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WILLIAM 'BLOKE' MODISANE - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH |
| Perhaps the best vantage point from which to view William
‘Bloke’ Modisane is that from a series of sketches of him by his fellow
Sophiatown Renaissance writer Lewis Nkosi in the late 1950s and in
the late 1980s. The first portrait was on the occasion of Modisane’s leaving
South Africa illegally what turned out to be a permanently self-imposed
exile. Having accompanied him to the railway station in Johannesburg in
his quest for new territories and for new horizons, Nkosi reflects on the
psychic and political pain felt by Modisane in the entrapment of South Africa:
“I remember Bloke, in particular, as a man who felt the hurt so deeply and
so personally that I wondered if he would not explode or commit suicide
if he did not leave the country. I remember the nights in Sophiatown just
before he left. We would sit up late nights listening to what we cynically
referred to as a ‘culture on disc.’ Time and again we listened to the deep
voice of Canada Lee, the late Negro actor who came to South Africa to star
in Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country” (Lewis Nkosi, “Why ‘Bloke’ Baled
Out”, Contact, July 11, 1959). Continuing on his reflections, Nkosi outlines
the historical project of the Drum writers as well as tracing the historical
conditions of possibility that made this undertaking feasible: “I don’t
want to suggest that this desire to escape did not arise out of a genuine
feeling of entrapment. I suffer from it perpetually. . . I know some spiritually
under-privileged people have suggested that this is a desire in the creative
artist to flee from his people. I know this to be untrue because while Sophiatown
remasined intact we felt we could endure at least to some extent. For most
of us Sophiatown, because of its community spirit, provided some emotional
warmth which could sustain us for many days and nights of cultural and spiritual
sterility. The throb of life of the people here was a constant inspiration.
There was even talk amongst the more ambitious of us of creating a Sophiatown
literature which would declare adequately the social experience of the people
who belonged to what we considered a unique non-white community. This started
us on a quest! Long nights of intense discussion, Jazz, drinking,n reading,
dreaming. Sometimes young people from Europe and America, stopping awhile
in Johannesburg, would look us up in Sophiatown. Those were the most satisfying
nights because they gave us an insight into what could be a great future
for this country if people were permitted personal choice. The irony of
it was that this illegal fringe to which we retreated in search of experience
was the ideal because it was the only time that we and our white friends
could live above the narrow, sectional life to which black and white South
Africans were so accustomed.” What this last New African literary generation
of the New African Movement was seeking to achieve was a particular state
of mind. In another context, Lewis Nkosi elaborates on this search to construct
a new historical consciousness of modernity: “Sophiatown is a state
of mind, [Can] Themba said. There is no way of summing it up better. No
longer just a town within a town, a segregated ghetto of South African society,
the Sophiatown I know has become an important attitude. An attitude of resilience,
stubborness, and unpredictability. It is an attitude of the urban African,
who is pressed hard to the wall, toward a white world. Sometimes this attitude
borders on to scorn for the White World” (Lewis Nkosi, “Sophiatown has become
a state of mind”, Contact, December 13, 1958). Even though writers such
as Can Themba, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Arthur Maimane, and musicians
such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Kippie Moeketsi and others, sought
to forge the singularity of a new urban culture of modernity in Sophiatown,
they sought to create an integrated view of South Africa culture, not beholden
to particularism and parochialism, as Lewis Nkosi so clearly understood:
“I’ve seen it happen. The house is turned upside down. But the same is true
of Sophiatown, although many people who romanticise ‘township life’ do not
seem to suspect this. In spite of all its vitality, the township is impoverished
because of its lack of contact with the other side. For instance, the township
is wasteful of much life, of its energy, because of its lack of the Houghton
[Jewish suburb] kind of discipline. The enthusiasm for life and the abounding
energy is fine, but it achieves nothing until it is disciplined and directed
into creative channels. In short, the persistence of the schism in our national
life is responsible for the over-glamourisation of the township, which,
in turn, is responsible for making people believe that the township is going
to produce the real, vital culture of this country. I don’t agree with this
assumption. I think the township is going to add an important dimension
of vitality and an arresting sense of the world to our culture. But it will
need the techniques of Houghton. We ought to have an integrated view of
our culture” (Lewis Nkosi, “We Ought To Have An Integrated View Of Our Culture”,
Contact, November 28, 1959, emphasis in the original). The cultural criticism
of Bloke Modisane which appeared in Drum magazine and in the Golden City
Post newspaper were an attempt to articulate the cultural space of Sophiatown
as a state of mind from a perspective of an integrated South African culture.
