have died in the prison are collected by a pair of "kaffir prisoners", presumably from a different nearby prison. And that's it: the prisoners are white, the guards are white, and Bosman never sees anyone else.

Bosman doesn't draw a veil over the less palatable sides of prison life: the casual brutality, the culture of dagga smoking, and so on. He describes being disgusted when he realised that another prisoner had fallen in love with him and kept sending him sentimental notes (but points out that he was still very young: by the time of writing, he's overcome his prejudices and some of his best friends are gay or lesbian...). When another prisoner, a disgraced schoolteacher, tells him in graphic detail about the twelve-year-old girl he'd had sex with, Bosman admits that he started having fantasies about young girls himself. Again, he points out that he was very young and had had little chance for sexual experimentation before being locked up, but it's still rather creepy. I don't suppose a modern writer would get away with that kind of honesty.

So, definitely comes with some caveats, but still a fascinating book.

>91 SassyLassy:

Not sure I'll get to the book but I enjoyed reading your post about it, thanks.

>92 thorold:, >93 kidzdoc:

Instant wishlisting...

>94 thorold:

I don't suppose a modern writer would get away with that kind of honesty.

Please forgive the digression but I just had a "synchronicity" event...

BLM protesters targeted monument to Indro Montanelli, who admitted buying 12-year-old Eritrean girl

Happy to say I always detested smug facho Montanelli, and I didn't even know about this. How typical and how sad that a woman protested even then when he paraded his crime in 1969, and that no one cared.

And it's not just this. Don't know if you heard of the Gabriel Matzneff affair in France earlier this year, but it's the same thing. (Long story; posted loads about it over years; links all over.) Lots of those writerly sex tourists to the Maghreb and similar places must be going over their oeuvre and checking what they let on.

However, while we seem to be waking up more generally to the wrongness of this behaviour, it's basically five minutes ago...

Just when I was beginning to think I had got through most of the Southern African reading I'd planned, along comes a book-club picnic, from which I return with another, even larger, stack of borrowed books...

This is one that caught my eye because there was a mention of it and a short extract in Stephen Gray's introduction to Cold stone jug. Very short, so I read it right away.

Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp (1898) by Douglas Blackburn (UK, 1857-1929)

  

Douglas Blackburn was an English journalist who spent about 20 years working in the Transvaal and Natal around 1900. He published half a dozen satirical novels about South African life and the Boer War. Prior to that — Wikipedia tells us — he had been involved in a fake telepathy scam in Britain.

This was his first novel, which appeared in London in 1898, had a second edition in 1908, and then disappeared until the South African Universities Press produced a reprint of the first edition in 1978.

The book is presented as a vindication of the disgraced Transvaal public official Piet Prinsloo by his son-in-law, Sarel Erasmus, who takes us through the many hilarious scandals of Piet's life as landdrost (rural magistrate), veldkornet (a uniquely South African role, something between a militia sergeant and a part-time policeman), and finally mining commissioner. Sarel aims to show us how it was always the fault of someone else, but, needless to say, all this does is to demonstrate to us that his accident-prone father-in-law was not only graspingly venal, but also ignorant and gullible. But only slightly more so than everyone else in the amateurish Boer republic, from Paul Kruger down.

It's blatantly prejudiced, often to the point of being simply offensive, and quite clumsily written, but there are some very funny anecdotes scattered through the story that make it almost worthwhile. But probably the main reason anyone would want to look at this kind of book is to get a feel for British attitudes to the Boers during the mining boom and the lead-up to armed conflict. If Blackburn's readers believed even a tenth of what he was telling them, they would think of Boers as semi-literate, ignorant, corrupt, lazy, hypocritical about religion, addicted to cheating rooineks and kaffirs out of their money and labour, and to whipping the latter. No wonder the brothers and cousins of those rooineks went to war so happily.

More positively, it's also interesting to see how Herman Charles Bosman took essentially this same cheap and nasty comic formula, a couple of decades later, inserted subtlety and emotional complexity, and turned it into something that can still be read with pleasure a century later.

>95 LolaWalser: Yes, having read Chaka, you've pretty much got to read Mhudi as well! One of the books I brought home today is the translation of M M Fuze's book The black people: and whence they came — I hope I'm going to have time for that.

Not that it makes it any less bad, but it seems to be implicit that the under-age girl Bosman's fellow-prisoner had sex with was white (would he even have been in prison if it had been a black girl?). Bosman was not a complete innocent: he had been married for about six months at the time of the murder, but he was teaching in the back of beyond whilst his wife kept her job in Johannesburg. He was divorced two years after getting out of jail and married someone else.

Two recent reads with only rather peripheral connections to Southern Africa:
- Granta 48: Africa — oddly turns out to have very few African contributors, mostly European or American journalists writing about Africa. The only pieces relating to the South were an article by William Finnegan about the 1994 election in Western Cape and a Mandela speech to the OAU, which didn't survive the transition to paper very well.
- Year of the king — Anthony Sher's diary of the year he spent preparing to play Richard III, which mentions a few South African plays that were on in London, and includes a short section on his visit to his parents in Cape Town for Christmas 1983.

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I think this is the first book I've read this quarter by a writer of Zulu background, not that that's particularly relevant:

Mating birds (1986) by Lewis Nkosi (South Africa, 1936-2010)

  

Lewis Nkosi grew up in Durban. He was one of the legendary Drum magazine team in the late fifties, with people like Es'kia Mphahlele (>84 thorold:). He left South Africa in 1960, took a degree at Sussex, and became a well-known teacher of African literature at universities in Europe, Africa and the US. This is the first of three novels he wrote in exile.

This girl, for example, white, pretty, consumed by her own vanity and the need to escape from a life of numbing boredom, will be responsible, some will argue, for the dispatch of one more young African life to perdition. Such a view is quite mistaken. Veronica is responsible, of course, in a way, but only marginally, symbolically, responsible. The bearer of a white skin and the bearer of the flesh and blood of a gypsy, the bearer also, if I may so add, of a curse and a wound of which, not being very bright, she was not particularly aware, this English girl has simply been an instrument in whom is revealed in its most flagrant form the rot and corruption of a society that has cut itself off entirely from the rest of humanity, from any possibility for human growth.

With very conscious echoes of To kill a mockingbird and L'Étranger, this is framed as a first-person account from the condemned cell by a young Zulu man, Sibiya, who has been convicted of raping a white woman, Veronica, whom he has met after they exchanged glances across the buffer strip between the "Whites" and "Non-Whites" sections of a Durban beach. According to him, they have been playing a silent but mutually-understood flirting game with each other for some weeks, each enjoying the power of their own sexual attraction and the frisson of its forbiddenness for the other. When they eventually get each other so wound up that they end up in her bed together, they are interrupted by white friends of hers, and she accuses him of rape to avoid being prosecuted under the Immorality Acts herself. Her version, of course, is that it's all in his imagination, that she had never even looked at "that native" before he broke into her house.

Obviously we're meant to be uncomfortable with this: Nkosi is a writer who loves to provoke. He knows perfectly well that liberal, western readers in the 1980s aren't going to trust a narrator who is an accused rapist and not only never lets his alleged victim speak for herself, but also accuses her of being of loose morals and "not very bright". He exploits that, to make us ask ourselves if we distrust Sibiya more than Veronica because he's black, or even because he has been convicted by what is obviously a farcically prejudiced court.

