Africa South: Viewpoints, 1956-1961 edited by MJ Daymond and Corinne Sandwith (UKZN Press)
If there is an elegiac tone to this important collection it is because the period it covers was a time in which there was genuine moral outrage at South Africa’s increasingly hard-line racial policies, and the left-liberal groupings opposing the National Party government believed that a concerted stand could halt the Âmadness.
Half a century later, as founder and editor of Africa South, Ronald Segal notes in the lively and revealing interview conducted in 2008 for this volume that “people don’t believe in anything. They’re distrustful of the future and they are obsessed with money.”
In their masterly introduction, which succeeds admirably in Âplacing Africa South in its 1950s context as well as considering the magazine’s pertinence for today, editors MJ Daymond and Corinne Sandwith of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s programme of English studies make a similar point: “The focus in society of the 1950s on moral critique and analytical clarity had been replaced in the 1980s by the exhilarating Âcertainty of mass action that came with the formation of the United Democratic Front.
“It was a decade which held a promise of ‘radical democracy’ — Today that promise has faded and a gap between South Africa’s remarkable Constitution and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the one hand and sociopolitical failures such as poverty (signalling a widening, not shrinking, inequality), Âcorruption and endemic violence, on the other hand, has grown Âincreasingly evident.”
Strong intellectual
This handsome, immaculately edited volume also reminds one of the strong intellectual foundations of the South African liberation Âstruggle, something that is seldom in evidence in the leadership of the ruling party today. Segal’s editorial policy was to encourage forthrightness but to undergird this with analytical rigour and a considered approach.
Thus Walter Sisulu’s “South Africa’s Struggle for Democracy” (1957), which with one of Segal’s early editorials opens this collection, sets the tone perfectly. It is impassioned and candid — it draws Âstinging comparisons between the Nats and the Nazis — but balances this with careful Âhistorical contextualisation and Âanalytical depth.
At its peak Africa South had a print run of about 8?000 a quarterly issue. Its chief features were its nonparty-aligned (although unambiguously oppositional) stance and its internationalist perspective, both of which would serve South Africa well today.
The activists of the time consciously positioned themselves in relation to the independence and antiracism struggles elsewhere in Africa, and in the United States and Britain, something that would have militated against the dangerous phenomenon of “exceptionalism” that engulfed South Africa in the late apartheid years and that still bedevils the Âcountry today.
Thus, alongside pieces by locals who would all become famous in their own right — among them ZK Matthews, Ruth First, Harold Bloom, Arnold Benjamin and Helen Joseph — we find essays by Basil Davidson (on African history), Cyprian Ekwensi (Lagos diary) and Ian Colvin (on independence in Ghana), with several others from Africa, Britain and the US. The detailed biographical notes that Daymond and Sandwith have provided to head each piece are invaluable: they both place the piece in context and bring the reader up to date about the author in question.
Telling details
This can sometimes provide an interest all of its own. In “African Tragedy” (1957) Phyllis Ntantala provides a Sol Plaatje-like portrait of the devastating effects of landlessness after forced removals and the development of “Native reserves” on ordinary people. But a telling detail caught my eye: on a return visit to South Africa in 2006 (she now lives in Michigan) she was obliged to spend some time in the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in Mthatha and wrote an indictment (“Places of Death, Not Life”, Mail & Guardian October 22 2006) of the shocking state of public healthcare in South Africa today.
The irony of this note Âprefacing a piece about systematic deprivation and human misery a half-century earlier is striking.
Daymond and Sandwith were faced with the difficult task of selecting a mere 50-odd pieces from the 460 on offer. They made some wise decisions: chose pieces that speak revealingly of the 1950s but that still communicate something today; mixed up the analytical pieces with “human interest” ones; and made a representative selection so that Âreaders today gain a vivid sense of the “noisy polyvocality” (their phrase) both of the times and of the magazine itself. Above all, they do this chronologically so that the reader grasps something of the unfolding history of the period and the hardening mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which saw Segal forced to take Africa South into exile in London.
Another fascination is the respect accorded Segal by the opposition movements of the day. As he remarks in his interview, he had no political party and no constituency behind him, and represented only Africa South and what it stood for — a nonracial, democratic, united and internationalist South Africa — but was frequently asked to talk at ANC and other party conferences and gatherings. The paranoid reaction of the ruling party today to reasoned and reasonable criticism from the press is another depressing indication of how far we have travelled from the ideals that Africa South embraced.
ÂSobering reminder
This is a substantial and important piece of historical recuperation, and we are in Daymond and Sandwith’s debt for it. Ronald Segal died while the project was under way, a Âsobering reminder that we should document our history before it is lost forever.
Readers who are taken with this elegant sampler and want to savour more are directed to the digital version of the complete Africa South collection: www.disa.ukzn.ac.za
Craig MacKenzie is professor of English at the University of Johannesburg