Also Modisane’s classic autobiography of the Sophiatown Renaissance moment,
Blame Me On History (1963) is preoccupied with this dialectic of unity and
diversity. In a critical review of the book, Richard Rive, a fellow member
of the Sophiatown Renaissance cultural movement, found compelling its presentation
of Sophiatown as a state of mind: “In a style vivid and penetrating at times,
the writer leads us through the ruins of Sophiatown, now bull-dozed into
oblivion, the shebeens, cheap cinemas and dark lanes. We hear with him the
street-corner discussions, participate in the murderous gang feuds, and
relive hos terrible childhood, where death and fear are the order of the
day. . . These passages are palpitating and autobiographical details skillfully
woven, although sentimental and melodramatic at times. His style is best
displayed when he describes his identity with Sophiatown. . . All these
episodes are sensitively portrayed and are sufficient to merit Blame Me
On History a worthy place in the literature emerging from the Continent”
(Richard Rive, “Sticking Knives: Blame Me On History by Bloke Modisane”,
The New African, October 26, 1963). In a very peculiar and specific way,
Modisane attempted to construct an integrated view of black culture in South
Africa, not as a national totalization (the integration of African culture,
with Jewish culture, Indian culture, etc.) as Lewis Nkosi had suggested,
but rather, as a black internationalism of the African diaspora. In this
endeavour, Modisane was following on his New African predecessors, such
as H. I. E. Dhlomo, R. V. Selope Thema, Solomon T. Plaatje, for whom New
Negro modernity and New African modernity were inseparable, in the early
part of the twentieth-century. In his weekly column, Nite Life, which appeared
for two years (1957-8) in the Golden City Post, Modisane theorized this
unity across the Atlantic in musical terms (bebop, Township jazz, Negro
Spirituals, gospel music, marabi, etc.). In establishing affiliative relationships
between New Negro modernity and New African modernity in the late 1950s,
Modisane was in a way indicating that the cultural movement in which he
was situated, Sophiatown Renaissance, was the last historical moment of
the New African Movement. The last word on Bloke Modisane is best left to
Lewis Nkosi, who wrote the following in 1990, four years after the death
of Modisane in 1986: “To write an introduction to this book is an act not
only of homage but [also] of conversion. . . The Modisane with whom I had
spent many hours in his small room in Sophiatown, holding intense discussions,
listening to his formidable collection of jazz and classical records of
Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok and Stravinski, and listening spellbound to the
recorded monologues of Olivier’s Richard III and Brando’s Mark Anthony,
a Modisane querulous but full of savage humour and whimsical relish for
the absurd, had seemed to me much more than victim and puppet. . . “ (Lewis
Nkosi, “Introduction” to Blame Me On History [Penguin Books, London, 1990]).
[The following essay was written from the perspective of what some members
of the Sophiatown Renaissance wanted us to believe as their legitimate
hegemonic position in South African literary history. Even though their
defense of the English language was found to be profoundly suspect, their
self-definition of themselves was largely accepted by us of the following
generations. This was still possible in the late 1980s when this essay
was written. But after 1994 this was impossible. This historic political
event opened in totally unexpected ways the continent of our cultural
history. It became clear that the Sophiatown Renaissance were the termination
in the making of cultural modernity. The beginnings of this cultural construction
had to be located. One could postulate a group of Xhosa intellectuals
(Elijah Makiwane, Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba, Walter B. Rubusana, Isaac W.
Wauchope, John Tengo Jabavu, William Wellington Gqoba) of the 1880s with
their two associations, Lovedale Literary Society and Native Educational
Association, and their two newspapers, Imvo Zabantsundu and Isigidimi
sama Xhosa, as the beginnings of such a cultural logic. Perhaps a more
plausible beginning is marked by the appearance of three essays from three
major New African intellectuals and political leaders in 1904: Pixley
ka Isaka Seme, “The Regeneration of Africa”, Royal African Society [London],
vol. 5, 1905-6 [the essay had been written in late 1903 at Columbia University];
Solomon T. Plaatje, “Negro Question”, Koranta ea Becoana, Loetse [September]
7, 1904; John Langalibalele Dube, “Are Negroes Better Off In America?
