Mind Your Colour

The 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature

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Chapter 2
You taught me language¹

Few people outside South Africa will have heard of, let alone read, the works of the Afrikaner novelist, C.H. Kühn (pseudonym: Mikro). However, many will have heard of Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. Mikro's novel, Toiings, which deals with ‘coloureds’, was, and still is, regarded as one of the supreme comic efforts in Afrikaans literature. Cary's Mister Johnson is also praised for its humour. The two novelists had totally dissimilar backgrounds.

Cary, born in 1885 in Londonderry, was to become well known for his novels and writings on Africa. In 1913, at the age of twent-five, he applied for a job in the civil service in what was then Northern Nigeria. He was to remain there until 1920 when ill health forced him to return. Cary was in Africa during the period when Lord Lugard was governor of all Nigeria and was thus part and parcel of the Lugardian system of indirect rule. While he endorsed the policy of delegating power to the indigenes through chiefs, he was level-headed enough to realize that a dictatorial local potentate could easily abuse his powers. Joyce Cary wrote Aissa Saved (1932), Mister Johnson (1939), The Case for African Freedom (1944), Britain and West Africa (1946) and The African Witch (1936), all of which dealt with Africa in one way or another. Of these books his novel Mister Johnson is fairly well known among scholars of African literature.

Cary came from the British tradition of the Empire. Mikro, born in 1903 in the country district of Williston, the Cape, was from a rather stern Calvinist background. Through his entire youth he was plagued with illness. We know that he was an avid reader of Dutch, English and Afrikaans authors, that he started writing in 1930, and that it was his involvement with the ‘coloureds’ which turned him into one of the most celebrated Afrikaans authors. He himself sums up

1 ‘You taught me language’ (and my profit on't is, I know how to curse), see W. Shakespeare, Complete Works, Tudor Edition (ed. P. Alexander, 1951) especially, The Tempest, Act 1, scene 2,6. Caliban is the speaker.

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his involvement when he says: ‘I wanted to educate my Afrikaner people to have an ear and an eye for the “coloureds”.’²

Mikro wrote his famous novel, Toiings (Ragamuffin) in 1934. A sequel appeared in 1935, namely Pelgrims (Pilgrims), followed in 1944 by Vreemdelinge (Strangers). The novelist continued his interest in ‘coloured’ life with the publication of Huisies teen die heuwel (Cottages against the Hills), and Stille Uur (Silent Hour), jointly published in 1942.

If one now looks at the scant treatment of the ‘coloured’ in Afrikaans fiction up until this point, then Mikro's novels and stories, which were filled at least with empathy, were a radical departure from the general pattern. And Afrikaner critics were not slow to recognize this.

Cary's Mister Johnson is centred on the colonial Africa of 1913-20, when Cary himself was part of the colonial apparatus. Mikro had been a part of Africa ever since young Bibault uttered the, by now, famous words, ‘k' ben een Africaander’ (I am an Africaander),³ in the town of Stellenbosch, during the reign of Willem Adriaan van der Stel in 1707. This defiant phrase was spoken in the heat of the moment, in response to a political situation. Then, for the first time, the word ‘Africaander’ was used to mean ‘white’. Previously, in the seventeenth century, only blacks were taken as being from Africa. Afrikaans-speaking whites may well look upon this incident as the earliest UDI on the African continent. To them, this statement embodied the struggle of the freedom-loving Boers against the bureaucracy of the Company. Bibault's statement is therefore also looked upon as the earliest expression of Boer (Afrikaner) nationalism.

Mister Johnson was written during the hey-day of British colonialism. Achebe had not yet appeared on the literary scene. The Yoruba writer, Fagunwa, whose influence on that other Nigerian novelist, Tutuola, was said to have been profound, was unknown to the Western literary critics, although he was writing in the 1930s.

Toiings appeared at a time in South African political history when the non-white was still very much a non-person, politically and in literary terms. And this despite the assertion of the South African PEN publication, reviewing fifty years of English literature, that Sarah Gertrude Millin, with her God's Step-children (1924), and Stuart Cloete, with his The Turning Wheels (1937) had blazed the trail to a greater South African realism. Toiings was published in Afrikaans in 1934, at a time when only some twenty odd years previously, that very language was still regarded as a patois, a mere ‘Hottentot's’ prattle.

