Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Few of the new arrivals knew anything of farming, however; nor had they been told of the explosive situation on the frontier. Quitting their farms, they took to the towns. Grahamstown, once no more than a military outpost, flourished as the focus of settler power; by the 1840s voices would be raised demanding that the seat of colonial government be moved there from Cape Town.

  Though Grahamstown is today no more than a provincial town, it remains the cradle of British culture in South Africa. As such it lays claim to embodying a link between white English-speaking South Africans and the liberal traditions (real or imagined) of their land of ancestry. Mostert shows just how illusory this link is. ‘There was a quality of racial hatred in [Grahamstown] of a virulence that equalled, and probably surpassed, anything previously experienced in South Africa,’ he writes. (p. 776) From the Grahamstown Journal emerged a stream of lies and propaganda against the Xhosa and their sympathisers intended to advance at any cost the material interests of the British-descended community; this propaganda would later be directed toward undermining the colour-blind franchise of the Cape Colony itself.

  Why should Grahamstown have been such a centre of reaction? Partly because it was vulnerable to Xhosa attack and therefore in a state of war scare (it was nearly sacked in 1819). But Mostert advances an additional and more provocative explanation. Whereas the frontier Boers had accommodated themselves to their Xhosa neighbours to the extent of becoming in effect just another frontier tribe, albeit a bellicose one, the British settlers remained locked into the ideology of social self-advancement that had brought them to the Colony in the first place: the Colony was a place where they would be able to get ahead socially as they had not been able to in Britain. What they brought along with them – furnishings, books, heirlooms – constituted social capital. When their homes were razed in frontier wars, the loss of their possessions was felt as a crippling assault upon their social identity, as it was not by the Boers. Hence their rage; hence, ultimately, the hostility between white and black that characterises the Eastern Cape down to the present day.

  Since 1778 the Xhosa had fought a series of increasingly bloody wars with colonists on the frontier. The causes of conflict were manifold: population growth, Xhosa cattle-rustling, settler greed for Xhosa land, the inconsistency and duplicity of official policy, the mischief-making of the colonists’ propaganda organs. All of these contributed to what Mostert justly calls ‘the most tragically disastrous and tarnished involvement between Britain and a sovereign black people in Africa in the nineteenth century’, an involvement whose ‘shadows continue to move with unappeased restlessness within the haunted house that is modern South Africa’. (p. xxviii) With the benefit of hindsight one can see the turning point in race relations to have been the moment when Sir Benjamin D’Urban, governor of the Colony, publicly characterised the Xhosa as ‘irreclaimable savages’, thereby placing them outside the pale and justifying total war against them (one is reminded of the judgement pronounced by Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘Exterminate the brutes!’).

  In 1850 there began what was to be the most terrible of these wars, ‘a war of race, perhaps the first of its kind’. (p. 1077) Mostert quotes from missionary diaries to attest the active, personal hatred by now felt by the Xhosa for whites. It was a war in which the British killed men, women and children without distinction, while the Xhosa tortured prisoners to death and mutilated corpses. Mostert devotes some two hundred harrowing pages to a recreation of this war as it was experienced on both sides.

  The British military establishment of the day was dominated by its commander-in-chief, the Duke of Wellington, a military thinker whose outlook had frozen with Waterloo. Till his death in 1852 Wellington resisted every pressure toward innovation. Fighting a bush war in Africa, British soldiers still marched in formation, wearing scarlet uniforms, burdened with heavy equipment. They were mown down by massed Xhosa rifle fire or stabbed with spears from under dense cover. Nevertheless, nothing was learned; battle tactics remained unchanged. (The chickens at last came home to roost, for Britain, in 1854, when the antiquated thinking and incompetence of the General Staff was laid bare by the ghastly sufferings of the Crimea.)

