Mind Your Colour
(1981)–Vernon February–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermdThe 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature
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Chapter 9
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The stereotypes as found in South African literature and culture seem to complicate, at least for white South Africa, a truthful appraisal of the ‘coloured’ situation. The history of the ‘coloured’ reads like a re-run of the stereotypes found in Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). Colin Turnbull's observations would readily be underscored by many whites in South Africa:Ga naar eind2 It is in the past that the tribe finds its present strength, its present morality....But, more important still, the tribe finds in the past the incentive to work for the future, and to maintain its present integrity. If the past is destroyed through taught disbelief, or through exposure to scorn or ridicule...the result can only be total collapse and chaos. White legislators justify political attitudes towards the ‘coloureds’, precisely on the basis of such views. The ‘coloured’, they argue, has no glorified tribal past, or ritualized order, to sustain himself. He has no folk heroes like Piet Retief, Chaka or Toussaint L'Ouverture (see: O'Toole, 1973). Outwardly, this may then appear damaging to the development of a group identity. Yet, in a sense, within the South African context, it can also be a blessing in disguise. The African and the white man can, after all, both fall back on a tribal myth, the ‘coloureds’ are asked to forge one which is all South African. Not surprisingly, many in this group reject terms such as ‘kleurlinge’ and ‘bruinmense’ and prefer to be known as South Africans. This is clear from Edelstein's study, What Do the Coloureds Think? (1974), and also from the Theron Commission Report (1976). It is not the shame of identification with being ‘coloured’, which prompts the ‘coloured’ to refer to himself as a ‘so-called coloured’, as O'Toole (1973) would have us believe. It is rather the connotations attached to the word ‘coloured’, as found in the white political ethos, which cause the violent rejection. Ironically, it is the Afrikaner (Boer) past, as the sacramental fount into which members of the laager dip from time to time, in order to maintain a group unity, which may, yet, spell the greatest danger to Afrikanerdom. For it is this group unity through myth and taught belief which makes it impossible for the Afrikaners as such, to change from being a group unto themselves, into a group for others. Part of the problem of defining people referred to in South Africa as ‘coloured’, is the existence of a play of contrasts. The ‘coloured’ position has been largely obscured by the overall black-white political | |
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confrontation, and the notion that, ‘from the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is nothing’.Ga naar eind3 Yet, there are increasing indications that ‘this exile [may be] the first step towards the quest’.Ga naar eind4 That this quest will steer many ‘coloureds’ into the direction of an orphic descent is already crystal clear. The African continent has, in the process of demythologization, seen the emergence of two significant myths in modern times. I interpret myth here as ‘a directing of the mind and the heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existence’.Ga naar eind5 The one myth was Pan Africanism, the other, négritude. Both contributed to the freeing of the former colonized from their servile status. In the Americas, there was, of course, the emergence of soul-brotherism and black power. One of the striking features, or by-products, of such rallying cries, was their reflection in the literature of the people concerned. A comparative analysis will bear out that the facets of négritude, Pan Africanism and soul-brotherism are increasingly being reflected in ‘coloured’ thinking and writing. There are similar indications that the ‘no past, no myth through taught disbelief’ image, as imposed on ‘coloureds’ by white South Africans, is also being expunged through a greater political awareness. In the French Antillean and West African colonies, it was assimilation of the French language, culture and civilization, which partly determined one's supposed acceptance, as distinct from the South African criterion of skin colour. But the expectations created in the colonized élite in French colonies were soon to prove false. Négritude was a means of throwing off the cultural and historical legacy of the French policy of assimilation. In America, the Afro-Americans embraced soul-brotherism and black power as a means to achieve their freedom. Balandier has sketched the colonial situation as one in which the indigenous society is subordinate to the European group politically, culturally and economically. Such a policy was to have dire consequences for the society and the respective groups in the society. Césaire, the Martiniquean, who was the first to use the term négritude in his, by now, well-known Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, describes the situation as consisting of a colonizer and the colonized, in which one also finds the elements of intimidation and mistrust (méfiance). Yet, it is interesting to note that in both the French colonial societies and the South African situation, the whites were, and in some cases still are, able to count on a relative amount of stability. This meant, | |
