Robert Kirby
We approach the end of the century and it’s nowhere to be found. The long- awaited, enviously portentous but never threatening: the Great South African Novel is yet to be written.
It’s not that there hasn’t been a wealth of human experience in this country. This century kicked off with a boisterous local war; since then South Africans have taken part in at least three international ones. There have been economic boom times, stock market crashes, gold rushes, pestilence and plagues. Riding along with all of these has been the depressing caravan of political activity and the suffering of its wake. Yet where is the literature which elsewhere in the newer worlds, as inevitable as the day, arose from the human experience? Where indeed is a single South African writer of true gift? Where is our William Faulkner, our F Scott Fitzgerald? Bend the sights a little wider, forgo Americans. Where is our Patrick White? Where’s our Gabriel Garcia Mrquez, our Jorge Luis Borges?
There must be some overriding reason. The obvious explanation would seem that South African literary enterprise could never quite divorce itself from a discerned political assignment. Should we want for a plethora of transmitted pity, South Africa’s white writers have done the nation proud. Keening on about the malfeasances of political conduct has been a veritable industry. The last 30 years have seen the South African literary and drama markets saturated by agitprop plays, novels and tracts, many the products of long- suppressed literary conscience and which, like so much of South Africa’s so-called “satire”, raised voices of protest only once the coast seemed to be clearing.
If South African writing in English, certainly that of the latter half of the half-century past, has been subordinated by its attention – however well-meaning – to political complaint, what else has kept the muse at bay?
No one knows, but what is certain is that the whole process has been incestuous in that more and more have felt the need to dip their pens in the same inkwell. Perhaps it was just a way of going along with the rest. After all, doing the black man’s suffering for him – from the comfort zone of white privilege – is a specifically potent form of apartheid.
Other temptations were obvious. There are few things as seductive as a ready-made audience. When a sin is fashionable attentive hearing of one’s opinions of it will be automatic. In other words, moralising about apartheid was always reliable box-office. Not only locally but to a widened international public. If white South African writers and playwrights did anything over the last 50 years it was to render the infractions of apartheid to easily consumable forms. Perhaps the frequent mawkishness of the South African “international” literary product serviced an unsuspected need in that it offered relief to public compassion, sorely bruised by the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalinism, gave them something they felt they could deal with. Bite-sized iniquities?
The practice was typified recently by that flatulent pomposity, Richard Attenborough, in his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Cape Town; an honour awarded apparently as a payback for Attenborough’s having made a movie about how terribly a nearby white journalist suffered at the police torture and death of Steve Biko. As someone commented at the time: in Cry Freedom you couldn’t see the trees for the Woods.
Never one to miss the opportunity to turn a moral penny for himself, Attenborough used the occasion to slap a mortar-board on his head and distend himself on, among other things, the matter of South African wartime pilots. These otherwise fine and courageous gentlemen, sermonised Attenborough, might well have helped defend England against Nazi Germany, yet were quite content thereafter to come back to South Africa to live out degenerate lives as beneficiaries of apartheid, a crime against humanity equal to anything Nazi Germany had to offer. It was an argument demonstrating that, as long as one is both banal and intellectually promiscuous, there’s much chaste coin to be gathered in Jameson Hall.
Attenborough got his pat on the back from UCT for political chores done, not for any exhibition of literary prowess. What is more, he received it with the blessing of the English department at UCT, at the very least under no audible protest from them. And so, while his acceptance speech exemplified the infective pornotropism of political correctness, it also made instantly obvious the nexus between depreciating South African academic standards and an atrophying South African literary establishment.
Until politics and literary adventure disentangle themselves there will be little to look forward to in South African writing, for its future cannot afford to echo its past. However haltingly, the apartheid theme is fading. When a dog dies we need expect only the wrath of its fleas.