SOURCE: Chandramohan, Balasubramanyam. “Inter-Ethnicity to Trans-Ethnicity.” In A Study in Trans-Ethnicity in Modern South Africa: The Writings of Alex La Guma, 1925-1985, pp. 149-82. Lampeter, Wales: Mellen Research University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Chandramohan studies Time of the Butcherbird for evidence of La Guma's transition from concerns about black Africans specifically to all ethnic groups in South Africa.]

La Guma's pursuit of the notion of a trans-ethnic society in South Africa acquires greater complexity in Time of the Butcherbird,¹ an overtly symbolic novel. The use of symbolism in the novel is a consequence partly of the social divisions that compartmentalise life in South Africa, and partly of the author's exile since 1966. Behind the shift in literary technique lies a change in the mode of La Guma's social concern. Thus, the shift from near-naturalism in the early works to symbolism and allegory in the later works coincides with the shift in La Guma's concern with Coloured life in Cape Town to life across ethnic divides. In this ‘widening of range’² La Guma's concern with Africans, ‘the largest and the most oppressed group [of South Africans]’,³ is natural; and Time of the Butcherbird is mainly about the dispossession that an African community faces in rural South Africa. The divergencies between inter-ethnicity and trans-ethnicity as interpretatative models sustain the unfolding of the story in Time of the Butcherbird.

Compared with the preceding novels, symbolism in Time of the Butcherbird permeates more aspects of the novel, and it is also more overt. The locale, the characters and the action are all symbolic. The symbols embrace South Africa's history. Attempts to locate the novel in a specific geographical context, and thereby evaluate the characters, situations, and actions on the basis of the closeness to actual people has led to a view that Time of the Butcherbird has a placeless⁴ about it. The symbolism in La Guma's works is a result of interplay between the author's personal background and political beliefs. The literary technique is affected by the shift in his concerns from filling the gap in the literary portrayal of the Coloureds⁵ to covering a wider range of issues and people.

La Guma's focus in Time of the Butcherbird is on the cycles of violence and counter-violence that lead to the wastage of human life in South Africa. In the novel he portrays one such cycle of rage, revenge and retaliatory violence taking place in a dorp in the Eastern Karoo. Dedicated to ‘The Dispossessed’, the novel deals with the dispossession of an individual, Shilling Murile, and his African community which is forcibly evicted from its ancestral lands to benefit the local Afrikaner community and the mining interests of a nearby town. The struggle for the mastery over land that has been the central theme of the conflict between the Africans and the Afrikaners is allegorised in a historical perspective. The other ethnic groups, English-speaking Whites, the Coloureds, the Indians, and the San are also shown, symbolically, to interact in their own ways with this central conflict. The matrix of ideas that re-emerged in the late 1960s and the early 1970s with the rise of Black Consciousness organisations, particularly the South African Students Organisation (SASO),⁶ provides the social and literary context of ‘nationalisms’ in the novel. La Guma's long-standing interest in Marxist ideas counterpoints and underpins trans-ethnicity in the novel.

The relationship between exile and narrative imagination becomes acute in Time of the Butcherbird. It is the first of La Guma's novels that was written wholly in exile. Abrahams points out that In the Fog of the Season's End, the previous novel, though published in 1972 had been ‘conceived and substantially written’ while Alex La Guma was in South Africa.⁷ On the contrary, Time of the Butcherbird was written in exile, as Mrs. La Guma confirms.⁸ The struggle to link the opportunities for wider perspectives that exile opens up, and loss of immediate felt experience with the subject material of one's writing is a common problem facing exile writers. Recounting his artistic problems in exile Mphahlele says:

Having been thrown into the bigger milieu of ideas outside your homeground, your writing registers ideas more readily than it dramatizes concrete experience. How to resolve this dilemma becomes a painful preoccupation.⁹

La Guma's writing in exile depicting the social life of Africans, particularly after the spread of Black Consciousness ideas of pride in one's ‘blackness’, took him beyond his acquaintance with Africans in the pre-exile period. It meant a re-evaluation of his stand on the ethnic or ‘nationality’ question.