Conditions and Opportunities of Negroes in America and Africa Compared”,
The Missionary Review of the World, August 1904. Having launched the New
African Movement, these essays made it imperative that any subsequent
cultural and literary movement engaged with the historical logic of modernity,
had to be placed in a sequence of successive orders. The Sophiatown Renaissance
was a termination of the logic of modernity. The ending must always be
appraised in relation to the beginning. All of these interrelated matters
is the theme of this website]. ISSUES IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE. by Ntongela Masilela
is possible that up to now Marxist-inspired culture has, with a care and insistence that it could better employ elsewhere, guiltily denied or covered up a simple truth. This truth is, that just as there cannot exist a class political economy, but only a class criticism of political economy, so too there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class criticism of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture, of the city itself. -Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. It would be inappropriate in 1988, especially in the English-speaking
world or in that world dominated by the hegemony of English language literary
culture, to write an article or an essay on literary matters without paying
due homage to the colossal figure of Raymond Williams, who unexpectedly
passed away early this year at the early age of 66. The achievement of
Williams is in many ways beyond comparison in our time: he opened the
structures of culture and literature to the material and historical processes
of our time. In so doing, he conceptually indicated the historical elasticity
or the historicity of the concept of literature. In his magisterial book,
The Country and the City, which both Perry Anderson and Edward W. Said1
consider to be his most original and brilliant text amobg the list of
his incomparable books, Williams attempted to articulate literature as
a world system: conceptualizing English-language literature within the
former British colonial empire as everywhere having a center with no peripheral
areas. In other words, this book is one of the most remarkable acts ever
undertaken to democratize the structure of literature on a world-wide
scale. It is very exhilarating to see Williams theorize within the same
literary system differential historical and cultural tempos of various
national literatures represented by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe,
R. K. Narayan and the English country-house poems. It may be that this
Williams' book, Marxism and Literature, is one of those books which demands being read and re-read for it is an exhaustible source of brilliant historical and theoretical insights. One of those insights is the following: "We have certainly still to speak of the 'dominant' and the 'effective', and in these senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with further differentiation of each, of the 'residual' and the 'emergent', which in any real process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characters of the 'dominant'."4 Utilizing this historical principle of the dialectical opposition of the residual and the emergent on one side, against the effective and the dominant on the other side, it is possible to open-up a new genealogical structure of our South African literary history. Still remaining within Williams' complex intellectual landscape, another principle can be drawn from a particular segment of his book, Keywords, where he writes: " In relation to the past, literature is still a relatively general word: Carlyle and Ruskin, for example, who did not write novels or poems or plays, belong to English literature. But there has been a steady distinction and separation of other kinds of writing - philosophy, essays, history, and so on -which may or may not possess literary merit or be of literary interest....but which are not noe normally described as literature, which may be understood as well-written books but which is even more clearly understood as well-written books of an imaginative or creative kind."5 It is clear from this excerpt that the constituent contents and forms of literature are variable and their structure is constantly changing and shifting in relation to particular historical dynamics. This is the fundamental point from Williams. The present political struggles in our country, beginning with the workers' strike in Durban in 1973 to the current forms of struggle waged by the United Democratic Front and COSATU (both banned in the early part of this year), has given emergence to, and formation of, new cultural processes on our literary landscape. There are several of these new cultural formations coming from present political gestations, but the ones concerning us here are the most pertinent and relevant for our purposes: the coming into being of workers' poetry in the African languages, represented by Black Mamba Rising (Alfred Temba Qabula, Mi S'dumo Hlatshwayo and Nise Malange); the emergence of black Afrikaans, whose representative figure is Hein Willemse; the advent of the strong black female voice in the genre of the novel, the premeir practitioners being Gladys Thomas, Miriam Tladi, Lauretta Ngcobo, among others; the rekindling of the consciousness of historical feminism among certain writers, the exemplary figures here being Menan du Plessis and Ingrid Fiske. All of these historico-literary constellations have to a large extent been well captured in the special issue of last year's TriQuarterly, entitled, From South Africa: New Writing, Photographs and Art.6 It is these new constellations which have shaped a new configuration of our literary history. Probably at a tangent