Another vital question: what will be the various African states’ official attitude to culture, and to literature as an expression of that culture? We writers do not know, and have every reason to be uneasy. Certainly, in the twentieth century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature – indeed, culture – has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defies them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. As writers, do we envisage, for example, a dispensation from a Ministry of Culture to fund publishing in African languages, and to provide libraries in rural communities and in the shanty towns that no doubt will be with us, still, for a long time? Would we have to fear that, in return for subvention, writers might be restricted by censorship of one kind or another? How can we ensure that our implicit role – supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there – will be respected?
Considering all these factors that stand between the writer’s act of transforming literature in response to a new era, it seems that we writers have, however reluctantly, to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be ours. We shall have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education – will our schools turn out drones or thinkers? Shall we have access, through our writing, to young minds? How shall we press for a new policy and structure of publishing and distribution, so that writers may write in African languages and bring pleasure and fulfilment to thousands who are cut off from literature by lack of knowledge of European languages? How shall we make the function of writers, whose essential gesture, the hand held out to contribute to development, is in the books they offer, something recognised and given its value by the governing powers of the twenty-first century? We have to begin now to concern ourselves with the structures of society that contain culture, and within which it must assert its growth.
And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, and African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs and secular rituals: the very stuff on which literary imagination feeds. The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pap is by now so deeply established among our people, and so temptingly cheaply purchased from abroad by our media – including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television – that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people, but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against the mega-subculture that, in my revised terminology in a vastly changing world, is the opium of the people.
Surely the powers of our writers’ imaginations can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We do not want cultural freedom to be hijacked by the rush of international subliterature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselves in the defeat of colonial cultures. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the page of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.
Albert Camus wrote: ‘One either serves the whole of man or one does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, he also needs pure beauty, which is the bread of his heart.’ And so Camus called for ‘Courage in one’s life and talent in one’s work.’ We shall need courage in our lives to take part in transforming social structures so that African literature may grow.
Gabriel García Márquez wrote: ‘The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.’ That goes for the peaceful revolution of culture, as well; without talent in our work, without ourselves writing as well as we can, we shall not serve African literature as we should.
I believe that the statements of Camus and Márquez and Neto (remember his words: ‘If writing is one of the conditions of your being alive, you create that condition’) might be the credo for all of us who write in Africa. They do not resolve the conflicts that will continue to come, but they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of writers squarely to their existence, reason-to-be, as a writer, and the reason-to-be, as a responsible human being, acting like any other within a social and political context. Bread, justice and the bread of the heart, which is the beauty of literature: these are all our business in Africa’s twenty-first century.
1992
Beyond Myth
Mandela’s Mettle
On Friday, in Oslo, Nelson Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with South African President F.W. de Klerk for their efforts to end apartheid.
Nelson Mandela is one of the world-famous today. One of the few who, in contrast with those who have made our twentieth century infamous for fascism, racism and war, will mark it as an era that achieved advancement for humanity. So will his name live in history, the context in which he belongs to the world.
Of course, we South Africans are part of that context and share this perception of him. But he belongs to us, and – above all – we belong to him on another and different level of experience.
There are those of us who knew him in childhood in his home, the Transkei, and see, beneath the ageing face formed by extraordinary experiences of underground and imprisonment, the soft contours of a lively youth unaware of the qualities within him beyond a commonplace appetite for life. There are freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives and are not with us to match the image of the leader, in the struggle they shared, with the statesman who has brought it to its fulfilment. There are those who see, superimposed upon his public appearances, his image in newspapers and on television today, the memory of his face, figure and bearing as he spoke from the dock when he was given a life sentence for his actions against apartheid, and declared a commitment he has lived up to since, many times, through many dangers: ‘I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’
It is a temptation to be anecdotal about Mandela. To speak, each of us who has had even some brief point of contact with him, of the pleasure of being remembered as well as remembering. For this man with the Atlas-like weight of our future borne on his erect shoulders does have what appears to be some kind of mind-reading facility to pick up identities, some card-index mnemonic system (perhaps developed in the long contemplative years in prison) that enables him to recognise people he may not have seen for years, or whom he may have met fleetingly during recent weeks of handshaking encounters. But this is no trick of political showmanship. Seemingly insignificant, it is a sign of something profound: a remove from self-centredness; the capacity to live for others that is central to the character.