2 P.J. Nienaber, Afrikaanse Skrywers aan die woord (Johannesburg, 1947), 211.

3 ‘K'ben een Africaander’, see J.L.M. Franken, Taalhistoriese bydraes (Amsterdam, 1953), 102. Incidentally, Bibault's life with the slave, Diana, and their slave child is seldom recalled (see: Valkhoff, 1966, 212-13).

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In depicting non-whites, both Cary and Mikro used as their metaphor, the ‘distancing art of comedy’. Cary portrayed Africans who were subject to English colonialism, Mikro a people who were of Africa and Europe, both in the acculturative and genetic sense.

Cary intended his Mister Johnson to be taken seriously. Each of his novels maps out the way individuals find themselves in conflict with their environment. The conflict may be external or internal. Cary tried to show ‘certain men and their problems in the tragic background of a continent little advanced from the Stone Age, and therefore exposed, like no other, to the impact of modern toil’.⁴ Mikro himself admits:⁵

At the time of writing Toiings [Ragamuffin] and Pelgrims [Pilgrims], I was about as uncivilized as Toiings himself, and asked [myself], rather naively, whether you knew the people who lived here amongst us .... I despaired everytime someone said he had laughed so heartily at Toiings. I did not want you to laugh... Yes, they [the Coloureds], also suffer, also strive, hope, laugh, live and mourn. And they are at our portals. We must not be light-hearted about their future. Toiings was a beggar at your door-step, hands out-stretched for a bit of love and understanding. In my mind's eye, I saw all Coloureds, all of them standing thus beggars among you... I saw them as pilgrims who were journeying with us to the same destination.

In a fairly lengthy review of the novel by Francois Malherbe in 1934, which appeared in Die Huisgenoot, he writes as follows:⁶

We live among a large Coloured population. They are as old as our nation. From the earliest times, our existence has been closely intertwined with theirs. They have built our houses, cultivated our land ... shared our sorrows and joys. They have carried us in their arms, they were our first playmates; we had love and respect for outa and aia. Their language is ours also, so also their customs and habits. They have no other country .... Culturally, however, we have regarded them as too brown (and left them) to English institutes like ‘Zonnebloem’ to teach them Shakespeare and Galsworthy ... Yes, the Coloured remains a problem.

All the Afrikaner ambivalences were contained in this evaluation of the ‘coloured’ within the South African context. Malherbe went on to laud the ‘child-like’ and ‘spontaneous’ Toiings. Later on, he was to

4 Allan Hall, ‘The African Novels of Joyce Cary’, in: Standpunte (Kaapstad, 1958), 12, 2:49.

5 Nienaber, 1947, 211.

6 Review of Toiings by Fransie Malherbe in Die Huisgenoot, 20 July, 1934, 33.

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sound a more critical note. There is a noticeable tendency among Afrikaner critics to slightly, not radically, change their views, as the situation demands it. Yet Toiings still remained, for Malherbe, the story of a neglected boy who learned to love a good girl (goeie meid).⁷

In 1958, however, Malherbe was prepared to concede that Toiings was still seen too much from the ‘viewpoint of the Baas’. Malherbe admonished the ‘coloured’ reader not to take exception to the terms ‘Baas’, ‘jong’, ‘meid’ and ‘skepsel’,⁸ which are liberally strewn throughout Afrikaans fiction. In magnanimous vein, he recognized that the educated ‘coloured’, and especially the teacher, would find it difficult to make such fare palatable to his ‘brown’ pupils. But, said the learned man, such objections arose out of feelings of inferiority - something which had also troubled his people (the Afrikaners) for so long, and which they eventually overcame. Dekker (1947) also constantly referred to the ‘coloured boy’ and his ‘meid’ and to the child-like nature of Toiings.

To all these critics, Mikro was the realist who observed the ‘coloured’ and who ‘portrays him in his way of life, his attitudes, his gestures, his mentality and his language’. Beukes and Lategan (1959) call Mikro ‘the most artistic portrayer of the “coloured” soul and life in literature’.⁹ Notwithstanding the attempts at a more honest and critical evaluation of the way in which the ‘coloured’ is portrayed in Afrikaans literature, Toiings and the like remain well within the physical and mental landscape of the Afrikaner.

