Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black (Random House Struik) is the third in a trilogy that began with Country of My Skull and A Change of Tongue. This book of literary non-fiction begins like a crime thriller: “A gunshot cracks. The man lunges forward, his hands groping towards a stationary taxi nearby.”
A rather misleading start.
It was 1992, in Kroonstad, when a local gang leader was shot dead by an MK soldier. The gun was hidden on the stoep of Krog’s property. Depending on her course of action she would either become an accessory to the crime or a state witness. From there the narrative moves back and forth between a 19th-century Lesotho resisting a colonial onslaught and Germany, where the author was a research fellow in Berlin in 2007.
The book opens in 1992, an especially significant time — a time of promise, but also a time of strife. The ANC has been unbanned and the apartheid edifice is coming apart yet, as Krog writes in Begging to Be Black, “more South Africans were killed between 1990 and 1994 than in the 20 years of Total Onslaught before”.
Whatever pretensions apartheid had to morality have long vanished. “That apartheid is wrong is relatively obvious, but how to live against apartheid is the harder question, because even the smallest decision has complicated consequences.”
Morals have become convoluted. Consider this: if one extends help, as Krog did, to an ANC cadre on the run because he slept with the wife of a local gangster, is one furthering the aims of the ANC’s just revolution?
The book asks whether it is possible to “make a moral decision within an immoral context”. How do you counter the grand national narrative that recognises two sets of morality: one black and another white? “A white life has meaning only for whites, while a black life means nothing for both black and white.” Small wonder a teacher at a black school asks: “My question is what do I teach children who are not scared of death?”
Riven by such conflicting feelings, extending right to the personal, Krog tries to locate a different framework of morality that admits the interconnectedness (Krog’s favourite phrase) of humanity that finds itself in a world in which different sets of values fight for dominance.
These questions take her back to King Moshoeshoe (1787-1868), founder of the Basotho nation. In an interview with the author in Johannesburg, I remark on the strangeness of that choice. King Shaka would have been the conventional option, I hazard.
“Yes,” she says, King Shaka rates highly because the “Western paradigm finds the brute, the killer, the brutal warrior more interesting than a peaceful king. A brutal warrior is what we want from Africa.”
In many ways the author’s choice of Moshoeshoe shouldn’t be difficult to understand. Although a flawed individual, Moshoeshoe was ahead of his time, recognising how “a chief becomes and remains a chief only by the people’s will, recognition and support”. He outlawed capital punishment, even for murderers, arguing that to kill a murderer “would not bring back the victim and instead of one death there would now be two”. Moshoeshoe confounded conventional Christian wisdom, pointing out the hypocrisy of Europeans who professed to “be the children of Him who said, ‘Love your enemies’ … [and yet] take pleasure in fighting”.
Conjoined to this narrative is Krog’s time in Germany, the “heart of darkness”, in her words, and how the Germans are trying to live with the guilt of the Holocaust. She’s wide-eyed and struck by how she’s treated in Germany; by the way things work smoothly.
Of course, Germany is a germane destination for this kind of story. For a long time it was the citadel of European thought and yet, in the middle of the 20th century, was the scene of breathtaking and unparalleled barbarism.
While in Germany, she converses (meditates is a more accurate term) with a philosophy professor who teaches in Australia — scene of some of the worst systematic racism in this hemisphere. There she explores her identity as a white South African in Europe; morality in her country; xenophobia; past and present African leadership. She questions South Africa’s handling of Robert Mugabe, for instance, and which modus operandi is the one that should be construed as African: “Is Thabo Mbeki’s muteness the perspective, or is Archbishop Tutu’s criticism the perspective, or the crowds who always cheer Mugabe? Or are these reactions all based on something else which makes them not contradictory, but moral and sensible but diverse interpretations of the same worldview?” she asks.
We move on to talk about Europe and belonging.
“In a sense,” I suggest, “you are a child of the West.” I remark that if I, a black man, were to wander on the streets of Berlin not many people would believe me if I said I was native to Germany. She writes that once during a visit in the Netherlands, the ancestral home of her forebears, she felt a brief, strange kinship. Tied to this question of belonging is whether the English language can carry the burden of the South African experience(s).
Never far away from this subject lies the question of whether there are common frameworks around which the new species of South Africans can identify — something applicable to all. “On our national holidays … we realise we have nothing in common — not what we read, not what we sing, not whom we honour,” Krog writes in Begging to Be Black.
She also examines the destiny of the Afrikaner, face flushed with astonishment and brows creased with anguish, suddenly confronted by “self-asserting blacks” and how it turned out that the majority of Afrikaans speakers were, in fact, not white. All this reminds me of the line in JM Coetzee’s new novel, Summertime, that makes reference to a people “born on farms or in small towns … isolated within a language spoken nowhere else in the world”. It must be a culture shock, not only to find yourself as part of a despised minority in your own country, but also to be part of a shrinking fraction in your own language.
Perhaps this is what Krog gestured at in her recent paper delivered at the Goethe-Institut’s Cracking Walls conference. She flatly contradicted English-speaking South Africans’ notion that the controversial song, De la Rey, portends the rise of the “bad racist Afrikaners”.
“The essence of the song is indeed ethnic [and so it should be, because it is as an ethnic group that Afrikaners stand accused], but by deliberately starting with the most honourable moment in Afrikaner history, the CD, as a whole, attempts to change the Afrikaner trajectory of ‘laager’ into a new one that ends with multiracial icons like Bryan Habana and Bob Marley,” Krog argues.
That might have been the intention, but it was a song that endeared the group to right-wing Afrikaners and built a nostalgic camaraderie based on victimhood and resistance.
“They are looking for something in their history that’s honourable. It’s a positive sign from a people who want to change,” she says in the interview when I bring up the subject again.
During the interview Krog is chatty and yet her ear is always straining to hear what I have to say and several times she prods me whenever I lapse into long, contemplative silences. “It’s just that we haven’t found what we mean by interconnectedness,” she says.
Krog combines intellectual honesty and a genuine interest in people. Neither in conversation nor in her new work do you get the sense — as James Baldwin would complain about French intellectuals — that ideas are more important than people.
Experimental and frank, searching and contemplative with a centre that you can’t quite lay your hands on, Begging to Be Black is arduous in its refusal to offer easy solutions. At times challenging to read, Krog nonetheless should be commended for her rigorous examination of South Africa, the legend of Moshoeshoe (the source of much untapped vitality) and South Africans’ uneasy relationship to one another and the rest of the world.