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Mind Your Colour (1981)

Mind Your Colour

(1981)–Vernon February–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

The 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature


Vorige Volgende

Chapter 6
A voice in the wilderness1

In Adam Small, the ‘coloured’ poet and dramatist, this ambiguity towards Afrikaans culture surfaces very strongly. The poet seems to be a bit of an anomaly on the South African literary scene. Afrikaans literature has never been extremely rich in ‘coloured’ authors and after the police brutality in the ‘coloured’ townships of Bonteheuwel and Manenberg in 1976, probably never will be. Those authors who have, however, written in Afrikaans are carefully nurtured in textbooks. S.V. Petersen, the poet and novelist, has kept an eerie silence, while P.J. Philander has apparently chosen the safe confines of a Quaker school in Long Island, New York. This discussion of Adam Small will also reveal how difficult it is to maintain oneself as an artist and a human being when one's views conflict with those held by others in the society.

Adam Small has been a contentious person in the Cape setting. During the late fifties and early sixties, the politically conscious ‘coloured’ found his political aspirations largely reflected in the NEUM (Non-European Unity Movement) and the Anti-CAD (Anti-Coloured Affairs Department), but Small kept to himself. In fact, during those vitriolic years culminating in the massacre of Sharpeville, it was almost heretical not to belong to one of the many political groups operating in Cape Town and its environment. Apostasy was severely attacked, abstinence turned one into a quisling - a favourite term of abuse for dissidents. Another of the weapons used from time to time was social ostracism. Few people could face up to the severities and most of them capitulated. Adam Small seemingly withstood all these pressures.

He was suspect among a section of the politically conscious ‘coloureds’ for another reason. At a time when there was a general plea for a boycott of the specially created university institutions, Small did

not hesitate to accept a lectureship at the one established for ‘coloureds’. Thus, the ‘brown Afrikaner’ badge came to be associated with him. The politically conscious ‘coloured’ looked upon the establishment of the university college for ‘coloureds’ in Bellville, a town outside Cape Town, as an attempt to forge the ‘new brown man’. And as such, any association with these ‘apartheid institutions’ was looked upon as a form of betrayal.

Small was also a poet and a dramatist who chose Afrikaans as his medium of expression. Since Afrikaans was generally associated with the architects of apartheid, it was not favourably looked upon by the educated and politically-conscious ‘coloured’, especially in the urban areas.

This question of language in a colonial situation is of course of fundamental importance. In the Cape, the language question gave rise to numerous debates among the teachers who belonged to the TLSA (Teachers League of South Africa). Readers were treated for weeks on end to a series of articles in which a certain Rylate2 (a pseudonym) took a critical look at the language question in the country. Afrikaans in particular was scathingly dismissed as a fascist language. The author was also contemptuous of the white efforts to foist Bantu languages onto the African. Of Afrikaans he writes:3

The ‘taal’, once formed, had a most revealing up-and-down history. After spreading under the DEIC it fell back with the coming of the British in 1806. Thereafter, ITS FORTUNES BECAME INSEPARABLE FROM THOSE OF THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL TREKBOERS. Thus, the First Taalbeweging...did not start as a language but as a POLITICAL movement.

Writing about the entrenchment of Afrikaans in urban areas and especially in industry, Rylate observes:4

Afrikaans became the ‘werktaal’ of the platteland reflecting all its particular viciousness, vulgarity, coarseness, barbarism and backwardness. The townward migration of the Afrikaners between the two wars spread Afrikaans into the peri-urban and even into the urban areas. Since they constituted the main bulk of the white labour aristocracy...Afrikaans tended to become a ‘werktaal’ also in the cities, thereby reinforcing the Afrikaans spoken by the Non-European workers who had migrated from the country to the town and acting as a human wall between the Non-Europeans and English.

A.C. Jordan, that distinguished scholar of African languages, was then given space to reply to Rylate's arguments. Being more of a linguist and therefore in a better position to sort out the straight political issues from the linguistic arguments, Jordan proceeded to point out that some of the arguments were rather inspired by the politics of Rylate. He showed how Rylate's attitude towards Afrikaans was the reverse side of the coin, that is, of white attitudes towards non-whites. Jordan also questioned the non-critical approach to English which, as the major language of imperialism and colonialism, had led to the exploitation of nations all over Africa and Asia. The general attitude was however crystal clear even in the fifties. Afrikaans was a language of contempt and of oppression. The whites were only interested in creating Bantu languages in order to retribalize the African. Linguistically then, these arguments may be full of loopholes. Yet, politically, they expressed what many a ‘coloured’ felt.

The Afrikaner, through his policy of Christian National Education5 enunciated in 1948, tried to foist onto the ‘coloured’, what he conceived of as ‘mother-tongue’ instruction (generally referred to in Afrikaans as moedertaal-onderwys). This, in essence, meant education through the medium of Afrikaans. Many ‘coloureds’ looked upon moedertaal-onderwys as nothing but a ruse to keep them backward. Moreover, there was more than just a sneaking suspicion that this type of education was deliberately designed to keep the non-white from learning English and therefore cutting him off from a more universal culture. This was unmasked with perspicacity by Bastiaanse in The Educational Journal of the Teachers League of South Africa as far back as 1956, more than twenty years before the eruptions at Soweto and Bonteheuwel. In fact, his argument has a greater validity than ever since Soweto. Bastiaanse writes: ‘moedertaal-onderwys is masqueraded as “mother-tongue instruction”, whereas in fact it is no more than the political enforcement of Afrikaans as a medium in schools.’6

The author then goes on to make it categorically clear that he is not against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction and communication as such, but opposed to the way in which the language is exploited in order to bolster up the system of apartheid. Afrikaans becomes a tool of the hated system of Christian National Education which, to most enlightened ‘coloureds’, is neither Christian, nor National, let alone a system of education. Bastiaanse continues:7

What is being attacked is the use of Afrikaans as a political weapon not only for the supremacy of one section of the Herrenvolk

over the other section, but, worse still, for its use as an agency of domination over the millions of Non-Whites in this country.

