Mind Your Colour
(1981)–Vernon February– Auteursrechtelijk beschermdThe 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature
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Chapter 8
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in which the white man does not feature. Whether he likes it or not, our destinies are inseparable.’Ga naar eind3 Ironically, therefore, the non-white creative artist, writing about a semi-literate public, and hoping in many cases to reach it through his works, finds himself dependent upon the urban, sophisticated European public, European critical standards, and publishing companies. The black artist will also be involved in the struggle for freedom, be committed to his people. What Kenneth Ramchand observes for the West Indies, in his book The West Indian Novel, is fairly true of what is now generally referred to as the ‘third world’: ‘Since 1950, most West Indian novels have been first published in the English capital, and nearly every West Indian novelist has established himself while living there’.Ga naar eind4 The choice of one's capital of exile was largely determined by the nature of colonialism and the actual colonizer himself (e.g. mostly Paris or London). The writing of a novel in an atmosphere of political and economic prosperity is a luxury seldom afforded the ‘third world’ writer. The work of the black artist in South Africa has, as has been overtly clear until now, been permeated with the stench of colour. The operative words for most blacks are economic, psychological and physical survival. There was, and still is, little room for culture and creation in the accepted European sense. Mphahlele observes: ‘It is not easy for the oppressed African to organize himself for the writing of a novel unless he produces the kind that panders to European “dupremacy”’.Ga naar eind5 Where non-white artists did write, their earliest attempts invariably found their way into print via popular newspapers and magazines, for example, The Golden City Post and Drum. One of the most influential editors of Drum, Anthony Sampson, has left us with a very vivid impression of the magazine, when he wrote:Ga naar eind6 I looked through the first four numbers of Drum that had already appeared. It was a sixpenny monthly magazine, written in English, printed on cheap yellow newsprint; the bright cover showed two Africans facing each other, symbolically, across the continent: one in a Western hat and suit, the other with African skins and assegai. The first numbers contained African poems and short stories; articles on ‘Music of the Tribes’ and ‘Know Yourselves’, recounting the history of the Bantu tribes; instalments of Cry, the Beloved Country; features about religion, farming, sport and famous men; and strip cartoons about Gulliver and St. Paul. | |||||||||
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There was a poem by the American negro poet, Countee Cullen.... In one early number there was a Zulu poem called: ‘Mlung ungazikhohlisi’ - Whiteman do not deceive yourself - In such magazines then, many a budding young writer started off with his poetic effusions. Sometimes, it was fashionable to encourage talent through short story competitions. Often, black South African artists started off as journalists. Mphahlele, Can Themba, Alf Hutchinson, Alex La Guma and numerous others were all processed through this unavoidable literary pipe-line. Like many others in South Africa, these writers were also fed, in their youth, on the works of Thomas Hardy or the Romantic poets. It does not seem to be an accident of language that the short-story writer, the late Can Themba, should have called his place ‘The House of Truth’, thereby recalling Chaucer's ‘House of Fame’. One wonders how many poems, imitative of the English Romantic School, perhaps never found their way into print. The literary form which attracted most attention among black South Africans was the short story. There are, of course, various reasons why the short story became the desired form. The short story is terse, to the point and ‘drives the message home with an economy of language and time’.Ga naar eind7 E.V. Downs comments on the short story in English literature in the following vein:Ga naar eind8 The short story-writer visualises his theme through the light of his own personal mood. He sees it from one point of view, but sees it clearly, and that clear, contracted picture on which his mind is intensely focused, he depicts with an economy proportionate to its vividness and definiteness. Mphahlele writes of the short story in The African Image:Ga naar eind9 The short story in such a multi-racial setting, in my own experience, goes through three stages: the romantic-escapist; the protest short story; and the ironic, which is the meeting point between protest and acceptance. Most African short story writers seem to move within this trinity as outlined by Mphahlele. One of the best exponents of the short story is Alex La Guma, whose stories are a mixture of farce and anxiety. His handling of the racial situation is never such that it becomes platitudinous, moralizing or politically didactic. He seems to have grasped the essential | |||||||||
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lesson that racial tensions ‘are a part but never the whole of experience’.Ga naar eind10 The Cockroaches, the Joeys, the Arthurs and the Michaels, main characters in his works, are all umbilically linked to one another. La Guma exploits the surprise ending with expertise, deftly delays and catches his reader on the wrong foot. His story, Out of Darknéss, is just such an example of ironic detachment. The author knows his people well, realizes that the system has inculcated in them a penchant for defining each other in terms of fine colour gradations. Cockroach, his main character, is in prison for murder. His girl friend's behaviour triggered off his tragedy.Ga naar eind11 ‘Then she began to find that she could pass for white. She could pass as white, and I was black...She drifted away from me, but I kept on loving her. Richard Rive is another short story writer of note, although he does not always succeed in avoiding the pitfalls of political pamphleteering at times. In his short story, Dagga Smoker's Dream (Dagga = Hash), he seems to have excelled himself. One is immediately impressed by the author's insight into his character, the undertone of irony, the strength of his dialogue and his clever exploitation of the language of the poor in Cape Town and its environment. The story is a very good illustration of the racial situation handled with poise and expertise. Unfortunately, Rive falters occasionally, as is so clear from the following extract from The Bench, which is a good story marred only at the beginning by his political trumpeting:Ga naar eind12 | |||||||||
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We form an integral part of a complex society, a society complex in that a vast proportion of the population are denied the very basic privileges of existence, a society that condemns a man to an inferior status because he has the misfortune to be born black, a society that can only retain its precarious social and economic position at the expense of an enormous black proletariat! Another literary form which became very popular was the autobiographical novel. Again, as in the case of the short story, there were various reasons why this happened. Most important of all was the fact that many of these writers started off their careers as journalists. Pride of place among the autobiographers goes to the Afro-American writer Richard Wright, who with his Black Boy (1946), paved the way for a host of similar books. Nadine Gordimer observes in The Black Interpreters:Ga naar eind13 Almost any African who has anything to say about the condition of being African, either in the colonial past or in the independent present, is likely to find interested readers, since he or she has information to offer, an inside story or an experience overdocumented from the outside, white-side. The autobiographical novel in South Africa has done much to acquaint the outside world (and some white South Africans), with the horror of apartheid. The most difficult transition for the black artist was from the autobiographical half-way house to the novel proper. For the problems are varied and great. In some cases poverty looms large, in others, the main issues are racism and colonialism. Often, one finds a combination of all these. One of the cardinal problems will be the role of the writer in societies of oppression and deprivation. Jean Paul Sartre, in an article on the responsibility of the writer, maintains:Ga naar eind14 If the writer is a maker of literature; in other words, if he writes - it is because he is assuming the function of perpetuating, in a world where freedom is always threatened, the assertion of freedom and the appeal to freedom. A writer who does not take his stand on this ground is guilty; not only is he guilty, but he soon ceases to be a writer. Sartre continues in the following vein:Ga naar eind15 | |||||||||