Most ‘coloured’ readers will, in so far as they will ever read or get hold of Mphahlele's The African Image (which is banned in South Africa), readily agree with his critical assessment when he fulminates:¹⁰

Like South African fiction of the nineteenth century, this was a gloating literature. More recently, a few novelists began to concern themselves with contemporary ‘problems’, but still with a defensive and wounded manner about them: the ‘colour problem’, the ‘Jewish problem’, the ‘poor-white problem’. Mikro the novelist, like Sarah Gertrude Millin, depicts grovelling, degenerate ‘Coloured’ labour squatters (Uncle Toms among them), and like Mrs Millin, he dislikes mixed blood. Jochem van Bruggen¹¹ is a sort of one-eyed Dickens: he sees only poor-whites and not in the complete setting ....The Hobson brothers¹¹ think of Bushmen as sub-human.... There is Frans Venter's novel.... In him the Afrikaans has just caught onto the black man come to the city.

7 ‘Meid’ generally has a derogatory connotation when applied to a ‘coloured’ female. In translation, however, it loses its sting and racial connotation.

8 The way in which terms are used in South Africa gives a clear indication of ethnic inter-relationships. The terms ‘baas’ (master), ‘jong’ (boy), ‘meid’ (see note 7), ‘skepsel’ (thing), express the subordinate position of the ‘coloured’ in white South Africa. See also the parallel with the Latin word ‘creare’ (thing/house-hold slave), Afrikaans skepsel.

9 G. Beukes and F. Lategan, Skrywers en Rigtings (Pretoria, 1959³), 254.

10 E. Mphahlele, The African Image (London, 1962), 107-8.

11 Jochem van Bruggen wrote some novels in which he realistically portrayed the poor-white via his main character, Ampie. The Hobson brothers wrote a novel called Skankwan van die duine (Skankwan of the dunes), which has, as its main character, one of the original inhabitants of South Africa, a San. He is portrayed as being half-animal, half-human.

11 Jochem van Bruggen wrote some novels in which he realistically portrayed the poor-white via his main character, Ampie. The Hobson brothers wrote a novel called Skankwan van die duine (Skankwan of the dunes), which has, as its main character, one of the original inhabitants of South Africa, a San. He is portrayed as being half-animal, half-human.

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One may question Mphahlele's attempts to impose his artistic vision on that of the artist, but one cannot fail to recognize his objections, if the historical and socio-cultural situation is taken into account.

Both Cary and Mikro were didactic in their purposes, both somewhat of the sociologist manqué. Cary was more of an outsider than Mikro. If there was any saving grace in his involvement with Africa at all, then it was that English colonialism allowed its participants and perpetrators, finally and ultimately, to withdraw. Cary could openly decide ‘to avoid the African setting which demands a certain kind of story, a certain violence and coarseness of detail.’¹² Mikro, as an ‘Africaander’, could not ever dream of avoiding Africa.

Historically, Cary was part of an Africa where the Lugardian system of indirect rule was in operation, a system which, in the words of Christopher Fyfe, ‘at its best envisioned the development of African territories by slow easy stages towards eventual self-government’ - a political code which made the ‘idealistic administrator feel that he was helping Africa forwards by introducing new ways gradually in forms Africans could easily accept’.¹³

Mikro was part of a South Africa, which, by the very act of Union (1910), had placed all non-whites beyond the rule of law - had turned them into non-citizens. Between the covert apartheid of the 1930s, the latter more overt forms of the fifties, and the system of indirect rule as applied by Lord Lugard in Nigeria, there was, and still is, a remarkable similarity in intent and purpose.