When one therefore reads the views of an anthropologist who has spent possibly a year or more in the Cape among the ‘coloureds’, in one specific area, namely, Woodstock, commenting in the following vein, one seriously doubts the use of even informants in the discipline of anthropology. The American O'Toole makes such a vain attempt to explain why ‘Cape coloureds’ prefer English to Afrikaans, in his book, Watts and Woodstock (1973). He invokes Fanon who wrote that ‘The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter - that is, he will come closer to being a real human being - in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.’8 Now, O'Toole would have us believe that if we substituted ‘Cape coloured’ for ‘Negro’, we would have ‘an accurate statement of the value of language to the Coloured people’. O'Toole continues:9

Many Coloureds are insulted if a stranger assumes Afrikaans is their first language. Almost all Coloureds will answer a telephone and exchange greetings on the street in English...The general rule, according to Coloured informants, is that what is mundane, trivial, unimportant (or romantic) is spoken in Afrikaans.

O'Toole is guilty of generalization when he says, for instance, that ‘almost all coloureds will answer...in English’, for a similar survey in the Boland, an Afrikaans-speaking rural environment, would produce the exact opposite result.

If one looks at O'Toole's analysis, it would seem more logical for the ‘coloured’ to adopt Afrikaans rather than English if he wished entry into, and acceptance by, the dominant group: the Afrikaner. For I have yet to meet ‘Cape coloureds’ who try to ‘play white’ by simulating an Anglo-Saxon background. In view of the historical situation, it is easier for the ‘coloured’ to pass as an Afrikaner than an Englishman. Possibly, O'Toole was too eager to swallow some of the information passed on by his informants whole and would have done well to invoke, or heed, Fanon's other warning: ‘The blackman has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man.’10

In South Africa, where the white man is rather loth to listen to the black man's protest, the oppressed are only too happy to find a willing ear in liberals from overseas. Quite obviously, the real reason must be sought in that peculiar and near-incestuous relationship that exists

between Afrikaner and ‘Cape coloured’. The ‘coloured’ is turning away from Afrikaans for several reasons. It is a deliberate act of defiance and an expression of contempt for ‘die Boere’ (the Boers), as Afrikaners are abusively referred to.

This hardening of ‘coloured’ attitudes towards the Afrikaner as a group, came out very clearly in a study by the late Melville Edelstein, entitled, What Do the Coloureds Think? (1974). He concluded that the ‘coloureds’ put more social distance between themselves and the Afrikaner than any other race group, barring blacks of course. He also found that ‘coloureds’ had a very low opinion of the Afrikaner as a group. However, ‘coloureds’ tend to change their attitude to the Afrikaner depending on their personal experiences.

If contempt for Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom constituted one facet, then the basic question of English versus Afrikaans is the other important factor. ‘Coloureds’ all realize that a mastery of the English language will bring in its wake an accessibility to a greater culture, and to greater cultural values. This in itself is nothing new in a colonial situation, where a rejection of the language of the political overlord is a well-known form of protest. I have seen this type of language soul-searching at first hand in Surinam, the former Dutch West Indies, just prior to independence in 1975.

Historically, Dutch has been the medium of instruction in the schools, the language of the law courts and of government. Side by side, there was, however, Sranan Tongo (lit. the Surinamese Tongue), a Creole language, which has steadily become the lingua franca of the various ethnic groups. Before independence, and one can safely assume even afterwards, the entire role of Dutch in post-colonial Surinam came up for scrutiny. The antagonists of Dutch argued that the language was spoken by a few million people and of no use internationally. This was a very valid objection. But the political argument should not be ignored, for the Dutch language was, and still is, associated with Surinamese enslavement by some nationalist. Shedding Dutch would therefore mean shedding another layer of enslavement.

The Surinamese example clearly illustrates that the alternatives suggested pose equally serious problems. It is, after all, an established fact that there is a generation of Surinamese so steeped in the Dutch language and culture, that an imposition of another language would create serious problems. The elevation of Sranan Tongo to that of official language would have serious drawbacks in terms of international relations.

In the Ministerial document of 1975, it was therefore duly recognized that Dutch could not be dispensed with forthwith, although

the priorities emerged quite clearly. The preference was for English, Spanish, Portuguese and (for the time being) Dutch, in this order. I have purposely used the Surinamese example to show how, in a country which had various possibilities open, the choice was no less easy.

In South Africa, there is not such a variety of European language alternatives as in Surinam. In a sense, this was a blessing, for the choice is a fairly straightforward one between English and Afrikaans. It was further facilitated by the fact that one language, Afrikaans, was associated with apartheid and Afrikanerdom, parochialism and oppression, and that English was regarded as the gateway to the wider, un-prejudiced world. Moreover, English was the language of Shakespeare and not of the ox-wagon and the musket. It is therefore logical, in view of the government measures to create small, self-contained ethnic groups, that non-whites should choose an international means of communication. The choice is not ethnically, but politically inspired.

Language as an instrument in the process of enslavement and colonialism is therefore of fundamental importance. In fact, ‘coloured’ attitudes towards the art of Adam Small are largely responsible for his oeuvre being ignored in ‘coloured’ schools. The article by G. Jonker, in the militant, anti-government, but well-respected Teachers League of South Africa Journal (October-November 1969), is fairly symptomatic of ‘coloured’ attitudes towards Small's literary works in general.

Even the way Small uses his language is singled out for attack. Thus Jonker scathingly comments:11

A writer is of course free to use a dialect, provided the dialect is the form in which the writer can obtain the purest and most precise expression of his thoughts and his feelings. When the writer however uses a dialect to achieve an effect which does not flow organically from his writing...then it is not permissible. Then the writing is not genuine but ersatz. It is completely odious to manufacture a dialect, put it in a speaker's mouth in order to portray him as being different [andersoortig]. This is what Small is guilty of.

The operative word in Jonker's criticism, which must and can only be understood within the South African context, politically and linguistically, is andersoortig. Perhaps it is just as well to put Small's use of a particular brand of Afrikaans, which is confined to ‘coloureds’, in wider perspective. Small is, after all, not the first writer to exploit that particular language which he, the writer, hears among his people.