by itself, but still a central element of this constellation, is the emergence of Don Mattera as one of the strongest poetic voices within our rich literary culture. The emergence of these new constellations within our present literary context has facilitated the material conditions for a new reading or conceptual shaping of our literary history. The first question that arises is where do we locate our literary origins! The standard response of many white literary historians in South Africa has been to associate our collective literary (literacy) origins with the penetration of European languages in our country: in other words, with the pebetration of cultural imperialism. Perhaps the pretext for this historical blindness has been that we are searching for our written literary origins. Even Stephen Gray's very impressive book, Southern African Literature, seems to locate our writerly literary origins in Camoen's epic poem. This inevitably raises the question of Portuguese imperialism during the advent of 'great discoveries'. A historically more plausible location of our writerly literary origins is in the writings or 'scribblings' in Khoikhoi-San cave paintings. The complex structure of these cave paintings are still shrouded in controversy and in mystery. But the effect of locating our writerly literary origins in these writings would be to extend and expand the longitudinal plane of our literary origins; and this would have the simultaneous effect of deepening the conceptual structure of our literary history. This conceptual positioning would also give a new cultural and historical form to what literature is for us South Africans, given the present new cultural formations opening up new historical spaces. After all the writings of Williams have taught us that the concept of what literature is, the very conception that exercises enormous hegemonic hold in many Third World countries, was the invention of the European bourgeoisie. It is a concept that reflects bourgeois cultural complications and hegemonies rather than our own historical cultural complications as South Africans. Let me add before going any further, that the documentation of these complicated historical processes is not easy because of the cultural politics of Apartheid. But this historical location of our literary origins in the Khoikhoi-San historico-cultural complex would also enrich the structure of the history of writing in South Africa. Within our literary history, we could examine the constantly changing structure of the history of writing. The importance of the Khoikhoi-San cultural complex has also important implications for the writing of African historiography. It is well-known that the great thesis of Cheikh Anta Diop has been that the Egyptian civilization was the invention of the African Negro. This thesis was first formulated by theAmerican-Liberian scholar, Edward W. Blyden, in the nineteenth-century and, the American man of letters, W.E.B. DuBois, in the early part of twentieth century. To the Greeks, like Herodotus, this great thesis was a self-evidebt fact. To prove this thesis, Chaikh Anta Diop, who tragically passed away two years ago, has examined the linguistic structures of the various languages which were dominant in the area of Egypt during this civilization. Diop has found many similarities and parallels between the linguistic structures of these languages and those in other parts of Africa. Perhaps there may be also similarities between the linguistic structures of these languages and those of the Khoikhoi and San languages. Within this continental context, South Africa would be able to play its role in locating our origins as African people in the Egyptian civilization. It is here perhaps that we black South Africans can make an important self-criticism of ourselves: in as much as we today criticize Nadine Gordimer for not having learned to speak, and even perhaps write, at least one African language, we should criticize ourselves for not having as yet learned the Khoikhoi and San languages. We should resist the temptation to put the whole blame on Apartheid. The learning of the languages of these First People will be one of the important cultural and literary projects in post-Apartheid South Africa. The importance of the Khoikhoi-San cultural complex in our literary history goes betond its location as the origins of our literariness as South Africans, for it is also within this cultural complex that a particular segment of our literary culture developed. Both our origination and the developmental process of our literary culture is inseperable from this great culture (two cultures which have constituted themselves into a historical unity). For it is within this cultural complex that the Afrikaans language found its gestation. In a recent book on the history of the Khoikhoi people, an American historian, Richard Elphick, has written : ".....it was not the passage of time, but the process of being spoken by slaves and Khoikhoi which hastened the transformation of Dutch into Afrikaans."7 It is clear from this book that the origins of Afrikaans are located are located within the multinational context of black people rather than of white South Africans. This confirms what Breyten Breytenbach has written in another context: "Afrikaans is a Creole language.....The language, however, was born in the mouths of those - imported slaves, local populations - who had no command of no European tongue and who needed to communicate in a lingua franca among themselves......"8 Richard Elphick is well-aware of the controversies surrounding the otigins of this language. Beyond the imperial cultural politics of Apartheid, this question of the origins of the Afrikaans language will become historically irrelevant and