There's a lot of rather black comedy in the book: in court, where the prosecuting attorney has the wonderful name "Kakmekaar" (sorry, you need to understand Dutch or Afrikaans for this) and where the official interpreter, provided by the court to maintain the legal fiction that "natives" can't understand English or Afrikaans, solemnly tells the judge that the Zulu language has no word for "orgies". The judge exclaims, "Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?" Nkosi makes the most of the prurience inherent in a rape trial: there's a lot more talk about the enormous size of Sibiya's penis than is strictly necessary, and it's clear that many of those in court are enjoying it. The bleak comedy continues in the condemned cell, where Sibiya is being interviewed by the Swiss Freudian criminologist, Dr Dupré, who wrong-headedly seeks for symbols in everything Sibiya tells him about his early life or about his encounter with Veronica.

An unsettling book, as it's meant to be, and a clever and provocative one. But it seems to be kicking in an open door: by the time it appeared, the Immorality Act provisions against interracial sex had already been repealed; segregation on beaches lingered on in theory until 1989, but in many places the authorities stopped enforcing it in the early eighties.

Sorry for the drive-by post: I'm still following this thread and reading books (and adding titles to my wishlist!) but I haven't written a review in ages...

In case you haven't come across them already, here are two websites that might be of interest:
https://brittlepaper.com/ is a website that promotes African literature in general. (See also https://brittlepaper.com/guide-african-novels/, https://brittlepaper.com/e-anthologies/ and https://brittlepaper.com/notable-african-books-of-2019/.)
The Caine prize (http://caineprize.com/) is awarded every year to a short story written in English by an African author. They are available to read online (see http://caineprize.com/previous-winners).
Obviously, not all authors are relevant to this theme, but I still found a few new names and titles.

>99 Dilara86: We're missing your reviews!

https://brittlepaper.com/ Grrr! My reading-list gets longer again...

>99 Dilara86:

Thanks for the links. I just glanced and, wut?--"Nigerian Church Erotica"?! Learned something new in a sec. :)

>101 LolaWalser: Finally, a book that makes good the unfulfilled promise on the covers of all those paperback editions of Elmer Gantry. :-)

The comments were fun, too.

This was an oldie I came across secondhand whilst looking for something else, and picked up on the off-chance that it might be interesting:

The Puritans in Africa : a history of Afrikanerdom (1975) by Willem Abraham de Klerk (South Africa, 1917-1996)

  

W A de Klerk was a distinguished Afrikaans playwright, novelist, travel writer, children's author, mountaineer, pilot, lawyer, conservationist and wine-expert (amongst other things); he's cited as a major influence by the radical young Afrikaans writers of the sixties (Breytenbach, Brink, & co.). This is one of the few books he wrote in English.

De Klerk's idea in this book seems to be to trace back the roots of the ways of thinking that led the Afrikaner nationalists of the 1940s into the monumentally destructive delusions of Apartheid (although he's writing in the mid-70s, he doesn't have the slightest doubt that it's only a matter of time before South Africa will have to face up to reality again).

The book is in four parts. The third and fourth parts, where de Klerk takes us through South African political and intellectual history from the 1930s to the 1970s and analyses what has gone wrong, are very clear and interesting: he's obviously talking about people and events he knows well, at first hand, and his insights are sharp, if sometimes a little too loaded with references to stars of the seventies (Hegel, Marx, Barth, Tillich, and of course the ever-popular Marcuse). He describes Verwoerd and D F Malan as setting out with a clear conscience and sincerely held — but deeply misguided — intentions to create a better world for everyone in South Africa, which then became more and more entangled in a vast, oppressive and costly mechanism of enforcement and control that soon lost sight of where it was meant to be going, and became an end in itself. A view that seems to make sense, although he perhaps doesn't take enough account of how many of the people operating the machine found that it gave them previously-undreamt-of opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of those caught in its wheels. Of course, it all comes down to the colossal arrogance of believing that you have the right to take decisions on behalf of millions of other people who never got the chance to say whether they wanted you to or not, because you know that that's what God wants you to do.

The first and second parts of the book, where he looks at the early history of the Afrikaners and at the development of radical protestant ideas in Calvin's Geneva, in 17th century England and Scotland, and in New England, seemed less successful. He isn't a historian, and he obviously finds it very difficult to stick to a clear narrative line, so it comes over as a kind of long, rambling, after-the-port-and-sherry monologue, leaping from anecdote to generalisation and back again, hopping around in time arbitrarily. And there doesn't seem to be a great deal of it that he actually uses in the concluding parts: if you have at least a rough outline of South African history in your mind, you can probably skip the first 200 pages without inconvenience; if you don't, you'll probably be more confused after reading it than before you started...

Something of a curate's egg, but just about worth it for the good bits.

---
The subtitle on the cover is "A story of..."; on the title page it says "A history of...". Both misleading...!

>103 thorold:

I still know very little about the history of SA but that little makes clear that there's no way things had just "started" to go wrong with Verwoerd and apartheid. Things were wrong from the second white exploiters stepped into that part of the world. But that may be too vast a statement to begin with, so I'll segue into No easy walk to freedom, which at a minimum shows that black Africans in South Africa were oppressed under a brutal regime for many decades before the formal institution of apartheid.

At no time since the entrance of whites onto the scene were black Africans treated as equals nor was such equality ever proposed by the whites.

The African National Congress in its first form was constituted in 1912 and in 1919 deputies were sent even to Versailles to lobby for support against the white rule.

Already "before apartheid" there was apartheid, or the colour bar: no black Africans in the Parliament (being token-represented by whites), no mixed education (a temporary and only occasional exception in some universities being rescinded within few years), no equal labour rights, access to industry, travel, administration etc.

Verwoerd was a German student and apparently pretty much a Nazi who found guidance in the Nazi plan for African colonies (a 1938 pamphlet by Gunther Hecht).

"There is no place for him (the African) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour."

These included--were executed in practice in South Africa--a special system of education for blacks, Bantu education, which Mandela writes was devised specifically to inculcate inferiority, that is it functioned as anti-education; and reservations for the black population, so-called Bantustans, the only part of the country where black people had permanent residency. This Reserve, as it was known, was however only 13% of the country, poor, undeveloped, and utterly incapable of sustaining the black population that was supposed to live there, or 66% of all the people.

This was in no way a coincidence but totally planned, because precisely such horrible conditions ensured a constant stream of "job seekers" and cheap labour for the mines and all the jobs in general best performed by desperate poor people.

But the "beauty" of it is that at the same time these "job seekers" could only apply for work, but not residency--the ideal of fascists everywhere who have to keep capitalism going without giving anything, but anything, to the underclass they use to do so.

Picture that--millions of black people cornered into the 13% "Bantustans" (regardless of where they had been born, lived, came from), denied relocation, and allowed movement only for jobs but not to live.

And here the "pass" system comes into play. These infernal passes were imposed exclusively on the black Africans and served to control them, monitor them, and imprison at will.

Recall how Xuma, in his walk around Johannesburg, is stopped at least three times within hours by the police asking to see his pass.

There were, of course, a gazillion such measures and laws and gotchas all used to pummel the black population. People were fired, expelled, imprisoned, families broken up in a myriad circumstances that all boiled down to having a black skin.

This book collects some of Mandela's articles and speeches from 1953-1963. It ends with two pieces that are I expect classics, the statements he made at his 1962 trial, and the next year, after he was already in prison, at the so-called Rivonia trial.

The sheer hypocrisy of the system that presumes to conduct a lawful trial of a man legally denied equal participation in the system is simply mind-boggling. Here indeed "the qadi accuses, the qadi judges".