In Toiings, the reader is confronted with the ‘Cape coloured’ shepherd, who finds unexpected happiness in his friendship with his master Fanie, and later on, Siena, who becomes his wife. His love for Siena is referred to as something ‘noble’. It is placed in inverted commas, for the very word itself, and the situation surrounding Toiings, has a comic ring. One is reminded of Volkelt's formulation that ‘alles Komische ist Auflösung eines Wertanspruch in sein Nichts’¹⁴ - a claim to have a certain value, wisdom or truth, which fizzles out in reality into a mere nothingness. Now, it is a fact that often what passes for humour is nothing but comic. This danger happens especially when the European writer depicts groups of peoples culturally and somatically different from themselves. Thus, F.E.J. Malherbe, in his otherwise stimulating study of humour, could use as an example of the comic, the illiterate African with his double-breasted suit pocket littered and illuminated with imitation gold pens and carrying a satchel stuffed with books (a classic example of a white-envisioned stereotype black, the townsman as opposed to the tribesman). The incongruities of the black and

12 Allan Hall, 1958, 47-8.

13 C. Fyfe, ‘The Colonial Situation in Mister Johnson’, in: Modern Fiction Studies, 9 (London, 1963), 226-30.

14 Joh. Volkelt, System der Aesthetik, 11 (München, 1910), 400.

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illiterate, as opposed to the civilized and the Christian, is for Malherbe an illustration of the claim to something higher which fades away into nothingness. One could, of course, counter by taking an illiterate poor-white, who puts on tails and striped trousers, but keeps his clogs on. But such an exercise would be pointless and prove nothing. Malherbe has, however, added, within the context of his cultural situation, an element to the Volkelt formula, which I would like to classify as a touch of ‘comic ethnocentricity’.

The practically illiterate Toiings has such an ethereal view of love and life - if indeed such a concept can be applied to such a person - that he refuses to kiss his simple, trusting and God-fearing wife at night, and can only bring himself to shake hands with her. He becomes an object of sniggers among Mikro's countrymen, the Afrikaners, and one of anger among the ‘coloureds’, who suspect that the author is only making fun of them. This portrayal totally conforms with the image of the ‘coloured’ as experienced by the Afrikaners, which is fraught with condescension and ‘benevolent paternalism’. While the Afrikaner does not view his attitude as such, the ‘coloureds’ do. The English were, of course, not averse to paternalism in their relations with the blacks. But theirs was of a type which cannot fully be dealt with in this chapter.

Yet, both Toiings and Mister Johnson are remarkable in that the emphasis is on the individual, and not on the ready-made situation which is dramatically always at hand in racially heterogeneous and culturally diffuse societies. Mister Johnson is child-like in his ambitions, his grandiose schemes of wealth, his endeavours to be popular. Toiings lacks Mister Johnson's imaginative flair, is more stolid, but no less child-like at times. Mister Johnson is constantly in trouble, largely through his own doing. Toiings' own world blows up from time to time, partly through external factors: the death of his first wife, drought on the farm, a little bit of wanderlust. Mister Johnson's existence is a constant flight into unreality. He lives what Hall (1958) calls a ‘Walter Mitty’ type of existence. Every disaster or nearmisfortune only lends added glamour to his precarious pattern of life.

The Toiings who strays and then gets temporarily involved with a city woman, is a sad figure, one enlisting our sympathies. When he gets involved with Drieka, the woman from Eppenton (the ‘coloured’ version of the English word, Eppington), a suburb outside Cape Town, he is still occasionally afflicted with remorse and a sense of morality. ‘Toiings wanted her with his entire being. He would have her come what may.... At first, his excesses worried him. There

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are still Baas Fanie, nôi Miemie and Siena who might hear about it. At such times he was surly and wandered around in the veld’.¹⁵

The Mister Johnson who is so bold as to take money from the native treasury, has no remorse. Waziri, the moving spirit behind it all, forces Johnson to procure a confidential report from the district officer, which in typical Johnson fashion is nearly bungled. When the natives jeer at him on his way home - they had heard that he was caught in the act - he can only interpret their attention as an added feather in his cap:¹⁶

Benjamin, stepping out with slower dignity, says, ‘I hear, Mister Johnson, he nearly catch you. Are you not afraid of that prison?’ He looks at Johnson with a kind of wondering curiosity.
Johnson laughs and tosses his hat to Sozy, hovering round him as usual at three yards' range, afraid to come nearer, but unable to take her eyes off him. ‘He no catch me - I do what I want I see everything in dem safe’.
‘What de good of dat - you no catch nutting?’
‘I no try to catch him. You tink I fool?’
‘What you do den, Mister Johnson?’
Johnson has no idea. But he opens his mouth to utter something and at once his imagination provides him with a plan, glorious and impressive.
‘I go take 'em when Mister Rudbeck not dar’.