Black Consciousness ideas emphasised from 1968 onwards the primacy of ‘blackness’ in South African affairs. Steve Biko and others, using Fanon's analysis of the coloniser-colonised relationship put across ‘blackness’ in psychological terms, as self-liberation from negative stereotypes. The term ‘black’ itself was redefined to include Coloureds and Indians. These ideas led to certain new tendencies in South African literature. Mphahlele's attitudes to multi-racialism in his 1962 and 1974 editions of The African Image¹⁰ typified the shift. Observing the changes in his attitudes Mphahlele says:

The idealism I shared with the political movement of the fifties that advocated a non-racial society died with the Treason Trial, the Rivonia Trial and Sharpeville. We the black people now feel that we should cultivate a distinctive consciousness to buttress and direct the African humanism that dissipated itself in all that rhetoric of the fifties and the politics of non-racialism.¹¹

The trend towards taking pride in ‘blackness’ and ‘black’ cultural inheritance can be noticed in the Coloured writers Matthews, Thomas and Mattera. February points out that the publication of Cry Rage,¹² the anthology by Matthews and Thomas, is ‘an important literary event in that there is a definite indication of a black orphic descent’.¹³ Another sign of this literary trend that continues beyond 1979, when Time of the Butcherbird was published, is the endorsement by Gordimer in her A Sport of Nature of ‘a continent of black humans ruling themselves’.¹⁴ The intellectual climate created by the rise of Black Consciousness provides the background to La Guma's concern with the problems of the Africans; and his attempts to ‘deal with the attitudes of white community to this issue of mass removals and to study their attitudes to blacks as a whole’.¹⁵

Black Consciousness ideas were a reshaping of some of the earlier attitudes to African nationalism. As early as 1878 Anthony Trollope commented that South Africa ‘is a country of black men and not of white men. It has been so; it is so; and it will be so’.¹⁶ In 1928 the theme of South Africa as country of Africans, in the political vocabulary of the day—the ‘Natives’, resurfaced in the Comintern's ‘Draft Resolution on South Africa’. The Comintern's draft resolution, which Roux attributes to Jimmy La Guma, envisaged the establishment of ‘an independent Native republic as a stage towards workers' and peasants' government’.¹⁷ The draft resolution contained the expressions ‘South Africa is a black country’, ‘the return of the country and land back to the black population’, ‘South Africa belongs to Native population’ and others.¹⁸ In the 1940s, independent of the ‘native republic’ controversy in the Communist Party of South Africa, Lembede, Mda and Ngubane of the Youth League of the A.N.C. re-kindled the idea of ‘exclusive’ African nationalism. Lembede argued that ‘Africans are the natives of Africa, and they have inhabited Africa, their Motherland, from times immemorial; Africa belongs to them’.¹⁹ While agreeing to the general premise of Lembede, Biko's views on the matter showed a difference. Bernstein points out:

[…] while Lembede had emphasised the exclusion of all non-Africans, Biko expounded the unity of all those who were discriminated against on the grounds of colour or race […].²⁰

La Guma's response to the situation was ambivalent. On one hand, he recognised in his journalistic writings, the importance of Africans in effecting political change, and on the other, he projected trans-ethnic political activity as the way forward. Analysing the social tensions in South Africa in an article in 1971 La Guma said:

Today the stratum of ‘white South Africa’ is characterised by […] highly developed industrial monopolies and mergers of industrial and finance capital; agriculture pursued on Capitalist lines, employing wage labour and producing for local markets and export […]

The lower strata of ‘black South Africa’ exhibit all the characteristics of a colony. The indigenous population is subject to extreme forms of national oppression, exploitation and poverty, lack of democratic rights and domination by a group advocating its ‘European’ or ‘Western Christian’ character and ‘civilisation’.

Characteristic too of imperialist rule is the reliance upon brute force and terror […] and the encouragement to the most backward of tribal elements and institutions.²¹

Such an analysis lies at the root of the self-perceptions of the African and the Afrikaner communities described in Time of the Butcherbird.

In Time of the Butcherbird the Afrikaner farmer Hannes Meulen and his foreman Opperman are responsible for the death of Timi, Murile's brother. Murile is denied justice in a court which is shown to be partial to Meulen, a White. Murile decides to take a private revenge. When Murile arrives at the dorp after serving the jail sentence ordered by the court, he sees his community opposing the planned eviction. Mma-Tau, the Chief's sister, who is organising the opposition as a form of ‘collective debt’, agrees that he is ‘entitled to justice’ (p. 80). Murile settles his private revenge by killing Meulen and joins his community in opposing the eviction. Intertwined with this main plot is the sub-plot of Edgar Stopes, an English-speaking White travelling salesman who comes to the dorp on his rounds, but gets stuck when his van breaks down. While Stopes is away his wife Maisie carries on extra-marital affairs, and Stopes has a vague sense of what was going on. Stopes happens to be near Meulen when Murile comes to take revenge. The second burst of fire from Murile's automatic rifle kills Stopes.