  Governor of the Cape at the time was Sir Harry Smith, victor at the Battle of Aliwal in India and one of Wellington’s darlings. Arriving at the frontier, one of Smith’s first acts had been to force a Xhosa chief named Maqoma to prostrate himself. With his knee on Maqoma’s neck, Smith announced, ‘This is to teach you that I have come to teach Kaffirland that I am chief and master here, and this is the way I shall treat the enemies of the Queen of England.’ As commander in the field, Smith almost managed to lose the war. But in the end, facing superior force, the Xhosa chiefs had to sue for terms.

  A few years later the defeated Xhosa received, through the medium of a fifteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse, good tidings in the form of instructions from the afterworld: they were to kill all their cattle, cease to cultivate their fields, scatter their food stores. A day of reckoning would follow: a new sun would rise, the British would be swallowed into the sea, there would be a grand resurrection of the ancestors; then would follow an earthquake, after which new herds of cattle, immortal, would emerge from under the earth and new corn stand in the fields.

  Public opinion split in two between believers in Nongqawuse’s prophecy and unbelievers. From the hilltops believers stood gazing eastward to sea for the ships that would bring the ancestors – incarnated as Russians – to defeat the English. Mostert records the emotion-laden reminiscences of people who spent 18 February 1857 waiting for the rising of the sun in the west. In vain: the new sun did not appear, nor did new cattle and new corn rise from the earth. Rage and reprisals against the unbelievers – whose unbelief was held to have led to the non-arrival of the millennium – took place all over the land. Tens of thousands starved to death; the integrity of Xhosa culture was shattered.

  This act of irrational self-destruction can be explained only as a despairing reaction to a series of demoralising military defeats and to unrelenting pressure on the traditional institutions of the Xhosa. Whether or not Mostert is right in claiming that the colonial authorities, and in particular Governor Sir George Grey, who has until the present enjoyed somewhat of a reputation as an enlightened man, foresaw the disastrous sequel, yet found reasons not to intervene, the fact is that the British stood to gain much. Without raising a finger, they could watch what their armies had failed to accomplish being brought about before their eyes.

  As for Nongqawuse – whose role in the episode may well have been no more than that of a tool in the hands of an uncle who, having fallen under Christian influence, cherished ambitions of becoming a ‘gospel man’ himself—she lived out her life ostracized by her people. Mostert includes a photograph of her from the period, looking glum.

  The cattle-killing may have marked the end of Xhosa military power, but it was by no means the end of the Xhosa. With the hold of tradition broken, individual Xhosa were released to sink or swim in the colonial economy. Many sank, some swam. The decades that followed saw the rise of a class of black farmers who farmed new crop types, using new techniques learned from the missionaries and competing successfully with white farmers. From Lovedale, the missionary institute for advanced education, began to emerge a new Xhosa elite, ‘Christian, articulate, model Victorian gentlemen in their conservatism, respectability and sobriety’. (p. 1257) Westernised by force as the Zulu never were, the Xhosa were to provide black South Africans with political leaders for the new age they were entering, including most of the founding fathers of the African National Congress, established in 1912.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century the Cape Colony had the most liberal constitution in the British Empire, in respect to the franchise more generous than the constitutions of some European states. It enshrined a vision, inherited from the Enlightenment, of a non-racial society of free individuals. But it was too much to hope that in 1910, when it finally gave over responsibility
for an unendingly troublesome colony, Britain would insist that the constitution of the newly formed Union of South Africa be based on the Cape model. Exhausted by the Boer War, intent on withdrawal at all costs, Britain did what the enfranchised blacks and the liberals of the Cape feared most: abandoned them to their countrymen, Boer and Briton, washing its hands of the whole mess. ‘The political tragedy of the twentieth century in South Africa was born in Westminster,’ writes Mostert. ‘It is impossible to avoid looking back wishfully . . . The Cape Colony was unique . . . Its value as the quintessential example and ideal for an emerging Africa at mid-century, and for most of the rest of the world . . . would have been inestimable.’ (pp. 1273, 1275)

  ‘I am of the Cape,’ writes Mostert, presenting his credentials in the fashion now obligatory among historians. With its ‘benignly occult’ qualities, the Cape (by which he here means Cape Town and its immediate hinterland) is ‘a spiritual birthright from which there is no departure’. (pp. 120, 121) It soon becomes clear that he shares a tendency, not uncommon in the Cape, to regard the region as both geographically and ideologically set apart from the passions and cruelties of a wider South Africa. (How he would square this with the fact that, in respect of murder and rape, Cape Town has long been the most violent city in Africa, I do not know.) His sympathies are clearly liberal, idealistic, and secular, though coloured by a somewhat mystical nostalgia for his lost African childhood.