A very good parallel in this respect is the Dutch as spoken by the Creole lower classes. While the educated ones will generally speak standard Dutch, the lower classes speak what is termed Surinamese Dutch.12 The lower class ‘Cape coloured’ also speaks a different dialectal form of Afrikaans which is richly interlarded with English.12 But the Surinamese Dutch of the Creoles has, so it seems, lost its badge of shame, whereas Coloured-Afrikaans, to avail oneself of such a monstrous term for the time being, has lost none of its stigma. Even Sranan Tongo, the lingua franca of the Surinamese, has lost its slave stigma, whereas the dialectal Afrikaans of the ‘coloured’ is constantly up against the stench of colour and politics.

The ‘coloured’ objection to Small's exploitation of a particular brand of Afrikaans is worthy of a closer look. It has been variously called Kaaps (i.e. the language from the Cape), even facetiously Capey language, and Kleurling-Afrikaans (Coloured-Afrikaans). It is looked upon as a mark of low social status and cultural inferiority. It is said to degrade instead of uplift, thereby only confirming the Afrikaner in his prejudiced belief that the ‘coloured’ is culturally and linguistically a buffoon. Small himself, in a foreword to his anthology Kitaar my kruis (Guitar My Cross, 19742), writes:13

Kaaps [the term he himself prefers], is not what some Englishman in South Africa refers to as ‘Capey’...also not what some Afrikaans-speaking persons refer to as Gamat-taal. Kaaps is a language in the sense that it carries the full fate and destiny of the people who speak it: their entire life, ‘with everything contained in it’; a language in the sense that the people who speak it, give their first cry in life in this language, conduct all their business in their life in this language, expectorate in the throes of death in this language. Kaaps is not funny or comical but a language.

What Small says here does not in anyway differ from the pronouncements of non-whites on language elsewhere. We may do well to recall, within this context, the words used by the Surinamese, Koenders, in 1948 in support of Sranan Tongo:14

Just as you find in other languages words that are borrowed from others, so also in our language, but it isn't a broken variant of another language. It has its own manner, makes its own words in its own way. A people that has neglected its language, or heaps insults on it for the sake of another language, whichever it may be, is more stupid than our forefathers.

The well-known Afrikaner poet and dramatist, Uys Krige, in a foreword to the university publication Groote Schuur (1960), observed:15

Our dialectal Coloured language is a dangerous means to employ in poetry. If it is not supported by a refined sense of language in the poet, who must avoid mere ‘camera’ work and who knows how to effectuate a synthesis of the rough expression with a certain elegance and refinement, if it does not spring from a special poetic vision and is not backed up by a strong technical ability, it can at the most be snaaks [funny], and at its best oulik [cute].

Afrikaner critics have also accused Small of stooping to achieve effect, of using an arbitrary and confusing phonetic spelling. The answer to this must obviously be that Afrikaner academia cannot fully penetrate the ‘townships’ and ghettos of Windermere and Bonteheuwel. In ‘Focus on Adam Small’ in Newscheck, one reads:16

By adopting as his medium the Englikaans patois of the Cape Coloureds, Small has succeeded in turning his poetry into a joke which nonetheless unfailingly illuminates the pathos of its subject. He has also made it untranslatable, incomprehensible to readers not familiar with South African by-ways. While thus losing internationality, Small has struck perhaps the first unmistakably all-South-African note.

Ironically then, Adam Small's exploitation of Kaaps, as he himself calls it, seems to bring him closer to the working classes than, for example, the English rhetoric of some ‘coloured’ political leaders. The response which his play, Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe (Kanna, He's coming Home, 1965), has evoked among a section of the ‘coloureds’ themselves, seems to indicate that in terms of literature, he is busy creating ‘accomplished street poetry...as wide as God's eye’.17

In this respect, it is interesting to note that the novelist, Alex La Guma, does not encounter opposition when he exploits that peculiar brand of English common to the poor ‘coloureds’ of District Six. In his unpublished MA thesis presented at Leeds University in 1969, H.P. Africa comments on A Walk in the Night in the following vein:18

The action of the novella is set in District Six, a part of Cape Town where a poor section of the Cape Coloured lives. These people are bilingual and speak both English and Afrikaans. Lexical,

grammatical and phonological interference is a common feature of their spoken language.

He then goes on to refer to this type of language as:19

a form of syntax which in many ways is peculiar to District Six, Afrikaans lexical items which occur frequently in English sentences, and some utterances which though represented as spoken English reveal Afrikaans substructures.

Africa then recalls Uriel Weinreich who in his Languages in Contact (1954) defines interference as, ‘Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact.’20 What Africa says of the English used by La Guma in A Walk in the Night is surely also applicable to the special brand of Afrikaans used by ‘coloureds’ in the Cape. Or is La Guma's English less objectionable, because his politics are acceptable?

Much of the ‘coloured’ objection to Small as a writer then, seems to stem from disapproval of his politics. It is no mere accident that the Moses figure in Small's poetry is singled out for special attack. The poet, in the eyes of his antagonists, identifies himself with Moses and sees himself as a non-racial ‘coloured’ Moses, who with the help of his brothers, the Afrikaners, will lead his people, the ‘brown Afrikaners’, to the promised land of Afrikanerdom. This is probably a vast oversimplification of what Small really believed then, but fundamental to this assessment is the fact that Small wanted change by talking to the oppressor. The antagonists illustrate their viewpoint by referring to one particular poem in his anthology Kitaar my kruis:21

 
nou vrinne
 
die Here het gabring
 
an my sy wonnerwerke oek so
 
hy het gavra wat's in my hand
 
en vrinne
 
in my hand was my kitaar
 
kô, lat ons sing.
 
 
 
now friends
 
the Lord had revealed to me
 
just so his miracles
 
he'd asked me what's in my hand
 
and friends
 
in my hands was my guitar
 
come, let us sing.

To the educated ‘coloured’, there is no irony or humour in this poem. To him, it is essentially Small's vision of the Christological role he can play through poetry. The symbol of the guitar as one of the cultural assets of the ‘coloured’ man becomes as tainted with ethnocentricism as, for example, the ‘tot’ system.

