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ALFRED HUTCHINSON |
| Although Alfred Hutchinson belongs to the decade of the 1950s in South
African literary and cultural history, he is practically invisible within
it largely because of a certain intellectual reading of this historical
moment. The reading of this decade has been determined by the valorization
of the Drum magazine as the quintessential expression on the ‘Fabulous
Fifties’. This seems to be the accepted view by acclamation as well as
by consensus. It is very questionable in what sense Drum magazine represented
the essence of the 1950s more profoundly or cogently than Liberation journal
or the Fighting Talk monthly. Although it is inarguable that Drum magazine
seems to have had a greater feel than the other two political and cultural
organs for the making of South African modernity in this particular decade,
it is very much arguable whether this of itself should give primacy to
the magazine. While Liberation could be excluded from consideration since
it was predominantly a political journal, Fighting Talk has as much legitimacy
as Drum in being considered the cultural expression of this decade, especially
from the time in 1954 when Ruth First took over as the editor of the monthly.
The reasons are various for this consideration. First, Fighting Talk published
the short stories of Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alfred Hutchinson,
and these appear to be uniformly better than those that appeared in Drum.
Second, the monthly excerpted the diaries of Alex La Guma, as well as one
or two chapters from Richard Rive’s then new novel Emergency, both of these
generic forms never found much serious representation in Drum. Third, while
Drum disengaged culture from politics, Fighting Talk articulated a cultural
politics in opposition to the apartheid state in this most political of
decades. Fourth, in contrast to Drum, Fighting Talk published literary
criticism and theorization of African literature by Joe Matthews and others.
Fifth, the reviews Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue, Alfred Hutchinson’s
Road to Ghana, Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates For My Wife in Fighting Talk,
were much more serious than the review of Peter Abraham’s Return to Egoli
in Drum magazine. Sixth, while Drum was enthralled with the connection
between New Negro modernity and New African modernity, Fighting Talk was
examining on its pages the nature of the African Revolution which was then
unfolding, as well as the politics of the African Independence Movement.
Seventh, before going into voluntary exile in 1957, Mphahlele as literary
editor lamented the quality of Drum magazine, while in Nigeria beginning
in 1958 to 1962, he wrote important essays in Fighting Talk on Langston
Hughes, on New York city as the quintessential city of modernity, on the
African personality, as well as on the politics and nationalism of the
African Independence Movement. Eighth, Lewis Nkosi wrote serious film criticism
in Fighting Talk than any that appeared in Drum. Given these achievements
of Fighting Talk, it is very puzzling perhaps even troubling that Drum
magazine has been given much greater prominence in representing the 1950s.
In other words, Fighting Talk was as much as expressive of the cultural
logic of the 1950s as Drum magazine, and given that Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel
Mphahlele, Richard Rive, Harry Bloom, Alex La Guma were to be found on
its pages as on those of the other magazine, clearly then, Fighting Talk
was equally a representative forum of the Sophiatown Renaissance cultural
movement as any other review of that era. Given a portion of the intellectual
pleaid surrounding Hutchinson on the pages of the monthly, and given also
that the thematic patterns and stylistic form of his short stories were
not fundamentally different from those of, for instance, Bloke Modisane
or Can Themba, there is therefore no historically informed reason for not
including him in the Sophiatown Renaissance. A Nigerian scholar writing
in the late 1980s recognized the belongingness of Hutchinson thematically
to a group of South African writers and intellectuals: “Among the frequently
encountered themes in the works of black or coloured South African writers
are: (a) police brutality; (b) racial conflicts among Blacks, Coloureds,
Indians and Whites; (c) the humiliation or moral defeat that is the lot
of the black man or coloured man in South Africa; (d) the necessity to
abscond from South Africa and stay in exile in order to save one’s integrity
as a writer and/or human being. All these themes, which are found to a
greater or lesser degree in Peter Abraham’s Tell Freedom. Ezekiel Mphahlele’s
Down Second Avenue, Dennis Brutus’s Sirens, Knuckles, Boots or Alex La
Guma’s The Stone Country and A Walk In The Night, are contained in Alfred
Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana but my intention is primarily to focus on theme
(d)---Hutchinson’s flight and painful exile from his land of birth. While
doing this, Hutchinson’s remarkable artistic creation will be under close
observation because it is really in this light that his autobiography shpuld
interest us as students of literature” (Tony E. Afejuku, “Exile sand The
South African Writer: Alfred Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana, Presence Africaine,
no. 148, 1988). It needs to be said in this context that perhaps not only
writers who appeared on the pages of Drum magazine were ‘Drum’ writers.
