by Andre Brink
This lasted more or less until puberty, when the black boys were drawn into the patterns of the lives of their elders, with their appointed chores and their subservience, and the white boys into the lives of the bosses; and if, previously, they might have called us ‘Theuns’ or ‘André’ or ‘Gert’, this would, almost unperceived, change to ‘Kleinbaas Theuns’, ‘Kleinbaas André’, ‘Kleinbaas Gert’, just as our sisters would become ‘Kleinnooi’ or ‘Kleinmies’. And there was reassurance in this. Life had its patterns and rites and fixed commandments.
Fear? Yes, there was fear. It surfaced mainly in small, real – and often preposterous – pockets of experience. For instance: some mornings when Elbie and I woke up in the room we were sharing at the time, there would be a black man sleeping under the bed. We never saw him. We just knew he was there. He had a long, sharp knife. And sometime he was going to get us. He would carve us up into little bits and devour us. The fact that it never happened, did not make it any less real.
Where did the image come from? Our parents were gentle, decent, Christian people. But ah, what darkness and terrors lurked under that harmless appearance! We knew, by then, some of the lurid or scary passages tucked away between the black leather covers of the Bible. But we had no secure knowledge – only ominous intimations – about the hidden, threatening corners and recesses behind the most everyday occurrences of our lives.
I believe that a whole history lay submerged behind the black man under the bed. That version of South African history that had been prepared, and sanctioned as an extension of biblical truth, through 300 years of colonialism – a racist and patriarchal version devised by white men (and in this equation both ‘white’ and ‘men’ were determinants). Year after year at school we were brainwashed by holier-than-thou accounts of the ‘Kaffir Wars’ on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony in which wave upon wave of murderous attacks by black, heathen savages on the small bastion of white civilisation between Table Bay and the Great Fish River to the east, and Table Bay and the Gariep River in the north were repelled by steadfast Christians fighting with God on their side. Scattered through this unfolding scroll were small, specific incidents of black brutality: the families of free burghers or intrepid colonists in remote wattle-and-daub homes in the deep interior attacked and wiped out; Voortrekkers who fled British domination to found free republics of their own in Natal and Transvaal, set upon by murderous hordes and treacherously slaughtered, small children lured into the veld to have their limbs hacked off and their throats slit, unprotected laagers of women and children left behind at the Blaauwkrantz River while the men were at the kraal of the Zulu king Dingane to negotiate a peaceful settlement, overwhelmed in the night and exterminated – the women butchered with assegais, the children’s brains dashed out against the wagon wheels. Later, in the Anglo-Boer War, blacks – in this sanctioned version of Afrikaner history – were enlisted by British soldiers to rape Boer women, burn down their homesteads, and transport them on open wagons to concentration camps where they were fed on ground glass.
Rare indeed were narratives about friendly blacks – of the motherly woman Amakeia who rescued a white baby in the Amatola range of the Xhosa territory during a time of war and sheltered him against her own people; or of Xhosa warriors during the frontier wars killing white men in combat but refraining from raising a hand against white women or children; or of an old black man saving the lives of two white boys on a remote farm and then getting killed for it by warriors from his own tribe. Such incidents occurred, in history or poem or story, but they caused amazement and wonder precisely because of their extraordinary and exceptional quality. Deep in the national consciousness slumbered the darker and more violent memories, conditioning a whole people to see their survival in the African wilderness as a re-enactment of the Old Testament and a direct consequence of divine intervention.
All of this found expression in the local literature. Silence itself was a form of articulation. Even in the early work of a much admired Afrikaans writer like Karel Schoeman blacks are often simply absent. The farms and villages of the country are represented as if only whites live there. In the novels of other writers black and brown characters feature sometimes as comic relief, or as a kind of descant to ‘white’ themes. When they do move to the centre of the stage, as in some work of the forties and fifties by Mikro, the attitude is paternalist and patronising. In the wake of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, the hugely popular F. A. Venter produced a strongly derivative novel, Swart Pelgrim (Black Pilgrim) that closely followed the stereotyped recipe of Jim-comes-to-Joburg. It was not without merit, but the message was laid on with a heavy hand: only in their own demarcated areas could black people find some measure of fulfilment. One of my own early short stories, written in the fifties, but mercifully never published in book form, recounts the via dolorosa of a black man from a ‘homeland’ who loses contact with his roots in the white man’s city, and then returns to his place of origin, only to find that he can no longer be at home there either. Depressingly moralising. But perhaps it was, at least, an attempt – failed, but well meant – to express something of an inner unrest about the racial situation in the country.
From my own childhood I remember a serial in a children’s newspaper recounting the life of a little slave girl, Fytjie, in the early days of the Cape, and its haunting account of the cruelties she suffered at the hands of her owners, and of how she was stripped naked and flogged in front of the castle for some minor infringement. A story of another kind, by the author Jan Scannell, from the time I was about fourteen, narrated the remarkable – and ultimately tragic – life of a black child reared by a white family and his vain attempts at being accepted by their community. The moral was obvious: races can only lead successful lives if kept apart. But there was something about the human waste involved that kept nagging my thoughts for years, just as little Fytjie’s suffering came to lodge like a live coal in a sensitive spot of my memory, waiting to be resuscitated in some of my own later writings.