Yet, this attitude towards Small on the part of many a ‘coloured’ deserves closer scrutiny, for it highlights some of the problems found in Chapter 2, when humour was applied as a symbol in such situations. Again, Zijderveld (1971) is right when he argues that it is the audience which will determine whether the crossing of the institutionalized borders is a cause for embarrassment, anger or laughter.

By very definition, the ideologue, whether white or non-white, finds no room in his ideology for humour, let alone a comic ironic stance. Ironically then, the Afrikaner who believes in apartheid, and the ‘coloured’ who rejects the system, will both be irritated by some of Small's poetry. And their irritation is rooted in their essential non-understanding of the function of humour as an instrument of play and unmasking in their society of ascribed roles.

Jonker traces Small's role within the South African context against his utterings on socio-political issues during, and especially after, the traumatic period of Sharpeville. He comments on Small in the following vein:22

Adam Small differs remarkably in two ways from his two fellow Coloured poets, Petersen and Philander. They are satisfied to be known as Coloureds. He is a so-called ‘brown Afrikaner’. They are rather ashamed of their political role, he is rather proud of his political versifications. These differences are striking but unimportant. Ashamed or unashamed, the political role remains the same. If you want to cut off a section of the non-white peoples from the rest, it does not matter whether you prefer your group to be called ‘coloured’, ‘Bruinman’ [Brownman] or ‘Bruin Afrikaner’ [Brown Afrikaner], which you look upon as being different [andersoortig] and unique [eiesoortig], because the fault lies not in the naming process but in the breaking away.

Jonker quotes extensively from Small's book, Die Eerste Steen (The First Stone, 1961). The book is dedicated, significantly at this stage

in his career, to ‘My People, The Afrikaners’. In a devastating comment Jonker writes:23

And politically speaking, Small is right. His politics are theirs. His views are shaped on those of the Afrikaners. Their viewpoint is his viewpoint. The trouble is that his skin is brown. With Small this is the great reason for his bitterness. And he is a bitter person. Bitter because, ‘he who is a sensitive and educated person, not a skollie [a street ruffian and a criminal] or a sore in the community, but someone to whom dignity should be due, whose value as a human being should be rated higher than that of civil servants who shout at him’ is cast out of the fold of ‘his volk’.

Small writes in Die Eerste Steen as follows:24

And this is precisely the greatest sorrow and the greatest sin of it before God; that all these things are done, whether with legal backing or not, are done also to people whose level and value of life is comparable to the best....But it is a crime against society if one isn't light of colour. The most undignified type of human being, the lowest of scum is privileged above the rest of us - as long as he is white. A white skollie has greater freedom than I have.

Prior to this, he had commented on the dilemma of his people as follows:25

The brown people [Bruinmense], have no natural apartheid territory in South Africa, have no natural aparte [separate] language, have no natural aparte history. The new deal is according to these lines and the idea of an alliance can be translated as the idea that the white man and the brown man (bruinman) are companions in adversity in South Africa. They will stand together in South Africa or go under together.

This viewpoint, as espoused by Small at this stage in South Africa, found willing response among the Afrikaners but would, of course, be totally unacceptable to the ‘coloured’ masses at large. After Sharpeville, in particular, the need for a united black front was seen as an absolute necessity in the struggle for freedom.

To Adam Small (at least in 1961), ‘the brown man was closer to the Afrikaner than any other population group in South Africa’. He continues:26

I repeat: the brown man is much closer to the Afrikaner than any other population group in South Africa, much closer than the Jews, much closer than the Greeks, much closer than the English, much closer than the Dutch or any other white group in South Africa....The Afrikaner welcomes the Jews, the Greeks, all these, immeasurably far removed as these people are from his cultural traditions. The ideal of unity with the English is nurtured....But we, who are in every meaningful way much closer to the Afrikaner than any of these groups of people, our name is not mentioned.

Rightly does Jonker observe that the united white front is an antiblack one which is anti-democratic and pigmentocratically inspired. Continuing his attack on Small, Jonker writes:27

He does not plead for the end of oppression in South Africa. Oh, no! He wants to shout open the portals of Afrikanerdom for the ‘brown man’....He wants to do this on the basis of an ‘alliance’ [Bondgenootskap] and ‘partnership in adversity’ [Lotgenootskap]. And this alliance can only have one possible interpretation: an alliance to maintain the suppression of the majority: and partnership in adversity can only mean that their future will be linked with the maintenance of oppression.

Adam Small reveals himself, in his writings, as virulently anti-communist and in this also he is only equalled by the Afrikaner. He is also devoutly Christian, and refers to communism as that ‘soul-destroying danger...which can overrun the continent of Africa as far as the southern point through the black masses’.28 For him, at this stage in his life, the only effective counter was to ‘appeal to the Christian conscience...for the cause of justice and love’.

Small did seem to live up to his ‘brown Afrikaner’ image when, in 1961, he wrote rather scathingly about ‘coloured’ political leaders:29

unpleasant people who fill the world with slogans in the service of so-called democracy, who deliver tirades on free speech and freedom of expression...but who themselves do not even once live up to one democratic principle. [He continues]. The way these people go about things, we shall finally be free - free without any sense of responsibility; we shall be free, yea unbridled; the kind of freedom which is the destruction of all mankind. They too will enslave us.

One could possibly argue in defence of Small that he was warning against rigid ideologies which permit no deviations from the official line. On the other hand, the political set-up in South Africa in 1961 allowed for only one stance (and still does) - an anti-government one.

Small's problem is also that of the writer and his role in an oppressive society. By adopting an attitude at such an early stage, in a terminology which is so clearly open to misinterpretation, Small tarnished his own literary image. The African, Caribbean and Asian writer cannot expect a charitable reception from his fellow literati and his people, if he appears to accommodate himself in a situation of oppression. If he does not openly choose sides, he risks being classed with the exploiter. The third world writer is, after all, purporting to write about and for his people, and in the process of creation hoping to give his work of art a touch of universality. The writer cannot withdraw into his lonely garret and write about daffodils. The ‘coloureds’ may then be over-harsh in their dismissal of Small's poetry, yet his early political activities and pronouncements certainly did more harm than good.