politically implausible. But for the moment, then, there is a direct line of continuity between the origins of this language and the historical emergence of black Afrikaans literature in recent years. In a recent essay, Keyan Tomaselli has touched on the effect and impact of the emergence of black Afrikaans on South African cultural systems.9 This question of the origins of Afrikaans makes it very questionable the wisdom of a recent essay on a particular segment of Afrikaans literary history by Stephen Gray and C.C. Coetzee in a two-volume book called, African Literature in the African Languages, edited by Albert Gerard and published in Budapest in 1986. The implication in this book is that Afrikaans is a European language and not an African language, which in fact is what it is. Given these new cultural inventions, emergences, formulations and discoveries, it becomes historically and materially possible to examine our literary history as to how politically and culturally Afrikaans was confiscated from the Khoijhoi-San people and from the slaves by the Afrikaneers. Is it even historically legitimate to call them Afrikaners! What was remarkable about the Khoikhoi and San peoples is that they never abondened their particular languages while they gave gestation to the emergence of the Afrikaans language. This has salutary lessons for us Africans today, given the astonishing hegemony of the English language (literary and otherwise) over the African languages in contemporary South Africa. Perhaps the publication of Black Mamba Rising (a collection of poetry in Zulu by two poets and a poetess, and note, not necessarily Zulu poetry; a distinction of fundamental importance given the cultural abberations of the Inkatha Movement - the distortion of cultural processes through nationalistic structures) by a segment of a very politically conscious South African working class (proletariat) marks the advent of a completely new literary process: the beginnings of the long revolution towards overthrowing the dominance and hegemony of English literary culture in our country. The fundamentalness of the literary project of Alfred Temba Qabula, Mi S'Dumo Hlatshwayo and Nise Malange relates it to the present historico-cultural project of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. But to revert back for a moment to the historical and cultural importance of the Khoikhoi-San cultural complex, for here lies an inexhaustible well of cultural resources. Richard Elphick indicates in his book that the Khoikhoi language seems to possess a very rich linguistic structure which facilitates the learning of other languages: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Khoikhoi learned French, Portuguese and Dutch without difficulties. It would seem then, that although this language is complex and difficult to learn, it is elastic enough to 'accomodate' other languages. The Khoikhoi and San languages have had a strong impact on some African languages: we have in mind the existence of clicks in some of the Nguni languages. Given the cultural richness of these languages (Khoikhoi and San), one of the fundamental literary projects in our literary history would be to recover the literature in these languages and situate it at the center of our cultural and historical experience. Such an undertaking would make clear why Laurens van der Post over thirty years ago in The Lost World of the Kalahari was correct to call them the First People. Indeed, they are the First People of our literary, cultural and historical experiences. It is not implausible or preposterous to suppose that perhaps in post-Apartheid South Africa it may be necessary to choose one of these languages as one of our national languages should the aberrations of nationalism make it politically impossible to choose some of the apparent candidates for such a position. This would make possible the placing in deeper focus the historico-cultural experiences of the First People. This action would militate against all forms of nationalisms and chauvinisms by indicating that South Africa first and foremost belongs to the First People. This ofcourse is not to imply that South Africa does not belong to all of us South Africans. The central incorporation of the literary culture of the First People to a commanding position within our South African cultural experience, would in fundamental ways re-shape and re-structure the literary lineages apparent in our literary history. The recent emergence of black Afrikaans as a new cultural force and its literary forms as historical constructs makes the singular importance of the Khoikhoi-San cultural complex even more apparent. Are there any similarities between the literary forms realized by contemporary black Afrikaans and the orature or its poetical rudimentary forms in the mouth of slaves or the Khoikhoi? Such a question reveals a different configuration of the structureof our literary history than that would be apparent if we concerned ourselves with the literary shapings effected by white Afrikaans. A fundamental question that needs to be posed id the following: is there really a fundamental difference between black Afrikaans and white Afrikaans to justify such historical differentiation beyond the schizoid cultural politics of Apartheid. Can a reconciliation between the two 'cultural structures' be effected only by the cultural politics of the proletariat? There can be no doubt that the flowering of black Afrikaans has been a cultural mirror to a certain segment of our working class. What historical literary lineages will black Afrikaans reconstruct for itself in contradistinction from that drawn by white Afrikaans: will both of them quarrel as to who is the legitimate heir to the legacy of Eugene Marais! Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to us Africans by the coming into being of black Afrikaans is the necessity for us to learn and study Afrikaans (whether the black and white distinction in this context will still hold is unclear). It is the paradoxical cultural consequences of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 which have facilitated the emergence of black Afrikaans, just as the politics of unity in the post-Apartheid era will perhaps eliminate these racial designations. Extending the logic farther, in a truly democratic South Africa, when all class distinctions will have been eliminated, Zulu literature, Afrikaans literature, Xhosa literature, Ndebele literature and others will disappear and only class literatures written in Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English and so on, will remain to give true expression to a multiplicity of forms or to an authentic historical formalisms. Black Mamba Rising is a prefiguration of the festival of forms or the poetry of voices which is just beyond the horizon, because of present-day historical blockages. One such blockage is the hegemony of the English language and its literary forms supported by ruling ideologies and the ruling classes in our country. The one real historical mission opened by this anthology of poetry is to challenge the dominance of this imperial language which has been historically imposed on many of us. This challenge is articulated from the class position of the working class, which makes the publication of this anthology one of the unique events in our literary history. The only serious danger here is the possible coopting of these three historic poets into writing in the English language. In another context, we intend to analyze this very important literary text, for it seems to mark a particular threshold in our literary history. Nevertheless, a few things can be mentioned here: first, it is remarkable that this text has emerged from a supposedly Inkatha territory to call for a class unity across and against ethnicity or ethnic identifications - in other words, whereas the reactionary Inkatha movement identifies the Zulu language with nationalism (even worse, ethnic nationalism), our three historic poets situate the Zulu language in the struggle for socialism and in the call for the unity of Africa (continentalism); secondly, perhaps for the first time in our literary history, there is a unity on a high historical plane, between a great African language and a progressive working class consciousness - mind you, this synthesis is realized not in order to develop a historical thesis, but rather, is developed in the structure of the creative process itself; thirdly, the literary text poses the question of the possible integration of the various literary histories constituted by the creativity in the African languages, for in the text itself there is an intercrossing or intersection of two literary traditions in that behind Qabula we can justifiably search for Mqhayi as well as behind Hlatshwayo we can look for Vilakazi. Black Mamba Rising then,10 presents the historical formulation that the various literary histories in existence within our cultural space can only be integrated into each other from the perspective of the working class; as for their possible 'synthesis', that can be achieved in a totally clasless society, beyond the metaphysics of ethnicity, where a singular historical consciousness will be the ruling order. What makes Black Mamba Rising truly astonishing, among other things, is that while it is a remarkable act of recovery or of restoration of literature in the African languages of South Africa, it is also a serious questioning of that literary tradition, for it poses to that very tradition the question of working class consciousness and the question of political unity. It is from these two perspectives that the continent of our literary history in the African languages can be re-examined and re-formulated. But this is a task for another occasion.11 Perhaps the simultaneous existence within the same temporal and cultural space of the Black Mamba Rising poets and a collective school of black female South African novelists (Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Gladys Thomas and others) is not merely a historical coincidence, but an expression of a profound dialectical unity, in that whereas one literary constellation indicates the existence of ahistorico-literary problem, the other literary constellation presents possible options towards resolving that problem. For in ctuality, these three novelists and short-story writers in their creative works present the question of the legitimacy of African writers continuing to write in English language in displacement of African languages: in other words, their work present the preliminary indications of the beginnings of the disintegration of the hegemonic hold of the English language on the imagination of African writers. It is this historical question which constitutes them as a collective school. Their writings, that is the historical logic governing them rather than in their creative structures, make clear that the hegemonic hold of English language literary culture in South Africa is directly related to the existence of the capitalist order in our country. After all, the penetration of the English language in our country was on the back of English imperialism and colonialism. The dominance of the English language in our country is an expression of the continuing dominance of imperialism proper and of cultural imperialism in particular. Here again, the importance of Ngugi wa Thiong'o within the context of continental cultural politics is absolutely clear. Clearly then, the neo-colonialism prevailing in much of Africa