About 18 months ago I reread many of the essays and they maintained a relevance,” says Njabulo Ndebele of his book’s genesis. ‘I thought of them as a useful reminder of the challenges we faced and how they could provide solutions as to how we approach the problems of the day.”
Fine Lines from the Box (Umuzi) covers the period between 1987 and last year and examines a number of issues that dominate our collective psyche, such as when journalism fails us as a country, access to higher education, the president and the Aids question, the late Brenda Fassie and, of course, Jacob Zuma and the fracturing of the ANC.
By allowing us to revisit some of his thoughts and utterances from the past 20 years, Ndebele succeeds in showing us how, as a society, we have often failed to learn from our errors. The questions he raises seem to have become more pertinent with time.
You have argued that by writing about the political environment and the conditions in which writers find themselves, they often make political statements rather than successful literature. What would you say characterises post-apartheid South African literature, especially that created by black writers?
There was a dip in literary productivity immediately after 1994. The pace is picking up again. I cannot speak authoritatively on the trends emerging as I have been running universities more than writing or teaching fiction, but let’s remember Zakes Mda’s observation: ‘It was easier to write about the past — because the past created ready-made stories. There was a very clear line of demarcation between good and evil, you see? Black was good; white was bad. Your conflict was there. There were no gray areas … We no longer have that. In this new situation black is not necessarily good. There are many black culprits; there are many good white people. We have become normal. It’s very painful to become normal.”
It is in this situation that some remarkable new writing has emerged. Black people are now the agents of history in this country. We bear the moral burden, the ethical burden, the intellectual burden, the leadership burden, the burden of health and disease. Everything. It makes sense that we should be at the unsparing centre of the focus of our writers.
Mda’s Ways of Dying, K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, to name a few, were written against the background of mounting disenchantment with aspects of modern South Africa. They alert us to the corruptibility of most liberation movements and the loss of direction after they have been in power beyond 10 years.
The MPLA of Angola is not recognisable today as a one-time liberation movement. Will we be saying the same about the ANC soon? The reason we have these new novels is because we live in a complex society with a complex economy and complex problems. Our artistic encounters with the South African reality will tend towards increasing complexity, increasing experimentation. It is to be welcomed.
Your new book has previously published material critical of universities that have proclaimed high standards as a subtle principle of exclusion. Effectively they are asserting the status quo. How far do you think this scenario has altered in the past two decades?
Remember that I problematised the notion of standards by asserting that all societies tend towards determining measures of excellence as a way of reproducing successful practice: in producing art, discovering new knowledge, applying new knowledge in making new products.
At issue is what problems are actually being solved in meeting specific social and individual needs. When this broader social context is not fully understood, we will tend to reproduce the excellence of others in solving problems we believe are ours but are in fact other people’s problems.
For example, I think we must abolish some English departments, which are all over the place, and redirect resources, research and teaching excellence in the direction of the exciting books you asked me about earlier.
We need significant curriculum shifts, a critical mass of black scholars. Otherwise we keep doing the same old things.
Education is a major concern of yours. How do you think the country can develop, woo and keep teachers sufficiently trained in maths and science to improve learner performance in these areas?
We need more than just wooing or keeping trained teachers: we need to rediscover the meaning of freedom through the vocation of teaching and learning. We need to restore our covenant with the future. What did we struggle for? I have yet to see any other country in the world where those who successfully fought for freedom and won it, then went on to systematically work against themselves by reproducing ignorance and death through devastating strike action by teachers and health professionals.
Expressions such as ‘improving learner performance” or ‘sufficiently trained teachers” are meaningless unless they can be seen as part of a continuing process of emancipation, which unfortunately seems to have been forgotten.
Forgetfulness might very well be a South African pandemic far more devastating than Aids. It kills solidarity; it creates room for fear and induces aimlessness, lack of direction. It focuses only on today’s survival and instant gratification; it kills the notion of sacrifice; it makes politicians arrogant; it makes a commissioner of police declare ‘they will never arrest me” at that precise moment when we crave the dignity of his office in the light of the most disturbing allegations against him.
Forgetfulness makes us sing songs of struggles that have passed because we are lazy to seek new sources of inspiration for new struggles.
A piece in your book seems to suggest that the media often looks at issues, such as corruption, superficially. Do you think many publications have had difficulty positioning themselves in post-apartheid South Africa?
My point is that South Africa desperately needs investigative journalism of the highest order. South Africa cries out to be understood. Depth of investigation, depth of analysis, depth of insight, going with the utmost reverence for words are the antidote to forgetfulness. They feed and deepen the imagination.
So the next time you write a sentence as a journalist, pause and ask yourself: Just how much can I either enlighten or darken, deepen or flatten? There was no greater act of responsibility than the investigative journalism of the Daily Dispatch in East London, which enlightened us about the death of infants at a hospital in the Eastern Cape. The newspaper cared enough to probe, to detail, to follow up and to write.