To Joyce Cary, the author, Mister Johnson was ‘the artist in life, creating his life ... one of those who scarcely notices whether he has friends or not; he gives friendship but has no time to ask whether he gets it. He is too busy.’ Cary goes on to make the point that Johnson need not forgive. ‘You notice how children don't need to forgive: they forget.... He couldn't live in resentment; because life was too exciting, he was whirling on.’¹⁷

I think it was this child-like, ever-smiling and innocent quality in Mister Johnson which prompted Mphahlele to rail in his African Image:¹⁸

I flung away Mister Johnson with exasperation when I tried to read it for the first time, in South Africa. I had seen too many journalistic caricatures of black people and ‘bongo-bongo cartoons’ showing Africans with filed teeth and bones stuck in their hair - too many for me to find amusement in Johnson's behaviour, always on the verge of farce.

15 Mikro (pseudonym of C.H. Kühn), Toiings (Pretoria, 1944¹¹), 97.

16 Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson (London, 1952), 62.

17 A. Hall, 1958, 52.

18 E. Mphahlele, 1962, 161.

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Not surprisingly, Cary becomes a very difficult author to teach in West Africa. The charges range from racialism to total disrespect for the African, a biased portrayal of the blackman by a white author who could only see Africans as noble savages, buffoons or bungling fools suspended acculturatively. The main point is that we are confronted with a reaction against a European ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ vision of the blackman, who is in the process of demythologizing himself after colonialism, who is in the throes of, or has just emerged from, a violent nationalism and is groping towards an African way of life. Here, it is once more clear that, art for arts sake, or the interpretation of a text outside its sociological context, is a mere academic exercise.

Toiings too is found to be objectionable within the South African context by those people who, on the basis of their level of consciousness, reject a taxonomy which relegates them to being ‘coloured’. Right through he remains the simple, trusting person, who falters only occasionally. Karreeplaas (the farm of his master) is the cradle of happiness. When Toiings leaves this valhalla, the reader expects him to falter and undergo a process of degeneration. Likewise, one expects him to return after he has come to his senses - a process accelerated by the illness of his son, David. And, in returning to Karreeplaas, he is logically ready for the ultimate culmination of his newlyfound happiness in the person of Jannetjie.

Toiings at least is preserved by a supercilious, but master-child affection, from his master and madame; more important, by his love for Siena and, after her death, by Jannetjie's love, which is an extension of the Siena love. Like Mister Johnson, Toiings is characterized by a certain naïveté. But, whereas the Bamu-Johnson relationship strikes one as discordant and not fully worked out, that of Toiings and Siena, and later on Jannetjie, has no such false note. Bamu will never cease to be a conservative bush pagan, Johnson will always be a tragic victim of the process of acculturation. Bamu's African world is real, Johnson's will always remain unreal. Mister Johnson has set himself apart from his environment, has taken to wearing English suits and using formal English. Toiings at least operates within his limitations. When Johnson takes the English woman, Celia, to meet his wife, the ensuing encounter is superb for its comic portrayal of the two worlds existing side by side:¹⁹

Before Johnson can speak, she comes in, sees Bamu and cries, ‘Oh, you're Mrs. Johnson’.

19 Cary, 1952, 86.

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She shakes hands with Bamu and says to Johnson, ‘I think you are very clever to get such a pretty wife’.
Bamu stares at her with a look of penetrating contempt and says nothing.
‘She wear a cloth this morning, small small for clean de house’, Johnson explains.
‘Oh, but it suits her beautifully - I hope she always wears the native dress. It is so much nicer than those terrible mission frocks.’

