It was 1989 and I, too, became a poet. Poetry in South African townships at the time was recited in football stadiums in front of thousands of anti-apartheid supporters. The most famous bard was Mzwakhe Mbuli, a lanky young man with a beautiful deep voice. The People’s Poet, as he was called, did not deal in ambiguity, rhyme or metre. In his work, memorised and recited by thousands of young South Africans, the apartheid government was the villain and the African National Congress’s cadres the heroes. It was not, shall we say, the stuff of Wordsworth:
The people are like crocodiles in the river;
And no one can fight crocodiles inside
the river;
South Africa why therefore buy time?
When crocodiles are against you
Why give chase to lizards?
But it did the job. Young activists recited Mbuli’s work like a manifesto. Books of poetry were released, many mimicking Mbuli. Young poets changed their speaking voice to a deep baritone. If you could string together a few lines with “Amandla!” (Power!) in them, you could launch a poetry career.
Then, not long before Nelson Mandela was to be freed, along came a man whose arm had been blown off by a car bomb planted by a South African security agent while he was in exile in Mozambique. Albie Sachs, then a member of the ANC’s legal affairs department and today a justice in the Constitutional Court, argued in a paper called “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” that what had passed for culture among progressive South Africans and his comrades in the ANC was impoverished and banal.
”Whether in poetry or painting or on the stage, we line up our good people on the one side and the bad ones on the other, occasionally permitting someone to pass from one column to the other, but never acknowledging that there is bad in the good, and, even more difficult, that there can be elements of good in the bad,” he wrote.
”And what about love?” he asked. “...Can it be that once we join the ANC we do not make love anymore, that when the comrades go to bed they discuss the role of the white working class?”
Although Sachs’s paper took the intelligentsia by storm and had writers’ collectives and academics in a fit for a while, it took years for its cry to insinuate itself into South African writing. When a confident ANC took over government in 1994 and Mandela became the first president of a democratic South Africa, protest or “struggle” literature - poetry in particular - was still all the rage. A tool to fight apartheid in the immediate past, South African art now had - explicitly or not - to devote itself to building the new country.
White South African writing, by contrast, was plodding on as it had always done: the flowers bloomed in summer, the river gurgled beautifully. White writing? Black writing? Yes, the distinction was important. In the main, the former ignored apartheid, while the latter was of the Mbuli type or subtler. Sometimes a liberal or communist would cross the line - Nadine Gordimer consistently, J.M. Coetzee more ambiguously, an angry Andre Brink once a year - but in general the two did not meet except in leftist writers’ workshops.
By 1994 Sachs’s cry for some complexity and some love had filtered through. But no one knew what to do with the incredible story unfolding before them. South African writers were either still trying to deal with the past, or did not know how to put a vision of the future on the page.
One writer who had always wanted to be freed by the arrival of a new South Africa is Zakes Mda. In February 1979 Mda put on a very short play in Soweto. Called We Shall Sing For the Fatherland, it was protest theatre - but in the wrong period. About two liberation fighters-turned-hobos being kicked from one municipal park to another until they froze to death one winter night, it was an obvious, unsubtle work that warned against the dangers of post-colonial African politics. Even then, he wanted to tell our leaders about the ease with which their rhetoric of a nirvana might be swiftly forgotten come Freedom Day. But like most political plays of the time it was turgid, ugly even, bludgeoning you with the message from Act One.
But the seed was there in Mda. In 1995 he published Ways of Dying, a powerful, lyrical book about a man who obsessively attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape and battered top hat. This is Toloki’s life in a new South Africa: he hears about a death, prepares himself and attends. He is here, there, everywhere death strikes. He is a “Professional Mourner”. Then he falls in love. One reviewer said you soon forget whether you read it or dreamt it. In a country where we bury so many because of Aids, it is a book, or a dream, that stays with you for months.
Mda’s latest book, The Whale Caller, was published in South Africa last year and is in a similar vein. It is about a bald old man who rents a small prefab house in the picturesque town of Hermanus, not far from Cape Town. Whales migrate from around the world and come to Hermanus to mate and enjoy the waters for about three months in the spring and summer. The whale caller of the title finds that he can call whales by playing on his kelp horn. After travelling through South Africa all his life he returns to Hermanus, where whale-watching has become big business; the town, although still charming, is in danger of turning into a mini-Costa Brava. In this changed place, in this new reality, he starts playing his horn again. He has a particular whale he favours - which he calls Sharisha - that responds magnificently by calling back and “dancing” with him.