He moves about our country now and is a flesh-and-blood presence to millions. For twenty-seven years he was imprisoned; in our midst – for Robben Island is in sight of Table Mountain, in Cape Town, and Pollsmore Prison is part of the city – and yet, in social terms, entombed. Silenced. Even his image removed; it was forbidden to reproduce his photograph in newspapers or other media. He could so easily have become legendary, his features recomposed as the icon of hopes that never would be realised and a fre
edom that always receded as each wave of resistance within our country was crushed and seemed defeated, and the outside world was indifferent.
But the people had a sense of his enduring what they knew: the harsh humiliations of prison were everyday experiences to black people under the apartheid pass laws and innumerable other civil restrictions that for generations created a vast non-criminal prison population in South Africa. When he and his colleagues were set to break stones and pull seaweed out of the Atlantic Ocean, ordinary people among the black population were being hired out by prison authorities as slave farm labour. His people kept him among them in the words of their songs and chants, in the examples of forms of resistance he had passed on to them, and in the demands for his release which were part of the liberation platform, maintained both by leadership in exile and the people themselves, at home. In such news of him that came out of prison, we came to know that his sense of himself was always part of all this, of living it with his people; he received them through prison walls, as they kept him with them. This double sense was intrinsic to the very stuff of resistance. The strong possibility that he would die in prison was never considered for acceptance. There never was the psychological defeat, for the liberation movement, of his becoming a mythical figure, a Che Guevara who might reappear some day only in mystical resurrection on a white horse, since once a personage becomes a myth he has disappeared for ever as a leader to take on the present in vulnerable flesh.
Of course, it remains difficult to write of a phenomenon like Mandela in terms other than hagiography. But he is not a god-like figure, despite his enormous popularity – and this popularity, in the era of successful negotiation between black and white, extends in all kinds of directions beyond the trust and reverence in which he is held by blacks and those whites who have been active in liberation from apartheid. I heard on the news while I was writing this that a poll of South African businessmen has revealed that 68 per cent wished to see Nelson Mandela as the future president of South Africa. Far from assuming a celestial status, Mandela’s quality is, on the contrary, so fully and absolutely that of a man, the essence of a human being in all the term should mean, could mean, but seldom does. He belongs completely to a real life lived in a particular place and era, and in its relation to the world. He is at the epicentre of our time; ours in South Africa, and yours, wherever you are.
For there are two kinds of leaders. There is the man or woman who creates the self – his/her life – out of the drive of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people’s needs. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other, it is a charge of energy that comes of others’ needs and the demands these make. Mandela’s dynamism of leadership is that he has within him the selfless quality to receive and act upon this charge of energy. He has been a revolutionary leader of enormous courage, is a political negotiator of extraordinary skill and wisdom, a statesman in the cause of peaceful change. He has suffered and survived more than a third of his life in prison and emerged without uttering one word of revenge. He has received many personal family sorrows as a result of his imprisonment. He has borne all this, it is evident, not only because the cause of freedom in South Africa for his people has been the breath of his life, but because he is that rare being for whom the human family is his family. When he speaks of South Africa as the home of all South Africans, black and white, he means what he says. Just as he did when he stood in court and vowed that he was prepared to die for this ideal.
As Aimé Césaire says, at the rendezvous of victory there is room for all. Mandela’s actions and words show he knows that without that proviso there is no victory, for anyone.
1993
Rising to the Ballot
What does an election mean in democratic Western countries? An election is a recurrent event of the social order, coming up like the obligation to fill out income tax returns. A day when, as a matter of routine in civic life, you go to make your mark in favour of the individual or political party whose policies for governing your life you believe will do this best. Unless one is oneself a politician, or actively campaigning for a political party, making that mark is not a major experience. I can project into this commonplace acceptance because, although I am a South African, I am white, and consequently I have had the right to vote since I was eighteen years old.
