Dead heats are most usually associated with horse races, not book prizes. Without wishing to suggest anything as significant as a trend, it is nonetheless difficult to discount the recent phenomena of joint winners in two major South African literary awards.
Earlier this year, the European Union Literary Award 2006 went to Fred Khumalo (Bitches’ Brew) and Gerald Kraak (Ice in the Lungs); earlier this month, Adam Levin (Aidsafari) and Edwin Cameron (Witness to Aids) won the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award. There was harrumphing over the latter decision, some of which was encapsulated in a piece in The Weekender by Alex Dodd, which noted: “Some purists … felt that the joint decision was a compromise that favoured topicality, newsworthiness and public politics over genuine literary merit.”
Judges of the Paton Award haven’t been fearful of innovative decisions: last year they expanded the shortlist from five to six titles (it should be added that the shortlist for the sister award, the Sunday Times fiction prize, was reduced correspondingly from five to four). But the principle of a single winner is surely one worth maintaining, no matter what the claims of rival candidates.
Can you imagine joint winners being announced at an Impac or Man Booker ceremony? Everyone loves a winner, goes the old adage, but it does not follow that joint winners will be doubly loved. It seems contingent on judges to declare unequivocally for one writer, one book, no matter how inseparable two authors and two tomes may be. (I say this knowing that I could well be similarly tested, as one of the judges for the EU Literary Award 2007.)
There were no such dual outcomes in the Via Afrika M-Net Literary Awards, another of the prize-giving ceremonies held during the Cape Town Book Fair. Etienne van Heerden won the WA Hofmeyr Prize for Afrikaans literature for his novel In Stede van die Liefde. It is appropriate here for me to apologise to Van Heerden for creating the impression that he has “abandoned” Afrikaans, as I carelessly scribbled some weeks ago (“Is English the new Afrikaans?”, June 2). By way of mitigation, but not excuse, for my gaffe is that this prize-winning work is his first novel published this decade.
Paton contender Antony Altbeker scooped the non-fiction Recht Malan Prize for The Dirty Work of Democracy, which details a year he spent observing a number of South African Police Service units.
First-time novelist Simão Kikamba took the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English fiction for Going Home, which chronicles acutely xeno-phobia in Africa and, more particularly, what it means to be a ma-kwere-kwere (foreigner) in South Africa.
The other Via Afrika M-Net winners were:
- Jan Rabie Rapport Prize for innovative Afrikaans writing: Marlize Hobbs for the novel Flarde;
- MER Prize for children’s fiction: Marita van der Vyver and illustrator Piet Grobler for Mia se Ma;
- MER Prize for juvenile literature: Fanie Viljoen for Breinbliksem;
- M-Net Lifetime Achievement Award: Cynthia Marivate, professor of African languages at Unisa. Marivate is also CEO of the Pan South African Language Board and chairperson of the South African Library for the Blind;
- M-Net Afrikaans novel award: André Brink for Bidsprinkaan;
- M-Net Afrikaans short-format prize: Marita van der Vyver for Bestemmings;
- M-Net Afrikaans poetry prize: IL de Villiers for Jerusalem tot Johannesburg;
- M-Net Sotho novel award: Mathediso Aletta Motimele for Ngwana wa Mpa;
- M-Net Sotho short story award: Goitsemodimo L Mancho won for Wetsho ke a go rata;
- M-Net Nguni novel award: Nelisile Thabisile Msimang for Umsebenzi Uyindlala.
- Xitsonga poetry award: SJ Malungana for Swilo Swa Humelela.
In a number of categories, no prizes were awarded: a rather different perspective on having joint winners. Still, regardless of how one feels about judges producing twins, there is always another, heterodox opinion: that prizes are “the enemy of promise” (the critic Cyril Connolly’s evocative description). That may be going too far, especially given that the global books landscape is now bedecked with numerous awards.
Joint winners create problems in the business of book reviewing as well. There is an implicit notion that the authors and titles be treated equally. So, in that spirit — not that we couldn’t make up our minds about which book to review — we offer a joint review of the winners of the EU Literary Award.
A new way with words
Bitche’s Brew
by Fred Khumalo
(Jacana)
Ice in the Lungs
by Gerald Kraak
(Jacana )
Anthon Egan
If these two novels — joint winners of the 2005 European Union Literary Award — are anything to go by, we are entering a new literary renaissance. Although different in many respects, both novels suggest a revival and a new generation in South African fiction who are moving beyond the stereotypical “(anti-)apartheid novel”, exploring character, emotion and ideas, adding insights in the process to new dimensions of our national experience.
Spanning the past few decades of apartheid rule, yet treating our history as an inevitable backdrop to a tale of love and separation, Bitches’ Brew is an account of the love between Lettie, a wise and worldly shebeen queen, and her sometime lover Zakes — jazz musician, businessman-gangster and, by the end of his life, an acknowledged Big Man in KwaZulu-Natal. Told as a series of letters to each other, we see how Lettie first meets the aspiring musician Zakes when she goes to Durban in pursuit of her boyfriend, who is the father of her first child. Though attracted to each other, they drift apart — Zakes assuming that Lettie is to marry said boyfriend. She doesn’t, but stays in Durban and works with Sis Jane, a shebeen owner, eventually taking over Jane’s business.
