Ten years ago, concerning the field of South African literature, I made a prediction: that, whereas the 1970s had been the decade of a brilliant group of apartheid-shaking poets, and the 1980s the star turn of a handful of dramatists performing worldwide, the 1990s would be the coming into their own of the short-story writers.
Surely they were showing signs of recapturing the golden age of the 1950s and Drum and Sophiatown and all those Come Back, Africa glories? They were moving the staid old, rather useful form on, and in an alert, outspoken, apt and even African way. But soon after 1994 that revival was stopped in its tracks as the support system and controlling outlets for such a potent initiative collapsed.
Instead, as far as literacy went, it was that suspiciously Western bookseller’s convenience of the novel that was winning through. Two of its practitioners, as everyone must know, were to pull in the Nobel Prize for it. The one seems to have turned his back at last on the disgraceful land that made him. The other, who once led us all in defying censorship and its vile, discriminatory abuses, appears to have ceased being critical these days of the new obstacles afflicting post-apartheid literature, insofar as it has emerged at all.
When the advent of democracy swept away the old apartheid restraints on writers, an upsurge of liberated creativity was widely and excitedy forecast. Wrong again. Some leading figures had waited too long a lifetime for such freedom, had dissolved into drink meanwhile. Habitually unable to take the side of any powers that be, others made a few coy praise songs, sank back into anonymity.
Anyway, dance turned out to be the new art form in which South Africans could excel, because of its ambiguous body language to show off, with the music of others made indigenous. We became instead a culture of bank sponsorship, and soap, and the embarrassment of having our museums run by casinos.
I could not anticipate that the traditional literary forms, which Africans through the centuries of colonisation had turned so deftly to their own defences, would be the first to snuff it.
Once the foreign aid dried up, the Congress of South African Writers went as a result. A long line of depletions continued in the publishing industry. The grand finale is the Heinemann African Writers Series being discontinued, taking most of the continent’s books with it. Books that were no longer affordable, either.
Then, despite funding unlike anything of old, how come the Market Theatre has not one show to offer over Easter time, when the nation is on holiday and has the right to expect some entertaining and stimulating outing? Once that same Market precinct was the pride of the nation’s counter-culture, running five new South African plays at a time on no state funding at all.
“Gone to hell on a broomstick,” as my friend Stan Knight remarks. He used to mount one spectacular after another at the now desolate Civic. As for poetry publishing in South Africa, since Adriaan Donker died — gone to hell on a rocket.
The Southern African Review of Books, the vehicle that I also needed in order to make my chipper stocktaking, has turned bottoms up, taking a lot of the art of reviewing with it. Reviewing, which Cyril Connolly called a full-time job on half pay, had always served to signal a healthy culture of critique and assessment. But, as any public intellectual who has survived the shutdown knows, it is market forces that now determine our values for us. Politicians seem not to speak freely and wisely to the heart; they merely advertise. And so on downwards through society. As a result, “Kruger Park” has now become the title of a porn video. This gives a whole new slant to our traditional pursuit of game-watching.
If, in our resilient culture of old, new movements pushed forwards against the odds in bunches or groups, in our pawned, sold-out present version of a life at least one figure has arisen to ring the alarms. He is lonely K Sello Duiker, whose The Quiet Violence of Dreams may be gauche, but sure is gutsy. There Duiker has the gall to identify the new targets: those self-congratulatory struggle memoirists; the hand-over of our heritage to tourist ticketing; the perpetual prisons covering the beloved country; the massage parlour of our Parliament.
At least Duiker has the ambition to take on the grit of today, while other reliables of old merely cough and shuffle. But one sweet Duiker doth not a renaissance make.
To conclude this dire decade, the shortest of stories. The scene is the run-down Johannesburg Art Gallery, where one or another minister of culture is due to speak. We used to do without such benefactors, getting along feistily, making Johannesburg the continent’s arts capital. But this one, not knowing his arts from his e-mail, is at least out in public, performing his ceremonial duties. He is to unveil a rock-pecking, considered to be the oldest artwork in the history of the world, nothing less.
Pointing to the wrong piece of chalk marking on a bit of simulated cave-wall, and out by about 30 000 years, he claims it proudly — not for all the South Africans he represents, but for some Zulu herd-boy, as he himself had once been. Beside him is the Bushman artist, the last of his clan, just about extinct, whose ancestors were the actual artists who first awoke humankind to its potential. He has been brought from the desert near Kimberley, once teeming with wildlife, as the rock attests. He is to speak as well, but somehow is overlooked. In his suit and tie, he runs out to the parking area in distress.
I join him, attempting to comfort him. We gaze at the railway ravine, a festering post-1994 tip of garbage. Opposite the taxis of all Africa blast with perpetual tape recordings.
“They are going to eat us,” he says in Afrikaans.
Who? I reply, startled.
“The new government,” he clarifies, undoing his stiff collar.
Maybe co-opt us — not literally ingest us, surely, I reply.
He rips of his tie, as if he has done with playing along in civilised garb. He shoves his fingers into his mouth: he means eat as in swallow. The tears pour down his face, as he grieves over his demise — he, the first of us all.
Then he delivers the punch-line, jumping into my arms: “Asseblief, come back, baas.”