At the first trial Mandela was sentenced to five years imprisonment for inciting a general strike--the strike that was organised to protest the imminent constitution of a White Nationalist "Republic of South Africa", a vote in which no black, Indian, or Coloured people participated--and for leaving the country without a travel permit.

At the second trial for some acts of sabotage conducted by a guerrilla group his sentence was extended to life in prison.

The statement in Rivonia lays out the evolution of Mandela's activism from non-violent to a considered, limited and controlled use of violence, such as sabotage, where no lives are meant to be put to risk (except for the saboteurs').

It's also very interesting for placing not just his own thought in the context of global leftist struggle, but also for expressing a certain "African" specificity, due to (generally speaking) African communitarian tradition.

It is perhaps difficult for White South Africans, with an ingrained prejudice against communism, to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accept communists as their friends. But to us the reason is obvious. Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression is a luxury we cannot afford at this stage. What is more, for many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with us, and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with the Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society. (...)

It is not only in internal politics that we count communists as amongst those who support our cause. In the international field, communist countries have always come to our aid. In the United Nations and other Councils of the world the communist bloc has supported the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism and often seems to be more sympathetic to our plight than some of the Western powers. Although there is a universal condemnation of apartheid, the communist bloc speaks out against it with a louder voice than most of the White world. (...)

Today I am attracted by the idea of a classless society, an attraction which springs in part from Marxist reading and, in part, from my admiration of the structure and organization of early African societies in this country. The land, then the main means of production, belonged to the tribe. There were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation.

Note that finding inspiration for a classless society in communitarian history isn't strictly African but also Slavic. Among Slavs it wasn't "tribes" that owned the land but zadruge, cooperative systems of people sharing resources and contributing to the same pot.

By the way, Mandela's remarks about communists reminded me of something an African writer wrote (90% sure it was Wole Soyinka in Of Africa, but could be wrong) about Nigerian men who studied in the USSR and returned with Russian brides. The families would be all agog with the news of a son bringing home a white wife. But then these wives turned out to work just like the African women, hauling water, cleaning, washing, cooking... and that, no matter how white and blond these women were, was not "proper" white, was not White.

Being White (as opposed to merely having a poorly-pigmented epidermis) is essentially the domain of Westerners, the Anglos in particular.

(Which ties in with Nell Irvin Painter's The history of white people, if anyone is interested in checking this phenomenon out.)

>104 LolaWalser: Being White (as opposed to merely having a poorly-pigmented epidermis) is essentially the domain of Westerners, the Anglos in particular.

This is something that is rarely said or expressed - and this is one of the reasons why some of the processes and problems USA (and the Western world) is still embroiled it does not make much sense elsewhere. There is White (light colored, Christian and most likely Anglo or (Dutch/French/German), occasionally throwing the Iberian nations or the Italians into it as well) and there is white (same color (some even lighter skinned) but either coming from Northern Africa, Asia or Central/Eastern Europe or not being Christian). For most people who believe that being White is somehow important, that second group is either ignored or considered part of the "also-runs". When I was still back home and trying to read some of the stories and news from across the pond, I had issues parsing some of the arguments because "White" in them did not mean what it meant for a child of Eastern Europe (not that we do not have our own racial prejudices...). Took me a long time to separate the terms in my mind - mostly because there was no way to understand that until you read a lot more of the background.

Anyway - perspective is everything sometimes.

Thanks for mentioning Painter - I do not think I had heard of that book before.

>105 AnnieMod:

I hear you on the cultural dissonances, and I can do no better than warmly recommend Painter's book, as it will provide quite a few explanations on that front.

I'm afraid you'll find no spics, wogs or frogs qualify for realWhite, no more than kikes, chinks and, in the words of Christian guru Charles Williams, "other kinds of niggers" do. It's a club strictly for those gentile gentlemen among men, Anglos and select Nordics (no Suomi, no Sami, please!) ;)

But, just so we know where we're at--while I completely agree there are not just one, the American, but various paradigms of racism, I regard the concept of white privilege as relevant to all "whites", regardless of where we live, but in particular to us who live in countries with historic, systemic racism. We do profit from white privilege in these countries, regardless of the fact that our ancestors were not involved in their creation.

Moreover, I do consider Europe to be deeply racist and white supremacist, all of Europe, and beyond Europe, every single country with a majority white population. I don't mean the situation is everywhere as in the States, nor is the language, the rhetoric, the notions, obviously, but that there is just the same propensity, and often actual mechanisms, to maintain white supremacy even in these places where "black" people exist as a very small minority or even not at all.

I have to say that is something I realised only after coming to the States.

Anyway, that subject risks developing into a huge digression (which, hey, at least it would mean some conversation in the thread!), so for now I'm leaving it there.

If you get to Painter's book, I'd love to hear what you thought! By the way, you may have heard about Ibrahim X. Kendi, he has a book that seems to cover the same ground... I plan to check it out to see how it compares: Stamped from the beginning.

>104 LolaWalser: I’ve probably made W A de Klerk sound rather less sophisticated than he really is: he doesn’t try to make out that the Afrikaners before Malan and Verwoerd were free of the sins of imperialism. But he’s clearly a huge admirer of Smuts (he talks about the two occasions when they met with an almost religious awe), and that leads him to airbrush out a lot of the faults of the early days of the Union, including the Native Land Acts.

On education, there really was a big step backwards in the fifties. Before then, South African education seems to have been the same kind of lottery as anywhere else in the world: even if you were poor, if you happened to grow up near a good school, and if your parents were motivated and self-sacrificing (and if your older siblings were already earning), you had the chance of a good education, and some black kids (like Mandela, Nkosi, and Mphahlele) benefited from that. What Mphahlele describes experiencing in the 20s and 30s isn't much different from what my grandparents experienced in Europe a generation earlier, although the proportion of kids that missed out altogether was probably higher in South Africa. The Bantu Education Acts took away that opportunity, slim though it might have been. That's the really poignant thing in Mphahlele's book: after years of struggle and deprivation he qualifies to teach, and just as he gets into a classroom for the first time the state tells him that he musn't teach his students to expect the sort of opportunities he had. And then of course all the protests and boycotts that followed had an even more destructive effect on education.

Racism is never as simple as we think it is. I’ve just been reading a piece by Kwame Dawes (in Granta 92) on the prejudice he encountered growing up as a Ghanaian in Jamaica (his father was teaching there). The middle-class kids he went to school with were all black and of West African descent, like him, but they’d been conditioned by the ex-colonial education system, the books they read, and the films they watched to identify with the “white” view of the world and think of “Africa” as the primitive, dangerous “other”.

>2 thorold:
I note on your map that Swaziland is labeled with it's current name- worth mentioning that when you travel there- your passport stamp will say Eswatini. Both Eswatini and Lesotho are stunningly beautiful locations with unique cultures. When travel can return- I would highly recommend them.

>107 thorold:

Hm, I don't know in what manner I may have conveyed that I think that racism is "simple"; I can't even tell how racism could ever be described as "simple".

Internalised racism such as in your example, like internalised misogyny or internalised homophobia, is a real phenomenon--and just another devastating effect of racist, white supremacist systems.

It's not some different sort of racism, it's some black people reflecting the racism of whites.

Anyway, as to South Africa, I think it's attractive but highly misleading to judge its circumstances at any time by a handful of special people like a prominent politician and some writers. I don't find it significant that some individuals had the luck and talent to emerge, when at the same time millions were systematically denied the opportunity to do so.