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The writer, to the extent that he postulates and demands freedom, cannot furnish the governing class, nor any other class, with an ideology, except one which insists on the freedom of men who still remain oppressed. And, on the other hand, he cannot address himself to those whose freedom he desires, unless he becomes a member of a party and acts as a member of that party by becoming a propagandist, by allowing his art to become propaganda; that is, by calling for the death of literature and ceasing to be a writer. In even stronger terms he postulates:Ga naar eind16 Yet, in the name of ethical values, he must demand plainly and above all else - for otherwise he is an oppressor or a trickster - the liberation of all oppressed people, proletarians, Jews, Negroes, colonial subjects, occupied countries and so on. For Lenin in his article on Literature and Art states: ‘Literature cannot be a means of enriching individuals or groups; it cannot, in fact, be an individual undertaking, independent of the common cause of the proletariat’.Ga naar eind17 African writers themselves have grappled with the particular role of the writer in Africa. Thus Achebe, the distinguished Nigerian novelist, observes:Ga naar eind18 African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans;.... The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what had happened to them, what they lost. In an interview with the American, Bernth Lindfors, in 1970, Achebe reiterated his belief that it was ‘impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest’.Ga naar eind19 Africa's foremost dramatist, Wole Soyinka, is even more forthright in his views:Ga naar eind20 when the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognise that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon .... The artist has always functioned in African society as the record of the mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. | |||||||||
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Ngugi, the Kenyan writer, warns of the reality that ‘80 per cent of the people are living in poverty and not a single step ... so far taken in fact to change the social structure.’ He continues, as long as this situation has not changed: ‘so long shall we continue to have impotent writers and intellectuals’.Ga naar eind21 Achebe's aim, ‘to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement’,Ga naar eind22 finds its highest expression among black South African writers. Black writers are not the first to have concentrated on what is generally referred to as the social novel. Wellek and Warren remark:Ga naar eind23 Much the most common approach to the relations of literature to society is the study of works of literature as social documents, as assumed pictures of social reality. Nor can it be doubted that some kind of social structure can be abstracted from literature.and,Ga naar eind24 One can argue that ‘social truth’, while not, as such, an artistic value, corroborates such artistic values as complexity and coherence. But it need not be so. There is great literature which has little or no social relevance; social literature is only one kind of literature and is not central in the theory of literature unless one holds the view that literature is primarily an ‘imitation’ of life as it is and of social life in particular. But literature is no substitute for sociology or politics. While there is considerable truth in the observations of Warren and Wellek, this becomes rather academic in a situation of oppression. The American critic, Howe, is closer to reality when he avers that, ‘where freedom is absent, politics is fate’.Ga naar eind25 Of equal importance is the question of the medium used by the writer, for invariably it will be that of the colonizer or the oppressor. In the South African context, it will be English (Abrahams and La Guma) or Afrikaans (Petersen and Small). I have already referred to this question of language in dealing with Adam Small's special brand of Afrikaans. Again, it is worthwhile listening to Achebe when he states:Ga naar eind26 The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an | |||||||||
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English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. Achebe hints that ‘the price a world language must be prepared to pay is its submission to many different kinds of use’.Ga naar eind27 This is certainly true of La Guma. From all this emerges the view that the novel will, of necessity, be social and depending on the nature of oppression, very often political. Max Beloff observes: ‘Politics is an aspect of human relations and like other aspects of the subject (e.g. love-making) is better suited to the novel than the treatise. Considering how well it is adapted for this treatment, the wonder is not that there are so many political novels but that there are so few.’Ga naar eind28 Stendhal, speaking of politics in a work of art, likened it to a ‘pistol shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention’.Ga naar eind29 Speaking of the political novel, in an essay on Orwell, Frederick Karl remarked: ‘The political novel at its best - The Possessed, The Magic Mountain, Nostromo, The Red and the Black - requires an imaginative projection in which characters are trapped, almost smothered, by forces that remain inexplicable and subterranean.’Ga naar eind30 The novelist's social matrix will stifle his created character, his individual who is caught up in the system, and despite his efforts to the contrary, he is ‘doomed to walk the night’. These problems constitute the spiritual, historical and factual inheritance of the nonwhite writer in a system of racially ascribed roles and institutionalized separation in South Africa. Special attention will be given to three writers in this chapter, namely, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma and Richard Rive. And it must be stated quite categorically, that it is not their ‘supposed colouredness’ which merits their selection, but rather the peculiar social conditions they describe in their novels. Peter Abrahams, the Northerner, is an interesting contrast to Alex La Guma, the man from the Cape. This difference is also reflected in their themes and approaches to literature. Abrahams left South Africa before apartheid revealed its true and vicious face, although one could argue that the covert apartheid of the late 1930s was no less obnoxious or painful. La Guma's characters find themselves in a more specifically bi-cultural situation. Their knowledge of both English and Afrikaans leads to language interference and the emergence of a peculiar brand of English exploited so expertly by La Guma. Much of the work of Abrahams refers to a pre-nationalist period, that is, | |||||||||
