life in their societies and the profound sense of dissatisfaction with the continuing social inequalities.
‘I am determined to leave Chandrapore’, says Aziz in E.M. Forster's novel, A Passage to India. ‘The problem is, for where? I am determined to write poetry, the problem is about what?’ At this moment, Africans do not wish to leave if they can help it, and they know exactly what to write about.
In Southern Africa the opening of a final war between white racial minority regimes and the dispossessed blacks, has created a new urgency among writers who cannot help but reflect the sharpening of the conflict.
If we read a novel like Robben Island by D.M. Zwelonke about the prisoners, where the author himself was an inmate, we encounter what has become the same phenomenon. As a novel Robben Island shares with other works of its kind a harrowing tone - ‘howling’ would be a more precise word - if a defiant universality, rootless, potent, disturbing.
Do we not, after all, imagine we have read this same account by other political prisoners in Brazil, spain, Portugal or Greece: ‘The keys clanked and rattled as the iron bars swung open. The heavy paw on my shoulder, jerked me into the cell. The privy-stink greeted my nostrils, the stink of fresh fart. The lights clicked on as a man rose from a little bucket, pulling his trousers up. A concentrated stink diffused from the bucket, filling the cell, now that the buttocks that had been its lid were removed.’ (71)
And yet the tone is not of self-pity. This is a novel of extremely fierce ‘wit’ which has turned suffering into an object of grim, barely suppressed comedy. Beneath its surface of anguished recollection there is a vain of incredible gaiety and defiance. Again and again Zwelonke shows us how even in South African dungeon it is possible to construct out of the ordinary, neglected objects of our daily lives the structures which make civilisation possible. Awaiting trial in solitary confinement, his morale at its lowest ebb, the author is given a copy of the Bible: ‘I read it avidly’, he tells us. ‘I asked for one written in Shangani, I liked the language... Then once I also found in the prison library a historical novel set in the Roman Empire, which set the corpusles of my blood circulating at cosmic speed.’ (72)
Zwelonke, Carim, and South Africa's newest poets like Mtshali and Mattera, have managed to construct from the shattered fragments of life under oppression, a literature of value and defiant self-assertion which goes beyond simple ‘protest’. I would hope that reading a book like this members of PEN International would not merely sympathise with the horros of imprisonment and torture under the system apartheid, but that they may consider concrete menas of ending that system. One way of doing this would be to expel the PEN-Club of South Africa.
As you probably know, before coming to your conference, I participated in a workshop of South African and Dutch writers and Artists organised by ‘De Populier’, cultural centre in Amsterdam from 7th - 10th May. The general theme of the workshop was: ART CONTRA APARTHEID.
About 40 writers, artists and representatives of liberation movements were present at this workshop. The South Africans were nearly all exiled writers and artists, coming from countries in Africa, Europe and America.
Mr. Chairman, we had invited these writers from South Africa: James Matthews, a short-story writer and novelist, the poet Pascal Gwala, and Adam Small, also a poet. In the event, only Adam Small was able to be present. We do not yet have the full facts as to why James Matthews and Pascal Gwala were unable to appear but we know that James Matthews sent a communication to Mrs. Mineke Schipper, explaining that should he fail to arrive it would be because he had been denied a visa and asking this conference to denounce the South African Government's constant interference with the right to travel.
Mr. Chairman, as a result of our three-day deliberations we passed a number of resolutions with regard to the cultural agreement between the government of the Netherlands and the racist minority regime of South Africa. The second major resolution dealth with the position of the South African chapter of PEN and I was especially mandated to bring that resolution before the attention of this conference. I believe the document containing all the resolutions and proposals which emerged from the Amsterdam workshop have been circulated at this conference, but I shall proceed to read the precise text relating to the question of the South African PEN-Club.
‘This conference, noting that the South African PEN-Club practices racism and therefore, according to the United Nations resolutions has no right to be a member of any international organisation,
a) | calls upon the International PEN-Club to forthwith expel the South African Pen-Club; |
b) | requests the International PEN-Club to give every assistance to a non-racial alternative body which may be set up by South African writers and artists.’ |
The position of the South African PEN-Club has remained a troubling one for a long time. I know that the South African PEN-Club claims that it does not practise racism; that formally speaking there is nothing in its rules which prohibits Black membership, that there are even one or two non-white writers who are members. But I am bound to say, Mr. Chairman, that the majority of the black writers and the progressive white writers who bear the brunt of the repressive measures of the South African government have no confidence in the South African PEN-Club, and, rightly so in my opinion. And what are the reasons for this?
The South African PEN-Club has failed to carry out its minimal obligations towards those black writers and their progressive white comrades who are victimised by the racist minority regime. In our opinion it is not enough for the PEN-Club of South Africa merely to condemn censorship in general terms: the situation in South Africa is more critical that that. We need a more representative PEN-Club in South Africa which enjoys the confidence of the majority of writers because it is seen to truly