Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  This is by no means to argue that all faces from the past must be as inscrutable as the faces of Martians. In the faces of British prisoners of war (p. 191), for instance, one can see the unmistakable lineaments of their great-grandsons, the football hooligans of the 1980s. It is merely to say that in this case the compilers claim a competence in cultural fine reading that their captions do not bear out.

  The captioning is undoubtedly the weakest feature of the book. Running to 50–100 words per photograph, the captions often contain useful factual information, such as, for example, that bars across upper-storey windows were not to keep burglars out but to keep children in, or that old-style bicycle brakes exerted pressure not on the rim but on the tyre. But too often the tone of the captions is syrupy or patronising. Of a group of young girls at play: ‘If this is a birthday it must surely be for the little girl . . . looking at the camera. What a real child she looks – happy, sweet-natured and quite capable of mischief.’ Of farm workers at a dance: ‘Their dance floor may be a dusty patch of veld, and the style of one or two a trifle vigorous, but these are people enjoying themselves.’

  The compilers have made a brave and not inconsiderable attempt to give a selection that is socially representative: pictures of rich and poor, black and white, Christian and Muslim and Jew. But – unavoidably, given the uses to which photography was put in nineteenth-century South Africa – the overwhelming majority of the images from which they have selected, and the majority of the images they reproduce, are of the faces and the clothed bodies of middle-class white people and of the objects and occasions deemed important by these people. So while the endpapers of the book consist of a breathtaking group photograph of hundreds of men, black and white, looking back at the camera from the slopes of a dump at the New Primrose Gold Mine, disproportionate coverage is given to unremarkable pictures of family gatherings and sports teams and dressed-up children – to what the compilers call ‘social history that embraces the ordinary man’.

  Social history because not history. The compilers make it clear that they are not putting together an illustrated history of South Africa along the lines of the Reader’s Digest Illustrated History. So instead of battles we have picnics, instead of famous men, ordinary folks. Fair enough. But where, in practice, does social history end and history proper begin? If the lepers confined to Robben Island are in the book because they belong to social history, are the Xhosa chiefs also confined to Robben Island not in the book because they belong to history? Does a dead baby in its little coffin (in the book) fall into social history, while trenches full of dead soldiers (not in the book) fall into history? The principle – that ordinary people doing ordinary things don’t deserve to be forgotten – is a good one, but the inference – that there is a space that can be abstracted from history and called the space of social history – seems to me hard to sustain, and, insofar as it results in a book that constitutes a (broadly speaking) happy and peaceful representation of a time and place that were (equally broadly speaking) sad and filled with strife, pernicious.

  It would be grossly unfair to assert that A Vision of the Past does anything quite so simple as celebrate Victorian South Africa. Nevertheless, the book is in many respects of a piece with an era that spent a lot of time and energy celebrating itself. The book certainly does not set out to subvert the comfortable image of itself that the era put out.

  Should a compilation of this kind set out to subvert its subject? Behind this question lies the question of what historiography – including social historiography – is all about. Is it enough to reproduce an era’s representation of itself without at the very least indicating the boundaries the era drew around that self-representation – without, in other words, indicating what was censored from the public image?

  The Empire of Victoria was very clear about the need for censorship and self-censorship. It drew a strict line between public life and private life; within private life it drew a strict line between what might and what might not emerge into the public gaze. The erotic belonged to the cordoned-off part of private life, and representations of the erotic accordingly found no place in the Empire’s self-presentation (or rather, since it is not in the nature of Eros to be repressed, emerged only in disguise). In A Vision of the Past there is no representation of the erotic undisguised, and certainly no trace of the pornographic. Yet ever since its invention photography has been intimately linked with pornography. Dirty pictures were part of the underlife of Victorian South Africa as they were of Victorian England; and if dirty pictures do not belong in social history, where do they belong?

  There is another questionable exclusion: photographs illustrating the social life and customs of ‘primitive’ peoples (such as James Chapman’s photographs of the Bushmen), as well as anthropometric photographs recording ‘primitive’ physical types. A strong argument can be made that such pictures, particularly the anthropometric ones, are in spirit closely allied to pornography, both subjecting the body to an aggressively prying gaze. Such ethnographic photographs occupy a peculiar position nowadays, on the point of being relegated from the category of empirical documentation to the category of the forbidden. Nevertheless, insofar as they proclaim themselves to be social history – the social history of people about to be steamrollered by history – leaving them out of a book like this deserves at least a justificatory paragraph.

  Though primarily a picture book, A Vision of the Past contains brief essays – bland and uncontroversial – introducing each of its eight sections, as well as some introductory pages on the history of photography in South Africa, pages that tell us rather less than we might want to know about the technology of early photography and photographic reproduction. (Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographic analysis of animal locomotion is cited here as ‘Animal Location by . . . Edward Muybridge,’ a mistake that does not breed confidence in the compilers’ scholarship.) For technical information the reader still needs to go to A.D. Bensusan’s Silver Images: A History of Photography in South Africa. But neither Bensusan nor the present compilers answer a question that presents itself more and more insistently as one pages through the book: why are the technicians from Cape Town and Hong Kong who made this expensive book unable to match the skill of craftsmen of ninety years ago at reproducing photographic material, particularly at the level of microscopic detail? A related question: Why is it that a photograph (reproduced on p. 223) of a street scene from the Cape Town of 1902, a photograph that would seem to have been taken with an exposure of 1/10 second or longer, has a subtlety of gradation of blacks that one no longer sees in today’s photographic prints?