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before the Afrikaners took over political control in 1948. Dark Testament appeared in 1942, Song of the City in 1945, Mine Boy in 1946, The Path of Thunder in 1948. Then followed Wild Conquest (1950), Return to Goli (1953), Tell Freedom (1954), A Wreath for Udomo (1956) and A Night of Their Own (1965). By the time the ‘coloureds’ were beginning to exert themselves politically, Peter Abrahams was already outside the country. As we have seen in the Introduction, 1943 was a watershed in ‘coloured’ politics. Very little of the complex political situation is found in the early works of Abrahams. Mine Boy is an earlier forerunner of Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, possibly falling into Lewis Nkosi's categorization of ‘Jim comes to Jo'burg’. It deals with the, by now, fairly familiar picture of the black man in the city. The novel is more of a collage of African life. The Path of Thunder falls neatly in the other South African literary tradition of miscegenation. His ‘coloured’ protagonist may then be more of a human being than the characters in works with a similar theme by white authors; however, he is still a stereotype. La Guma and Abrahams represent two stages in the politics and history of South Africa. If Abrahams is still closer to the period of Hertzog and Smuts, where the ‘coloured’ man was very much a ‘poorer’ (brown) relation, then the period of La Guma was definitely shaped by the political events of the bus boycott in the 1950s, culminating eventually, in the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960. La Guma, after all, was one of the main actors in the political arena during the fifties. He was also detained during the treason trial. The works of Abrahams are still characterized by romantic idealism, whereas La Guma's prose is steeped in social realism. In contrast, there is Richard Rive who is also from the Cape. He has several short stories to his credit and one novel, Emergency. Some of his fiction is banned, some available in South Africa. There are no indications that Rive ever aligned himself with any of the political movements in the Cape. Yet, his fiction is decidedly political in tone and tenor. However, notwithstanding his hostile portrayal of South Africa (from the Government's point of view), Rive has not suffered political harassment of imprisonment. A closer look at his fiction seems to reveal more about viewpoints and prejudices of the various ethnic groups, than about the overall political setup. And as such, he also moves, to my mind, more within the accepted South African literary tradition, than is apparent to the non-South African. Emergency is an excellent illustration of this, as will be demonstrated later on. | |||||||||
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Abrahams was born in 1919 in Vrededorp, a ghetto for ‘coloureds’ and Asians in Johannesburg. His early development is at once interesting, for his writings highlight the difference between life in the North and the South. ‘Colouredism’ of the Cape variety does not have that special aura of differentness (andersoortigheid). The ‘coloured’ as a bi-cultural being is less noticeable in the North. On the other hand, the gulf between African and ‘coloured’ seems less in the North. In the Cape, the tendency to accommodate is responsible for greater frustration and confusion. Abrahams had his reputation firmly established by the time the Ekwensis and Achebes appeared on the African literary scene. As a writer, he was most productive, producing eleven books between 1945 and 1966. The first one which will be discussed here is his autobiography, Tell Freedom (1954). In Tell Freedom we have a beautifully told, vivid and imaginative account of his early years. Of his own family he writes:Ga naar eind31 My mother was the widow of a Cape Malay (a product of the East Indies' strain of the coloured community) who had died the previous year and left her with two children. She was alone except for an elder sister, Margaret. My mother and her two children were living with her sister Margaret when she met the man from Ethiopia. Margaret was the fairer of the two sisters, fair enough to ‘pass’. Her husband was a Scot. He worked on the mines. They had a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. They lived in 19th Street, Vrededorp. And there, in the street, the two brown children, my brother and sister, played with their cousin, the little white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. To this street and this house came the Ethiopian. There, he wooed my mother. There, he won her. They married from that house. Here then, in a nutshell, we have all the complexities of the situation in which those classified as ‘coloured’ in South Africa find themselves. Tell Freedom is written in simple prose and is in no way maudlin in tone. It is livened up at times with a gentle touch of humour, while the comi-tragic note is never totally absent. At an early age, Peter Abrahams is introduced to the racial hierarchy in his society:Ga naar eind32 ‘Sixpence crackling, please.’ | |||||||||
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This was just the prelude to many similar, harrowing scenes in colourconscious South Africa. Now the interesting thing about this scene is the effect it subsequently has. The white man comes to Peter's Uncle Sam to tell him to teach his boy mores for having dared to hit back at white children. Abrahams succeeds in re-creating the nightmare of Uncle Sam, who stands for all the Uncle Sams who ever found themselves in similar positions. Sociologically then, this passage tells us a lot about the role of the father, or the father figure, in poor ‘coloured’ communities. One abstracts a picture of the ‘coloured’ who is completely emasculated by society, humiliated, yet ironically expected to reveal himself as a voice of authority at the point where he himself is being humiliated. This is a point worth taking into consideration in deciding whether his (Abrahams') women characters are over-emphasized, as Wade wrote in his book on Abrahams in 1972. Let us, with this in mind, look at the flogging scene, for example. After his deed Sam begs of his wife Eliza:Ga naar eind33 ‘Explain to the child, Liza’, he said. And some time later in the passage, Aunt Liza explains to the boy:Ga naar eind34 ‘It hurt him,’ she said. ‘You'll understand one day.’ The women are often forced to take over the man's role. Uncle Sam's behaviour is aptly depicted in O'Toole's study Watts and Woodstock:Ga naar eind35 | |||||||||
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Coloured men are weak fathers by their own standards. It is difficult for a man to be servile in one context and masterful in the next. The self-demeaning role Coloured men are bound to play in society is too demanding to allow them to step out of the role in their homes. In this case it is Eliza who covers for Sam and cushions the hurt. Fieta in The Path of Thunder (1948), fulfils a similar role in mangled Sam's life. Lea in Mine Boy, is another example of this strong breed. That female characters are portrayed so strongly has its origin in the very society which gave rise to them. That this factor caused bewilderment to the South African critic, Wade, should be attributed to his non-understanding of poor ‘coloured’ societies. O'Toole is probably very close to the truth when he avers in Watts and Woodstock:Ga naar eind36 The poor women of Woodstock play instrumental roles because of their relatively favored social and economic position in South African society as compared with their men....The Coloured man has been carefully and expertly taught to jump when the ‘master’ says jump....For this reason the Coloured man is punctillious in his deference to whites. Fieta and Liza are thus prime examples of a breed which endures and endures. Peter Abrahams is acquainted with the wider, more educated world, through a Jewish typist. The scene is fraught with comi-tragedy.Ga naar eind37 ‘Lee?’ The upshot is that she reads to him Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare - standard fare, to my knowledge, for anyone who had grown up in | |||||||||
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former British territories. This is how he reacts to the story of Othello: ‘The story of Othello jumped at me and invaded my heart and mind as the young woman read. I was transported to the land where the brave Moor lived and loved and destroyed his love.’Ga naar eind38 When the typist gives him the book as a present, he can only utter:Ga naar eind39 ‘Thank you, miss. Thank you!’ A new world was now opened to him. When Abrahams first came upon the works of black writers from America, he was similarly moved. One can only imagine what this discovery must have meant to the impressionable youngster. Reading Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen opened his eyes further to the plight of the black's in South Africa. The open note of defiance, the pride in being black and the revolutionary tone which characterized Cullen's poem, The Dark Tower, found willing penetration into the tortured soul of Abrahams. Here was a black man who openly stated:Ga naar eind40 We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brother cheap.