Hutchinson would seem to be the primary example of this. It needs to be
said in the larger context of the historical coordinates that inform and
construct a particular era, that whereas Drum magazine expressed its culturalism,
Fighting Talk monthly articulated its Communism. It is perhaps in relation
to this that Lewis Nkosi argues in his fundamental essay, “The Fabulous
Decade: The Fifties”, that what principally constituted the 1950s was the
unparalleled combination of Jewishness and Africanism. This is a provocative
and challenging thesis that postulated an unusual and correct reading of
that moment. When Fighting Talk is given its rightful preeminence in the
1950s, the intellectual portrait of Alfred Hutchinson emerges in its dramatic
form. Hutchinson, being a major contributor to this remarkable review combined
in his intellectual personality this Communism and culturism which were
necessary armours against the fascism of the apartheid state. Given his
serious contribution to the monthly, it is not surprising that Fighting
Talk commissioned a political and intellectual portrait of him as well
as giving ample space to a serious review of his book. The portrait, among
other things, makes the following observations: “This humility of Hutch
has made him a favourite with practically everyone. At his room in Alexandra
Township, he is never lonely. Sometimes a colleague comes round to confide
in Hutch; sometimes it is his neighbor who just wants to talk to somebody
about himself, and often it is the cripple ‘Texas’ who does not mind Hutch’s
outbursts of temper against him because he knows that he will ultimately
get his own way. For Hutch loves life. He believes that every person is
basically good. It is not surprising that his hero is the great Czech writer
and martyr Julius Fucik. Hutch is most populary known as a people’s writer.
His development since the days when he was a student at Fort Hare College,
ewhere he carried away a distinction in English in his arts degree, has
been an interesting though painful, process. For Hutch comes of very well-off
parents; his father is Scottish, and his mother is from some Royal Swazi
house. Hutch could quite easily have chosen to manage his father’s farm
as he is the eldest child, and so passed his life in the obscurity of Hectorspruit.
But when he came to teach in Johannesburg in 1951, Hutch came under the
influence of Duma Nokwe, a college friend, who was then studying part-time
for his law degree. Two more dissimilar persons could not be imagined:
the one a rigorous logician and even at that time a man of the people and
the other, an easy going individualist, rather fearful of the ‘masses’.
When the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust laws came in the winter of
1952, it accelerated a process of painful heart-searching for Hutch. He
was honest enough to admit that something had to be done about the mounting
tide of oppression that came with the Nationalist government, and he could
see the importance of the Defiance Campaign. But it also demanded he renounce
his whole upbringing, and the relative comfort of his profession. In the
end his honesty saved him, and he volunteered to defy the Unjust Laws.
. . . In December 1952, Hutch defied the Unjust Laws in the same batch
with Manilal Gandhi and Patrick Duncan. To this day he considers this the
best thing he has ever done. At any rate, this action helped to smash his
individualism, and set him steadfast in the search for the new life. .
. . When Hutch was arrested at the Central Indian High School where he
was teaching, the pupils did their best to restrain their emotions. For
Hutch was not merely a teacher, he was a friend to every one of them. .
. . Hutch is a born teacher, but not one who sees only the blackboard,
the textbook, and the four walls of his classroom. Life is his interest,
and it throbs in his writing. The penetrating description, the deft, feeling
phrase, his needle-sharp perception and his deep sensitivity make his lines
and paragraphs unforgettable” (Henry G. Makgothi, “Treason Trial Profile:
Alfred Hutchinson”, Fighting Talk, November 1957). Several factors account
for Alfred Hutchinson’s shift from the bourgeois individualism of his earlier
years to the Communism of his mature years: Duma Nokwe, who had made his
own particular re-alignment earlier from the African nationalism of A.
