Although writer Christopher Hope has not lived in South Africa since the mid-Seventies, he still refers to himself as a South African, albeit a “travelling” one, as he is often on the go to find places that remind him of home.
“I tend to gravitate towards corrupt, authoritarian countries, because I’ve learned the ropes,” he says of his successive halts in places such as East and West Berlin, Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Moscow. “Even if I disliked the politics, I never felt lost. I feel less at home in liberal democracies. Give me a good tyrant any day. No matter where they are from. All tyrants resemble one another. They are brothers under the skin.”
In fact, Brothers Under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny, published in 2003, hones in on the idiosyncrasies of tyrannies using Robert Mugabe as a vantage point. “As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even the smallest amount of it changes people to the point where they are no longer entirely human. And of course there is a black, dark comedy built into power, the absurdity of it. In Zimbabwe [as the Public Order and Security Act stipulates] you can’t laugh at or make jokes about the president. It is illegal.”
Even though Hope, now 62, has taken in more than his fair share of absurdity in the search for new material, how can “authoritarian” countries possibly remind him of post-apartheid South Africa, as he seems to be hinting, even if he grew up under National Party rule and lived across the road from Hendrik Verwoerd? “What’s strange about nationalists is that they tend to believe the party takes precedence over the people, and that the party line must be considered ahead of open and free discussions,” he says. “In that way I see striking similarities between the present democratic government and the last nationalist government. For instance, the state broadcaster, to put it politely, employs the same style of careful reporting that the old SABC used to use. I’m not saying the situation is the same, but I can’t help but be reminded of how things used to be done.”
In the Seventies, when Hope’s career as a writer was starting out, poets such as Mafika Gwala, Wally Serote and James Matthews were at the forefront of good local writing. A poetry convention held at the University of Cape Town in 1974 would prove seminal in conveying the electricity hanging in the air. Having since joined the fray in “pissing the hell out of the government”, Hope was refused a passport and later granted an exit permit.
He left in 1975, settling in France, where he still has a home, before moving to London for 17 years. His first novel, A Separate Development, which he calls “a simple little comedy about racial segregation”, was banned within weeks of its publication in South Africa in 1981. “I was not surprised, but it was nonetheless a considerable blow to me as a young writer, not knowing whether your story would ever see the light of day,” he recalls.
Today his oeuvre includes nine novels, children’s books, poetry collections, short stories and journalistic articles. Hope has often written unflatteringly about Africa, much to the chagrin of writers and audiences based on the continent, who have wondered about the validity of his right-wing views, which are often dispensed from a distance. “I was born here and I travel in and out of Africa. It’s like a constant fever of the blood,” he says, adding that he has spent several months every year on African soil. “I’ve never emigrated as far as I’m concerned.”
In a 2002 article, published in the London The Guardian, Hope writes of peasant Zimbabwean farmers who proclaim that “things were better under [Ian] Smith”; he portrays Tony Blair as a victim of homophobic slander and blasts land redistribution without framing his criticisms in context. “[My detractors] may well have a point but, unlike a lot of people, I spend a lot of time there, especially in Matabeleland,” he counters. “These are the views I heard expressed by the people in the country and in the villages. All one can do is report as accurately as one can and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”
He insists he is not against land reform. “The disparity between the few people who own land and the many people who don’t is one of the many injustices in Southern Africa that have to be put right. But I have a problem with how it has been done,” he says. “There has been a slowness on the part of white farmers to realise the gravity of the situation and I was attacked by many whites for pointing out that they were sleepwalkers. But the government has owned large parts of land that have never been justly redistributed, especially in Matabeleland, where people are short of just about every resource. Most commercial, farm-owned land is now in the hands of the government and I don’t see much improvement.”
Hope’s latest novel, My Mother’s Lovers (Atlantic), is probably his most ambitious portrayal of Africa yet. Over the course of 442 pages Hope covers rain queens, the South African Anglo-Boer War, the hilarious, failed shooting of Hendrik Verwoerd, struggle heroes who have become post-apartheid misfits and people who won’t take their antiretrovirals because “Aids is a syndrome and not a disease”. These characters, places and ages all swirl around an outrageous protagonist, Kathleen, who is equally at home in the boxing ring as in equatorial jungles.
“I wanted to write a book that spans the continent, one that moves from Cairo to Cape Town and spanned the century where so much of my life has been lived and where so much has happened,” he says. “Most South Africans don’t travel to other parts of the continent. Kathleen flew easily between South Africa, Kenya and the Congo in the 1930s. The irony, of course, is that if you live in Sierra Leone or Liberia now, you will find it difficult to move to the next country. So I try to capture these extraordinary changes in the novel.”
Kathleen, according to the writer, is a burlesque of Africa itself. “People like to talk loosely about Mother Africa as this feminine, female, maternal figure. If there is such a person, she is indifferent to the fate of her children,” he says. “She rides roughshod over all of them.”
While My Mother’s Lovers is a revealing book, told through the sharp-witted, politically incorrect style of Kathleen’s son, Alex, it moves too fast to be trusted. It is weighed down by its own sweep and sprawl of characters and eventually turns on itself. In that way, I guess, it is an apt description of the writer’s views on the continent, where tragedy and comedy trade places so fast that often “you don’t know which one you’re looking at at any one time”.