Here was a poet who was prepared to say that, ‘we were not made eternally to weep’.Ga naar eind41 This, then, is the dilemma of the black artist who, in order to make his art acceptable to the white public and publisher, must perforce tone down his reality, clothe it in a cocoon of lies, or else go into exile. To ‘pander to white supremacy’, or to be completely absorbed and usurped by political organizations which spell an end to one's creativity. The choice for Abrahams was eventually determined by the romantic lure of England and its liberal tradition. Perhaps it is one of the banes of the non-white artist that he must first be a freedom fighter and then only an artist. Abrahams put a very high premium on the freedom of the individual, and this is something one should at least welcome, for tension in the climate itself can so easily tempt African writers into ‘dealing with men as component units of a social problem... [while] such tensions are a part but never the whole of experience’.Ga naar eind42 In his autobiographical Down Second Avenue (1959), that other. | |||||||||
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well-known novelist, short story writer and critic, Ezekiel Mphahlele, who was with Abrahams at the same school, gives the following impression of him, which is very instructive:Ga naar eind43 I remember him vividly talking about Marcus Garvey, taking it for granted we must know about him. And dreamily he said what a wonderful thing it would be if all the negroes in the world came back to Africa. Abrahams wrote verse in his exercise books and gave them to us to read...I remember now how morose the verse was: straining to justify and glorify the dark complexion with the I'm-black-and-proud-of-it theme. Abrahams did eventually reach his destination, England, but not before he had submerged himself into what is regarded as the home of the ‘Cape coloured’ - Cape Town and its environment. Towards the end there is a passage in his autobiographical Tell Freedom which foreshadows similar lunar, barren landscape depictions by Alex La Guma.Ga naar eind44 Entering the Cape Flats was stepping into a new Dark Age. The earth, here, is barren of all but the hardiest shrub. It is a dirty white, sandy earth. The sea had once been here. In its retreat it had left a white, unyielding sand, grown dirty with time. Almost, it had left a desert. And in this desert strip, on the fringe of a beautiful garden city, men had made their homes. They had taken pieces of corrugated iron and tied them together with bits of string, wire and rope. Abrahams fails generally to depict the smell of decay and degradation which is so well featured in La Guma's work, possibly because he is more of a romantic, not that La Guma is in any way devoid of this trait. It is only in Abrahams' autobiographical work that the disturbing note of odorous poverty is constant. One gets the feeling that his overwhelming desire ‘to tell freedom’, and his ardent desire to portray the individual, leads to insufficient characterization at times. His novel The Path of Thunder (1948) deals with the oft-encountered theme of ‘sex across the colour line’. The story is about Lanny Swartz, a young ‘Cape coloured’, who returns to his village with several degrees after a stay in Cape Town. His search in Cape Town and his contact with other people leads him to ponder on the very self-same question the little girl had asked old Johannes, the slave, in Wild Conquest (1971): ‘What is freedom?’Ga naar eind45 | |||||||||
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Lanny, one gathers, has returned with some missionary zeal to improve the lot of his people in Stilleveld. In this small micro-cosmos are to be found all the elements of an explosive racial situation. Lanny's very presence as an educated person upsets the pattern of racially ascribed roles, which dictates that ‘coloureds’ should be servants, fools and generally ignorant. Thus the stage is set for the inevitable orgy of violence. In fact, the operative symbol in the novel is violence - it starts off with it and ends with it. The reader is treated to a blaze of guns and false heroism. Lanny's arrival in Stilleveld sets the tone throughout the novel:Ga naar eind46 Across the way from the siding was a little coffee stall. A buxom Afrikaner lass tended it. A lorry stood a little way from the stall. Two bronze, muscular men were drinking coffee. They all looked at Lanny... | |||||||||
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Lanny, the main character, is different from the rest of the ‘coloured’ rural cast. Unlike them, he is not docile or obsequious, and this would spell his downfall in the end. Ironically, however, in this initial scene, he allows himself to be humbled by the Boers. It is as if he simply cannot help falling into his ascribed role, as dictated by white South Africa, when he hears the, ‘Hey! You!’ On the night of his arrival, he is invited to the house of Gert Villier, who bluntly tells him that ‘We do not like independent bastards here, Mister Swartz’.Ga naar eind47 Once more, the predator threatens the prey with violence. But Lanny is also a romantic idealist, and the scenario does not allow for such aberrations. Lanny recalls Josef Malan in Brink's novel, Jan Herold in Rabie's, Abe Hanslo in Rive's and Adam Small's ‘coloured’ in Die eerste steen. It is this maudlin, sentimental and tug-at-the-heart portrayal which makes Lanny a character cast in the typical South African tradition. He, like all such characters in a similar position, is destined for extinction. But The Path of Thunder is also about inter-racial sex, as such indulgencies are sometimes euphemistically called in South Africa. Now, it is interesting to discover that white women in such literary encounters are, as Claude Wauthier puts it, ‘redeemers [who] like Desdemona... come to a tragic end.’Ga naar eind48 Of the man of colour in the novel one could state that his endeavours are a ‘Subjective consecration to wiping out in himself and his own mind the colour prejudice from which he has suffered so long’.Ga naar eind49 To that extent then, The Path of Thunder is about ‘the sexual myth - the quest for white flesh - perpetuated by alien psyches’.Ga naar eind50 For, running through the entire novel, is the love of Lanny, the ‘coloured’, for Sarie, the Boer girl. Thus Abrahams, too, continues the South African literary tradition of thrusting white paragons of beauty into the arms of disturbed ‘coloured’ youths. One wonders whether André Brink was so original | |||||||||