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that in both societies, the dominant white groups found some legitimacy for their exercise of power. It is also significant, that their dominant scheme of values and norms was to some extent accepted within, and by, the indigenous population. Césaire cannot therefore be wholly right in stressing only the elements of intimidation and mistrust, for, quite obviously, there must have been quite a measure of trust (confiance), as opposed to mistrust, in order for the colonizer to have been so effective. In both types of societies, the whites justified their dominant positions through a series of rationalizations. For example, to the French, the African and the Antillean were noble savages, passive people who had never been capable of any ingenious, intricate or profound discoveries. In the case of the ‘Cape coloureds’, the whites refer to them as children, indolent, ne'er do wells, happy-go-lucky, gregarious and shifty people. Statements like the following by highranking police officials are still the order of the day: ‘The Coloured man is by nature [sic] lazier and more work shy than the Bantu.’Ga naar eind6 This statement was made by one Colonel J.H. Vorster, district police commander of Athlone, a ‘coloured’ suburb. Yet, while the French attempted to establish an intimate relationship between the colonial territory and the metropolis, the policy of apartheid was designed to ensnare each group within its peculiar ethnicity. In the case of the ‘coloured’, the absence of a tribal heritage and an indigenous culture helped in the non-formation of a ‘coloured’ identity. For apartheid to be successful, it needs the tribe. And it is for this reason that the Afrikaners have tried, and are still trying, to forge a ‘coloured’ myth. Sadly, however, what has emerged (if anything at all) can only be classified as folklore. The ‘coloureds’, while traditionally not subjected to the pass laws, have been allowed by some gentleman's agreement to live marginally in the white man's cultural and economic valhalla, without being co-sharers in the administrative process. For the ‘coloured’, the mother country was not situated overseas. Traditionally again, while the ‘coloureds’ attended separate schools, the syllabuses initially did not differ from those of the whites. The ‘coloured’ child was treated to similar white historical visions of South Africa. He too, was forced to regurgitate the well-orchestrated myths at the annual examinations. But under apartheid, this has undergone a radical change as the following quote from the Primary School in Environment Study in the Cape Province reveals:Ga naar eind7 | |
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The aim of school activity is to give the child a clear idea of himself in the socio-economic structure of his country and, more specifically, the place taken in by the particular section to which his family group belongs and the addition to the economic and cultural values of his particular section. The group of literates in the French colonial situation was assured of all sorts of privileges, for example, they were exempted from taxes and did not have to take part in corvées. The ‘coloureds’ were also, up to a certain point and stage, given a measure of preferential treatment. Western education was an important channel of mobility in the colonial society. In West Africa and the West Indies, all this led to an alienation from their own culture and environment. The French colonized were expected to recite in parrot fashion, ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’. In the case of the ‘Cape coloured’, the situation was slightly different. One could hardly speak of an alientation from their own culture. Whatever indigenous culture the ‘coloured’ had was effectively destroyed by the end of the eighteenth century. In their case there was no ritualized order to sustain them, or constitute the formation of a group. They lingered on, constituting what Fanon called the ‘terrified consciousness’, on the fringe of white, puritan society. Yet, as in the case of the French colonies, the educational system was purely European-orientated. In the French colonies, the image of France was buttressed up by the school system, the whites present in the colonies and the Africans and Antilleans who had visited Paris. Understandably, it was a rather distorted picture which led to such irreverencies as an idealization of France, with Paris regarded as the mecca of culture. The African or Antillean who had been to France, the ‘been-to’, was regarded as a half-god, as Fanon so aptly indicated in his book Black Skin, White Masks. One finds a similar distortion of the image of the white man and his civilization, ‘die duusman’ (duus = diet = volk = people), as he is called sometimes by the ‘coloured’ populace. But, while the educated black man from French colonies in Africa and the Antilles had to go to Paris to experience his disillusion, the ‘Cape coloured’ stayed at home to undergo his. In the case of both the French colonized and the ‘Cape coloured’, whatever fringe benefits of white society they were allowed to enjoy, had led them to a misguided anticipatory socialization. In both cases the reference group was, for a very long time, the | |