  As an historian he is consciously old-fashioned. His book contains no graphs or tables. He is well aware that the story of frontier conflict he tells can be retold as the working out in human affairs of variations in rainfall and the spread and retreat of cattle-fever bacilli. He acknowledges the importance of these material determinants. Nevertheless, to him history is primarily the story of men in conflict; his interest is not in economic forces but in (male) personalities. His principal documentary research has been carried out in an area he admits to be ‘unfashionable’: missionary records. (p. 1288) He visits overgrown battlefields and reports the melancholy effect they have on him. When he enters the narration in propria persona, it is not as part of an ironic postmodernist ploy. Sometimes, indeed, he reads like one of the more magisterial, all-knowing Victorian novelists – Thackeray, for instance.

  This does not mean to say that he is an amateur. He has plainly read and taken his cue from the first volume (1969) of the Oxford History of South Africa, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, the first of the new, revisionist histories of colonial South Africa. His preliminary chapters on the history of precolonial Africa, the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples, early European voyages of exploration around the Cape, the first years of the settlement at the Cape, and life on the Cape frontier, are fully informed by contemporary historical scholarship, as are all his chapters on the Xhosa. His work on the missionaries breaks new ground.

  His prose sometimes reminds one of Laurens van der Post at his most romantic. There are purple passages on the African continent and the ‘occult’ forces informing its landscape. (p. xxii) Some of his rhapsodies descend to hokum: in the indigenous languages of South Africa ‘the cadences of the wild, of water and earth, rock and grass, roll onomatopoetically along the tongue’. (p. 35) There is a tendency to grandiose hyperbole (the Xhosa cattle-killing was ‘probably the greatest self-inflicted immolation of a people in all history’) and a degree of unconscious patronising (the Bushmen are ‘delightful people’). (pp. 1187, 27) Too often the momentum of the narrative falters and the reader becomes bogged down in the jostlings of minor chiefs, correspondence between military commanders, petty intrigues, political shadow-boxing. Frontiers would be a better book if it were two hundred pages shorter.

  Mostert treads carefully and for the most part wisely through the minefield of South African ethnic and racial terminology, in which an apparently neutral term like ‘settler’ or ‘native’ can be taken as the bitterest of insults. He is right to point out that, as black people began to be absorbed into a national economy, it made less sense to call them Xhosa, Zulu, etc., and more sense to call them simply Africans. Thus to nominate a person as ‘a Xhosa’ in a South Africa just emerging from decades of enforced ethnic categorisations and to make this the primary definition of his/her identity implies at best an old-fashioned ethnicist outlook, at worst the dogmatism of apartheid; even the more cautious locution ‘a Xhosa-speaker’ may be taken as an evasive euphemism.

  Frontiers is a masterfully conceived book from which one can learn a great deal about why the South African past casts such a dark shadow over the present. It will certainly correct the notion that what happened on the eastern Cape frontier between 1780 and 1870 was no more than a series of bush skirmishes, that the battles that formed modern South Africa were fought solely between Boer and Zulu, Briton and Zulu, Boer and Briton. It will also contain no comfort for the reader who believes that, as far as race-hatred is concerned, the British in South Africa have clean hands.

  28 Photographs of South Africa

  PHOTOGRAPHY CAME TO South Africa in the 1840s, not long after its invention. Equipment of the first generation was cumbersome but not expensive, processing tedious but easy to learn: soon there were studios in most large towns, while itinerant photographers were criss-crossing the remoter parts. The invention of roll-film and cheap hand-held cameras in the 1880s made picture taking accessible to non-professionals. By the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of images, perhaps millions, had been recorded on glass or celluloid.