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and revolutionary as Afrikaner critics seem to think, in his novel, Kennis van die aand. Lanny's predicament is symbolically represented in Sam who was mangled by the Boers for daring to ‘sleep and love white’. In between, one is confronted with vignettes of minor frustrations at different levels. In Lanny's second encounter with the Boer girl Sarie, there are already the first rumblings of what Tucker calls in his book, Africa in Modern Literature (1967), ‘the aura of sex which no book about white women and black men has yet avoided’.Ga naar eind51 Lanny had just been at the receiving end of his second spell of violence. Sarie transgresses the ethics of the tribe by helping him.Ga naar eind52 He didn't behave as though he were Coloured. She had to force it into her mind in order to remember it all the time. Again, Tucker seems to be right when he observes: ‘no miscegenation occurs, but its unheard music reverberates throughout the novel(s)’.Ga naar eind53 Lanny's story is an exact replica of Mad Sam's, whose physically mangled body is a constant reminder of what whites are capable of doing to ‘coloureds’ and blacks, if they transgress the rules. Mad Sam is just another man of colour who, in the words of Geoffrey Gorer, ‘is kept in [an] obsequious attitude by extreme penalties of fear and force’. Gert Villier lives out this attitude when he tells Lanny:Ga naar eind54 I'm going to kick you and kick you until you are like Sam. They call him Mad Sam. But he was like you. Thought he was good enough for a white woman...I made him what he is today. My slave!...I kicked him and now he moves like an animal. That's what's going to happen to you, Mister Swartz!Ga naar eind54 | |||||||||
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The three major ‘coloured’ characters symbolize different strata in the racial hierarchy. Lanny is the educated, defiant idealist, with a tinge of romanticism, who having dared to cross the institutionalized sexual and racial borders, is destined for extinction. The ‘coloured’ preacher stands for that species which retreats into religious passivity, an example of the Orwellian ‘passive non-cooperative attitude’.Ga naar eind55 Mabel, Lanny's sister, is stereotyped, for a moment, in the English man's car, into an euphoric, all fleece and fluff character. The white characters in the novel are the spiritual descendants of the Jansen family, as found in the historical novel about the Great Trek by Abrahams, Wild Conquest (1950). It is Finkelberg, a Jewish intellectual (himself historically an underdog), who ironically explains to Mako, an African, the lowest category on the racial totem pole, what has happened between Lanny and Sarie, the Boer girl:Ga naar eind56 ‘You don't understand, Mako. There are two ways of falling in love...You and I know one way...But there is another kind too. By that love people are just drawn together without looks or anything else mattering, not even the fact that this is the highveld.’ Poor Lanny, one is inclined to utter, to suffer even at the hands of Abrahams under the schmalzy excuse that he had no past! No wonder then, that an Afrikaner novelist, Brink, decided to correct this literary hiatus. But Abrahams, by putting this comment about the ‘coloureds’ having no past and tradition in the mouth of Finkelberg, himself seems to succumb to stereotypes whites have of ‘coloureds’. Peter Abrahams gives his novel an ironic Great Trek twist of two beleaguered individuals who go under in a display of pyrotechnics while facing a hostile crowd. His passage towards the end is reminiscent of the satirical swipe by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe in | |||||||||
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his novel Things Fall Apart. This is how Abrahams ends his novel;Ga naar eind57 The Eastern Post of the next day carried a story on its front page in bold black letters. It told how a young Coloured teacher, one Lanny Swartz, had run amok, killed a prominent farmer, Mr Gert Villier, and then been chased into the house of Mr Villier. Politics and the political situation in South Africa must be a major preoccupation for the black artist - a ready-made theme. In Wild Conquest, one of the few historical novels written by a black South African, the author, Peter Abrahams, has an excellent opportunity to correct the farcical portrayal of ‘coloureds’ and blacks. Yet, sadly, he allows Boer history to predominate. The novel is remarkable for its relatively fair treatment of the Boers - a compliment not extended to Abrahams's people in Afrikaner literature. The novel also deals with the slave element in the ‘coloured’ people. The slaves do not emerge as docile victims, ready for slaughter. Instead, old Johannes, the slave, in defying the Boer Trekkers, becomes a spiritual ally of Boni from Surinam and Toussaint L'Ouverture from Haiti. If the works of Abrahams are permeated with romanticism and individualism, then those of Alex La Guma are filled with the ‘naturalistic’ stench of decay and deprivation. Born in the Cape, he soon embarked on a literary career through the medium of journalism. La Guma has written several short stories (an art in which he excels), and some four novels, notably, A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967) and In the Fog of the Season 's End (1972). Son of a redoubtable freedom fighter, Jimmy La Guma, Alex grew up in an atmosphere where politics was fate from the very inception. Theirs was a well-known household name in the Cape, especially among the politically-conscious. Alex was very active in the struggle for freedom and played an important role in preparing the congress of the people of South Africa at Kliptown, Johannesburg in 1955, where the historic Freedom Charter was drawn up. Subsequently, he | |||||||||
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was one of the persons arrested on a charge of high treason in 1956. In the post-Sharpeville period, he was once more detained for a period of five months without a trial. In 1962, he was served with a banning order and then placed under arrest.Ga naar eind58 This made it impossible for him to move around, to publish or be published. The only way out was exile in England. Brief though this synopsis of La Guma's life is, it is nevertheless important for an understanding of his work. His committedness springs from a deeprooted personal belief, as anyone who has ever had the joy and privilege of knowing him will tell you. At a later stage, we shall see how this affected his portrayal of South African society. La Guma is a living testimony of the novelist turned warrior, freedom fighter. His story And a Threefold Cord (1964) is, to quote another freedom fighter, Brian Bunting, ‘drenched in the wet and misery of the Cape winter whose grey and dreary tones...[are] captured in a series of graphic etchings’.Ga naar eind59 The novel also recalls the Afrikaner author Uys Krige's lampooning of another poverty-striken wasteland inhabited by the ‘coloureds’ - Windermere, meer Wind dan Meer (i.e. Lake of Winds, more Winds than Lake). But let us recall La Guma's description:Ga naar eind60 In the north-west the rainheads piled up, first in cottony tufts blown up by the high wind, then in skeins of dull cloud, and finally in high, climbing battlements, like a rough wall of mortar built across the horizon, so that the sun had no gleam, but a pale phosphorescence behind the veil of grey. The sea was grey, too, and metallic, moving in sluggish swells, like a blanket blown in a tired wind... La Guma's characters are subordinate to his physical descriptions. The terror and agony of his characters are rather felt through his finely drawn social settings and minute details, for example, the ‘hesitant | |||||||||