In this idyll, the feisty village drunk starts stalking the whale caller and finally, makes him fall in love with her. That’s it, really.
Or maybe not. In all post-apartheid literature, Mda seems to be the only writer on these shores who grapples with the present with confidence. He instinctively seems to have known what he wanted to do. While his colleagues write in a way that is tentative, as if unsure whether to start shaking their fists at the new dispensation and its massive contradictions (such as black capitalists funding, and pledging allegiance to, the South African Communist Party), Mda has charted his own path. He has taken marginalised individuals and used them to bring humanity to his literature. Instead of bludgeoning us with the appalling inequities of the tourist-mecca Hermanus - where beggar children are shooed away from its sushi restaurants so as not to offend the holidaymakers - this becomes background. Its understatedness is its power. This is not We Shall Sing For the Fatherland. What it is instead is everything we have not yet seen in South African literature, reminiscent of Gabriel Garc¡a Marquez (and this comparison is not made lightly): lyrical, simple, and obsessed with the human condition.
Mda is not the only writer to have transcended the “struggle” syndrome. Two other extraordinary South African talents are young, acclaimed - and dead.
One was K. Sello Duiker, a television scriptwriter, who burst on to the literary scene in 2000 with a powerful small novel about a street child in Cape Town. He got South Africans talking about books - and they were saying, buy this new book called Thirteen Cents. Although it was a fine book (it was too close to Ben Okri for me), it was Duiker’s second, published in 2001, that was a real tour de force.
In South African literature black men were traditionally depicted as the oppressed who would rise up. They were not bedevilled by doubt or complexities. In The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Duiker wrote about people like me, or himself: young, well-spoken, products of formerly whites-only private schools. His main character is gay, gets raped, finds himself in a mental institution, and works for a while as a male prostitute. He is complex, bedevilled by his place in a new South Africa and the fact that he lives in a white world: living and trying to survive what Frantz Fanon called the “nervous condition” of the free black in a white society.
Duiker was troubled too. Last year he was promoted to a wonderful new job at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Then one day in January he went home and hanged himself. He was 30.
Little more than a month before that, Phaswane Mpe, a 34-year-old writer and literature lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, also died unexpectedly, for reasons that remain unclear. Mpe’s debut novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), was set in the formerly hippie high-rise flatland in Johannesburg which is now home to millions of blacks from across the continent. Almost all the characters get killed or commit suicide. It was odd, scary even, but it was powerful in that Hillbrow came alive in it. In a country where we prefer not to look straight into the face of our problems (the minister of health habitually endorses quack doctors who deny the existence of Aids or the efficacy of anti-retroviral drugs), Mpe was staring the beast in the eye.
Meanwhile we constantly wonder what our lions are doing in this winter. The Nobel laureate and double Booker Prize-winner, J.M. Coetzee, seems to have fled the coop, and now writes or teaches in - or rather travels the world from - Australia. We are a nation still not at ease with our writers. Debate about Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace - about a university professor who falls into disfavour for sleeping with one of his students - continues to tear us apart. I am one of those who disagrees with his view - that the victory of the black majority over apartheid means the subjugation of whites, that what has happened is a total inversion of the apartheid era - and yet reading Disgrace again, now, there is no doubt that it is a masterpiece. But that doesn’t make him right. Coetzee’s next novel, Slow Man, is due out later this year.
Another Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, has grappled with issues of the new South Africa in her recent work - and ironically found herself at the centre of them. Her last novel was The Pickup, published in 2001, but since then she has managed to be in the news several times. That year - in a painful coda to the time when three of her books were banned by the apartheid government - the country’s most important provincial education department removed her 1981 novel, July’s People, from its approved reading list because “the subject matter is questionable” and “any condemnation of racism is difficult to discover”. It sounded as though they hankered for the struggle poets again. And last year she had a nasty public falling-out with a biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts. Gordimer, unhappy with parts of Roberts’ biography, got her publishers to withdraw from its contract to publish the book, which would have appeared as an authorised biography. Roberts cried censorship.