Besides, even access to education doesn't mean the same to everyone in an unjust system. Mandela earned a bachelor's through correspondence and then went on to law school. But once a registered attorney, he was not treated the same nor allowed the same opportunities as the white attorneys. He and his partner were consigned, as all black Africans, to open their office in some region far away from the urban centres where their clients were. As this made their practice impossible, they were forced to occupy space in the city illegally. Every day they went to work they did so with the threat of exposure, fines, imprisonment hanging over their own heads--this just for going to work.

But most to the point is that the black population wasn't even allowed its own representatives in the Parliament. Ever. Since the inception of the country. Whatever atrocities followed and may have gotten worse with apartheid, this much signals clearly from the start that black Africans were regarded strictly as the underclass, and to be treated as such. (I don't know exactly about the status of the Indian minority and the "Coloured" category, but it would appear mostly the same restrictions applied to them too).

Mandela's first trial statement (even more complete than in the book):

"Black Man in a White Court" Nelson Mandela's First Court Statement - 1962

...

Why is it that no African in the history of this country has ever had the honour of being tried by his own kith and kin, by his own flesh and blood?

I will tell Your Worship why: the real purpose of this rigid colour-bar is to ensure that the justice dispensed by the courts should conform to the policy of the country, however much that policy might be in conflict with the norms of justice accepted in judiciaries throughout the civilised world.

I feel oppressed by the atmosphere of white domination that lurks all around in this courtroom. Somehow this atmosphere calls to mind the inhuman injustices caused to my people outside this courtroom by this same white domination.

It reminds me that I am voteless because there is a parliament in this country that is white-controlled. I am without land because the white minority has taken a lion's share of my country and forced me to occupy poverty-stricken Reserves, over-populated and over-stocked. We are ravaged by starvation and disease . . . (INTERRUPTION)

Full transcript of the Rivonia trial in 1963: I am prepared to die : Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial

>110 LolaWalser: I've just this evening been reading about Rivonia in Edwin Cameron's book Justice: A Personal Account!

Check out The Kaiser's Holocaust regarding the genocide in Namibia.

>112 bvelto: Thanks! I think that was one I meant to have a look at when it came out, ten years ago...

In the meantime, I've been going through another old Granta, Granta 92: The view from Africa — a lot of good stuff, but the only significant pieces from Southern Africa were doublures of things I already read and discussed above (Gordimer >89 thorold: and Vladislavić >77 thorold:).

Two in-between reads for Pride month, found on Scribd (the first one via the listings in >99 Dilara86: )
The (post-1994) South African Constitution is still one of the very few in the world that explicitly protects citizens from discrimination on the grounds of sex, gender or sexual orientation. A large part of the credit for that is usually given to the young ANC activist, Simon Nkoli (1957-1998), who bravely came out as gay in prison, and helped to persuade his comrades and the ANC leadership that the new nation needed to embrace all kinds of diversity, not just in race:
They called me queer (2019) edited by Kim Windvogel & Kelly-Eve Koopman (South Africa)

 

An anthology of fiction, personal testimony and verse by LGBTQI South Africans, proudly asserting that the rainbow bit of "rainbow nation" is still there after 25 years. All very positive and uplifting, and probably a very valuable book to have on your shelf if you're a young person growing up in South Africa with questions about your own sexual identity, but not all that interesting for outsiders, because there's not really all that much that is specific to the country or the continent. Most of the contributors are very young, many of them not even old enough to have been around in 1994, and they are clearly all citizens of the Instagram village. It's probably inevitable that the sort of people who are members of the kind of discussion groups and fora that bring them into contact with the editors of an anthology like this are all going to be young, articulate, educated, urban and tech-savvy, and they have exactly the same sort of coming-out stories as queer or trans young people in Liverpool, Amsterdam, or Philadelphia. There are a couple of references to the appalling crimes of violence there have been against members of sexual minorities, especially lesbians and trans sex-workers, but there's no attempt to attach numbers or put those into any kind of context.

Justice : a personal account (2014) by Edwin Cameron (South Africa, 1953- )

 

Edwin Cameron came from a poor, working-class background in Pretoria — his father was in jail for much of his childhood, and he and his sister were sent to a state orphanage. But he took what he himself admits was shameless advantage of the educational opportunities the apartheid state gave to even the most deprived whites, if they wanted them, studied classics and law (ending up at Keble as a Rhodes Scholar, just to rub in the imperialist advantage!), and became a human rights lawyer based in a public-interest law centre at Wits, representing workers and opponents of apartheid in a string of high-profile cases. In 1994 he was appointed as a high court judge under the Mandela government, and he has since served in the appeal court and the constitutional court. He is one of the very few senior government officials in Africa to be both openly gay and openly HIV-positive.

This book is something between a memoir and a textbook on constitutional law: Cameron takes us through the history of judicial involvement in politics under apartheid, the development of the new constitution, and the important cases that have shaped South African law since 1994. There's a lot about the Defiance Campaign and the various trials of Mandela, the Treason Trial, Rivonia, and the rest, as well as about the less spectacular campaigns that helped to undermine the application of the Pass Laws and other key grass-roots components of apartheid oppression in the eighties. Cameron confirms the frequently-made assertion that the relative independence of the judiciary under apartheid and their insistence on proper procedure on occasion saved people from oppression and injustice, and incidentally gave Mandela, in particular, an impregnable platform from which he could address the world whenever the state chose to prosecute him for something. But he also reminds us that judges were drawn — and not at random — from a white population that supported the National Party. The overwhelming majority of the time, courts, especially at the lower levels, were happy to enforce oppressive laws and turn a blind eye to police malpractice. The judiciary can't be exonerated.

There's also a lot about the detailed working of the new constitution, and the way it gives the courts power to decide whether the government is pursuing policies aimed at giving people the basic social and economic rights the constitution promises them — housing, healthcare, water, education and so on. It's not trivial for judges to venture into these areas without overreaching themselves and getting involved in policy-making, which is obviously something that has to be left to elected representatives. Cameron takes us through a few notable cases, including Soobramoney (about the right of a hospital to withhold an expensive treatment from a patient in accordance with a prioritisation policy) and Grootboom (about the obligation for a local authority to have a policy for providing emergency housing). He also discusses at some length the court action taken by the Treatment Action Campaign to mitigate the effects of President Thabo Mbeki's irresponsible AIDS-denialism, for obvious reasons a matter close to his heart.

Cameron was still a serving senior judge when he wrote this book, which perhaps explains why he is rather vague and allusive in his references to government corruption and to "allegations against the integrity of some judges" (presumably referring to the notorious Judge Hlophe of Western Cape). Whilst recognising the many problems South Africa still faces, he seems to be optimistic about the future: the constitution has survived a turbulent twenty years, and politicians, corrupt as they may be in private, still find it necessary to express respect for the rule of law in public. Which probably puts South Africa on a par with the US, and a step ahead of the UK, which doesn't even have a constitution.

Sorry, I feel as though I'm taking up far more than my fair share of this thread. Blame it on the combination of lockdown, retirement, and the unexpected amount of interesting material there is to explore...