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drip-drip onto the plank floor; then a quicker, steadier plop-plop-plopping’.Ga naar eind61 This concentration on external forces occurs at the expense of individual characterization. Charlie Pauls and his family are only incidental to the setting. There is no question of the nightmare being an inner one. Instead, one is confronted with the ‘smells in the room....The smell of sweat and slept-in blankets and airless bedding...the smell of stale cooking and old dampness and wet metal’.Ga naar eind62 Occasionally, one is given a glimpse into a character's soul, for example, when Charlie tries to console his girl friend Freda after the fire death of her children: ‘Like he say, people can't stand up to the world alone, they got to be together. I reckon maybe he was right.’Ga naar eind63 La Guma has this naturalistic bent to portray the sound and the taste of objects and landscapes. His story is narrowed down to a particular family or category of persons, and the environment in which they find themselves. This imposes certain limitations on him, since he is more concerned with the censures of the society on the protagonist rather than what the latter is or can become in the society. To an extent then, La Guma's characters and heroes are trapped in a vicious maelstrom of cause and effect, paralysed by forces which reduce their desires and needs to animal-like proportions. Ronnie, the sullen ghetto product, is largely impelled by primitive emotions of revenge and has no qualms about killing his girl Susie, when he suspects her of running around with other men. Even the knifing is seen in graphic, animal, sexual terms, ‘the savage, enraged, cutting caresses of the blade...[her]...surrender as to another lover.’Ga naar eind64 His novels are about poverty and the victims of poverty, politics and racism. His characters cannot escape from the situation in which they find themselves. La Guma's characters are doomed from the start. The author is no psychological novelist. As social novelist, he is less interested in delineating character than in the society that has infected him. His emphasis is not on the man, but on the social group and the social setting. His characters are primarily social animals, described in terms of their race and their place in the social setting. Caroline for example was seventeen ‘married and great with pregnancy...a machine...wound up and set to perform an automatic function’.Ga naar eind65 The novel, And A Threefold Cord, is rather episodically structured, but then this is true of the author's other novels too. It is full of interest and details. The experiences are external, hardly internal. The tragedy is conceived in social and not individual terms. What | |||||||||
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emerges in all the novels is a picture of crushed humanity and pitiful human beings. Seldom are they in open conflict with others. Events predominate, people are reduced to mere pawns, action is meaningless, violence is directed at each other. Reduced to this sub-human condition, La Guma's characters can only love and hate, fight and kill with animal brutality. There is Roman for example, more anthropoid than homo sapiens, who ‘beat his wife's head with faggots...kicked her ribs and broke her arms [who] when he became tired of beating her, whipped the children. [A person who was] as dangerous as a starved old wolf, ready to turn on anybody who got in his way.’Ga naar eind66 Alex La Guma's characters are all isolated elements in an atmosphere which will eventually devour them. The author paints a landscape of annihilation without being maudlin. He uses the language of the poor, that peculiar mixture of English and Afrikaans, which I shall refer to as Englikaans. This type of language seems to define the oppressive circumstances as well as the tragic-comic position of the poor. There is no political rhetoric, no trumpeting of slogans with La Guma. The force of his social protest gains momentum from his rather naturalistic depiction of the physical and spiritual landscape in which his characters dwell. White people hardly intrude, or only peripherally, for example policemen who are the representatives of the legalized brutality of the system. They don't have to intrude, for without the haunting spectre of white brutality, the Cape Flats and District Six would not exist in the form these places exist in La Guma's novels. The only white character in his novel, And A Threefold Cord, is George Mostert, who is a lonely soul caught up in his own spiritual waste land. He is doubly cut off from the main stream of existence. He is white, but lives outside their normative structure; he lives in a ‘coloured’ area, but through his skin, is largely precluded from the warmth and proletarian exuberance of the shanty towns. In The Stone Country (1967), La Guma explores another ghoulish facet of South African life - that of the prisons. The novelist has an inside knowledge of South African prisons. The picture he paints is a grim one. It is a joyless existence, punctuated with an occasional, mock-humorous tone - a painful indictment against society. Prison is a place populated with ‘Ragged street-corner hoodlums, shivering drunks, thugs in cheap flamboyant clothes and knowledgeable looks, murderers, robbers, house-breakers, petty criminals, rapists, loiterers and simple permit-offenders.’Ga naar eind67 | |||||||||
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The narrator, George Adams, is one of the politically subversive types, possibly the author in disguise. He is a sensitive recorder of details and events - although with somewhat too detached an air. But the latter trait saves him from becoming a political commentator. The prison is described as follows:Ga naar eind68 built...during Victorian times, and over the years bits and pieces had been added to its interior, and alterations made here and there, a and because it could not expand outwards, it had closed in upon itself in a warren of cells, cages, corridors and yards. The inmates are a tragic collection. There is Butcherboy Williams, animal-like in his persecution of others and who dies a violent death. There is the Casbah Kid, a mere boy waiting to be executed in Pretoria and of whom the author writes: ‘to force conversation from the boy was like tackling a safe with a soft tool’.Ga naar eind69 John Solomons, the clown, was obsequious, pathetically playing out his role of a ‘coloured’ buffoon. A ragged, motley collection then, the jetsam cast up by a society which discriminates and destroys on the basis of colour. These are the derelicts of apartheid who have no raft to cling to. In the novel, A Walk in the Night (1962), the setting is District Six, that ghetto which once overlooked Table Bay, with its varied population of Indians and ‘coloured’, Jews and Greeks (with their numerous shops). A dirty place, but like that other black ghetto in Johannesburg, once long ago, Sophia Town, a place teeming with life. Once more, La Guma operates within his limitations. We are introduced to an atmosphere of decay, moral degradation and deracination through his graphic descriptions. ‘A row of dustbins lined one side of the entrance and exhaled the smell of rotten fruit, stale food, stagnant water and general decay. A cat, the colour of dishwater, was trying to paw the remains of a fishhead from one of the bins.’Ga naar eind70 Here one is confronted with the lumpen proletariat, the poor who are unthinkable. That same animality which is in his other books lurks subterraneously on every page. H. Africa, in his unpublished MA thesis on La Guma's use of language, makes some very interesting observations. La Guma's language further serves to define and illustrate the lowly position of the poor. La Guma's exploitation of the peculiar language of the ‘coloured’ serves to | |||||||||