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ruling group. In South Africa, there were various laws which prevented ‘coloureds’ from achieving full citizenship. For example, the Franchise laws, the Group Areas Act, the Race Classification laws, the Job Reservation Act. Harsh reality revealed that the term South African was only reserved for those who, according to the laws of apartheid, were civilized and by implication, white. The Africans and the West Indians soon discovered that complete assimilation led to a negation of their own culture and an acceptance of French bourgeois values. But in actual fact, their acceptance by the French was of a circumscribed nature. In the metropolis they soon discovered that they were still looked upon as ‘le nègre’, by even the lowest of Frenchmen. The ‘coloured’ finds himself in a similar situation. No matter how civilized or Westernized and educated, he is still ranked lower than the poor white, or the Greek and Portuguese urban proletariat or peasant turned immigrant. Both groups thus experienced a deflation of the norm which they had been led to believe in. This deflation led the French African and the Antillean students living in Paris, to an awareness of their own ‘self-deception in self-definition’, and culminated in the 1930s in a discovery of their brotherhood under the skin. The eminent West Indian novelist and thinker, Wilson Harris, in a paper delivered to the Conference of Commonwealth literature at Aarhus, Denmark in May 1971, explored and discussed two particular concepts, as related to the indigenes, which are of extreme relevance in our context. Namely, ‘ritual bounty or continuity on one hand - ritual bounty [being the] victor's assets or hoard of conquest - and, on the other hand, the great chain of memory expressing subtle and complex ambivalences woven through the bodies of nature and history, man with man, victor with victim.’Ga naar eind8 According to Wilson Harris, the total effect of ritual bounty can be gauged from the manner in which the conqueror has managed to pulverize the conquered into a ‘uniform conviction so that the reality or play of contrasts is eclipsed within an order of self-deception’.Ga naar eind9 He warns of the self-deception, which can play parts with both revolutionary and conservative:Ga naar eind10 without a ceaseless creative and re-creative rapport between old monuments and new windows upon the cosmos, one may misconceive the arts of genesis - one may plaster over afresh every break-through appearing within an old collective myth into a | |
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new recurring monument in the name of uniform or time-less identity. While the négritude and soul-brother writers have succeeded in becoming ‘the new tenant of memory within the hollow monument’Ga naar eind11 [of the colonizer], and thus responsible for the ‘devolution or breakdown of historical premises’,Ga naar eind12 this process is only gathering momentum among the ‘coloureds’. The breaking down of old premises means destruction, even self-destruction at times. But this very act of destroying opens up the way for new perspectives. Négritude and soulbrotherism was, in essence, the ‘charting of the hollowness’, which remained after the destructive process, in order ‘to set up a new echoing dimension of spatial resources for the liberation of community’.Ga naar eind12 In the Americas, it was to lead to a rediscovery, and even glorification of Africa. The West Indian poet, Mackay, who lived in Harlem during the 1930s, sings of the ‘dim regions whence my father came’ and hopes ‘my soul would sing forgotten jungle songs’.Ga naar eind13 These ideas were an expression of the quest through exile. This would eventually climax into a self-mockery - at times even an anticlericalism - which is so often characteristic of black poetry, in contrast to the irony of the white poet. The West Indian poet, Leon Damas, is an excellent exponent of this type of poetry.Ga naar eind14 I feel ridiculous
in their shoes, in their dress suits
in their starched shirts, in their hard collars,
in their monocles and bowler hats...
I feel ridiculous
with their theories which they season
according to their needs and passion.
In contrast, the poet, Petersen, laments his dark skin. But passivity and religious acceptance was also a trait of the earlier Afro-American poetry.Ga naar eind15 Let it then be O Lord that I
a thousand years ago have sinned
against man and God...
then know I now at your command
is this scabbiness laid bare...
There is just a hint of the plaintive and sad quality of the American spiritual in this poem. | |
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The post-Sharpeville period (1960 onwards) produced a considerable number of exiled writers and political militants, whose influence was felt at home and abroad. At home, for example, Matthews, Thomas, and even Adam Small, seemed to be drawing on a ‘more folkloristic (oral) tradition, as opposed to the more cerebral white poetry’. They drew on the language of the ghettos, like the American black poet Langston Hughes and endowed it with some literary respectability. In English, Brutus and Nortje exhibited the first stirrings of a ‘ceaseless creative and recreative rapport between the old new windows upon the cosmos’. Politically, ‘coloured’ students joined up with blacks in SASO (South African Students' Organization for blacks). The poetry of Matthews and Thomas, who both still live in South Africa, moved significantly closer to the soul-brotherism of the Americas, reminding one forcibly of Le Roi Jones:Ga naar eind16 we want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies...
