ALFRED HUTCHINSON

E’skia Mphahlele

AFTERWORD

(To the 2006 Alfred Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana, Penguin Modern Classic Edition, [1960]).

At the conclusion of the tense obstacle race which is Alfred Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana, he was only just to achieve his goal: the Sixth All-African People’s Conference in Accra of 5-12 December 1958. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, being the first independent African country, symbolized all that Hutchinson yearned for, and he was to be a delegate there of South Africa’s African National Congress.

Waiting for him in Accra, we knew from the front page of The Sunday Times in Johannesburg of 9 November that, during the temporary recession of the Treason Trial, as Accused no. 11 he had skipped bail. He was correctly suspected of leaving the country without a valid passport, a crime for which if he were ever to be captured he could be sent back to jail once for a minimum of three months. With the trial expected to resume on the following 19 January, it was not known if he would have been re-indicted. But as the Union of those days had no extradition treaty with Ghana and he would be seeking political asylum, we assumed that if he made it, he would be safe.

Next we heard that, as was later reported in the Treason Trial Bulletin (in no. 5 of January 1959), ‘Mr. Alfred Hutchinson, one of the defendants in the Treason Trial, was once again arrested, on 2 December, in Tanganyika and charged with being in the country illegally and with failing to report to the Immigration Office.’

During those nail-biting days, as leader of the ANC representatives, I kept an ‘Accra Conference Diary’, which was duly published in Fighting Talk (in February 1959), edited by Ruth First in Johannesburg and soon enough to become prohibited. For Monday 8th I recorded that ‘the Tanganyika delegates had told us Alfred Hutchinson had been released and was waiting to be picked up by plane’. The American Mary Louise Hooper (representing Chief Albert Luthuli) was sent off to the airport to await him. For the Saturday morning I noted: ‘We’re still wondering if Hutchinson will make it.’

For the Tuesday 9th plenary session:

          Tom Mboya gives his address: ‘We are determined to free Africa, whether    
          the colonial powers like it or not.’ He says the time has come when colonial
          powers must scram out of Africa, 72 years after they sat in Berlin to plan
          their scramble . . . Heads od delegation begin their addresses. There are
          about 50 delegations and I start to make my speech.

Then:

           Alfred Hutchinson stalks up the aisle, six feet of him, just like one of those
           outlaws on the screen who come to tame and civilise a noisy, lawless town
           of the Wild West. I rush from the platform to embrace him, beside myself
           with excitement. Mboya introduces him to the conference amidst loud
           applause. I miss the rest of the speeches because I’m absorbed in Hutch’s
           tale of escape.

On the Friday we and Jordan Ngubane (representing the Liberal Party), with Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Duncan and others, are invited to the Prime Minister’s office for a chat. In the February 1959  issue of our other regular venue, Drum, is carried a famous photo of us all gathered at the microphone at the closing ceremony, singing our national anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’.

Thinking back to that 1958 event in Accra, one’s mind cannot but relive the momentous atmosphere. The South African slogan, ‘Freedom in our Time’, was really uplifting. That Alfred Hutchinson’s narrative should end at the moment when it echoed the mighty chorus of African voices at Accra is most fitting. The actual set of events of the conference and its proceedings, and Hutchinson’s arrival, all merge to acknowledge one another as it were in a togetherness expressing a greater truth of a higher order. It was that the writer Laurens van der Post, I believe, would have considered ‘a togetherness of events’ within a universal order.

Yes, freedom for some of the countries, South Africa included . . . but for us that was more than thirty years ahead. But still, it came in the lifetime of some of us. We felt the bond that held us together, giving us a single, profound identity. Hutch himself remarked on this condition, adding: ‘we’ve now matured, Zeke, you and I.’

As is perhaps well known, Hutch was enabled to stay on in Ghana as a teacher for a while and to begin his new life. It was a wonderful chance, too, for me to meet his wife-to-be, Hazel Slade, when she arrived, and thus to witness the happy ending of the second strand of his escape narrative. That was prior to my own departure back to nearby Nigeria, where I was by then resident (as Hutch would also be, after his stint in Britain during most of the 1960s).

