Life-writing is arguably South Africa’s pre-eminent literary genre. Jane Rosenthal examines memoirs by two South Africans who went into exile and then returned, with different outcomes
On the Outside Looking In: Colliding with Apartheid and Other Authorities by Alan Lipman (Architect Africa Publications) and Radical Engagements by Lorna Levy (Jacana)
Most South Africans, if they know Alan Lipman at all, will remember him as the author of architectural pieces in the Sunday Independent. Of this he says: ”My newspaper pieces — have enabled me regularly to encapsulate and thereby exorcise disappointment — on many occasions outright disgust — with the built offences that pervade our urban environments.”
This statement, quite apart from its architectural import, shows Lipman as one of the dwindling number of people who know how to use an infinitive without splitting it (”regularly to encapsulate”). Though this endears him to this reviewer, it is a tiny part of his writing, which is elegant, passionate and vigorous, always substantiated by considerable erudition. He says he is an ”unreconstructed polemicist” and his articles are ”unreservedly combative”. This makes for lively and interesting reading.
He gives, at the outset of this ”personal memoir”, a 10-page outline of the chronology of his life. And though the rest of the book is also more or less chronological, his main interest is an account of the ideas and principles that have influenced and directed him. He provides many welcome reading suggestions to enlarge and refine the reader’s acquaintance with particular ideas.
His questioning spirit and earliest manifestations of dissent and resistance led him up against his own father and other senior males in the extended family. But one uncle started him on serious reading and he became a regular in the reading room of that great instrument of universal education, the Johannesburg Public Library.
Of his military service in both the South African Air Force in World War II and the Israeli forces (regular and irregular) in 1948, he is disarming and entertaining, describing himself as ”ineffably conceited” and ”immature”. After various escapades, some grim experiences and some sobering realisations about war, Zionism and nationalism, he returned to study at the University of the Witwatersrand.
He and his wife, Beata, were involved in left-wing politics until they went into exile in the 1960s, though by then they had resigned from the Communist Party of South Africa. Or were expelled before they could resign. This was not a simple decision for them. Lipman says he was ”glad to be free of repeated moral provocation and cant” but admits how much he learned while in the party.
The family settled in Wales for 30 years where Lipman taught architecture, later combined with sociology, at the University of Wales. He also devoted himself to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and various commitments in the Labour Party, chiefly to do with housing for the poor.
There is no name-dropping of associations with the ANC in exile, or indeed upon his return to South Africa. He devotes space to two good friends, colleagues at the university, ”who, in their markedly different ways, changed my intellectual life, who challenged and helped consolidate my previously wobbly architectural and sociopolitical thinking”. And of the vice-chancellor of the University of Wales he says: ”Like a cultivated, quietly matured, port-engorged Stilton and a chunk of kitchen cheddar, Augustus Smithfield-Thackeray and I.” My guess is Lipman was at least a good Gorgonzola — though there is much to be said for a good Cheddar, the people’s cheese.
Among the ideas he discusses and relates to his own life are anarchy as a political ideology, the combining of sociology and architecture, the needs of humanity reflected in architecture and different research methodologies in the social sciences. He summarises his views on modernism in architecture, which he supports, and post-modernism, which he does not. He names a handful of South African architects whose work he admires; and he lacerates with equal scorn the tacky post-1994 reconstruction and development programme housing and the pretentious walled and gated communities of the rich.
Lipman’s lifetime of work and thinking has gone into this memoir; and he does not end it with a few facile nuggets of wisdom. In keeping with the Walt Whitman quote he has on the dust jacket: ”Resist much, obey little —”, he launches the reader into consideration of ongoing struggles, which he believes cannot be sidestepped.
Among these are the Iraq War and its aftermath, and at home, housing for the poor. Although he admits the immensity of these issues, he nonetheless quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley: ”Rise like Lions after slumber.” For the whole of this inspiring adjuration, read this book. It carries one along at great speed, cheerfully into the fray.
It comes as no surprise that, after detailing a long and useful career in politics, both in South Africa and the United Kingdom, Lorna Levy should say: ”I would describe myself as having been damaged by apartheid.” Indeed, we South Africans have all been damaged by it, one way or another, and are still trying to redress and reconcile 16 years after liberation.
Levy, the only child of a left-leaning, but quite cautious, Jewish middle-class family, was raised in Yeoville and Illovo and schooled at Barnato Park. After graduating from Wits in the 1950s she went straight into trade-union work. Forced into exile when her husband, Leon Levy, then head of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, was released from detention on an exit visa, she had to start over again in London.
She worked as a teacher and was active and successful (elected as a councillor) in the British Labour Party. She also tells of visits for conferences and training courses to The Hague, Moscow, Oslo, Prague and East Berlin. Once she had returned to involvement with South Africa and the ANC, one of her tasks was to organise the voting of South Africans in the UK in the first democratic election, a high point in her working life.
In all sections of the book she outlines current issues; in South Africa it was the struggle for a ”pound a day” wages for workers and seats for shop assistants to rest on. In the UK she was involved in housing for the poor, the plight of Ugandans fleeing Idi Amin and egalitarian education at the time that Labour was bringing out the system of comprehensive schools.
In almost all her working environments she encountered both sexism and racism and has commented on them. And like most of us she seems a little unaware of her own prejudices — she says outright that Afrikaners were not liked in Yeoville and seems to suffer from that common sense of superiority of the exile politico, that all whites who remained in South Africa were ”the archetypal white South African who gave orders and wallowed in privilege”.
There are many memoirs by white women involved in resistance politics from Southern Africa; these include works by Doris Lessing, Ann Marie Wolpe, Gillian Slovo, Pauline Podbry and Hilda Bernstein. Levy’s book will certainly take its place alongside them and Luli Callinicos describes it as ”the finely observed life of a highly aware South African radical”.
But whereas most of these forerunners remain quite vigorous and cheerful even in the face of disillusion and disappointment (seemingly the inevitable result of the high idealism that carried them into this work in the first place), Levy’s memoir is rather sad and restrained in tone. It is hard to say whether this is because of her ultimate failure to secure a deployment in the diplomatic service of the new ANC government (after they had selected her for training), or because this memoir is decidedly short on personal detail. Only her close relationship with her father is elaborated in any detail, possibly because other family members are still living.
She does examine the question of national and Jewish identity. After years in the UK she begins to see herself as British, but interestingly feels more Jewish than South African when she returns from exile. She comments on the conservatism of her extended family in Johannesburg who ostracised her parents after she and Leon went into exile, and contrasts this with the warm welcome they had from relatives in England. She quotes lightly and pertinently from other writers on emigration and identity including Milan Kundera, Eva Hoffman and Milton Shain.
Ultimately it seems the damage done by apartheid was more the result of the self-imposed dislocations of her life that uprooted her from a society in which she had not been deeply rooted to start with. In many ways it was a hard life and in others hugely privileged. She ends the book in 2005 when she and Leon return to settle in Cape Town, another new city for them after 30 years away.