Zakes meanwhile, embarks on a musical career between Durban and Johannesburg, moving into “business” himself under a Soweto gangster. After the 1976 uprising, when shebeen ownership is unsurprisingly dangerous, Zakes moves back to Durban and rises in the ranks of township gangsterism. He meets Lettie again, they fall in love, she becomes pregnant, and just as they are about to marry, she dumps him — she is unimpressed with his drug-running activities and penchant for violence. Years later, as he is dying, they re-establish contact and plan to meet again.
Within this account of two lives that meet, Khumalo has written a moody, deceptively simple story. Like the jazz that is so much part of Zakes’s life, the incidents he describes can be seen as creative improvisations on a theme — getting on with one’s life under apartheid, trying to get ahead, the way our choices close certain possibilities and open us to others. One gains at times a sense of déjà vu — Lettie and Zakes seem to repeat certain patterns of behaviour, yet each time with enigmatic variations.
Khumalo has a fine-tuned sense of moral complexity: all his characters live in the ambivalent world of shebeens and organised crime. Musicians are part of the shebeen scene, a scene which is (by apartheid terms) illegal. Drug dealers often mask for businessmen and “pillars of the community”, who are left alone by the police so long as they don’t take up politics and pay their bribes. Even the struggle becomes a market — bodyguards morph into mercenaries for hire to both sides of the African National Congress / Inkatha Freedom Party struggle in the 1980s. Normality after 1994 legitimises some people and criminalises others — but even here there is the irony that Zakes’s criminal empire is being threatened by old comrades and business allies whose advances were made through Zakes’s help.
No less sense of ambivalence — but of a different sort — is found in Gerald Kraak’s Ice in the Lungs. Here apartheid is more central to the plot: young anti-apartheid activists in Cape Town during the 1970s. But the novel’s interest moves beyond the political to examine the relationship between the personal and the political, sexuality and activism, loyalty and ideology.
A group gathers regularly at a restaurant in Cape Town run by a Greek communist refugee, George. Matthew and Pru are students at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Paul is an organiser of a workers’ advice office. Oliver is a deserter from the South African Defence Force, hiding out in the city. Luke and Temba are at the University of the Western Cape. Pru recruits Matthew, who works for UCT’s students representative council and has access to printing materials, to produce a newsletter for Cape Town workers. Soon he finds out that Pru is working with Paul at this advice office. Paul himself sees the office as the basis for creating a broad-based trade union movement that might revive the struggle in Cape Town. Luke and Temba are also part of this network, though they are sceptical on a number of counts: What role do white activists play in a black struggle? To what degree is the organised working class a force for change? Oliver remains on the fringes, an observer and sympathiser damaged by his military experience.
As they move towards more direct action — pamphlet drops, underground work, arrests, trials and exile for some — Matthew and Paul, recognising they are both gay, become lovers — but they keep their relationship hidden. For Paul, the relationship is secondary to political organisation — he is aware that their “coming out” might jeopardise the work, a source of scandal to his black comrades and of blackmail from the system. Matthew, however, sees no need for contradiction between being gay and an activist, between love and supporting the revolution. These differences deepen the tensions between them and the group.
The tension between personal and political is mirrored in a number of other plot parallels. There is the relationship between Temba and Pru, threatened by the secrecy necessitated by apartheid law and, to some extent, by custom. Then there is restaurateur George and his youthful love affair with communism and a beautiful communist in Greece, his increasing unease with the Stalinisation of the party during and after World War II — and the way in which his beloved is warped into an ideologue.
Though different, both novels display common literary virtues — concern for character and a sense of place. Though it would have been all too easy to create stereotypes, both Kraak and Khumalo avoid this. Khumalo’s gangsters and shebeen queens are complex figures, not cut-outs from a bad soap opera: Lettie starts out, no doubt, as the innocent abroad but grows into an independent woman with acute insights into both men and business. Zakes himself seems to acknowledge his own “split” qualities — artist with a sense of the spiritual, and gangster with more than a little taste for violence. Similarly, Matthew and Paul are not your average “queers” and comrades — they battle within themselves and with each other to carve out a place for their love in an environment where such love is seen as bourgeois, decadent or a security risk.
Place is striking in both novels. Khumalo gets the vibe — the geographical ambiguity — of township life spot on. Kraak’s images of Cape Town, though a decade before my own awakening to politics and place, are historically accurate and seem reminiscent of my time at UCT in the 1980s.
More than anything else, perhaps the greatest thing to recommend both these novels is their readability. They are page-turners, and beautifully written. This may seem a trite observation, but let’s be honest — many literary award novels are a pain to read: too often they are arty, clever and an academic exercise for writer and reader. Not here. Khumalo and Kraak are fine storytellers and their stories engage us — gays, gangsters or otherwise.