is not that much different from the internal colonialism prevailing in our country. These three writers continue a literary tradition which has been present in our literary history since the introduction of European literary forms into our national creative imagination: namely, the creative usage of the novel genre by our black female writers and white female writers to capture, express or articulate a historical crisis or a historical problem. It is this historical vision which unites our female writers into a singular constellation, far beyond the metaphysics of ethnicity. And it is also this presence of historical complexities in their novels that makes them premier practitioners of this genre and by far exceeding their male compatriots who are novelists. If in Lauretta Ngcobo, Miriam Tlali and Gladys Thomas it is the question of the hegemonic hold of the English language literary culture on the imagination of African writers, in Nadine Gordimer it is the difficulties and complexities of the impending revolution, and in Menan du Plesis and Ingrid Fiske it is the question of the viability of feminism in the context of Apartheid, when the primary struggle is against capitalism and racialism. It does not follow therefore that these writers necessarily express the same philosophy of history. What is evident is that the female imagination in the genre of the novel has a greater grasp on the complex labyrinths of our history. Here we do not encounter aimless ruminations on the metaphysics of interracial love or the disintegration of a schizoid personality or schizophrenic, when the real challenge is aimed at the capitalist order itself. The literary sensibility of our female writers has a deeper feel for historical depth and collective possibilities. Here too, like everything being historical, this sensibility has its own limitations. But there can be doubt that it opens new ways of viewing and understanding our literary history. For instance, the strong female sensibility in grasping the structures of the novel in South Africa, raises the question of Olive Schreiner's imprintation on this novel. Is it because of her strong beliefs in socialism and feminism that has made the novel within our national context not easily evade the pull of various historical forces? This differentiation between our female writers and male writers should not be taken too far, for Turbott Wolfe shows the limitations of such a contrast. Before bringing this presentation to a close, we would like to say a few words about the Sophiatown Renaissance, probably the most important and most original cultural movement in our literary history. At last year's presentation here in Bad Boll we noted the significance of the Voorslag and Sestigers literary schools in our literary history.12 In contrast with both these movements, the Sophiatown Renaissance opens a multiplicity of visions on the cultural richness of our literary history. Nationally, the Sophiatown Renaissance has been usually understood to have been only an extraordinary flowering of literary creativity among Africans in the 1950s. But two books of photographs, The Fifties People of South Africa and The Finest Photos From the Old Drum, both published in South Africa last year, edited and compiled by Jurgen Schadeberg, ahow that this cultural renascence gave rise to perhaps the first school of photography in South Africa.13 This cultural effervescence also extended into painting. In other words, the Sophiatown Renaissance had deeper historical roots and a broder cultural vision than any other cultural movement in our country. It was not a cultural phenomenon isolated only to a particular race or insulated within a particular ethnic group; it extended its cultural coordinates to embrace other nationalities: embracing Indians and the so-called Coloureds (today, the other blacks): for instance, the photography of Lionel Osstendorp during this cultural moment is on par with that of Peter Magubane. The destruction of the Sophiatown Renaissance by the Apartheid state was indeed a great cultural crime. It is incumbent upon us generations who follow to situate the Sophiatown Renaissance back in its premier position where it belongs in this century. On this issue, there can be no compromise or even discussion.14 Within the context of the African continent, retrospectively, the Sophiatown Renaissance is historically related to the Nigerian literary movement of the 1950s (consisting of Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and others), in that they both of them were an attempt to establish modern African National Literatures in the European Languages. The meeting of both these literary schools in Transition and Black Orpheus magazines through the mediation of Ezekiel Mphahlele was not accidental.15 The historical impossibility of establishing African national literatures in the European languages is made clear by the historical example of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Ngugi is the historical representation of the triumph of the African Marxism of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral and the re-emergence of African national literatures in the African languages.16 Within a pan-Africanist perspective, again through the intervention of Ezekiel Mphahlele, the Sophiatown Renaissance sought cultural identification with the Harlem Renaissance which had taken place thirty-years earlier: the fascinating friendship between Langston Hughes and Ezekiel Mphahlele has still to be examined.17 It is all these three interrelated horizons which make the Sophiatown Renaissanceone of the highest moments of cultural expression in South Africa. A conceptual structure of our literary history without this al summit would be totally impoverished.
1. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso, London, 1983, p.25. Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, Faber and Faber, London, 1984, p.23. 2.Fredric Jameson, "The state of the subject (III)", Critical Quarterly, vol.29 no.4, Winter 1987, pp.16-25. 3. Stephen Heath and Colin McCabe, "Raymond Williams 1921-1988", Critical Quarterly, vol.30 no.1, Spring 1988, p.3: "The death of Raymond Williams was a great loss for both the British and the European Left." 4. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, London, 1977, p.121-122. 5. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Fontana Paperbacks, London, 1983 (1976), p.185-186. 6. A special issue of Triquarterly no. 69 (From South Africa: New Writing, Photographs and Art), Spring-Summer 1987, (eds.) David Bunn and Jane Taylor. 7. Ralph Elphick, Khoikhoi and the founding of White South Africa, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1985, p.212-213. 8. Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Faber and Faber, London, 1984, p.353. 9. Keyan Tomaselli, "Introduction", Rethinking Culture, (ed.) Keyan Tomaselli, Anthropos Publishers, Bellville, 1988, p.8. 10. Alfred Temba Qabula, Mi S'Dumo Hlatshwayo and Nise Malange, Black Mamba Rising: Izimongi Zabasebenzi Emzabalazweni Wase-South Africa, "Insingeniso", by Ari Sitas, Worker Resistance and Culture Publications, Durban, 1986. 11. The presence of Alfred Temba Qabula at the Second Bad Boll (West Germany) South African Literature Conference in late 1987 was a serious historical moment. His presence amongst us Exiles was a clear indication that our forced long march through the European languages cannot be used as a pretext or excuse for not going back to our mother-languages (African languages). The similarities between his project (and his Comrades) and that of Ngugi wa Thiong'o is clear. Also meeting Don Mattera at the First Bad Boll South African Literature Conference in 1986 was a momentous occasion. For this, Robert Kriger, our compatriot scholar and organizer of these Conferences, cannot be highly praised. 12. cf., "The Moments of 'Voorslag' and 'Sestigers' in our Literary History", South African Literature: From Popular Culture to the Written Artifact, (eds.) Robert Kriger and Wolfgang Schafer, Evangelische Akademie Bad Boll, Bad Boll (West Germany), 1988, p.93-102. 13. cf., "South African Photography in the Literary Era of the Sophiatown Renaissance", Fotogeschichte, Frankfurt, Jahrgang 10, Heft 36 (1990), s.97-100. The essay was written in 1988. 14. See Daniel Kunene's mis-appraisal of the Sophiatown Renaissance: 15. This is one of the reasons that Ezekiel Mphahlele is one of the crucial figures in our contemporary cultural history: to reject him would be to reject glorious decades of our cultural history. Lewis Nkosi's unrelenting hostility towards Mphahlele is profoundly misguided: Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks, Longmann, 1980; "South African Fiction Writers at the Barricades", Third World Book Review, vol. 2 no. 1-2, 1986; [. In another context we have responded to Lewis Nkosi's unjustified harsh criticism of Mphahlele: "A review of Poetry and Humanism: Oral Beginnings by Es'kia Mphahlele", Research in African Literatures, vol. 19 no. 1, Spring 1988, pp.117-121. 16. cf., "The Classical Forms of African Marxism" [“Pan Africanism or Classical African Marxism”, in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, (eds.) Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, Verso, London, 1994, pp. 308-330. 17. cf., "Sterling A Brown: The Last of the Harlem Renaissance Greats", Presence Africaine, Paris, 4th Quarterly, 1988; "Richard Rive: In Memoriam", Isivivane: Journal of Letters and Arts in Africa and the Diaspora, Berlin, 1991, pp.39-42. |
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