The Native Commissioner
by Shaun Johnson
(Penguin Books)
Shaun Johnson, a distinguished former journalist and Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, is well known to many readers for his astute observations of the South African political scene. In this, his first novel, his acute observation of personality and sense of the complexity of situations is put to excellent use.
The novel is the story of George Jameson, a native commissioner with the Union Department of Native Affairs from his youth, through the transition to National Party rule in 1948 (and the ominous renaming of the institution to the Department of Bantu Affairs) until his suicide in 1968. Drawing on multiple narrators — George himself, George’s wife Jean, and his youngest son Sam (eight years old when his father died), we are given a warm, well-realised account of an ordinary white South African’s struggle to come to terms with his country, his morally ambivalent work and role in society and his losing battle with depression.
Johnson uses a common narrative technique to set the story off: a collection of papers, given to son Sam as an adult by his mother. After resisting (not opening the box of papers sealed shortly after his father’s death as Jean gets her husband’s estate in order), Sam eventually opens the box and starts to read the documents collected there. This leads him to write reminiscences of his father.
George’s decision to become a native commissioner is rooted in his childhood in rural Zululand, where he is exceptionally talented in languages — though of English stock, his Zulu is superb (as is his understanding of Zulu culture) and he has considerable talent in and love for Afrikaans. He joins the Union Department of Native Affairs because, like many colleagues, he sees this as a means to do good. His vision is that of many a political liberal of the times — gradualist, integrationist, with a concern for understanding African culture.
Like many of his generation and sympathies, he joins the Union Defence Force as World War II begins, but because of his linguistic skills he finds himself “at home”, as an officer in the Native Regiment. With 1948 things take an unpleasant turn. Not only do the political reforms he has hoped for not materialise, the National Party government rollercoasters in new, more repressive legislation. Members of the old Union Department, particularly English-speakers, find themselves sidelined.
George’s attempts to limit the damage of apartheid policies fail, and earns opprobrium from his new bosses. He is shifted from one peripheral place to the next until, in the mid-1960s, he lands in Witbank. Then the depression that has been building up in George over the years surfaces brutally.
Johnson’s novel offers a number of insights and poses a few challenges. It is not a dramatic tale of a remarkable character, let alone an anti-apartheid hero. George is an anti-hero, or more accurately an ordinary hero. Those of us who grew up in English-speaking South African families probably know George Jameson — or people like him. We know people in our own families who worked in government service, ordinary figures in an increasingly vicious state who found themselves for various reasons trapped in their work but unable to find an out.
These were men who identified themselves with Africa rather than Europe, who — like George and Jean in one part of the novel — go to Europe to see “home” but return more convinced than ever that South Africa is home. These were men, often veterans of World War II, who were believers in gradualised democracy and “fair play” for black people — but who would never, and did never, get into the struggle. In short, what Johnson has done is give a voice to a largely voiceless group: the ordinary, decent, politically limited (at least to our present eyes), middle-class, white South Africans.
The challenge on one level is for us to read George’s story not with the benefit of political hindsight but with an openness to the limitations that context places on a person’s choices. Johnson’s sense of political complexity, so ably expressed in his journalism, is articulated here with at times exquisite nuance: we are privy to a mind struggling to hold together personal convictions and the cynical demands of superiors. Jameson’s failure to achieve this is, in microcosm, the failure of the early 20th-century South African liberal project.
The challenge is also, on a literary level, to make an ordinary life one we want to read about. Johnson does a fine job of bringing George to life. He is a kind of white Everyman, whose life and worldview mirrors that of many of our fathers, uncles and grandfathers. For others, particularly black South Africans, The Native Commissioner may help explain people who have affected them and their families for between 40 and 100 “lost years”.
It is truly encouraging to see that South African writers are now willing to move into areas such as the sympathetic and subtle portrayal of, in effect, an agent of segregation and apartheid. Johnson certainly shows us the corrosive and evil side of apartheid, but without bashing us over the head with the obvious. Most of all, he tells us the unputdownable tale of an ordinary person, and an ordinary family. It is a great read not only because he writes well but because, to me at least, it strikes a chord. George Jameson could be many of our fathers. His family could be ours. Mine.