One may argue that politics is no basis for literary criticism, but then there is no act which is not political, within the South African context.

The sixties proved to be a period of great destruction. Sharpeville was a watershed in South African history. Yet, notwithstanding increasing international pressure, the apartheid measures became more rigid. One by one, black leaders landed up in South African jails. Black political organizations were either banned or forced underground or into exile. This inevitably created a political vacuum. The children born in the sixties were totally of the ‘apartheid generation’. The so-called liberalism of even the fifties had ceased to exist. As during every revolutionary period the seventies saw the emergence of a new breed of young people who embraced black consciousness. These were the children of the apartheid generation who owed less loyalties to the older political vanguard. SASO (the South African Students Association for Blacks) and BPC (Black People's Convention) were the two organizations largely responsible for this new thinking. The role of the deceased leader, Steve Biko, has been amply dealt with in articles and books. In the Cape, this new black consciousness was reflected in the changing attitudes of ‘coloured’ students at the ethnic university college of Bellville. This led to unrest on the campus and police interference. In a recent nationwide interview on South African

television (1978) Adam Small recalled how he was converted to, or influenced by, black consciousness because of the late Steve Biko. Small was of course, teaching at Bellville during this period and he too was confronted with the new South African youngster. From newspaper cuttings and interviews one gets a glimpse of his involvement with, or attitude towards, black consciousness.

Black consciousness as expressed by SASO meant the search ‘for a Black identity, self-awareness and self-esteem and the rejection of White Stereotypes and morals.’30 All over South Africa, from Soweto to Bonteheuwel, a young people were proclaiming their blackness. The idea of ‘stopping to look at things through white eyes and beginning to look at things through Black eyes’30 found response in the souls of the oppressed youth.

Small also seemed to have endorsed these black consciousness ideas. In 1973 he was very much involved in the People's Free Education Front and with its aim of having a black University for blacks and run by blacks. He envisaged his ideal through the media and the arts. His activities led to his eventual resignation as a lecturer at the college in Bellville, although it would be better to say that he was outmanoeuvred and forced to resign.

In an article in the Rand Daily Mail (1971), Small commented on racism in the following manner:31

Racism is a phenomenon of inferiority. Our blackness is a phenomenon of pride....We can no longer care whether or not whites understand us. What we do care about is understanding ourselves, and, in the course of this task, helping whites to understand themselves....We are rejecting the idea that we live by their grace (that is, that they have the right to decide our future). We may live by the Grace of God, but we do not live by the grace of the whites.

Again in an article in the Rand Daily Mail (27 June 1973), he finally seems to repudiate the ‘brown Afrikaner’ syndrome. ‘We certainly do not want to be Afrikaners. The term “Afrikaner” is associated with narrowness and a history of discrimination....The greatest problem...is that violence is committed in the name of religion.’32

But let us return to Small's literary output and see how some of the critical assessments apply to his work. One of the notable qualities in his poetry is his exploitation of a brand of humour which is peculiar to the group of people he writes about. But even an ostensibly

innocuous statement like this could lay one open to a charge of believing in a special type of ethnic humour. I have already indicated how humour can be squashed by the ideologist both to the right and the left. Small's poetry has been labelled funny (snaaks) and a joke by whites; ‘coloureds’ have only detected buffoonery in it. Yet it is an indisputable fact that lurking everywhere in his poetry or drama is that special brand of humour whereby marginal groups retain their sanity in oppressive societies - that is, through the gift of laughter. The oppressed can at times play out an ostensibly comic role in the presence of the oppressor, whereby the latter becomes the pitiable one. Laughter can of course be a purifying device, or an escape valve - an outlet for feelings of frustration, hatred and hostility. The extent to which one experiences behaviour as painful, is determined by the value one attaches to it.

Anton Zijderveld puts it so clearly in his book on humour:33

The humorist, like the anarchist, is after all, bent on transgressing the limitations and borders, imposed on us by language and institutions. He shifts border-lines, reformulates existing definitions, creates to some extent, some kind of chaos and rejoices, in a short-lived, though often intense, feeling of superiority..., When humour, for example, becomes completely politicized, and is wielded as a political instrument, then it changes from playful laughter into grim reality. Even in conflict situations, humour is doomed to remain a game, because, through the laughter that it evokes, humour is in a position to transcend the borders between ideological positions. Humour is, therefore, of limited significance to those who are interested in maintaining these borders. It is probably, for this reason, why ideologues are so seldom humorous - they simply cannot afford to be so.

The way in which outsiders, like the American O'Toole, can, for instance, misinterpret situations, is crystal clear from an anecdote which he cites in his anthropological study, Watts and Woodstock:34

A popular story in Woodstock [an area outside Cape Town] concerns a Coloured man who is kneeling on the floor in a D.R.C. [Dutch Reformed Church] when the parson walks in and says, ‘Seun, what are you doing here?’ The Coloured man replies; ‘Washing the floors, if it pleases the baas’. The parson says, ‘Well, that's all right. As long as you aren't

praying.’ The story is not told to elicit laughter.

Once again the observation by Zijderveld would seem to supply the correct answer to O'Toole's when he writes about black humour:35

The laughter that these jokes evoke, is not laughter-with-the whites about the Blacks, but laughter-among-themselves in a group with self-consciousness and pride. In such a situation, there is hatred against the ‘sell-out’ who still keeps on trying to adapt to the life pattern and ideas of the majority. Jokes occur which warn against the ‘sell-out’. Humour then becomes a means of social control....This type of humour not only rejects the assimilation of the blacks, but also contains a second layer: the frustrated white is also taken for a ride.

To reject Adam Small's humorous and satirical attacks via his poetry and prose, is, therefore, to ignore or misinterpret the peculiar culture (sub-culture) in which his writings find their origin in South Africa, or to apply ideological standards to them in which laughter is not permissible.