Another one from my Seven Seas collection:

Transvaal Episode (1956) by Harry Bloom (South Africa, 1913-1981)

  

(Author sketch: University of Kent - https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/tag/harry-bloom/)

Harry Bloom seems to have been yet another extraordinary character: he grew up in South Africa and qualified as a lawyer there; he and his wife worked as war correspondents in Europe during WWII; they lived in Czechoslovakia for a while, then moved back to South Africa, where he worked with Bram Fischer and Nelson Mandela in the anti-apartheid campaign, wrote a couple of novels, and collaborated with Todd Matshikiza on the hit jazz musical King Kong (which launched Miriam Makeba's international career). It's not recorded what he did on his days off!
After a spell in jail he left South Africa in 1962 and started an unexpected new career as an academic lawyer at the University of Kent, becoming a pioneer of the then still rather esoteric field of computer and media law.

(I just realised now, having done the googling, that a charming elderly professor I was chatting to at a party a few months ago was someone who must have worked closely with Bloom. Another missed opportunity!)

This book, originally published in 1956 as Episode and later variously as Transvaal Episode or Episode in Transvaal, was the first of Bloom's two novels. Set in a fictitious small town, it's an anatomical dissection of a township riot, the sort of incident that fills newspaper columns for a couple of days but is then forgotten about by everyone except those whose family members ended up dead or in jail. It often feels as if it is veering off into satire, but Bloom's sober, journalistic style keeps reminding us that it's actually a composite picture of real events in real places.

The arrival of new-broom administrator Hendrik Du Toit to run the "native location" at Nelstroom marks a significant downturn for the twelve thousand black people who live there: the conscientious but unimaginative Du Toit is determined to stamp out the routine petty corruption that allows them to work around the impossible requirements of the pass laws and other apartheid regulations. When the idle, billiard-playing police commander is also replaced by a keen young lieutenant fresh from Riot Control school, the local branch of the ANC asks for assistance, and the experienced organiser Mabaso is assigned to them.

A trivial dispute about a missing collar in a bag of laundry sparks off a chain of events that escalate, thanks to the malice of Lieutenant Swanepoel and the incompetence of Du Toit, into a full-scale riot, with the police completely out of control, driving through the location shooting at random, and the location residents, boxed in with nowhere else to go, expressing their rage by burning down their own public amenities and attacking community leaders. Mabaso does his best to restrain things and puts his faith in the humiliation the authorities are going to face when their actions are exposed in court, but Swanepoel's special training hasn't been wasted: he makes sure that Mabaso, at least, is shot "attempting to escape" from police custody.

A searing attack on the poisonous working of institutionalised racism, obviously informed by Bloom's experience of Europe in the aftermath of the war as well as by what he's seen in South Africa, although he's careful to avoid making explicit comparisons between Afrikaners and Nazis. Over and over again he gives his characters opportunities to avoid the catastrophe, but they fail, because they would require a white official actually to listen to what a black person is telling him rather than fit it into his library of possible black-white interactions ("Yes, baas", "Right away, baas", etc.).

---



(This original cast recording is still available on streaming services — worth a listen if you like that sort of thing)

Another audiobook:

The Madonna of Excelsior (2011) by Zakes Mda (South Africa, 1948- ) audiobook, narrated by Robin Miles

  

Mda examines the complicated relationship between Afrikaners and black South Africans in a small town in the Free State platteland, where, as usual in small towns, politics has much more to do with individuals and what happened between them a few decades ago than with big national issues. In Excelsior, the defining event in recent history has been the arrest of five white men and fourteen black women from the town under the Immorality Acts in 1971. The white men were all prominent figures in the Afrikaner community, and their activities lead to the birth of a surprising number of mixed-race babies.

We follow one of the women, Nikki, and her daughter Popi, through the declining years of apartheid and the first decade of democracy: the optimistic coming to power of the ANC, the lofty socialist ideals that gradually slide off into corruption and capitalist "enterprise schemes", the disenchantment of the Afrikaners who feel they aren't being given a chance to contribute to the new society, and so on. Underlying it all is the comfortable notion that, at a personal level, Afrikaner farmers and rural black people have far more in common than they think they do, and it's only those nasty middle-class ideas from the city that are driving them apart. Much the same reasoning that you find in nostalgic rural fiction from Attlee-era Britain. Which, oddly enough, is almost always written either by nasty middle-class people from the cities or by (former) aristocratic landowners, never by actual peasants.

Still, politically dubious though it might be, it's an attractive story, with strong, funny characters, interwoven with luscious descriptions of Van-Gogh-esque paintings of rural life by a local artist.

Narrator Robin Miles obviously isn't South African, but she does a pretty convincing job with the strongly-defined Sotho and Afrikaner voices, only breaking the illusion slightly with some odd pronunciations of Afrikaans placenames.

Q2 is over, and Reading Globally has moved on to the new theme read "Travelling the TBR 2.0" https://www.librarything.com/topic/321973

...but that doesn't stop us from carrying on with this topic in the background, at least as long as we still have one or two relevant books on our piles!

Another mission-educated black writer from the early days, (cf. >36 LolaWalser: >79 thorold: >92 thorold:), although Fuze is a generation older again than Plaatje and Mofolo. The inexhaustible topic of Zulu history, but non-fiction this time:

The black people and whence they came : a Zulu view (Abantu Abamnyama, Zulu 1922; English 1979) by Magema M Fuze (South Africa, 1840-1922), translated by Harry Lugg (1882-1978), edited by A T Cope

  

Magema Magwaza Fuze came from an important Zulu family. He was educated by Bishop Colenso at the famous Ekukhanyeni mission station, trained as a compositor and printer (like Sol Plaatje) and remained in Colenso's circle, becoming a teacher and a notable early writer and journalist in the Zulu language. He met Cetshwayo a number of times, and acted as tutor to Dinuzulu's family during their exile on Saint Helena.

Fuze's book Abantu Abamnyama, written around 1900 and eventually published with the help of contributions from Zulu and European supporters shortly before his death in 1922, is usually cited as the first major original work to be published in the Zulu language. It seems to have been conceived mostly as a permanent record of the oral knowledge of tribal history that had been handed down to him in his youth. There's a fairly speculative general introduction about the early history of black Africans, interesting more as a record of popular received opinion at the time than anything else. It also gives an interesting insight into the sort of speculative discussions that must have gone on in Colenso's liberal Anglican circles: Fuze demonstrates logically that Adam and Eve must have been black, for example, and tells us about one particular tribe that is said to have given up agriculture and evolved into baboons, in an odd bit of reverse-Darwinism.

When he comes to the Zulu and their direct ancestors, Fuze speaks with much more conviction, and we get pages and pages of genealogies which must be gold-dust for specialists, if rather dry for the rest of us. But there's also plenty of interesting information about traditional customs and their variations, and some entertaining anecdotes explaining where particular names come from. From Shaka onwards, we get a detailed historical account from the Zulu point of view: as an enlightened Christian, Fuze obviously finds it necessary to disapprove of the excesses committed by Shaka and Cetshwayo, but he's nowhere near as critical as non-Zulus like Mofolo and Plaatje. And of course, when we get to Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu, Fuze is talking about events and people he was very close to himself, so it's a very interesting story, if a slightly rambling one. Zulus are thoroughly blamed for their many internecine wars, but wars between Zulus and non-Zulus are always somehow the fault of the outsiders.

This English translation was made in the 1970s for the University of Natal by Harry Lugg, a former Commissioner for Native Affairs in Natal, who had known Fuze well (and was in his nineties when he did the translation). He rearranged Fuze's rambling text slightly to give a more logical sequence, and the text is peppered with Lugg's comments on the words used in the Zulu original as well as the editor's notes on the historical background, so it's not the easiest of books to read. To add insult to injury, it's printed like a thesis, as a photographic reduction of the typescript (the expert compositor Fuze would not have been amused). But there's a nice 1970s look and smell to it.