I had first met Alfred Hutchinson in 1952. Three teachers, myself included, had been dismissed from working in a High School in Orlando East---now part of Soweto---and further banned from teaching anywhere else in the country. We had been organisers in the union, where we were officials, to resist so-called ‘Bantu Education’. This was a move by the Government to halt progress being made at the time by African students. Our curricula had been the same as for whites, even though we attended separate schools. Bantu Education was especially tailored to be inferior and therefore to change all that. Generally, the new features would include ‘Bantu folklore’ and instruction in the mother tongue through to matriculation. There were no textbooks yet in African languages for the whole range of high school grades. Pupils had revolted and boycotted classes.

In order to assist them a few of us, as examinations were drawing nearer, held classes in a community centre. I invited Alfred Hutchinson to join us and teach English (his other subject was History). He himself had been dismissed from his post for taking part in the 1952 Defiance Campaign against unjust laws, organized by the ANC, and since 1955 had been making do in the short-lived Central Indian High School, which persisted functioning in Fordsburg against the Group Areas Act. He was most willing to be recruited. He was a man with a witty sense of humour, but with a quiet, gentle, collected manner about him.

Nonetheless, in Road to Ghana he shares precious little about himself with his readers. Only obliquely does one learn of his renegade English grandfather, of the place and manner of his growing up and of his schooling and professional attainments. His early reporting for New Age, the first sketches and short stories written for Fighting Talk that made him one of the up-and-coming talents of the Johannesburg scene and his meticulous accounts in the diary he kept of the Treason Trial itself as it progressed, are not even mentioned by him, just as they remain uncollected to this day for that matter. His mind is totally on that road and on the acquaintances and friends chance throws across his path. All must make way for his theme, which is what he sees as the appalling growth of South Africa’s system of racial repression beyond its borders, in particular the contempt with which white men are coming to treat all Africans.

As I remarked in the first edition of my The African Image of 1962, the reason for his single-mindedness was obvious:

          He knew the paralysing pain of fear at various times when he had been
          hounded by the police in South Africa, and, the highly sensitive person that
          he is, he is always amazed when he comes out of the tunnel of fear,
          wondering how he could have found the courage to want to survive.

When Road to Ghana was published by Victor Gollancz in London in 1960, it was dedicated to ‘the South African Freedom Fighters’. Rather daringly, five extracts from it were serialized in Drum’s sister publication, the Sunday paper, The Golden City Post (from 21 February 1960 to 20 March), billed as by ‘Tough Hutchinson’---with pictures of the well-known figure by several Drum photographers.

But, apart from those pieces, and an extraordinarily withering article carried in The Observer on 10 August 1969 about his disillusioning experience of the spreading racism in British schools, that was the last South Africans were to hear of Hutch. He became a banned person, his masterpiece simply deleted from the list of South African literary works.

To keep his memory alive back home, in 1964 I slipped an extract from Road to Ghana into Modern African Stories, which I co-edited with Ellis Ayitey Komey (for Faber and Faber), noting that, if the complete text was no longer to be available to his own people, it had at least by then been translated into French, German, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Arabic and Romanian . . . In the same year Richard Rive did likewise with another chunk of Road to Ghana in his selection of Modern African Prose (for the Heinemann African Writers Series), making a point of having it fetchingly illustrated by Albert Adams.

All that said, now that South Africans of a new generation are free to reassemble and assess all of their literature afresh, Road to Ghana may at last take its honourable and deserved place among the cluster of autobiographies the many exiles like Hutch and myself were once driven to produce---to be sure, as an outcry against the grinding apartheid circumstances of that period, but also as our own personal testimonies. Hutchinson’s contribution to that historic struggle is uniquely graceful, indeed a delicate display in the telling.