Small himself is painfully aware of this when he quotes Sutherland on satire in his foreword to his anthology Kitaar my kruis (19742). ‘Satire is not for the literal-minded....The unintelligent either do not read satire at all, or misunderstand its significance when they do.’36 For an essential task of the satirist is to invite the reader to share his moral indignation, to unmask the deception and to preach the ideal. And it is Small's ideal which he preaches which falls on barren ground: brotherhood, love and justice in a Western Christian democracy.

Small fulminates against Afrikaners, the Dutch Reformed Church, apartheid, freedom fighters, The Non-European Unity Movement, like some lone-ranger. And in the process he seems to become a victim of the socio-political climate which expects the person of colour (and rightly so), to develop along ideological lines which plead for the destruction of the system in South Africa. Small's lone attempts to prefer, what he sees as, ‘sensitivity to crudeness, intelligence to boorishness, honesty to deceit’,37 fall on barren ground.

Yet, possibly Small is saying, by implication, that the ideological stance precludes the comic-ironic and the satiric viewpoint. The task of the satirist is, after all, to hold up an ideal picture to his society. Nothing is sacred or sacrosanct. It may just be conceivable that Small is misinterpreted for the very reason that some students and critics fail

to appreciate Evelyn Waugh's African portrayals. Karl's comments on Evelyn Waugh come to mind here: ‘Too often, however, we tend to look for social enlightenment in a humorous writer whose very humour depends on his parody of those who accept and strongly believe in social enlightenment.’38 Karl continues to remind the reader that for the comic writer, ‘the terms of his comic intention must allow him free play’.39

Much of Small's satirical swipes centre around religion. The poet himself is a religious person, notwithstanding the doubts which assail him from time to time. In his anthology Sê Sjibbolet (1963), he quotes one of his spiritual mentors, Sören Kierkegaard:40

I know it well, there have been mockers of religion who would have given - yea, what would they not have given? - to be able to do what I can do, but did not succeed because God was not with them...With me is the Almighty - And He knows best how the blows must be dealt so that they are felt, so that laughter administered in fear and trembling may be the scourge - it is for this that I am used.

Adam Small is not the first poet to attack the conservative and even racist role of the Church. The négritude poets from the West Indies were the first blacks to consciously expose this double role of the church as an institution in Western societies. Virulently anticlerical and even anti-Christian at times, the West Indian writers unmasked religion as one of the instruments of black oppression. Exploiting biblical texts, these writers and poets use them to expose the original Christian myth through a process of inversion. An excellent example of the anti-clerical and possibly anti-Christian, stream, is Jacques Roumain who writes in The New Negro Sermon:41

 
We shall not forgive them, for they know what they do...
 
They have made of the bleeding man the bloody god,
 
O Judas snigger, snigger Judas....
 
In the cellars of the monasteries the priest counts the
 
interest on the thirty pieces of silver.

Having exposed the priesthood and the church, Roumain espouses a new myth - revolution under a red banner:42

 
No brothers, comrades,
 
We shall pray no more...
 
We shall no longer sing our sad and despairing spirituals.
 
Another song shall surge from our throats,
 
And we shall unfurl our red banners.

Small too is capable of ironic depiction, of inverting the Christian myth, of using the vulgar argot, which by sheer contrast with the original Biblical passage and elevated language, irritates. But Small is in no way anti-clerical in the négritude vein. His products are not vituperative ejaculations of hatred. He does not see institutionalized Christianity as integrally interwoven with, for example, racism or imperialism. Small, rather, tends to accommodate himself within the Christian myth. He can still write in a mood of acquiescence:43

 
The Lord has shaken
 
and the dice rolled wrongly for us
 
That's all.43

The same acceptance of one's ascribed role of suffering is found in another poem, Lydingsweg (Road of Suffering):44

 
We have long ago in places
 
like Windermere
 
all our longings
 
forsworn.
 
 
 
Oh Lord, you can go on listening
 
to our song
 
without worry, we are long ago
 
past sorrow's door....
 
So don't worry Lord
 
I'm fixed up
 
I am my own Lord
 
and then we too are even.
 
if another's gang stabs me
 
full of holes one day
 
I'll go and die on my own cross
 
specially for me.
 
 
 
Oh! Long ago in places
 
like Windermere
 
we have all our longings
 
forsworn
 
long ago in places
 
like Windermere
 
we have all our longings
 
forsworn.

Small is therefore never anti-Christian, only against the perversion of Christianity by the whites who profess to believe, but who discriminate on the basis of colour. He will use the Biblical passage and transplant it onto the ‘coloured’ setting, which gives his protest extra emotive force. And this would seem, at least to the white Christian, to be heresy. Christian books are studded with people who were burnt for less.

The poet, for example, uses the Christmas story to show that his people are familiar with such humiliations and know such lowly places on earth:45

 
we know such places,
 
yes, we know them.
 
we've got duplicates all over
 
in Windermere,
 
in District Six...

This inversion of the white Christian myth reaches its zenith in his poems Second Coming - I and II. The coming of the Lord is portrayed in twentieth century terms: Christ himself is welcomed as a superstar by hippies and pious types alike. He is whisked off to a white reception, while the ‘coloureds’ surge towards him on the white fringe. And in what is possibly one of the best and poignantly pathetic lines in his entire oeuvre, a ‘coloured’ calls out as the car drives off to the white reception:46

 
en notice my hie agter, please
 
en smile moet my.
 
 
 
and notice me here, at the back, please
 
and smile with me.

In that one line is concentrated all the force and pain of Small's struggle - and by implication that of the ‘coloureds’: to be noticed and recognized.

Yet, there is nothing in Small's poetry which is comparable to the biting satire found in the works of the Antillean poets. Compare and contrast, for example, the poem entitled Je n'aime pas l'Afrique by Paul Niger from Guadeloupe with Small's religious poetry:47

 
Christ redeemed sinful man and built his Church in Rome.
 
His voice was heard in the desert. The Church on top of Society.
 
And Society on top of the Church, the one carrying the other
 
founded civilisation where men, docile to the ancient wisdom
 
to appease the old gods, not dead,
 
sacrifice every ten years several million victims
 
 
 
He had forgotten Africa.
 
But it was noticed that a race (of men?)
 
still had not paid God its tribute of black blood, they
 
reminded him
 
So Jesus spread his hands over the curly heads, and the
 
Negroes were saved.
 