Those readings were an indispensable part of my growing up: in a large measure I can say today that every watershed in my life, every moment of true discovery, has been marked by a book, or books. This holds true for discoveries of an emotional, intellectual or moral kind through writers such as Camus, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Undset and others, but inevitably also for a gradual progress in thinking about race.
Apart from these glowing exceptions, the reading matter we were raised on, and the history transmitted to us in church and school and home, fixed indelibly in my young mind the image of the dark Other, the dangerous black man lurking under the bed. It was that basic fear which made it possible to excuse almost any outrage committed upon black people around me in my youth. That – and the absence of sufficiently strong images to the contrary.
I remember that in my fourth or fifth year at university somebody invited a black academic to address us. He was, as I recall, the renowned Professor Z. K. Matthews, known as a man of very moderate and accommodating views and therefore condemned and rejected by many black leaders: but to us he was a stranger. For the first and only time in my youth I encountered a black man who was not a servant or a labourer of some kind. The mere fact of a black person in the role of a teacher, or a doctor, or a lawyer, had never even entered my consciousness. And Matthews was too unique, his appearance on our campus too fleeting, to unsettle the thought patterns of my first twenty years.
What did set me thinking, because it must have occurred at almost the same time as the performance by Professor Z. K. Matthews, was one of the most remarkable lectures I have ever heard. It was in our final undergraduate year in history, and it was delivered by Professor D. W. Kruger, an academic famous for his pro-apartheid convictions. But he was also a true historian who assiduously went in search of historical truth. And in this lecture, in preparation for a course on the French Revolution, he compared the situation in South Africa at the time, the late fifties, with that in France on the eve
of the Revolution. It was a tour de force. And because of Kruger’s reputation as a historian, it did prepare a small space in my mind for what was to happen.
Many years later, at the end of 1989, on the eve of the political changeover in South Africa (although very few people in South Africa could actually foresee it at that time), a small group of mainly Afrikaans intellectuals were invited to Paris to meet members of the ANC in exile. It was a follow-up encounter after the watershed meeting in Dakar in 1987. One morning we were scheduled to meet French politicians in the Assemblée Nationale. Thabo Mbeki was scheduled to speak on behalf of the South Africans. But on that morning Thabo was reported to be unavailable. The term used was ‘indisposed’. And on the bus on the way to the Assemblée Pallo Jordan (now minister of arts and culture) was asked to stand in. There was no time at all to prepare. Yet minutes later he went to the podium in the Assemblée and stunned everybody with his analysis of the French Revolution. In a way a circle was completed, bringing together a Nationalist professor of history at the University of Potchefstroom and a black activist in the French National Assembly.
Racism, in its vicious and destructive forms, was never overtly preached in our home. Yet it was omnipresent. The subtly pernicious way in which it manifested itself was evident from my father’s attitude to music. He was never what one could call a musical man, but there were songs he loved – none as much as that aria from Samson and Delilah, ‘Softly awakes my heart’, sung by Marion Anderson. He would drop whatever he might be doing to come and listen to that magnificent voice. If ever he could be moved to tears by a piece of music, this was it. And then, when I started university, I made a discovery which I couldn’t wait to share with the parents. ‘Did you know,’ I asked them at the lunch table, ‘that Marion Anderson is black?’
My father never listened to that aria again. And when it did come on the radio, he would turn it off or leave the house. I remained bewitched by her voice.
Indirectly, events like these paved the way for an incident which happened near the end of my studies at Potchefstroom. The government had just announced a series of severe new restrictions on access to university studies for blacks. The measure went under the name of The Extension of University Education Act, an appellation typical of the convoluted thinking of the Nationalist government: there were no extensions involved, only restrictions, which severely limited the opportunities of black students wishing to study at white universities. Our Students’ Representative Council arranged a debate with the liberal, English-speaking University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the whole event was staged as a showdown between Afrikaner and English universities, and on the evening the hall was packed.
The debate, regrettably, was predictable. All our students spoke in Afrikaans and supported the apartheid line; the Wits students vehemently rejected it, in English. In a surge of bravado I also joined in. I spoke in English and aligned myself with the opponents. There was surprise and glee among the visitors, outrage among my fellow Afrikaners. The matter was regarded as so serious that I was summoned by the rector. But after that everything simmered down. In the larger context it was a non-event. It made no difference whatsoever to the course of the bill through parliament or the debates in the country. But on our campus I was now irrevocably branded as a renegade, a kafferboetie. Even that did not make much of a dent: in the safe, comfortable context of our student body everybody knew everybody, everybody had a preassigned role. Mine was that of the rebel, the heretic. It didn’t warrant more than a shrug or a wry smile: most of my fellow students presumably saw it as a deliberate minor act of provocation. A gesture in Sartre’s terminology; not an act.