  Despite such cavilling, A Vision of the Past contains scores of absorbing pictures in which one can lose oneself for hours on end. Many of them are poignant, less for what they represent than for what they promise and what failed to arrive – a snap (dated 1900), for instance, of ragged black children playing cricket (untutored, unsupervised) in the veld outside Aliwal North.

  29 The 1995 Rugby World Cup

  IF ONE’S VERDICT on the 1999 rugby World Cup is that the South African team was mildly unlucky to end up in third place, rather than second or even first, then the verdict on the 1995 Cup must be that South Africa was mildly lucky to end up first. Though solid in all departments, well drilled and determined, the 1995 team was not the most talented or inventive on show. The New Zealanders they beat were a stronger combination, who on the day of the final happened to make too many jittery mistakes.

  But the World Cup is not just about rugby. It is the occasion for a month-long orgy of chauvinism and mime-show of war among nations. When South Africa hosted the tournament in 1995, it was unabashedly used as a political exercise in nation building. So it is not unsporting to look back critically on the packaging of the 1995 tournament, and specifically on the opening and closing ceremonies, where the ‘philosophy’ behind the World Cup bared itself particularly nakedly.

  These ceremonies, recast, to suit the roving eye of the television cameras,
away from old-style brass bands and marching phalanxes in the direction of extravaganza of the Miss Universe kind, betrayed how the designers of the spectacle – professionals hired by the operators who nowadays own the game – conceive of the new South Africa. The new South Africa they put on show at Newlands and Ellis Park was very different from the South Africa exhibited by the old regime in the spectacles it organised. It was more feminine, or more sexualised: the grim-faced, men-only, militaristic muscle flexing had disappeared. At a deeper level, however, it remained disturbingly similar, so similar, in fact, that one might call the concept (to adopt the word the professionals must use among themselves) naïve, at the very least.

  The master metaphor behind the two ceremonies was clearly Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s ‘Rainbow People’, modified for the occasion into ‘Rainbow Nation’. The rainbow metaphor does not originate with Tutu, of course: he brought it back from his travels in America, where rainbowness has a history going back at least to the 1930s. ‘Rainbow’ thus entered South African discourse in a self-aware fashion as an ideological term, a substitute for a long series of discredited synonyms: ‘plural’, ‘veelvolkig’, and the like. It absolved itself of the taint of mere synonymy by the instrumental intention behind it: it was to be set to work to reverse the mindset of a population locked by its former masters into ethnic-political compartments. Specifically, it predicated the nation as a mental construct and nationhood as a collective state of mind. If a group of people can be encouraged to believe they are a nation and to act together like a nation, even if only in play, then they are a nation.

  This conception of what nationhood consists in differs sharply from the conception that underlay apartheid, at least in its pristine years, and that still underlies such residual movements as Boere-Afrikanerdom and Zulu nationalism, which set as prerequisites a common history, common roots in a common territory, a common culture, and (most strikingly though also most vaguely) shared ‘blood’.

  The World Cup and the ballyhoo surrounding it were used by its South African backers as a vehicle for promoting a South African nationalism. The team selected by the South African Rugby Football Union, despite its predominant whiteness, was promoted as the embodiment of that nation. At a deeper level, rugby was used by the medium (television-sports or sports-television) to promote the idea that a nation and a national consciousness are to all intents and purposes the same thing, and therefore that sounds and images, if numerous and powerful enough, can create a nation.

  What did the opening and closing ceremonies show? History remains a deeply contentious subject in South Africa. The struggle for the right to make up the story of the country is by no means over. Seeming to declare a truce on that front, the opening ceremony made an attempt to be history-less. It presented a dehistoricised vision of Tourist South Africa: contented tribesfolk and happy mineworkers, as in the old South Africa, but purified and sanctified, somehow, by the Rainbow.

  When it got to the paler end of the spectrum, however, it found itself unable to proceed without becoming, intermittently, not only a pageant but an historical pageant as well. And so, to the procession of timeless Sotho in blankets and timeless Zulu in ostrich feathers it had to add what looked very much like happy eighteenth-century slaves and slave-owners in knee-breeches, bearing baskets of agricultural produce to the Rainbow feast. There were also, somewhere in the middle of the pageant, half a dozen lost-looking lads in khaki shirts and shorts whose presence seemed to be more symbolic than iconic (Voortrekkers? Baden-Powell Pioneers? mere generic whites?).

  From the moment when the rainbow procession into the Newlands stadium slipped into the historical mode – a moment that was foreseeable, given the naïveté of the people who dreamed up the spectacle, to say nothing of the soteriological impulse behind Tutu’s notion of a Rainbow People (a people who have passed through the fires of history and to that extent are elect or at least special) – it became difficult not to be aware of what was present in and what was absent from this new history.