La Guma's last novel, thus, is a tale of Baconian wild justice, of Mosaic justice in the tradition of the revenge plays of Seneca, Kyd and Shakespeare. The plot is one of a typical revenge story. A murder is committed of, or injustice is done to, someone close to the protagonist, and the protagonist is enjoined by the memories of the dear one to seek revenge. The mounting pressure on the protagonist to seek a private revenge is a consequence of the absence, or the failure, of the available channels of justice. More often the protagonist is faced with the situation where the dispenser of justice is himself the perpetrator of the crime. He often occupies the most powerful position in the society and the victims cannot appeal for mercy. The motif of revenge that underpins Hamlet illuminates the plot of Time of the Butcherbird. The parallels with Hamlet in the novel are thus structural and thematic while they were more linguistic in the case of A Walk in the Night²² and The Stone Country.²³

La Guma uses the dorp in the novel as a microcosm to reflect the issues of South Africa as a whole. Murile's revenge against Meulen in particular and Whites in general stands in a universalist perspective dealing with the helpless wronged individual resorting to revenge. La Guma portrays the other problem that Murile's people face—the planned eviction—in a historical perspective. There have been two dominant attitudes on the part of the blacks when they faced the White colonisers who were militarily superior: confrontation and compromise. The roots of such attitudes go back to the historical figures Nxele and Ntsikana who, in the early part of the nineteenth century dramatised these attitudes through their philosophies and dealings with the Whites. Nxele, commonly known as Makana, took the road of confrontation and organised an attack on the British garrison in Grahamstown. On the other hand, Ntsikana's approach was one of compromise with the Europeans and he played a crucial role in converting many Xhosas to Christianity. Peires notes:

Nxele was a war doctor and his cosmology was one of battle between good and evil. Ntisikana was a man of peace and submission, and his cosmology was one of peace and submission.²⁴

La Guma draws on the opposing historical attitudes of Nxele and Ntsikana to portray the dilemma facing the African community. Hlangeni agrees to the instructions given to him by the Bantu Commissioner regarding the removal to a distant place. He is given to defeatism and accepts even his own demotion from being a Chief to the position of a headman. On the problem of eviction he tells his people, ‘Hear me, my people, it is foolishness to defy the whiteman […]. What can we do against the whites? It is better to obey’ (p. 48). In contrast, Mma-Tau, in an impassioned speech to the community gathering that met to discuss the eviction, argues that there is no dignity in obeying the laws and weapons of the government without a protest. Mma-Tau reasons: ‘If we go forward we may die, if we go back we may die; better go forward’ (p. 48). The dilemma faced by the African community in the text re-enacts the dilemmas of the past. The historical conflicts of Nxele and Ntsikana find a symbolic echo in the novel.

Murile's revenge in killing Meulen forms the central part of action in the novel. Murile's private revenge coincides with the public (communal) revenge the African community in the novel longs for. Mma-Tau says, ‘A whole people is starting to think of collecting a communal debt, the time for collecting this debt is drawing on’ (p. 80). When Murile returns to his village after serving his prison sentence he is pre-occupied with the idea of taking revenge. He has come here, he thinks, ‘to do one thing’ (p. 42); he is an ‘avenging rhingal,²⁵ a patient leopard’ (p. 66) waiting for ‘his’ thing, and once it is achieved, he will go ‘his own way’. Through her lengthy arguments Mma-Tau persuades Murile to see his individual ‘debt’ as a part of the ‘collective debt’, arguing that individual ‘debt’ ‘becomes of small significance […] compared with the people's need for justice’ (p. 80). Such persuasion affects Murile's thinking. Instead of killing just Meulen against whom he had the grudge—the foreman Opperman having been killed by a rhingal in the meanwhile—Murile kills Stopes as well.