P. Mda and Anton Lembede to the Leninism of J. B. Marks and Moses M. Kotane,
influenced Hutchinson in embracing Marxism; his personal honesty and integrity
convinced him that oppression and injustice were fundamentally inseperable
from capitalism; his visit in 1953 to the 4th World Festival of Youth and
Students For Peace and Friendship at Bucharest in Rumania enabled him to
experience actually existing socialism as a real alternative to capitalism.
The ‘new life’ he entered into was very political. He became in the 1950s
the ANC Transvaal provincial secretary, and subsequently the national executive
committee of the organization. Because of his role in the Defiance Campaign
of 1952 and his vehement oipposition to Bantu Education resulted in his
being one of the 156 Treason Trialists who were put on trial between December
1956 until late 1958. During this period he studied for a law degree at
the University of the Witwatersrand, but never completed the course. His
political flight into exile in Ghana is portrayed in his autobiography
Road to Ghana (1960). Fighting Talk carried a review of the advanced copy
of the book: “As far asI know, Alfred Hutchinson was front page news only
once in his life. For a brief moment the press featured his arrest in Tanganyika
on a charge of entering the country without official documents. For a day
or two, while they filled in the background of Hutchinson’s career---A.
N. C. official, school-teacher, treason trialist---the news-hawks followed
his story. They told of Tanganyika’s declaration that he was a prohibited
immigrant; of Christian Action’s immediate offer of an air-fare anywhere
he desired to prevent his forced repatriation to South Africa; of his air
flight to Ghana and his appearance at the Accra Conference as a delegate
of the African National Congress. And there the story ended. After a brief
moment, Hutch faded from the news as suddenly and mysteriously as he crashed
into it. . . . Perhaps this is because Hutch is something special. Not
special because he got away. Others have done it before, often more easily,
more legitimately, less painfully. Amongst the Non-White writers of talent,
Arthur Maimane, Bloke Modisane, Zeke Mphahlele have all made the break
from Verwoed’s South Africa. Before then, even before the days of Nationalist
government, there were others who made the break, so long ago and finally
that they are no longer ‘our people’ but aliens---Gerard Sekoto, painting
rootlessly in Paris, Peter Abrahams writing rootlessly in London. Doubtless
those who knew them all could enter special pleadings, special justifications
for their decisions. South Africa is a grim place for all who are not White.
It is doubly grim for those who feel. React and desire more keenly and
sensitively than the rest of us, and thus are able to depict their emotions
artistically and dramatically to others. . . . Hutch is---above all else---a
writer.And the justification of a writer is his writing. In his few months
of escape in Ghana, Hutch has justified his decision by writing a book,
a fine, sensitive book, worthy of his great talent for descriptive prose.
In all his years in South Africa he wrote little---an unsuccessful and
unsatisfisfactory novel, some promising short stories, some magnificent
but slender descriptive sketches mainly for small circulation magazines
like Fighting Talk. None of it was worthy of the real ability of the man.
And all of it written with such tremendous pain and suffering, such torturing,
and only under relentless pressure and nagging by editors and friends.
In South Africa as it is today, Hutch’s talent would have slowly shrivelled
up and died, leaving behind it only the stray flash of inspiration to tell
of what might have been” (L. Bernstein, “He Wanted No Tomorrow”, Fighting
Talk, December 1959). By eventually ending in Nigeria in the late 1960s,
Alfred Hutchinson, like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, and Bloke Modisane,
forged a rapprochement between modern South African national literature
and modern Nigerian national literature, represented by eminent writers
such as Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe,
John Pepper Clark. This was no mean feat on the part of Hutchinson. Today
Alfred Hutchinson lies buried in Nigeria as a symbol of the rapprochemont
that occurred nearly fifty years between these two great literatures.
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