We want poems that kill.
What formerly applied to black poets from America, now also came to apply to the writings of ‘coloured’ South African writers. ‘For a white man to read Le Roi Jones...is like being held in a dark room listening to an angry voice he is not expected to appreciate or understand.’Ga naar eind17 In the Cape too, poets like Matthews and Thomas came to fulfil the function of being ‘poetry guerrilla fighters who talk Black English and ignore accepted aesthetics’.Ga naar eind17 Matthews and Thomas are both inundated with their blackness (which is revealing and new, within the South African ‘coloured’ context). Moreover, they are concerned with the negation of the black man's humanity. In their poetry, they are closer to the négritude and soul-brother writers. One is not specifically conscious of the man or woman of ‘mixed’ origin in their oeuvre, but of the entire condition of the black man in a white-controlled world. Their poetry transcends the Liesbeek and the Vaal Rivers, and links up with that of the Niger and the Mississippi. Matthews and Thomas seem to be moving in the direction of the two important black emancipatory phenomena, namely, négritude and soul. It was after all the concept of ‘soul’, which bound the American black in an all-class emanicipatory struggle. Jeanpierre defined it as follows: ‘Soul seems to be African négritude dressed in American clothing imbuing with an African-American hue all the encounters | |
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which have fallen within the province of blacked-lived experience in America.’Ga naar eind18 Stephen Henderson looked upon soul as ‘all of the unconscious energy of the Black Experience...primal spiritual energy...the expression of powerful total personality, drawing its reserve from centuries of suffering and joy.’Ga naar eind19 The celebration of blackness becomes a demythologization of the white myth, that black is ugly. Langston Hughes eulogizes the black woman in the following manner:Ga naar eind20 Ah,
My black one
Thou art not beautiful
Yet Thou hast
A loveliness
Surpassing beauty...
Ah,
My black one
Thou art not luminous
Yet an altar of jewels,
An altar of shimmering jewels,
Would pale in the light
Of Thy darkness
Pale in the light
Of Thy nightness.
In contrast Senghor's black woman is more specifically sensuous:Ga naar eind21 Naked woman, dark woman
Firm-fleshed ripe fruit, sombre raptures of black wine,
mouthmaking lyrical my mouth...
Pearls are the stars on the night of your skin...
All these echoes are to be found in the poetry of James Matthews, who writes:Ga naar eind22 Look upon the blackness of my woman
and be filled with the delight of it
her blackness a beacon among the insipid
faces around her
proudly she walks, a sensuous black lily
swaying in the wind
This daughter of Sheba...
my woman wears her blackness like a queen
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a robe
This daughter of Sheba.
The resuscitation of the black woman was, and is, an important act in the black man's effort to liberate himself from Euro-centric myths. Matthews and Thomas see themselves not specifically as the muses of the ‘Cape coloured’. Their anthology, Cry Rage (1972), is therefore an important literary event, in that there is definite indication of a black orphic descent. It is this fundamental realization by the ‘coloured’ that, while his language may be Western, his idiom is non-Western (black if one wishes). White attempts to define and come to grips with ‘coloured’ political aspirations may founder precisely because they think that they understand the ‘coloured’ language, whereas in essence, they miscomprehend the ‘coloured’ idiom. The black writer cannot shirk his responsibility to attack a political system which denies him his freedom. Through his art, he does not only give vent to his own frustration, but also to that of his entire people. The poems of Matthews and Thomas form an indictment, a litany of protest against the system of apartheid, bearing out the American black poetess Nikki Giovanni's belief that ‘there is no difference between the warrior, poet and the people’. Matthews and Thomas mistrust words like democracy, liberalism, dialogue and reconciliation, which are only employed to ensnare the black man in his status of inferiority. The Europeans may then be shocked by these raw emotions. Whites in South Africa simply banned the anthology. The title of the anthology Cry Rage already signifies the impotency, the rage, the hysteria, the comi-tragic lurking everywhere. For the black artist, South Africa is a frustrating place - he is cut off from other artists of a different pigmentation; he cannot even go to a proper theatre; he is, ironically, dependent on white publishers and white critical evaluations. Writing about, and presumably for, his semiliterate people, he is in the anomalous position of reaching only the ritual proprietors of his distorted universe. Matthews is bitter and will brook no altruism under the guise of Christian Nationalism and Western Humanitarianism. In one of his poems he writes of these hypocrites:Ga naar eind23 they speak so sorrowfully about the
children dying of hunger in Biafra
but sleep unconcerned about the rib-thin
children of Dimbaza...