..and another:

Elsa Joubert was a distinguished Afrikaans travel-writer and novelist; this book was her big international success. Sad to see that she died three weeks ago, one of the victims of COVID-19.

The long journey of Poppie Nongena (Afrikaans 1978; English 1980) by Elsa Joubert (South Africa, 1922-2020) (author's own translation)

  

Poppie is the life-story of an ordinary black South African woman, who gets caught up in the injustices of the Pass Law system that was one of the cornerstones of apartheid. Her life becomes a constant struggle to stay on the right side of the bureaucracy whilst still finding time to care for her children and earn a living.

Although it's set out as a novel, Joubert makes it clear that she is telling us the story of a real person, as told to her by the woman and members of her family, with nothing changed except the names. (She shared the royalties from the book and the later stage-play with the original of "Poppie", who was able to buy a house for herself as a result.)

It's written in the simplest of language (I sampled the Afrikaans text as well as the English version: in Afrikaans it feels positively brutal in its directness), but it turns into a sophisticated exploration of what it feels like to make your life in a world you have absolutely no control over, and on the intersection between different cultures. Poppie and her family are constantly in tension between Xhosa and Afrikaans language, Christian and Xhosa culture, urban and rural ways of life, and so on, as well as having to cope with the illogical requirements of a law that deems you to be a resident of a place you have no tangible connection with, and an undesirable intruder in the region where you and your family have always lived. And takes it for granted that people living on low wages are somehow able to give up big chunks of their working time to queue up every time they need to have any contact with officialdom.

In the background of the story is South African history from World War II to the township violence of the seventies: Poppie doesn't see herself as political, she's too busy surviving and trying to make opportunities for the next generation, but when her younger siblings and her children get involved in protest, she understands perfectly well why they are angry. But she also has a pretty good idea that it's not going to end well for them.

Obviously, this is an educated, middle-class, white writer, transcribing the words of someone from a completely different background, so there's got to be an element of fraud in this, even if only at the subconscious level, but it's very convincingly done, and Joubert manages to give us the illusion that we are really seeing the world from Poppie's point of view. This seems to have been a book that opened a lot of people's eyes to the realities of apartheid, inside and outside South Africa.

Read during Q2

SOUTH AFRICA



Rumours of Rain by André Brink
first published 1978

Many of us have met a man like Martin Mynhardt: white, middle-aged, fit, educated, cultured, powerful, charming but only when required. There's an elegant wife and a series of quiet affairs. After all, a person married to him would expect such a thing wouldn't she? Men like this never question their progress through life - it is the natural and deserved course of things. However, if the gods are paying attention, there will be a rare crashing comeuppance for the Martins of the world, unforseen and unexpected.

It was 1976. Mynhardt had just flown to London from Johannesburg to make a presentation to an international group of mining executives. When an embarrassing statement by a member of his group resulted in the withdrawal of his delegation, he decided not to return home, but rather to stay on in London until his meeting in Tokyo the next week. He would write the story of his 45 years, leading up to this week.

Martin started out ever so self assured, in keeping with the certainty which guides the lives of those of his ilk. There were self congratulations for the progress he felt he had made from Afrikaans farm boy to pillar of industry. He congratulated himself on his company's efforts at integration, never realizing the sheer tokenism it represented.

Over the course of the week, uncertainty started to creep into his account. Land deals, politics, his best friend's "desertion" to the anti-apartheid movement, his son's radicalization after being sent to fight in Angola: all were questioned and rationalized, for Martin was a man for whom certainty in thought and deed was paramount. In the midst of all this, there had been a crisis with his widowed mother on her farm. Why would she just not fall in with Martin's pre-arranged plans?

Perhaps there are a few too many "types" here that appear in a number of South African books from this era. They may have been necessary at the time though for a reading public outside South Africa. Brink has written a masterful portrayal of a man completely out of touch with the world around him, and suddenly coming to realize it. If Brink had not allowed Mynhardt to reveal himself so well, it might almost have been possible to feel sympathy with him and his final plea: I've tried so hard, I've acted with the best of intentions. I've tried to remain loyal to the simple fact of my being here and the need to survive. Isn't that enough? However, this is a man who gave no quarter, and consistent with his own philosophy, none should be given to him.

________________________

Short listed for the 1978 Booker Prize, which was won by Iris Murdoch for The Sea, The Sea

>118 SassyLassy: Looks interesting. For the moment, I've got another Brink on the pile brought back from the book picnic a couple of weeks ago, but I'm noting that one as well.

This is another from that pile — I read Vladislavić's Portrait with keys earlier in the thread (>77 thorold:)

Propaganda by monuments & other stories (1996) by Ivan Vladislavić (South Africa, 1957- )

  

This is the second short story collection by Vladislavić, from 1996. The eleven stories vary from the relatively conventional to the insanely busy: there's a lot of very good stuff, but in places a good idea seems to be buried under the weight of a thousand others, as in the title story — where a shebeen-owner writes off to the Soviet foreign ministry to enquire about the possibility of acquiring a surplus statue of Lenin to decorate his newly-legal tavern — or "Autopsy", where The King is spotted coming out of Estoril Books in Johannesburg. The surreal "Isle of Capri" and the Borgesian "The Omniscope" are less extreme examples, but still seem to be trying a bit too hard.

I particularly enjoyed "The Tuba", where an old-school racist tries to disrupt a Salvation Army band and ends up making music with them, and "The Book Lover", where the narrator explores inconclusive clues to the life of an earlier owner, a woman called Helena Shein, he finds in secondhand books picked up in various Johannesburg bookshops (this was especially fun because several of the books concerned are ones I happened to read recently). "The Whites Only bench" is another very good story, as is "Courage", a story about an artist who comes to a remote village to look for a model for a post-liberation statue. "'Kidnapped'" (a story about not writing a story) and "The Firedogs" were fun too.

Not in the same league as his more recent book Portrait with keys, but a very interesting collection.

The story "The book lover" in >119 thorold: led me to this next book — I managed to track down a secondhand copy in Galway, of all places. The figure of Johannes van der Kemp interested me, partly because he played a big role in Buys: 'n Grensroman, >26 thorold: above.

Sarah Gertrude Millin came to Kimberley from Lithuania with her Jewish parents at the age of five months. Starting in her early twenties, she published a couple of dozen books, mostly novels and biographies on themes from South African history. She was married to Philip Millin, a lawyer who became a High Court judge.

The burning man (1952) by Sarah Gertrude Millin (South Africa, 1889-1968)

   

I didn't realise it until I started reading it, but this goes together with Millin's earlier novel about Coenraad Buys, King of the Bastards (1949), which overlaps with it in time. I'll have to look for that: apparently she got Jan Smuts to write the foreword, which gives an indication of where she must have stood in mid-century South Africa.

Johannes van der Kemp (1747-1811) was one of the many "stranger than fiction" figures who pop up in Southern African history. An Enlightenment scholar at Leiden who became a libertine army officer, got chucked out of the service for marrying outside his own social class, qualified as a doctor in Scotland, and then, late in life, experienced a religious conversion and was one of the first group of Evangelical missionaries sent out to the Cape by the London Missionary Society, where he became a thorn in the side of the Dutch and (later) the British colonial authorities, as well as antagonising the Boers. Most improbably of all, he found common ground with the rebellious and anarchistic patriarch Coenraad Buys when the two met at the court of the Xhosa king Gaika (modern spelling Ngqika: Buys had recently become his stepfather).