Not in this world, of course

From Small: ‘O God, Thy highest test is not the fire but the humiliation’.48

For him as for Kierkegaard, ‘Christianity is the divine, and that instance of the divine which precisely because it is truly divine would not at any price be a kingdom of this world.’ Unfortunately, within the South African setting, this type of celestially-orientated Christianity has long outlived its purpose. But then, the Small of the seventies would himself concede this.

Many of his poems deal with the political system and despite the complete dismissal of his oeuvre by Jonker earlier on, it is certainly worthwhile taking a closer look at it. The poem Liberalis Gahêkkel (Liberal Heckled) is particularly interesting because in it he attacks those do-gooders who pose as liberals, but who in essence are no different from the other whites who discriminate:49

 
They view you with their whole range
 
of prejudice;
 
we, however, really sacrifice,
 
It's not for nothing we're nice

The way in which Small gives form to his political and religious protest in his writings finds no solace with the Afrikaners who interpret his poems as being hostile to the white man. But, neither does his attitude appeal to the politically-conscious and educated ‘coloureds’, who view his ‘socialized ambivalence’ towards Afrikaans culture with disgust.

And yet, the satirical poem, Oppie Parara (lit. On the Parade),

recalls that of the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, namely Telephone Conversation in Commonwealth Poems Today.50 The parade is an open square in Cape Town, which serves as a market and platform for various types of activities (formerly, blacks held mass protest meetings here). In the poem, he lampoons whites who lack the one trait which makes for true living - the gift of uninhibited and unbridled laughter. The tone and tenor of the poem right through is half-mocking and the white woman is made to appear ridiculous. There is even a subtle reference to sexuality in the poem, but it is formulated in such a manner that it is spleened of all vulgarity. It is the wit of a superior, and not of an inferior, which characterizes this poem:51

Oppie Parara
 
Please Madam
 
come smile
 
just look
 
our stalls are piled full of happiness
 
 
 
oh come why so sour today
 
fie fie
 
is life then vinegar
 
And where does madam buy it
 
looks dear to me too
 
 
 
no, madam
 
come smile
 
our stalls are piled full of happiness
 
 
 
The white woman cannot smile
 
and she commands:
 
I want nothing,
 
the coollie strictly formal
 
 
 
But madam, paw-paw, paw-paw and bananas
 
and juicy grapes from the heart of Canaan
 
and how does madam fancy such a fig
 
look just how swollen it is
 
from top to bottom bulging out
 
don't blush madam
 
we have a leaf to go with it

And in order to re-establish the balance, the white woman angrily retorts:

 
You, you coollie
 
I shall call the police now!
 
 
 
The fruit seller's voice trails behind
 
police, police?
 
Oh no madam, don't be so spiteful
 
say decently goodbye....

At times however, Small's poetry sags rather heavily under his Kaaps and one is then indeed left with a feeling of unrefinement and vulgarity. It is for this reason that some of his products have a pamphlet quality about them, and can also be relegated to transient inferiority. In his play Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe (Kanna, He's Coming Home, 1965), however, he reveals himself as a dramatist, who can do for Afrikaans what Soyinka has done for Nigerian (and English) drama.

For the non-South African not familiar with Afrikaans or the peculiarities of South Africa, Kanna (as I shall henceforth call the play) will be well-nigh impossible to come to terms with. Yet it is essential to remember that ‘drama has unique capacities for social unification, in that it works through the eyes of the spoken word. Hence, if rightly shaped and performed, it can be equally accessible to the literate and illiterate, the educated Christian convert and the traditionalist, or, in Elizabethan terms, to the stage box and the groundlings.’52

Kanna is fulfilling such a dual function, according to Afrikaans critics. Thus, the celebrated author, poet and Afrikaner critic, W.E.G. Louw. reminds the reader that Kanna is a play filled with poetry and must be performed on the stage in order for the outsider to comprehend and enjoy its full richness. He finds the play not only a wry commentary on South Africa, but one which brings tears to the eyes.

Significantly, many reviewers use as their starting point the lines spoken by The Voice in the play: ‘This is a story about the simple one, the simplest of simple, the poor who will always be there... always.’ Small himself, in commenting on a performance of his play by white actors, observes: ‘The human exchange is necessary. And in our country that exchange is easier through art than anywhere else.’53

‘Coloureds’ themselves, who have seen amateur performances, were similarly moved, according to first-hand information. For in the play, there was instant recognition of facets of their own lives. Yet the play

has also succeeded in transcending a parochialism and in exciting emotions of pathos among, especially, the Afrikaners.

Die Transvaler, a paper catering for the Afrikaner in the North, commented on the performance of Wilna (a white) who plays the old ‘coloured’ woman, Makiet, as follows:54

As Makiet, Wilna has created an unforgettable and moving female character in Afrikaans, which can hold its own any day with those women in world literature, like Brecht's Mutter Courage, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Euripides' Electra and Medea, Sophocles' Antigone.

It must be realized at all times, that the ‘coloured’ has been forced into such a stage of ‘socialized ambivalence’ that whatever dramas were performed, in draughty church halls and schools with abominable acoustics, consisted either of Strindberg's The Father, Shakespeare's Hamlet, or worse still, the Afrikaner author Frits Steyn's Wildsbokkie. All these plays were of course far removed from the cultural, linguistic and socio-political realities of the ‘coloured’ townships of Bonteheuwel and Manenberg.

The story is a fairly simple one of a rural ‘coloured’ family which lives in poverty-stricken conditions and decides to move to the city. Kanna, the main character, is an orphan adopted by the redoubtable old woman, Makiet. The pattern is the familiar one of a poor family pinching and saving to enable Kanna, their one bright hope, to enjoy a good education.