But because I am a South African, I also understand what I believe no one in the Western world can: what this week’s election in the year 1994 in our country signifies for the great majority of South Africans, the blacks who, by law, have never before been allowed to cast a vote. And because I have been a protagonist, in my way, in the struggle against the racism that found its base in denying blacks the vote, the right to have a voice in the governments that proscribed every aspect of their lives, I also share what this election means to black people. That is why I shall speak of ‘us’ instead of ‘them’ when attributing that meaning.
To us, the election signifies not just a new beginning. It is a resurrection: this land rising from the tomb of the entire colonial past shared out in different centuries, decades and proportions among the Dutch, the French, the British and their admixture of other Europeans; this indigenous people rising from the tomb of segregated housing, squatter camps, slum schools, job restrictions, forced removals from one part of the country to another; from the burial of all human aspiration and dignity under the humiliation of discrimination by race and skin; this people rising, for the first time in history, with the right to elect a government: to govern themselves. A sacred moment is represented in the act of putting a mark on a ballot paper.
Yes, there are high emotions involved in this election beyond the obvious political ones of the contest for power as a democratic process. How to transform the emotion people feel into enablement, the ability to use that process, is another matter. The generations of subjection have produced their own psychoses. It is difficult to convince people whose lives have been totally controlled by white employers and the authorities that served the interests of those employers that anything one commits to paper – a signature, a thumbprint – is not open to the scrutiny of the white baas and his agents.
This is particularly true of farm workers. The blacks who work on white farms, although distinguished from slavery by being wage-earners, have belonged literally body and soul to the white farmer. They and their families live by his favour on his land – the land they work for him – and if dismissed lose their homes as well as their jobs. It is not easy to give them the democratic faith to believe that their vote will be secret, not even the baas will know against what party’s name they made their mark. By the stroke of a pen in their own hand, they fear to lose whatever wretched security their lives have. Rural and urban people alike have been conditioned by something else, very different – one of the strategies of the liberation struggle that now, ironically, inhibits them from using the vote. One of the most successful campaigns against apartheid, adopted by both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress, was that of refusing to carry the pass. The hated dossier that blacks had to exhibit, like a shackle, on demand, and for which they went to prison on failure to do so, was the document that restricted their freedom of domicile and their right to seek work in one area rather than another.
From this anti-pass campaign came a wariness of all official documents that has remained long beyond the abolition of the pass. Having been told, then, by the liberation movements to protest against apartheid by not complying with government bureaucracy’s official records, many people retain a strong unconscious reluctance to apply for an identity document that each voter must produce at the polls.
Against this background, voter education has proved to be the essential first step in the curriculum of a new democracy. Very different from electioneering, voter education must teach people not for whom they should vote, but why they should exercise their rights through the vote, and how to do so. A number of organisations have been
formed to provide this. Probably the most active, nationwide, is Matla Trust (‘Matla’ means strength in the Sotho language) on whose board I serve, and of whose activities I therefore can give account at first-hand, but which also are typical of the activities of such organisations in general, even if these do not share the same scope as Matla.
From its headquarters in Johannesburg, Matla serves a whole country of constituencies varied by many differences of language, levels of literacy, understanding of civic processes. With 60 per cent illiteracy among the people, the possibilities of voter education by the written word are limited. Using the daily press is the least effective of means. With a proliferation of languages – though many even illiterate black people speak three or four indigenous ones in addition to either English or Afrikaans, the official languages of the white regime – the task of reaching the population through oral programmes is a challenge. There is the great disparity between material possessions of urban and rural people. In the vast black townships around the cities, television sets are widely owned (some run on batteries, where electricity still has not been provided for black people), while in the rural areas a small transistor radio with restricted range is the only medium through which people can be reached in their homes. So that for the spoken word, and the spoken-word-plus-image, a separate approach is required.
Matla Trust has devised many strategies to reach responses to these problems. From the eleven branch offices around the country, field educators go out to villages, farms, factories, religious, youth and women’s associations to explain to people in their own languages what the casting of the vote means to their future, and how to do it.
Telling Times Page 54