But to me, secretly, it did mark some kind of a shift. The problem was that I lacked the guts to go beyond the gesture; I could not really step outside the laager. It was much too dark and unpredictable out there. And deep down I still clung to the values I had been brought up with. It would take more than a student debate to make a difference, either to others or myself. That black man was still lying, and waiting, ominously, under the bed.
THE PLAY’S THE THING
IT MUST BE a natural impulse that has always linked the two experiences of theatre and religion in my mind. And it came back to me through my wife Karina’s account of her early experience of religion in Poland, when she must have been about seven and became intrigued by her friend Gosia’s habit of ‘going somewhere’ every Sunday morning. Having grown up in an almost non-religious home it meant nothing to Karina when in reply to her inevitable question Gosia said, ‘Church.’
‘What is church?’ she asked.
Gosia tried to explain, but that didn’t really clarify the matter; so the following Sunday she took Karina with her. Almost immediately she was hooked. It might have been inspired, at least partly, by the fact that little Gosia also happened to be the first girl that introduced her to sex. In a way church was the next step, and might turn out to be just as pleasurable and adventurous. The first real problem arose when Karina turned nine and learned that she could not take her first Communion with her friends as she had not been christened. Serious family deliberations. Then, a lasting credit to their understanding, her parents agreed to what must have been something of a traumatic weekend: first, they had to consent to getting married in church (her father undoubtedly tongue in cheek), followed by Karina’s and her brother Krystian’s christenings. At last she was ready to become a little bride of Jesus. But there was a final ritual to go through: blessing her splendid new rosary with a sprinkling of holy water. Unfortunately, she was playing soccer with the boys that afternoon and forgot all about Mass. The only remedy was to slip into church early the next morning, dipping her small hand into the holy water, and liberally sprinkling her own rosary, before drying off the excess holiness on her dress.
From there, everything went smoothly. Except that she began to have misgivings about confession. For a while she handled the challenge by inventing wild and weird sins for every session with the priest, but in the long run it became too taxing for the imagination. She reached an understanding with God that she would privately keep him informed of all her transgressions, imagined or real, without the intervention of a third party, and for some time religion became more or less manageable. Most of the time her devotions were confined to the construction of endless small shrines, mostly underground. But even that became boring. In due course the upheavals in her family life became too much for faith: fleeing to Austria when she was ten; and then emigrating to the United States for a year when she was twelve. The idea of confessing one’s sins, not only to a total stranger, but in a completely foreign language, English, became too much for religion to bear and in due course she happily settled into atheism.
There was so much intrinsic theatricality in the whole story that my own youthful infatuation with religion faded by comparison. It made me realise that one of the main reasons why in the long run (and it did indeed take a long time for me to make the break) religion failed me, was that it simply could not fulfil the need for spectacle and drama I had brought to it.
That is why, whenever I think about that long and unrequited affair with religion, the theatre inevitably becomes part of it.
In my own life, it is not easy to decide which of the two came first. If exposure as such must determine the answer, religion would win, beginning I presume with my christening, when the dominee, the pastor, a well-meaning old man known for the rather irresponsible vigour with which he sprinkled the holy water on the foreheads of the infants at the font, became so carried away by the actions he performed on that cold but bright Sunday morning that according to the reports of my parents I was all but drowned. But it need not have been an altogether traumatic experience. I can remember when at the age of five or so my youngest son, Danie, came swooshing down a slide and splashed into the deep end of a swimming pool at a resort where we were on holiday. It happened right in front of me, but it was so unexpected that for a while I couldn’t believe my eyes. Only when after about
a minute he still hadn’t reappeared I dived in, got hold of his long blond hair and plucked him to the surface. He spluttered and belched and choked. But as soon as he caught his breath again he gasped, ‘Can I go again?’ That may well have been my own reaction to my watery introduction to organised religion.
But after that early moment of drama church remained, for many years, a rather uninspiring business. The only visual feature in the stark Protestant interior of our church on which one’s eyes could profitably dwell, was the legend proclaiming, in Gothic script so unreadable that we used to believe it must have been written by God himself: God is Love. It was disfigured by the large water stain on the whitewashed wall above the dominee’s head, on which I have dwelled before, in which one could conjure up all kinds of fantastic shapes: a dying Jesus, a rampant Devil, the monsters Brolloks and Bittergal from the wonderful, scary Afrikaans stories by C. J. Langenhoven, naked fairies, a camel, a weasel, something very like a whale. In Sunday school in Jagersfontein there was the entertainment provided by Oom Koot, who led the singing. In Douglas there was Ouma Sielie who took a peppermint to church to bribe her granddaughter Santie into silence; but the process of biting the sweet in half by positioning it between the only two teeth she had in her mouth, one top left, the other bottom right, was so laborious that it kept me oblivious of any divine message. Sermons, I must confess, never held much interest for me and served mainly as occasions for daydreaming, making up stories, or cherishing all manner of thoughts, not all of them pious. It was only well into my university years that for the first time it dawned on me that sermons were actually meant to be listened to.