In a sense, Kanna is the first real ‘Been-to’ in South African literature, a type so readily found in the works of the West African authors, Achebe, Armah and Soyinka. Kanna leaves for overseas and all action is centred round his scheduled return - the cargo come home. In this respect he recalls the parallel with the cargo cultists in Guinea as found in the novel Fragments by the Ghanaian Armah:55

The main export to the other world is people....At any rate it is clearly understood that the been-to has chosen, been awarded, a certain kind of death. A beneficial death, since cargo follows his return. Not just cargo, but also importance, power, a radiating influence capable of touching ergo elevating all those who... have suffered the special bereavement caused by the been-to's going away....After all, in the unelaborated system - where the been-to has yet to make his appearance, and there is no intermediary...at any rate - the human being once dead is in

his burial considered as having been exported to the other world. A return is expected from his presence there: he will intercede on behalf of those not yet dead, asking them what they need most urgently....Needs dictated by instant survival and subsistence requirements....The been-to here then only fleshes out the pattern. He is the ghost in person returned to live among men, a powerful ghost understood to the extent that he behaves like a powerful ghost, cargo and all....In many ways the been-to cum ghost is and has to be a transmission belt for cargo. Not a maker, but an intermediary. Making takes too long, the intermediary brings quick gains.

In a sense then, Kanna is the ‘Been-to’ who was sent off (admittedly not with a libation in West African style, but at least with a prayer) to the other world to return with cargo, like Baako, the chief character in Armah's novel Fragments. Kanna does not return permanently (only briefly upon the death of his old mother, Makiet), but through the technique of flashback and scenes spanning time and space, even the grave, the reader is familiarized with Makiet and her family. Small has also ‘transformed the irritating flashback into a way of annihilating time and space so as to raise dramatic issues about the relationship between past and present’.56

While Kanna is overseas, Kietie is raped as a toddler by a street gang, which is witnessed by her brother, Diekie. There is no over dramatization of the horror of this act. If anything, the horror of it is conveyed precisely through the down-playing of the incident. Kietie is first engaged to a road-side preacher who commits suicide. Then she gets married to Poena, who forces her to become a prostitute. Diekie, her brother, is eventually hanged for murdering Poena. In a poignantly simple scene, a similar effect of overall tragedy is achieved when Diekie says farewell at the station, on his last journey to Pretoria to be hanged.

The central figure in the play is the old woman Makiet. Of the white girl Wilna's portrayal of Makiet, the author himself says: ‘in her acting, the old woman gains a dimension, a stature which keeps her rooted at one and the same time in the circumstances of the old brown woman, of whom I had written...rooted also in eternity’.57

Makiet then is the hardened prototype of the selfless, hard-working and long-suffering ‘coloured’ woman. She is umbilically linked to Lea, the female character in Mine Boy, a novel by the South African author Peter Abrahams. Makiet realizes that reward on this earth for her children can only come through education - and education will bring in its wake

cargo. Her role becomes even more strenuous through the limitations imposed on her by the artist. Makiet can only operate from a wheel chair, can only transmit through gestures of the hand, the body and the eyes. In respect of Makiet it is worthwhile quoting O'Toole when he so astutely observes: ‘The strength of the wife role in poor Coloured society lies in the fact that a woman can always fulfil her faminine functions as homemaker and mother, while it is not always possible for a man to fulfil his masculine function as a bread-winner.’58

Small, in an interview quoted in the Afrikaans daily Die Burger (September 13, 1973) said of Kanna: ‘The play...gives the best insight ever into a portion of our South African reality and, naturally, into a portion of the universal reality of poverty here among us.’59 The line: ‘Toe, Sit, Hulle Maar Die Hysgoed Op Die Karretjie’ (then they dumped all their belongings on a little cart), filled with pathos and evoking images of the play Anatevka, could very well have been the epitaph of the poor.

There are, however, deficiencies in the play. Small does not allow one to enter into the private awareness of his characters. The constant comparison with Brecht by critics jars, for a comparison with the works of the Nigerian dramatist Soyinka would have been more profitable, especially his The Swampdwellers. The play is however characterized by one outstanding quality - that of visual actuality.

The discussion of Kanna has again revealed how difficult it is to define Small within the South African context. The aura of ambiguity continues to cling to him, notwithstanding his more political pronouncements in the seventies. Praised by Afrikaner critics for his play, he still had to have special permission by the whites to attend a performance of his own play, about ‘coloureds’, by a white company, in a white theatre.

And therein lies his dilemma. Perhaps his self-mockery, in one of his poems, illustrates this:60

 
Ou bryn pêllie
 
ou swart pêllie
 
ek sê
 
willustratiet is daa in die wêreld in vi djou
 
sê vi my?
 
ek sil vi jou sê:
 
fokôl man, fôkol!
 
- die gatkant van die railwaytreine
 
die gatkant van die êrouplyne
 
Ol' brown pally
 
ol' black pally
 
I say
 
what's there in the world
 
for you
 
tell me?
 
I'll tell you:
 
fuckall man, fuckall!
 
the backside of the railway trains
 
the backside of the aeroplanes

Poetry for Small has, in the words of John Huizinga, ‘not only an aesthetic function...but a vital function that is both social and liturgical’. Yet his central dilemma remains:61

I am not against the appellation Afrikaner [he apologizes]. I am only against petty Afrikanerdom...and Afrikanerdom is for me at the moment petty, generally petty. Read thus or hear, everywhere I say Afrikaner, actually petty Afrikaner. It is this that I am contrasting with Afrikaans. We must not forget that many people besides the Afrikaner speak and is therefore in one way or another Afrikaans. This is actually my dilemma as a ‘Sestiger’.

And yet, the following sardonic lines by Small nibble at one's consciousness (Small, 19742, p. 28):62

 
brownman
 
why worry?
 
your guitar
 
is slung o'er your shoulder
 
- the noose gets tighter and tighter -
 
but your guitar's slung o'er your shoulder
 
brownman
 
why worry?

Since ‘politics is fate’ where freedom does not exist, Adam Small's satire goes unheeded, and he finds himself judged on the basis of political and philosophical statements which are subject to misinterpretation. Unfortunately for him, it is the ‘brown Afrikaner’ image which lingers on in the minds of his antagonists. The white Afrikaner, who undergoes his cultural revolution under the name of ‘Sestiger’, is confronted with a similar crisis. He must prove that Afrikaans is not

synonymous with Afrikaner oppression and baaskap (overlordship/domination).


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