Most of these people moved in or about the fringe of the life of the University, though many had never been students there. Whatever the diversity of their true interests, or the variation of their sincerity, they had one common condition: all were young people who had overflowed the group, race or class to which they belonged. The sons of Jewish merchants who wanted to paint instead of make money, the daughter of a Nationalist farmer who worked for the establishment of native trade-unions, the boy who incurred all the scorn of a country of tough pioneer stock turned tougher businessmen because he wanted to dance in the ballet, the fiercely intellectual young Afrikaans poets who had more in common with Baudelaire than Paul Kruger — they formed the only society where all the compartments of South African life ran into one another. Even the barbed wire of wealth was down; the sons of the poor found that a certain lack of money was honorable, the sons of the rich escaped the confines of luxury. Loosely attached to the arts and learning at one end, and to politics and social reform at the other, this society is a common phenomenon all over the world. The important difference was that in South Africa, a young, fanatically materialist country with virtually no tradition of literature or art, and, in the problem position of a white minority predominant over a black majority, a socio-political preoccupation that is closer to obsession than to mild academic discussion, this society had far greater responsibility than its counterparts in older countries. Lopsided — tethered to a thin line of culture from Europe on one side, dragged down toward an enormous, weighty racial tangle on the other — they had only the tantalization of recorded music, imported books, reproductions of pictures; but ate, slept, worked and breathed in the presence of the black man, like the child’s monster of inherited guilt always at his back. The desires to which these facts gave rise consequently tended to be even more confused than those of young people in other countries, so that a young man’s passionate eagerness to win the music he was denied hearing in the comfortable torpidity of his home jumped like a little flame from a grass stalk to a great, dry crackling mass of a whole nation of black people denied so much that he had taken for granted. So, if his social conscience was not pure, if in some other country where his parents’ money and cultural standards would have been more equitable he would not have concerned himself with the cry of the dispossessed, in South Africa a quick sympathy from his own small struggle struck out and identified itself with the vast one. There were many others like him, who, wanting something for themselves, suddenly found understanding for the yawning want of the Africans — not the clamor of the few leaders and rebellious papers who were articulate for them, but the plain, unremarked want of food, of clothes, of houses, of recognition and friendship that was silently in the thousands of ordinary black people who went about the life of the city.
Of course, this society which excited me much and quite impartially was made up to a large extent of people for whom it was only a stage in the process of becoming placid, conventional citizens. As you have to be fish before fetus, so for a time they were liberal before conformist. They flirted a little with the vague stirrings of a sense of beauty, just as the fetus remembers a prehuman life in the sea, and then put away the Bach Chaconne and the Mozart Mass like toys outgrown, and turned to the real business of having babies and bridge afternoons. They put Balzac and Dante and Martin Buber where they looked impressive in the bookcase, and became family men concentrated on the fluctuations of the stock exchange and the relative merits of Buicks and Cadillacs. Men and women, when they reached forty-five, they would sometimes like to mention that they had gone in for that sort of thing once; they had also had measles or mumps and had at one time thought of going on the stage — this with a kind of helpless, satisfied smile at the children produced and the elegant house apparently grown up round them as unavoidably as a tortoise grows its shell.
They were unimportant. So were a great many others, who would never be writers, never be painters, never bring the legitimate stage to South Africa, or dance at Sadler’s Wells, although they lived, talked and worked in what they believed was the manner of people who did these things. In fact, this set of eager, intense, earnest and gay people consisted mainly of the intelligent pseudo, the hangers-on who at the time were quite indistinguishable from the few who were something: the few who were of them and in their midst and were in reality to become the writers, the painters, the actors, the dancers and even the leaders all believed themselves to be.
I do not think there was anything at the time to suggest that Leo Castle, the dark boy with the spotty forehead (he was working as a window dresser in a department store then, and ate the wrong food irregularly), had any more chance of becoming a ballet dancer instead of a window dresser who danced in the chorus of visiting musical-comedy shows once a year than his friend John Frederic, who did the same. Yet a year or two later he was dancing Comus in London, and The Rake’s Progress in New York, and in time a little book about him came out, showing him invested with all the satyrlike beauty of the male dancer at his best, in the company of people like Balanchine and Fonteyn. And Isa Welsh, always talking to some young man, with the tip of her tongue touching the corners of her mouth now and then as if she were a bashful adolescent. — Who would have believed that the book she was supposed to be writing would get finished and that she would divorce Tom and become one of the four or five important writers, writing intensely indigenous South African books from the self-imposed exile of England, America or Italy. Or Phil Hersh, wearing the same rather fluffy beard and haggard slouch as André, William Otter, or Hugo Uys; who would have marked him out for the painter of an epic of Africa as shocking and famous as Picasso’s “Guernica”?
I have said that all the barriers were down, and so saying have slipped into a South African habit of thought more national than any ideology; more difficult to outgrow than love or loyalty.
— I spoke as if European society were all of Africa. I spoke with the subconscious sense of the whole overwhelming Bantu race, waiting in submission outside the concepts of the white man. I spoke from our house on Atherton Mine, with Anna in her room in the back yard.
Among these people with whom I moved, the last great barrier was not down in the practical sense. How could it be? But it was coming down in their heads, an expansion in them was bursting through it. And even when it was achieved in the mind, in the moral sense and the sense of dignity, there remained the confusing pull of habit and use as well as the actual legal confines.
We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function or another — Anna, the gardenboys, above all, the stream of bare-breasted underground workers between the Compound and the shaft of the Mine — found with a real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human. They had passed before me almost as remote if not as interesting as animals in a zoo. I would not have been physically unkind to them because it was part of the strict pride of my upbringing that civilized people — what my parents would call “nice” people — were smug in their horror of squashing so much as a bug. If a hungry native came to our door, he was given food or even a sixpence. “At least they can’t go and spend it in a bar,” my mother, who would not give money to white tramps for this reason, would say. Anna, who by qualification of long years of working for us, was known as being “almost like a white person,” might be granted some concern over her family, but as a general rule, emotion was denied them and personal relationships were suspect. They have half-a-dozen husbands; every girl off the street’s a “sister.”—So they were casually denied love, jealousy, concern; everything that made us human. They were also denied entertainment (no swimming pools, libraries, radios), friendship—”I won’t have my back yard made into a location,” Atherton women boasted. “I’ve told her, no friends hanging about the room, you can meet them outside if you want them”—and personal pride: we children would be called out to be amused by the sight of the servant going out dressed up in her Sunday best. — In fact, everything that made our human state pleasant. And we white children had grown up innocently accepting and perpetuating this until now, when slowly we began to turn on ourselves, slowly we began to unravel what was tightly knit in us, to change the capacity of our hearts, the cast of our sense of humor, the limits of our respect. It was as painful and confusing as the attempt to change what has grown up with the flesh always is. And unlike the analyst, prizing down for the significant incident on which the complex and the cure are based, we could not triumph and say: There — it was everywhere, in the memory and the eye, the hand and the laugh.