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Literature engagée can, however, be harmful to the poetic element, as the following poem so aptly shows:Ga naar eind24 poverty is my cross
My colour binds me to it
charity offices the stations
on the road to Golgotha.
This is an example of protest writing at its worst, and what Stephen Spender called ‘poetry conscripted for the victims’. Yet, to Matthews and Thomas, such niceties are trivial in the South African context. Reality after all indicates:Ga naar eind25 Fear is the knock
at the fourth hour after midnight
when the house is hushed in sleep.
In a foreword to this anthology, Matthews spelt out his credo quite clearly: ‘For blacks, to be born and to live in South Africa is like living through a nightmare where words have different connotations because of pigmentation.’Ga naar eind26 Only occasionally does Matthews allow himself an ironic stance, for example, when he lampoons the patronage and patronizing attitudes of South Africa's white liberal culture vultures:Ga naar eind27 the occasion is to honour
missus marshall's latest discovery
a painter who paints in the manner
of picasso
that was before picasso produced works
which missus marshall found rather strange.
I am invited to view the works of her protégé
another in her collection that numbers a singer, a sculptor,
and me
to be displayed when missus marshall
flaunts her liberality
in presenting her cultured blacks.
Gladys Thomas is one of the few ‘coloured’ women, if not the only hitherto, who has seen fit to give expression to her unfreedom poetically. No doubt there are very real reasons why the ‘coloured’ woman in South Africa has not yet announced her presence on the literary scene. They are, after all, the nursemaids of the white kids, they are | |
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the ones who have to supply rational explanations to their own children as to why they cannot enjoy certain privileges. They are the ones who give birth to a generation of the enslaved. Morbid and sad is her Haunted Eyes:Ga naar eind28 A Beautiful land
with beautiful mountains
and beautiful seas
But not for me
Come take my hand
Stop touring and go slumming with me
Look! before your eyes
You see a jungle
See the white cages
with thousands of animals running wild
look at their eyes
Haunted eyes
That's why you see wire fences...
Nadine Gordimer, the novelist, says: ‘I do not fear the Blacks, but many whites do. My message to the self-appointed guardians of our culture is: There can be no such thing as South African Literature if it excludes Black Literature - and it does at the moment.’Ga naar eind29 Matthews's cri de coeur echoes through three hundred years of rapine and despoliation and finds support in the poems of Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Le Roi Jones (Baraka) and Eldridge Cleaver, when he writes:Ga naar eind30 Can the white man speak for me?
Can he feel my pain when his laws
tear wife and child from my side
and I am forced to work a thousand miles away,
does he know my anguish
as I walk his streets at night
my hand fearfully clasping my pass?
is he with me in the loneliness
of my bed in the bachelor barracks
with my longing driving me to mount my brother?
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will he soothe my despair
as I am driven insane
by scraps of paper permitting me to live?
Can the white man speak for me?