Tooings and Siena have a credibility which is lacking in Mister Johnson. Although critics try to prove the opposite, Toiings and Mister Johnson remain types which conform, especially to the European vision of the ‘coloured’ and the ‘native’. Where Toiings is portrayed comically, the ‘coloured’ interprets it as the white man laughing at the non-white. Where the white critic talks of Mikro's love for Toiings, the non-white can only see a benevolent paternalism. Where Toiings is portrayed with humour, the ‘coloured’ can only see him as a buffoon, someone who is liberally plied with liquor, and who constantly eulogizes wine as an essential component in his life, as is also evident from Mikro's Huisies teen die heuwel and Stille uur (1942). One of the characters says: ‘Pete you know me. Chrisjan knows me. Salute knows me. You all know me. Take me and drink as an example. Drink I say, for what else is there to do on this world?’²⁰

Fully in accordance with the custom observed hitherto, F.E.J. Malherbe comments on the passage in the following vein: ‘In this way does Mikro portray his naïve children of nature, in their shy, superstitious and passionate nature.’²¹

Similar notes are sounded in the work of Boerneef (pseudonym: I.W.v.d. Merwe), where the relationship between the farm ‘coloured’ and the farm white is described as being ‘not too intimate like two white people, yet very much familiar, like a young white master (duusbaas) can sometimes be with just a “plaashotnot” (farmhotnot). Each knew his place’.²² Andries Harlekyn's (clown) eulogy to ‘vaaljapie’,²³ in the works of Boerneef, is only a continuation of a peculiarly Afrikaans literary tradition. In his state of inebriation, the ‘coloured’ becomes a further object of ridicule and laughter for the Afrikaner public.

Like Toiings, Mister Johnson also has a white man cum god-father, Rudbeck, who is tied to him by a bond of paternal affection. The clerk had stolen his heart by enthusiastically supporting his road

20 F.E.J. Malherbe, ‘Die kleurprobleem en die letterkunde’, in: Afrikaanse Lewe en Letterkunde (Stellenbosch, 1958), 81.

21 Ibid., 82.

22 Ibid., 82.

23 ‘Vaaljapie’ is a cheap wine drunk especially by the farm labourer and the urban proletariat. The educated ‘coloured’ sometimes frenchifies the word in jocular fashion to ‘vaeldzdpi’.

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scheme. For Rudbeck, the road is an obsession. Johnson on the other hand, is so emotionally attached to him and so eager to please, that Rudbeck finds it difficult to be his executioner at the very end, and ironically, Johnson wants Rudbeck to shoot him. Yet Johnson's exit is entirely in keeping with his performance throughout the book and therefore the only realizable and acceptable one. Johnson ‘triumphs in the greatness, the goodness and the daring inventiveness of Rudbeck. All the force of his spirit is concentrated in gratitude and triumphant devotion; he is calling on the world to admit there is no other god like his god. He burst out aloud, “Oh Lawd, I tank you for my frien' Mr. Rudbeck - de bigges' heart in the worl'”.’²⁴

Toiings is charmingly naïve at times. In his moment of greatest happiness, he kneels down in the field and prays to God: ‘Dear Oubaas. It's me Toiings. I look after the sheep on Baas Fanie's farm, and I love Siena. Yes, Master, Amen.’²⁵ Generally however, he plays out his comic-ascribed role. He prepares his son, ‘Dawid Goliat Filistyn’,²⁶ very carefully for his obsequious role on the farm. The farm-hands answer to the names of Woer-woer and Windvoël. The village is full of pitfalls, and by implication, the farm stands for peace, order and purity. Toiings had no such dramatic exit as Mister Johnson. After all, he never aspired so high, and could, therefore, never fall so low.

A remarkable feature, then, of humour in a white-black situation is that the black can so easily become a buffoon of some sort or another. This image is sometimes dictated by the social roles in colonial society; for example, the arrogant superiority of the white and the servility and subservience of the black (and the necessary interaction of the two groups), all of which forces the non-white character to play out his expected comic role. Invariably, the illiterate or semi-literate is also forced, through a process of acculturation, to use a language which is a corruption of his own and that of the white man. This, and his incomprehension of the subtleties of the European language, further makes for a linguistically comic farce. No doubt African students found this one of the objectionable features of Mister Johnson. My experience at Fourah Bay, Sierra Leone, certainly showed that Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief could not count on much sympathy from African students.