  Who, in 1995, were the principal absentees? The list began with Jan van Riebeeck himself and cut a swathe through all the colonial founding fathers, from Simon van der Stel to Piet Retief to Cecil John Rhodes. Absent too was the alternative line of fathers: Moshoeshoe, Gandhi, Luthuli, et al. No Famous Men at all, no Famous Women either, just People, of various tribes. Shangaan and Pedi but no Huguenots, no 1820 Settlers. Muslims and Indians but no Jews. More disturbingly, no San, no Khoi (and this on the continent, according to the theme song, ‘where the world began’). Coon kaskenades but no volkspele. Gumboot-dancing but no tiekiedraai.

  If the representation of the host country stepped a fine line between ethnic stereotyping and service of the Rainbow concept, the rest of the opening ceremony was an uninhibited riot of clichés: gaucho Argentinians, matelot Frenchmen, gondolier Italians, shamrock-green Irish leprechauns – the parts all played by bewildered children watched over by angel maidens in sexy, diaphanous white robes, children who had twenty seconds to shuffle about in the appropriate national dance before they were shunted off the platform to make way for the next nation.

  When it came to the larger ex-colonies, rainbow nations in their own right, the image-makers faced a dilemma. What ethnic icons were appropriate to such countries as Canada and Australia? They settled, rather lamely, for separate but equal representation: in the opening ceremony the Canadians were clad in democratic blue jeans, the Australians in bushranger kit; in the closing ceremony the aboriginals had their day in the sun, beating drums, blowing didgeridoos.

  Of course, the moment to wait for was the revelation of how the puzzle was to be solved of setting on the platform a single image of the Rainbow People. Were we going to have a cluster of happy black, white, Coloured and Indian faces as in the ‘plural’ South Africa of old (‘One country, many nations’)? And what were they going to wear? The solution that emerged had an air of desperation about it: cute black pikkies in mine overalls and helmets (pikkie from Portuguese pequeño, little; its English cousin has dropped out of polite usage).

  For some, the opening and closing ceremonies were colourful extravaganzas, fun events which stirred the blood and brought tears to the eyes. For others, the predominating emotion was relief – relief that the ceremonies began and ended on time, that the sound system worked, that the choreography, if not exactly snappy, at least did not get into an irremediable muddle in front of the world’s cameras, that only once (a bejewelled singer borne into the stadium in a litter on the shoulders of muscular old-Egyptian slaves) were the depths plumbed of Sun City tastelessness.

  In some cases it was the World Cup anthem that lingered in memory long after the images of the pageant itself had vanished. The tune itself has a suspicious resemblance to the middle section of Gustav Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ (since Holst’s copyrights expired in 1984, arrangers were free to do with his music as they pleased). Already ponderously sentimental in Elgarian fashion, this tune now had saccharine harmonies superadded, and words of sonorous vacuity (‘As we try to reach our destiny . . . to take our place in history and live with dignity’), sung by a large blonde woman doing an imitation of African American (not African) vocal timbre – a voice at the same time strident and aggressively sentimental, the voice in which the American music industry purveys its dreams of love and desire.

  Part of the experience of being colonised is having images of yourself made up by outsiders stuffed down your throat. At the World Cup ceremonies, South African spectators learned, some for the first time, that they were Rainbow people, that, whether they liked it or not, they would be represented as such on the world’s television screens. As to the terms in which they would be packaged, they would have no say on these. The words and music, the images and stereotypes in which the Rainbow concept was to be dressed, would be concocted not just by foreigners but by an industry dedicated to the manufacture and recycling of the exotic, to the construction of varieties of rainbowness across the globe. For present purposes, their country was
to be offered as an exotic destination, different from other destinations certainly, but different only in a piquant, easily digested way, the way of sports tourism.

  Notes and References

  1 What Is a Classic? A Lecture

  1 What is a Classic? (London: Faber, 1945). Hereafter cited as WIC.

  2 ‘Le Poète de la latinité tout entière’, quoted in Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber, 1975), p. 16. Sainte-Beuve’s lectures were published as Etude sur Virgile in 1857.

  3 In a Criterion article of 1926 Eliot claims that Britain is part of ‘a common culture of Western Europe’. The question is: ‘Are there enough persons in Britain believing in that European culture, the Roman inheritance, believing in the place of Britain in that culture’. Two years later he assigns Britain a mediating role between Europe and the rest of the world: ‘She is the only member of the European community that has established a genuine empire – that is to say, a world-wide empire as was the Roman empire – not only European but the connection between Europe and the rest of the world.’ Quoted in Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 111, 85.

  4 Eliot left Harvard to study in Germany, then moved to Oxford when the First World War broke out, then married an Englishwoman, then tried to return to Harvard to defend his doctoral dissertation (but the ship on which he had a berth did not sail), then tried to get a job in the U.S. navy but failed, then – it seems – simply gave up trying, stayed in England, and eventually became a British subject. If the dice had fallen another way, it is not impossible to see him getting his PhD, taking up the professorship that awaited him at Harvard and resuming his American life.