Matthews and Thomas both still live in South Africa. The extent to which their messages have, however, penetrated the disenfranchised of South Africa may be largely underestimated by whites. One has only to read Mongane Wally Serote's tribute to James Matthews, in Black Literature and Arts Congress (vol. 2, 1974), to realize this. I recall how deeply Serote spoke of his brother Jimmy Matthews in Amsterdam in May 1976. But the struggle is fought on two fronts, that is at home by people like James Matthews, and abroad, by poets like Dennis Brutus. He too is a practical illustration of the poet-cum-warrior. Opposed to the regime, he soon fell foul of it and was imprisoned on Robben Island. Letter to Martha are poems which record his experiences and feelings on the island. As is the custom in South Africa, Brutus was banned on release from prison. This not only severely restricted his freedom of movement, but worse still, made it impossible for him to publish. These poems were written as letters to his sister-in-law Martha. Brutus first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots (1963). In 1955, Daniel Abasiekong wrote in Transition: ‘It is natural that a South African poet with an open sensibility should react to the horny regime that operates in his country.’Ga naar eind31 Yet, it is an indisputable fact that the strength of his poetry lies precisely in the political attitude of the poet. He deliberately uses an imagery and an idiom which is suggestive of the terror of the landscape: ‘jackboots’; ‘bones’; ‘spirits crunch’; ‘Sharpevilled to spearpoints’. In exile, Brutus has become the focal point of many activities. In America, in particular, where Black Studies and African Departments are plentiful, his political role as a poet is not insignificant. One wonders, however, whether Abasiekong was so completely right when he argued that ‘these political poems...[are]...not so much a political attitude’. It is difficult at times to abstract the poetic man from the political man. Obviously, for Brutus, the creative act is a political act. And the man himself has not been slow to respond to this challenge. Occasionally, for me at least, one is afforded a peep into his soul:Ga naar eind32 | |
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I remember rising one night
after midnight
and moving
through an impulse of loneliness
to try and find the stars.
And through the haze
The battens of fluorescents made
I saw pinpricks of white
I thought were stars.
Only to be rudely reminded of the harsh reality of ‘anxious boots’, ‘machine-gun post’ and the ‘brusque inquiry’ lingering longer than the ‘stars’. But there is just a hint of poems conscripted for the victims. Whatever qualms one may have about ethno-inspired poetry, as a reaction against white domination, it remains a fact that phenomena such as négritude and soul have functioned as a ‘cultural concept which has gone far to unite the community and prepare it for more important changes’. Ironically, again, the whites in South Africa have always insisted on the development of group consciousness and a deeprooted pride in one's own ethnic identity. Yet, in practice, they are afraid of the concepts of soul and black power. When, for instance, blacks started wearing T-shirts with the slogan, ‘Black is beautiful’, this was immediately translated as a threat to the establishment, and, therefore, banned. Afrikaner intellectuals and political scientists hastened to act as apologists for apartheid, by pointing out that the slogan was inflammatory, detrimental to good race relations and revolutionary. Some ‘coloureds’ are increasingly referring to themselves as blacks. African leaders are also beginning to reassess the role of the ‘coloured’ group. Thus, Mr Ramusi, the leader of the opposition party in Lebowa, a Bantustan, commented in Die Burger: ‘There is a movement to group the coloured with the whites in order to reinforce the numbers of the whites. But we are watching whether you are trying to be white.’Ga naar eind33 The ‘coloured’ ghetto inhabitants of Manenberg and Bonteheuwel are fast discovering their counterparts in Soweto, Gugulethu and Langa. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in the statement of one of the teenagers sentenced to a long term of imprisonment during the upheavals of 1976:Ga naar eind34 | |
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Separate education which was unsatisfactory made me think even more. All institutions should be open to all. Because of the lack of facilities it appears that Blacks do not have the necessary qualifications to occupy higher posts. Bodies like the C.R.C., the Indian Council and Bantu Administration are fruitless because they can never remove our frustration. Our people feel they are a waste of time...I asked myself what was to be done to bring to the Government's attention the dissatisfaction and what changes should be made. Perhaps the way I did it was wrong but to date I have still not found any other way to bring my dissatisfaction to light.This nineteen-year-old was sentenced to six years in prison. The proposed new deal which was recently made known by the South African government, envisages a white, ‘coloured’ and Indian parliament. Some ‘coloureds’, Indians and whites may dupe themselves into believing that they have found a solution to the country's problems. No solution can exclude the majority of the people, the Africans. Even the Reverend A. Hendrickse, the new leader of the ‘coloured’ Labour party, was forced recently, at their annual conference, to speak out in favour of the African National Congress. His motives may be unclear or even impure. Yet, it is an indication of the type of reflection in ‘coloured’ society. Nothing, however, has been solved and nothing will be solved, as long as the ‘coloured’ is seen as a separate problem, which must be solved separately. In the language of Joseph Campbell, ‘everyone of us shares the supreme ordeal - not in the brightest moments of the tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair’.Ga naar eind35 |
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