  Taking 1910 as her cut-off point, Mona de Beer has sifted through some 30,000 photographs in South African archives and collections to make a selection of 370, which she reproduces in a handsome book entitled A Vision of the Past.1

  At the most obvious level, what these pictures have in common, particularly the earlier ones, and what distinguishes them from social-record photographs of our own time, is their stillness. Because the chemical emulsions in use reacted to light only slowly, shutter speeds had to be slow; because shutter speeds were slow, subjects in motion could not be photographed. In the case of human subjects the standard instruction was therefore, ‘Keep still for the camera!’ In the interval between this command and the click of the shutter, the subject had nothing to do but compose himself, becoming a self-for-the-camera whose trace, formed by the lens, given substance by chemical processes, would re-emerge into the world as a photograph.

  The nineteenth-century people whose pictures we see are therefore strikingly conscious of themselves as objects of the gaze of the lens and strikingly composed before that gaze. In their formality, in the lack of any alternative to being posed, these subjects suffer a degree of constriction, but also – paradoxically – enjoy a degree of ease not open to present-day subjects, faced with mystifying commands to ‘Be natural!’ ‘Relax – be yourself!’

  The men in these pictures – or at least the white colonials – seem to compose themselves around self-ideals, or ideal selves, of the manly and the dapper. The women are harder to read. Perhaps the most that can be said is that one does not detect in them the narcissism of the looked-at woman of a hundred years later. I doubt that this is to be explained by unfamiliarity with the camera. Rather, the explanation may lie in the absence of iconic models of how to look while being looked at – models which abound today. In any event, the effect is that, in the cases of both men and women, the sexual appeal of the photographs is hard to read.

  This is by no means to say that these subjects were innocent of aesthetic paradigms. On the contrary, singly or in groups they fall into poses characteristic of European figure painting – poses derived almost certainly not directly, from paintings themselves, but at third or fourth hand via the routine practices of studio photographers.

  Even in pictures whose emphasis is on an activity – black-smithing, haymaking – rather than on whoever is performing the activity, motion has to be interrupted till the shutter clicks and as a result the pictures take on an illustrative and even emblematic quality. Sometimes the effect can be
eerie, as in a picture of women in kappie sunbonnets ‘playing cricket’ (so the caption says), or one in which a party ‘playing tennis’ on chalked-out but unfenced courts in the bare veld of Rouxville turn to the camera holding their rackets much as a king in a pack of cards holds his sceptre of office.

  Little of the portraiture reproduced is of artistic value. On the other hand, outdoor scenes, particularly those which mix social levels, allow the more enterprising photographers opportunities that are sometimes well taken. The courtiers and shepherds of the European picturesque are interestingly translated, for instance, in an anonymous photograph of a well-dressed walking party waiting to be ferried across the Riviersonderend by an old boatman. Photographs in this genre from the Gribble studio in Paarl are particularly impressive.

  Mona de Beer and her collaborator Brian Johnson Barker seem to be untroubled by any doubts as to their ability to read facial expressions from a bygone age. That is to say, they seem not to question the existence of a transhistorical and even transcultural code of looks reflecting universal inner feelings. In this they can call for a certain amount of support from modern human ethology as well as from those eighteenth-century philosophers of sentiment who argue that an inborn faculty of sympathy allows feelings to be transmitted from one breast to another without the mediation of a semiotic system.

  Whether or not looks have the power to communicate feelings transparently, however, the captions in this collection raise questions. How many readers, I wonder, and specifically how many black South African readers, would join the compilers in interpreting the look on the face of the girl selling brooms (p. 140) as ‘wistful’. And, while granting to the compilers that anyone about to be body-searched for illicit diamonds may feel anxious and/or resentful and/or angry, would any set of readers scrutinising the photograph of the seven naked men (p. 161) agree on which of the men are anxious, which resentful and which angry?