All this did not stop Gordimer from releasing Loot, a collection of her short stories, in 2003. And last year she edited Telling Tales, a collection of 20 stories by Arthur Miller, Paul Theroux, Njabulo Ndebele, Gabriel Garc¡a Marquez, Kenzaburo Oe, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Woody Allen and others. Proceeds go to HIV/Aids charities. As if that is not enough, the 81-year-old Gordimer’s new book, Get a Life, is published at the end of the year.
Andre Brink, meanwhile, has written a novel to be published later this year to coincide with his 70th birthday. The publicity describes Praying Mantis as “a heady mixture of comedy and tragedy” exploring “the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history”. The main character is Cupido Cockroach, “the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region”.
And so, from the lions of literature back to the “young lions” of the struggle, what became of the poets in the end? Even before the popularity of Mzwakhe Mbuli and others, poetry has had a strong place in South African literature. Mongane Wally Serote was the most famous of the anti-apartheid writers and, although his poetry fell, sadly, into the ideological in the 1980s, his early work had the power and proportions of a Seamus Heaney.
Another powerful poet is Keorapetse Kgositsile, who fled into exile in the 1960s and in all that time never lost his gentleness and feeling for the country. Kgositsile writes as though he has never been angry in his life, and nowhere is his power more apparent than in his latest collection, This Way I Salute You, published in 2003. When one sees a title such as this in South Africa the instinct is to run the other way - fast, as it is usually a signal that these will be poems about our political leaders and how great they are. But Kgositsile’s collection is a paean to the jazz musicians and artists he loves: John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hugh Masekela. As if writing of our literature today, he says:
And generations still come or go
Mine, born deaf, never learned
The power of fire.
The generations to come are listening to him, though, and are opening their eyes. Lebogang Mashile is a funky young woman who is part of the massive poetry revival in South Africa. Unlike us, though, the new poets write about love and their view of the new South Africa and about sex. Mashile, the child of parents exiled to the US, is a leading light of this movement. Her appeal goes beyond the literati: young women follow her every move. At the launch earlier this year of her first poetry volume, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, about 100 young people turned up and whooped to her reading.
Inspired by Kgositsile and others, Mashile represents a new direction in South African poetry: the practitioners bring in everything from rap to gender politics and locate it in a gritty new South African voice. They also like rhythm and metre, and have paragraphs instead of line breaks in their work. They work at it. Mashile is a fine poet, with a lot of promise. Her real voice is yet to come.
These new voices infect the realm of non-fiction, too. A little over two months after it first came out, it is not by chance that everyone here is busy talking of William Mervin Gumede’s book, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle For the Soul of the ANC. If anything, it is a reflection that we are fast losing the respect we attach to power and authority. Gumede lambasts Mbeki for his handling of HIV/Aids and his sidelining of almost all possible contenders for his throne. It is a book driven by a strong individual voice and a hunger to contest ideas.
Contrast this with Africa: The Time Has Come, a collection of Mbeki’s speeches published in 1998. It is edited by an editorial collective, its introduction is sober, yet the fawning is unmistakable and it was brought out by a publishing house very close to the government. Clearly, with works like Gumede’s, we are moving on from those days.
In his 1989 paper, Sachs relates an anecdote about an artist called Dumile Feni, who was once asked why he did not draw scenes like the one that was taking place in front of him: a group of men being marched under arrest by the apartheid police for not having their passes in order.
”At that moment a hearse drove slowly past and the men stood still and raised their hats. ‘That’s what I want to draw,’” Feni said.
In South Africa, in books like Mda’s and Kgositsile’s and even in Gumede’s, they are at last beginning to draw it.
Justice Malala is a South African television producer and former editor of This Day newspaper.
The Whale Caller
by Zakes Mda
Penguin £14.99, 224 pages
In a Ribbon of Rhythm
by Lebogang Mashile
Oshun (South Africa only) R102, 64 pages
Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC
by William Mervin Gumede
New Holland Press £16.99, 384 pages