In turning van der Kemp's life into an historical novel, Millin is clearly fascinated by the strong passions that drove the twists and turns of his improbable career, with its odd mixture of Enlightenment humanism, evangelical Christianity, and powerful sexual impulses. And she enjoys his provocation of the racist sensibilities of the Boers, and has fun imagining the three strong female characters she brings into his life: Susanna, the married woman who becomes the mother of his daughter; Helena, his working-class first wife; and Sally, the mixed-race teenager he marries in his old age. But I don't think it entirely succeeds: Millin is just a bit too polite, perhaps, or hasn't quite made her mind up what it is that is really driving van der Kemp. Probably she finds van der Kemp's absolute opposition to racism and slavery more important than the sincerity or hypocrisy of his religious beliefs, and she doesn't want to obscure that by offending either her religious readers or the atheist ones.

An interesting period piece, anyway.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_van_der_Kemp

Another late entrant:

Livingstone's companions (1972) by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, 1923-2014)

  

Nadine Gordimer's writing career covered more than sixty years: this, the seventh of her many short-story collections, comes from about a third of the way through it.

Many of the stories seem to be in one way or another about the less obvious consequences of racism and colonialism in Africa. The title story looks through the eyes of a globetrotting foreign correspondent at the empty Westminster-style ritual of a post-independence parliament in a single-party state, where the Speaker's Clerk is dressed up as a "perfect papier-mâché blackamoor from an eighteenth century slave trader's drawing room" and the Foreign Minister solemnly delivers a content-free travelogue of a recent state visit. It's not worth two lines of copy, so the journalist moves on to another assignment. His editor sends him to retrace the steps of Livingstone's last journey for the upcoming centenary of his death, and he finds himself staying in a lakeside hotel (presumably in Zambia), where his readings from Livingstone's journals are ironically juxtaposed with his observation of the white people who run the hotel and their guests, trying to attach a veneer of seventies trendiness to their crumbling heritage of colonial luxury. Gordimer doesn't make the connections for us, we can take it as the strength of Africa defeating both the out-of-place idealist and the staying-on exploiter, or we can see it as an ironic commentary on the "Christian civilisation" Livingstone was so determined to bring to central Africa.

We go on to look at white South Africans out of place in Europe, in black Africa, and in their own country; at the troubled interactions between black intellectuals and white liberals; and we even get a few good old-fashioned parent-child, sibling, or husband-wife-lover stories. But all with that dry Gordimer twist. Of its time, but not really dated.

Still cleaning up the pile:

A revolutionary woman (1983) by Sheila Fugard (South Africa, 1932- )

  

Sheila Meiring Fugard was born in England but moved to South Africa with her parents as a small child. She published three novels and a couple of poetry collections in the seventies and eighties. She was married to playwright Athol Fugard from 1956 to 2015; their daughter Lisa Fugard is also a novelist.

This is one of the odder books that turned up while I was in pursuit of Southern African writing: it's a non-realistic avant-garde three act play thinly disguised as a historical novel. Or novella, maybe: it's less than 150 pages long, anyway. Characters deliver long passionate speeches to each other or to the audience, you can practically see the lights going up and down on them as they step forward to speak, and it's all performed to the backing of a hypnotic (virtual) soundtrack by Ravi Shankar with a strong whiff of incense in the background.

We're supposedly in an obscure dorp in the Karoo in 1920, where the narrator, Christina Ransome, is teaching the "coloured" children of the location. She's a Red Revolutionary, a disciple of Gandhi, and a feminist, attributes not calculated to make her popular with her Boer neighbours (and only the Hindu-mystical part of them is developed to any extent). She also has a love affair with an Indian man behind her, as well as a very sexual kind of obsession with her late lover's teenage wife, Lakshmi ("Her breasts undulated beneath the sari ... her face was an open lotus ... she was a woman ready for copulation. A tantric goddess."). The words lingam and yoni pop up every two or three pages.

The action of the book turns around Miss Ransome's star pupil, the seventeen-year-old coloured boy Ebrahim. He is caught in bed with a Boer girl and accused of rape. The girl is fourteen and has learning difficulties, so even the local version of Gregory Peck (fresh from studying Egyptian papyruses in Leiden, evidently a key part of every criminal lawyer's toolkit) is going to have a hard time helping him. And of course a Boer lynch-party turns up, and things start getting even odder than they were before.

Probably not a book it would be advisable to attempt to tackle without a good supply of seventies psychoactive substances and a sitar to hand. I'm not quite sure what Fugard was trying to achieve with this book, but I don't think she did so, whatever it was.

I found another André Brink novel I'd overlooked earlier:

The rights of desire (2000; also published in Afrikaans as Donkermaan) by André Brink (South Africa, 1935-2015)

  

The last André Brink book I read was the apartheid-era protest novel A dry white season. By contrast, this one is set against the background of the New South Africa, amidst the criminality and failing public services of Cape Town at the end of the twentieth century, with an underlying feeling that it's a lot easier to protest against abuses and injustices than it is to see a way forward for fixing a broken society, particularly if you happen to be an ageing white liberal.

The widowed Ruben Olivier, 65 years old (the same age as the author), lives in a big old house on the fringes of the city. His sons see no future in South Africa and are emigrating, his best friend has been murdered, and Ruben is left alone with his elderly housekeeper Magrieta and the house ghost, the 18th-century slave Antje of Bengal. The sons, having failed to persuade him to come to Australia or Canada, suggest that he take in some lodgers to provide a bit of company and security: they are thinking of a nice, middle-aged couple, but what turns up to answer the advertisement is Tessa, a thoroughly modern young woman. She and Ruben could hardly be more different, but he both likes her and (covertly) fancies her sexually, she seems to like his company (but doesn't especially want to have sex with him). When she also wins the approval of the cats, Antje and — more grudgingly — Magrieta, it's obvious that she's in.

This gives Brink the framework for a sensitive but rather complex and tenuous exploration of the interplay of love, sexual desire, history, violence and death, and the way that stories, whether fictional or derived from memories or historical documents, are never more than partial representations of the truth. We dig into Antje's story of passion, exploitation and murder two hundred years ago, into Magrieta's life as a coloured person displaced from District Six in the 1970s and now the victim of mob violence in Cape Flats, into the real story of Ruben's "happy" marriage, into Tessa's searching for a substitute for her absent father and finding only men to exploit her, and are shown the way all of these things are bound to end badly, when seen from Ruben's pessimistic (and permanently horny) perspective.

There's a lot of very interesting and perceptive writing here. There's also obviously something rather uncomfortable about spending 300 pages with Ruben's sexual obsession, but Brink knows how we are likely to react (after all, he had a long history of marrying younger women himself...), and he makes sure that Ruben is never trying to justify himself with the reader, and that Tessa's modern instinct to talk everything through prevents his obsession with her from building up into a destructive secret. (Tessa, although born in 1970, often seems to belong more to Brink's generation than her own — even the shocking modern music she listens to turns out to be The Velvet Underground...)

