No friendship between black and white is free of these things. It is hard to keep any relationship both clandestine and natural. No matter how warm the pleasure in each other’s company, how deep and comfortable the understanding, there are moments of failure created by resentment of white privilege, on the one side, and guilt about white privilege on the other.
Another life altogether.
Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: Do you want to be overrun by blacks?
I bump an African’s scooter while parking, and before he and I have a chance to apologise or accuse, there’s a white man at my side ready to swear that I’m in the right, and there are three black men at his side ready to swear that he is in the right.
Another life altogether.
Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: Are you prepared to see white standards destroyed?
A friend of mine, a dignified and responsible African politician and an old man, is beaten up by white intruders while addressing a meeting of dignified and responsible white people.
Living apart, black and white are destroying themselves morally in the effort. Living together, it is just possible that we might survive white domination, black domination, and all the other guises that hide us from each other, and discover ourselves to be identically human. The least we could all count on would be the recognition that we have no more and no less reason to fear each other than other men have.
— Africa Seminar
Washington, D.C., 1959
HOW NOT TO KNOW THE AFRICAN
A few months ago, 1st April 1966—April Fool’s Day — I read in a Johannesburg newspaper an advertisement for a course of lectures entitled Know the African. From the description given, it was clear that these lectures were designed for white people who have the only recognised relationship with coloured people in our country — that of white employer to black labour force — and who might find it useful, from the point of view of efficiency, to get to know just enough human facts about these units of labour to get them to give of their best. This sort of study of ‘the African’ as a strange creature whom one must know how to ‘handle’ in the eight hours he spends at work is apparently the limit of getting to ‘know the African’ permissible to South Africans, nowadays. For that same week there appeared in the papers an announcement of the ban, under the 1965 Suppression of Communism Amendment Act, on the utterances and writings of forty-six South Africans living abroad, and this list included all those black South African writers of any note not already silenced by other bans. The work of our country’s African and Coloured prose writers is now non-existent, so far as South African literature, South African thinking, South African culture, is concerned. They were the voices — some rasping, some shrill, some clowning, some echoing prophetically, one or two deeply analytical — of the thirteen millions on the other side of the colour bar. We shall not hear from them again.
White people are likely to come back pat as Pretty Polly with the remark that these African and Coloured writers who have been banned, gagged, and censored are, after all, a handful of intellectuals, completely unrepresentative of the ordinary people in the streets, locations, and kraals. What could one hear from them but the inevitable dissatisfaction of all intellectuals, exacerbated by the fact that they are black?
Of all the self-delusion white South Africans practise, this is perhaps the purest example. Who, of any group, in any society, formulates the aspirations, makes coherent the inchoate resentments, speaks the dreams of the mass of people who cannot express these things for themselves? Who, anywhere in the world, translates the raw material of the human condition, which millions experience but for which millions have no words? Would the private history — lived in the minds of all Afrikaners, whatever their station — of the Afrikaner’s bitternesses, hopes, and joys, the shaping of his attitudes in relation to circumstances over three hundred years, have been recorded if this had been left to the nation’s stokers and mine shift-bosses? The Afrikaners’ writers and poets spoke for them — their handful of intellectuals. The same applies to English-speaking white South Africans; their handful of intellectuals and writers are the medium through which the currents of their thought see the light as communication.
The silenced African and Coloured writers are, indeed, nothing but a handful among millions of ordinary labourers and domestic servants; and in their work they express what all these people could never, would never, say.
If we want to know — not ‘the African’, that laboratory specimen, that worker bee of fascinating habits, but the black men and women amongst whom we live, these writers are the only people from whom we could learn. They are not pedagogues or politicians; with the exception of the former Cape Town councillor, Alex La Guma, and Dennis Brutus and Alfred Hutchinson, none of them has ever been accused of involvement in practical politics. When they do deal with politics in their writings, they are short on political abstraction and long on personal anecdote. Some are not ‘serious’ at all, and the self-parody is as revealing as the Jewish joke (I am thinking of Todd Matshikiza’s zany and delightful autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife). Some exaggerate wildly a life whose everyday degradation and brutality, under our eyes in the faces of the dagga-smoking children thieving about Johannesburg streets — those “picannins” who are a feature of our way of life — would hardly seem to need it, and the exaggeration in itself becomes a revelation of the posturing fantasy bred by such a life. (I am thinking of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History.) All of them, from Can Themba writing his few short stories in an overblown yet pungent prose dipped in the potent brew of back-street urban life, to Ezekiel Mphahlele writing with dry lucidity (Down Second Avenue) of childhood in one of those mud huts you pass on the road, near Pietersburg, offer a firsthand account of the life that is lived out of sight of the white suburbs, and the thoughts that lie unspoken behind dark faces. If one wants to know more than a few poor facts, these autobiographies, novels, stories, essays, and poems are the place to find the inner world where men learn the things worth knowing about each other.
Many of these works are what I call ‘escape’ books: the record either of the fear and hazard of an actual physical escape from South Africa without passport or permit, or the other kind of escape, less finally and sometimes never accomplished — the slow escape, within the writer’s self, from the apartheid carapace of second-class citizen, and the retrospective bitterness that threatens to poison life, once outside it. Ezekiel Mphahlele’s autobiographical Down Second Avenue, Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife, Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana—escape books all, in their different ways — entered South Africa after publication in England, and were on sale here for a time before being banned. One of the first and perhaps the most movingly artless ‘escape’ book, Tell Freedom, by Peter Abrahams, was banned, although it had been out of print for years and the writer was long in exile. Modisane’s Blame Me on History and Mphahlele’s next book, African Images, a collection of essays, were banned before they reached the bookshops, and Alex La Guma’s novel and the poems of Dennis Brutus were automatically withheld because both writers were under personal bans. Dennis Brutus’s little volume of poetry consists mainly of love lyrics; Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night is, so far as I am aware, the only novel to come out of District Six — a slum story notable for a curiously impressive, fastidious, obsessive horror at the touch, taste, and smell of poverty.