Cary's Mister Johnson had ‘most of the qualities the native traditionally has in romantic fiction’. Yet Cary ‘does not romanticize him or his fate: Johnson dies sadly, not heroically, becoming tragic only in his pathetic desire to retain his dignity.’²⁷

24 J. Cary, 1952, 204.

25 Mikro (C.H. Kühn), Toiings (Pretoria, 1944¹¹), 13.

26 Ibid., 33.

27 F.R. Karl, The Contemporary English Novel (London, 1963), 139.

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Comments by white critics have, at times, only complicated the picture. The comment in Beukes and Lategan on Toiings is certainly not calculated to endear the book, or the main character, to the ‘coloured’ public at large: ‘Just as the wild animal of our country ... had to give us the animal story, so also the Coloureds and the African intimately connected with Afrikaner life were bound to find their way into Afrikaans fiction.’²⁸

The Englishman, Kettle, has taken Cary to task for showing a lack of realism in Mister Johnson. ‘Rudbeck shoots Johnson as he would a suffering dog to whom he feels a special responsibility and although the horror of the act is conveyed, it is somewhat blunted by the underlying paternalism of Joyce Cary.’²⁹ Kettle questions the Cary portrayal against the emergent forces of nationalism. Hall finds Mister Johnson a ‘social tragedy in which a man's fate is shaped by forces not only beyond his control but outside his comprehension ... the jetsam cast up by opposing tides of African and European cultures.’³⁰

African students, we have noticed earlier, have difficulties with the portrayal of a Joyce Cary or an Evelyn Waugh. ‘Coloured’ South Africans find it just as hard to swallow the white depictions whole. The realism of colonialism and indirect rule, as well as that of degradation and apartheid in South Africa, preclude mere beneficent assessments.

The artist can of course approach reality in diverse ways. He can concentrate on these outer manifestations with love, get to know them so intimately that they reveal a higher, spiritual truth to him. He can also be swept away by his own emotion and ideas and exploit the outward visual aspect as a means of reflecting his own inner life. He may not be enthralled by the things themselves, but by their value as symbols. In his art, the visual aspect will fade to give way to symbolic significance.

Realism which in everyday life reveals a true humanity is often typified as humour. But humour should never be confused with shallow laughter, mere jocosity. The humorist detects small contradictions in life which evoke laughter. But often these contradictions only serve to hide a deeper, spiritual contrast between the ideal and the real. The laughter of the true humorist is therefore often softened, or toned down, to a smile of sympathy or even empathy at times. The humorist will laugh about the incongruities, the follies of people, as well as the inexplicabilities of their fate with a conciliatory smile. Humour carries with it always a hint of the tragic, which brings with it ‘complication, infinite complexity of motive and action’.³¹

28 G. Beukes and F. Lategan, 1958, 253.

29 Arnold Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel (London, 1955), 2:183.

30 A. Hall, 1958, 54.

31 F.R. Karl, 1963, 179.

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The non-white objections highlight some of the difficulties in applying humour to white-black situations. One should not forget that our emotions are largely stimulated and determined by institutionalized structures. Not surprisingly, therefore, humour to a large extent boils down to the manner in which we deviate from, or play with, the institutionalized patterns of our emotions. Humour can therefore only be comprehended within its existing and peculiar situation (culture or sub-culture).

Mphahlele, the South African, and other West African critics and students have succeeded in drawing attention to an important and essential element in humour, namely the observer, the audience, or the silent participant. In the case of Toiings, we are largely concerned with the effect of this work of art on the ‘Cape coloured’, who finds himself politically and culturally in a system of ascribed roles as opposed to achieved roles, with no tribal past or folklore ready for resuscitation by some white parliamentarians. To them, the manner in which Mikro has crossed the institutionalized borders is not funny at all. The ‘coloured’ public is irritated, embarrassed and not amused by Toiings. Rightly does Zijderveld (1971) point out in his study on humour as a social phenomenon that the way in which the observer defines or assesses the situation, will determine whether there is cause for embarrassment or irritation, alarm or laughter. All this, in turn, will be determined by the cultural values of the observer.

Realism for the dispossessed means apartheid; deprivation: physically, culturally and mentally. Realism means being a non-person, existing by the grace of the whites. Realism means entrenchment in ethnocentricity. How serious white South Africans were in portraying the ‘coloured’, will become even clearer when we deal with the works of Millin and Cloete. For, if hitherto, the Afrikaans author could only see his ‘coloured’ character as an object of fun, then English novelists like Sarah Gertrude Millin were to turn him into a leper.