...and another Bessie Head:

Serowe: village of the rain wind (1981) by Bessie Head (South Africa, 1937-1986)

  

For some reason I had the idea when I ordered this book that it would be another short story collection, but it turns out to be something rather more unusual: Head expresses her gratitude the Botswana village that has taken her in by documenting as much as she can of its history and culture through a set of about a hundred interviews with people who live there, especially older people. In so many ways, this seems to be a very African way of working, so it's a little bit of a shock to learn that her direct inspiration for the format of this project was Ronald Blythe's sixties classic, Akenfield — the 2008 AWS edition comes with a preface from Dr Blythe, who is obviously as surprised as we are, and very flattered.

Head shows us what makes Serowe such a special part of Southern Africa, focussing in particular on the influence of Khama III, chief of the Bamangwato around the end of the nineteenth century, his son Tshekedi Khama, who ruled in the mid-20th century, and the exiled South African Patrick van Rensburg, who came to Serowe in the 1950s and established various pioneering educational projects.

Khama — who became famous internationally in the 1890s because of a diplomatic mission to London to keep "Bechuanaland" out of the hands of Cecil Rhodes — was an authoritarian who imposed Christianity on his people and banned alcohol, but he was also a firm believer in development through self-help. His standing gave him the opportunity to push through some big changes in traditional custom, and in particular he abolished initiation rituals for young men and diverted the energies of the age regiments (initiation fraternities) into community service projects like building dams and schools, and kept a firm hand on the activities of foreign missionaries and traders within his territories. Tshekedi continued and expanded the community service idea, and van Rensburg added further refinements, such as producers' and consumers' cooperatives and self-financing vocational training programmes. (I've worked with a foundation that gives financial support to community self-help projects: it's astonishing to see how many of the initiatives Head describes are things I've seen people re-inventing quite independently in other parts of the world half a century later...)

Head introduces her interviewees and puts them in context, but then she lets them speak for themselves, even when they are expressing opinions she presumably doesn't share herself. Many of the older people, understandably enough, consider that Bamangwato culture is collapsing around them, and that the centralised democracy of post-independence Botswana gives them less influence over their own lives than the old regional autocracy of the chiefs, controlled as it was by the local forum of the kgotla, in which everyone (i.e. all the older males) got the chance to express an opinion.

A big topic is the shift in family structure that has resulted from Khama's abolition of polygamy and bride-prices, which obviously helped to remove some major inequalities between rich and poor and between men and women, but also indirectly led to a situation in which defaulting husbands could not easily be held to account by their in-laws, and marriage itself eventually went out of style. At the time Head was writing, 95% of children in the village were born to unmarried women. Head interviews a number of older and younger women to hear what they have to say about this (she doesn't seem to have managed to find any young men prepared to talk about it, though...).

There are some very interesting interviews with craftspeople, especially the old tanners (men), hut-builders and potters (women) who explain the traditional way their craft worked; these are set against interviews with younger people, many of them from the boiteko cooperative, who explain how they are mixing traditional ideas with technology from elsewhere. The funniest one is the elderly wood-carver, though, who clearly finds it impossible to understand how anyone could fail to find the spoon that's waiting to be discovered in a tree-branch or the stool hidden in a stump. (Or perhaps couldn't resist pulling the leg of this young South African woman who's come to ask him silly questions.)

Although it talks about a community facing a lot of very big problems (plus AIDS, which they didn't know about yet), this comes across as a very warm, positive book, really expressing Head's love for Serowe and its people, and demonstrating the way a community exists as the collective experiences of its members. And it's also a quiet challenge to Western readers with fixed ideas about "primitive" rural African societies and the things holding them back. All the speakers in this book are sophisticated, articulate people who've clearly thought deeply about their community and its needs.

Belatedly adding Unter dem Frangipanibaum by Mia Couto which is beautifully written. But also a very foreign way of looking at the world.

I read Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda set in an unnamed city on the coast of South Africa, presumably based on Cape Town, in 1993-4, shortly before the transition to inclusive democracy. The protagonist is a professional mourner who meets a woman from his home village at the funeral of her son in the city about twenty years after he last saw her. Unusually the story has a third person plural narrator, a collective "we", the people of the city and the village who have individually witnessed events but are recounting them from a communal perspective (I think this is a nod towards collective oral traditions of narrative and also omniscient ancestors). Most published fiction of around 200 pages is stripped to essentials but this novel is full of the telling small details of ordinary people's lives.

The usual "ways of dying" for each age group - accidents, violence, and illness - occur as natural events in various characters' lives. The average age of death in South Africa was falling from a high of 63 in 1991 to only 53 in 2004 (the lowest since 1972, although by 2020 it had returned to 64) but people continue on with daily life: they grow up, go to school, work, form relationships, have children, and care for families. The story ought to be depressing but, despite being confronted with the inevitability of all our demises, I found it life-affirming. After all, each day means more when we understand we have so little time on this earth, and the saddest way of dying is giving up on life while you're still alive. 5*

Those who profit from death: professional mourners, authors who make art about death, those who make money out of the business of death, and politicians.

Quote

Sorry, but I collect tripe quotations: "The Archbishop earned his living during the week by selling tripe and other innards of animals in a trunk fastened to the carrier of his bicycle. He rode from one homestead to another through the village, shouting, 'Mala mogodu! Amathumbo!' in his godly baritone. This simply meant that he was touting his offal, encouraging people to buy."

Audiences on art: "As usual, they cannot say what the meaning is. It is not even necessary to say, or even to know, what the meaning is. It is enough only to know that there is a meaning, and it is a profound one."

Another late entry: this had been sitting on my shelf for ages without me even realising that Scheepers is South African...

Feeks (1999) by Riana Scheepers (South Africa, 1957- ), translated from Afrikaans to Dutch by Riet de Jong-Goossens

  

Riana Scheepers is a South African writer who grew up bilingual in Afrikaans and Zulu, and writes in the former. At the time she published this story collection she was still a high-school teacher, and she has written extensively for children as well as for adults. She doesn't seem to approve of her work being translated into English, but does seem to be quite well known in the Netherlands and Flanders.

The stories in this collection play on some obvious South African themes: Zulu and Dutch-Calvinist cultural traditions, violence, and so on, but the main recurring theme seems to be the way female strength can be elided into witchcraft. In some of the stories women are falsely accused of using supernatural powers; in others they actually do seem to have the power to change the world in unauthorised ways. Sometimes — as in the story where an elderly woman unjustly consigned to an asylum by her relatives gets her own back on the world by fine embroidery — Scheepers expresses her anger at the state the world is in subtly and very indirectly; at other times she is frighteningly direct.

I wasn't very impressed with The good doctor two years ago (>65 thorold: above), but some friends urged me to give Galgut a second chance and read his recent Booker winner. It turned out to be a much more interesting book than the other:

The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut (South Africa, 1963- )

  

The story of five diverse and complicated members of an Afrikaner family, bridging the end of apartheid, and cleverly condensed into snapshots set around the funerals of four of them. At the heart of the story is the promise made by Manie Swart to his dying wife Rachel to give a house to their black servant Salome, the person who had shouldered the heavy burden of Rachel's care during her last illness. At each missed opportunity for realising the promise, the value of the gift and the difference it could make to Salome's life become progressively less, in what's presumably a complicated allegory of South Africa and the end of minority rule.

Galgut's writing is fresh and witty, and the main characters and the storyline are complex and surprisingly free from the obvious clichés the context would lead you to expect — some of the minor characters descend into caricature, though, especially the various priests, the undertaker, and the Random-Army-Buddy-who-keeps-popping-up, who perhaps have a bit too much of the Evelyn Waugh minor character about them.

A very interesting and quite moving book about the moral and intellectual failure of a culture.