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strengthen the finely drawn and naturalistic social setting. Africa's thesis is especially concerned with the lexical, grammatical and phonological interferences in the speech patterns of the ‘coloureds’, as they appear in the novel, A Walk in the Night. He identifies four situations in which certain lexical items recur:Ga naar eind71
Africa then proceeds to identify words and slang expressions which are frequently used in the novel. They are as follows: baas; bedonerd (crazy); bliksem (miscreant); mos (just); hotnot (hottentot); boer (Boer); donder (wretch); oubaas (old master); verdomde (damned); volk (people generally).Ga naar eind71 However, Africa fails to point out that volk, when applied to ‘coloureds’, has a much more prejorative connotation than when it is used to refer to the nation. He also identifies the following slang expression in the novel: juba (a chappie); endjie (a cigarette stub); blerrie (bloody); ching (money); rooker (gangster); bokkie (girl friends).Ga naar eind71 The language of La Guma defines his characters in terms of their social setting, their level of education, their morality. It endows his characters with a certain humour at times. Yet, it also has a comitragic ring to it. Whereas in Toiings, language is used to portray the ‘farm-hand’ and villagers as comic beings, in A Walk in the Night, language affects the entire people. This adds further to the truthfulness of La Guma's descriptions and social settings. The political situation is never totally absent in the works of La Guma. His characters are used to reflect the iniquity of the South African society. What happens to them is, by implication, a political comment on this society. The finely drawn social settings only serve to expose the horrible system of apartheid. Very few of his earlier characters emerge as fully-fledged political heroes. However, by the time we come to And A Threefold Cord, his main character can state: ‘like he say, people can't stand up to the world alone, they got to be | |||||||||
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together’.Ga naar eind72 And, ‘if the poor all got together and took everything in the blerry world, there wouldn't be poor no more’.Ga naar eind73 Rabkin's comment is very apt:Ga naar eind74 The moral action of La Guma's characters has been described as essentially defensive. There is evidence, however, that the author has found this method increasingly inadequate, and in the succession of his leading characters can be traced a development towards an outright political posture. Thus, while Mike Adonis is shown in moral retreat, from the dignity of a factory worker to the questionable status of a petty criminal, Charlie Pauls, in And A Threefold Cord, is an occasional worker, in whom the roots of class-consciousness have taken a precarious hold. The main characters in his political novel, In the Fog of the Season's End, Beukes, Elias Tekwane and, to a minor extent, Isaac, are all politically-conscious and motivated people. Whatever we get to know about them as human beings, by way of flash-backs, is given to show how they came to be involved in politics. We are given little insight into the individual and private struggles of the characters. References to Tekwane's youth in the Transkei are used as a commentary on, for example, the pass laws. Thus, despite La Guma's vivid evocation of scene and locale, the characters, as fully-fledged political heroes, remain largely outside the grip of the reader. The minor characters in the novel who are involved with Beukes help him out of a peculiar loyalty. They are either semi-literate urban types, like Tommy who ‘knew vaguely that Beukes's “business” involved handing out printed papers during the night, calling on people to strike, even being arrested’.Ga naar eind75 Or, they are middle-class teachers, like Flotman, who openly concedes: ‘I'm scared...I don't want to go to jail and eat pap and lose my stupid job or get bashed up by the law.’Ga naar eind76 And then there is the doctor, towards the end, who, despite all the risks involved, treats Beukes's wound and justifies his actions pontifically: ‘If the community is given the opportunity of participating in making the law, then they have a moral obligation to obey it....But if the law is made for them, without their consent or participation, then it is a different matter.’Ga naar eind77 Beukes is not a superman, but an ordinary person with ordinary desires. La Guma at least refrains from creating a super-educated hero, who can only find salvation in the arms of a white liberal woman. True to form, his heroes are practically all from the working class. The love affair between Beukes and Frances is the first normal one | |||||||||
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from South Africa - the white liberal ‘goddess’ in the arms of the politically disturbed and sensitive ‘coloured’, does not intrude. Beukes muses: ‘Looking at her he thought sentimentally that her face could be disfigured with a hammer and she would still look beautiful.’Ga naar eind78 At last, one is confronted with a relationship where the ‘coloured’ character is not forced to quote from Shakespeare, Pirandello, Garcia Lorca or Molière. The conversation which follows between Beukes and Frances is totally in keeping with the tone, setting and intention of the novel.Ga naar eind79 ‘So, you saw me before, hey?’ The novelist leaves the reader in no doubt as to his political stance. The struggle will increasingly become an armed one. This is spelt out clearly when Beukes says farewell to some youngsters (including his friend Isaac), who are off to undergo guerrilla training abroad: ‘What the enemy himself has created, these will become battlegrounds, and what we see now is only the tip of the iceberg.’Ga naar eind80 Yet, the ‘children ... in the sunlit yard’Ga naar eind81 appear to be a symbol of the future South Africa without racialism. It is a huge step from La Guma's working class characters to Richard Rive's educated middle-class heroes. References to, and descriptions of the poor and their poverty-stricken environments do nothing to wipe out the middle-class aura which surrounds his political novel, Emergency (1964). The novel concentrates on the events leading up to, and including, the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960. Its theme is decidedly political. The author himself states in the prologue: ‘Since to my knowledge there is no recorded history of this important and dramatic period in South African history, I have had to rely on my own compilation gleaned from newspapers at the time.’ One is therefore entitled to expect, at the least, an important historical, if not political statement. Yet the novel falls far short of the author's bold statement in the prologue. On the contrary, the novel reveals, upon closer scrutiny, that the author moves very much within the accepted South African literary tradition of accommodation. The authorities may then object to his presentation of historical and political facts - they object to anything which is contrary to official government policy and nationalist ideology. In the treatment of his characters, Rive proves to be far less revolutionary. | |||||||||
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His main character, Andrew Dreyer, is a ‘coloured’ school teacher, who was born in the slums of District Six, outside Cape Town. He suffers miserably at the hands of his near-white family (mother, brothers and sisters), and never seems to rid himself of his inferiority complexes. This is reflected in the descriptions of some of the major characters which cross Andrew's path. James, his brother, is described as follows: ‘James was very fair like his mother, went to white cinemas and bars.’Ga naar eind82 Abe Hanslo, his close friend, ‘had a freckled skin, green eyes and a shock of fair hair’.Ga naar eind83 Apparently the novelist had a special affection for Abe, for little further on we read that Abe was ‘Fair, with freckles around the nose and green eyes and a mop of fair hair’.Ga naar eind84 Rive does not even bother to use different words to describe Abe, unless ‘mop’ for ‘shock’ is regarded as a fundamental change. Andrew's mother was fair. ‘She had always been strange in her attitude towards him.... He wondered whether it had anything to do with colour. She was fair, like James and Annette, whereas he was dark.’Ga naar eind85 His brother-in-law, Kenneth, had ‘A pale, sickly-white skin and dull, expressionless, green eyes’.Ga naar eind86 Eldred Carollissen, his pupil, was ‘good-looking with greenish-grey eyes’.Ga naar eind87 Florence Bailey reminded one of ‘a German lass. Flaxen hair, blue eyes and apple-red cheeks...in the Black Forest’.Ga naar eind88 Only her husband, Justin Bailey, is not evaluated in terms of skin colour, possibly because the relationship between him and Andrew is not that deep. When Andrew meets the white girl, Ruth Talbot, for the first time, he is immediately swept off his feet. She is not described in detail, but then one assumes that she is aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Andrew dislikes the cheap white girls his brother James and brother-in-law Kenneth consort with, yet objects when Mrs Carollissen, his landlady, says of Ruth: ‘She's a nice girl. Pity she's white.’Ga naar eind89 After reading through the physical descriptions of Rive's characters one is inclined to conclude with O'Toole: ‘One comes away from such a genealogical discussion with the general impression that many Coloured people are descended by a neat biological trick from only one (white) ancestor.’Ga naar eind90 Andrew Dreyer is fraught with such inconsistencies. He feels overwhelmed in the comfortable study of his friend, Abe Hanslo, which is ‘pleasantly furnished with Gauguin and Utrillo reproductions... records of Beethoven, Mozart and Smetana’. Yet our political hero cannot refrain from reminding his friend that he has working class origins. ‘Yes. I grew up somewhat differently. In a slum to be exact.’Ga naar eind91 When, however, he is harassed by the police and in real danger, our | |||||||||
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hero calmly turns to Ruth and says: ‘What would you like to hear? Britten, Purcell or Rachmaninov?’Ga naar eind92 What Soyinka says of Rive's Make Like Slaves (1976) is perhaps also applicable to his Emergency. ‘We are left to feel that, given a more sensitive white woman or a less abrasive (guilt-ridden) coloured man...a small part of the battle could be won.’Ga naar eind93 Andrew Dreyer, the political hero, comes across as a confused, woolly-headed liberal and romantic. The political discussions sound more like a re-run of speeches from the early 1960s among the politically involved groups in Cape Town. In no way do they enhance the reader's understanding of the political situation. Most of the discussions highlight the contradictions in, what is referred to as the ‘coloured’ community. The main character, Andrew Dreyer, is closer to his ‘brown’ brother, Josef Malan, and like him, he refuses to run away when the opportunity presents itself. Instead, he chooses a peculiar form of martyrdom, by simply deciding to stay at Ruth Talbot's place. Lewis Nkosi had some rather pertinent remarks to make about Rive's novel:Ga naar eind94 We find here a type of fiction which exploits the ready-made plots of racial violence, social apartheid, interracial love affairs which are doomed from the beginning without any attempts to transcend or transmute these given ‘social facts’ into artistically persuasive works of fiction.Ga naar eind94 Commenting on Rive's use of dialogue, Nkosi writes:Ga naar eind95 Rive's use of dialogue is never to reveal his characters but to present argument about the political situation, which is his main interest. Thus the characters never use words which are uniquely theirs; but words and arguments which suggest the position of the various ethnic political groups they represent. Andrew Dreyer has more in common with Brink's Josef Malan than with La Guma's Beukes. In his final discussion with Abe Hanslo, after an unbelievably bizarre scene in Langa, he simply states: ‘Who me? Oh, I'm going to Ruth's flat to listen to Rachmaninov.’Ga naar eind96 And then he moves out to await his fate in the flat of his white girl friend. Such action points to an extreme form of naivety and a lack of political consciousness, or a misunderstanding of the political task at hand. Dreyer destroys Rive's proud boast in the prologue. ‘Ruth smiled | |||||||||
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nervously at him, then Andrew started to open the French windows.’Ga naar eind97 Ah, well! one is inclined to exclaim. We are at least saved the embarrassment of another heart-rending death-cell scene in the style of Alan Paton or André Brink. We have seen how the novel follows the political situation in some respects. As the political climate changed, so also did the literary idiom of the writer. If initially, it was openly accommodating, then in the early 1950s and 1960s, the tone was decidedly political. One may disagree with the way in which the novelist presents his politics, and question whether the true political novel will ever emerge from South Africa. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that the writings of many black South Africans have largely contributed to an awareness of the inhuman political situation in South Africa. The early works of Abrahams reflected some of the human disruption in South African society in the late 1930s and mid 1940s. La Guma's writings reflect increasingly the changes in the political climate in the 1950s and early 1960s. While initially, he unmasks the iniquity through his realistically drawn (naturalistic), social settings, his characters become increasingly more politically conscious. This too follows the general pattern among the ‘coloureds’. Rive's novel reveals some of the pitfalls for the South African novelist. The ambiguous attitudes of the political rulers are responsible for a fair amount of ambiguity among ‘coloureds’ themselves. Even the novelist who chooses politics as his theme may, unconsciously, be a dupe of his own ambiguous past. |
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