Murile's killing of Stopes brings into focus the additional dimensions of revenge. The justice of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth which provides Murile with the justification and motivation for killing does not, on the surface, extend to Stopes. It could be argued that Stopes has not harmed Murile or his brother personally; in fact he did not even know them. Stopes was just a bystander when Murile was shooting at Meulen. Ironically he even had a sense of contempt for Afrikaners in general and Meulen in particular. This raises the question whether his death was merely an accident, or a result of an extension of Murile's individual ‘debt’ into a ‘communal debt’. The evidence in the text does not support the interpretation that it was accidental. Murile does not fire random shots even after killing Meulen. It is the second blast, the first being directed against Meulen, that kills Stopes. Murile is left with a few more bullets when he escapes and meets up with the old man from his community who is taking sheep to a hill as a part of the resistance to eviction.

The narrator in Time of the Butcherbird shows that the killing of Stopes was a part of the idea of revenge that Murile had at that moment. Murile's killing of Stopes can be compared with Medea's killing of Jason's sons to expiate the death of her father and brother. In the case of both Murile and Medea vengeance goes beyond the perpetrator of the specific crime for which revenge is sought. The explanation for this case of extended revenge lies in Medea's words:

Cui prodest scelus
is fecit.(26)

Metaphorically the above lines apply to Stopes as well. Even though he is not politically minded, he agrees with the notion of White solidarity against the Black ‘they’. Keeping in view the racial divide that exists in the novel, Stopes becomes the ‘they’ whom Murile and his community consider their oppressors. After killing Meulen and Stopes, Murile joins his community which by then had resisted the attempted eviction by building barricades and throwing stones at the police who come to evict them. Thus, Murile's revenge changes its character as the action progresses in the novel. His revenge killings have the approval of the narrator: ‘the whitewash of the passage-wall [of the hotel where Murile shoots] was suddenly decorated with a blossom petalled with blood and brains and pieces of bone and fragments of teeth like pomegranate pips’ (p. 110). In making violence both an inevitable and a redemptive force for Murile La Guma reworks a Fanonian²⁷ notion used by Ngugi in the title of his novel Petals of Blood.²⁸ The political significance of the transformation of Murile's revenge from being a private revenge killing to a revenge along ethnic lines is crucial to the problem whether it is ethnicity of trans-ethnicity that La Guma upholds in Time of the Butcherbird.

La Guma's novels follow the contours of political development in South Africa. One of the important political developments of the sixties relates to the government's implementation of the ‘Bantustan’ policy, assigning ‘homelands’ on a tribal basis. This spurred on political activity in the rural areas and split African communities for and against the ‘Bantustans’. Time of the Butcherbird highlights some of the social problems associated with the ‘Bantustans’ and the mass removals that went in its implementation. Explaining the background to the novel La Guma says:

I believe that one of the most serious social problems of South Africa is that of mass removal of millions of African people from their well-established homes and the government program to establish or reinforce “Bantustans”. In addition […] the attitude of the people and the resistance that's been put up on various levels in the rural areas to this policy. When the idea of writing a novel on this came to me, I thought it was necessary to combine the effect of the “Bantustans” and the resistance of the people.²⁹

As the politics of the “Bantustans” were mainly in the rural areas La Guma shifts his setting in Time of the Butcherbird to a rural dorp. The main plot of the novel, dealing with Murile's revenge and Mma-Tau's resistance, is located in the dorp, and the sub-plot involving Stopes and his wife Maisie is located in a city. In the previous novels the rural area plays a limited role. In A Walk in the Night it is mentioned as an area to which Joe's mother returns after being abandoned by her husband, and being evicted for the non-payment of rent. Joe runs away in order to escape living in the rural area. In And A Threefold Cord the rural area is suggested as the place from which the early migrants to the Cape Flats came. In In the Fog of the Season's End the rural life is covered more extensively in describing Elias' childhood. However, it is only in Time of the Butcherbird that La Guma locates the main part of the action in a rural area.

The dorp in Time of the Butcherbird is a symbolic locale. La Guma does not give the name of the dorp, or indicate any specific region it is located in. References to actual places that enables one to pin down the locale in A Walk in the Night, such as the mention of Hanover Street, or in In the Fog of the Season's End the reference to Signal Hill, are absent. It is only through the description of the vegetation, terrain and geography of the dorp that its location in the Karoo region can be inferred. The cultural history of the place revealed through the characters enables the reader to hazard a guess of locating the dorp in the Eastern Karoo. The kloof where Opperman dies bitten by a ringhals is ‘a part of the local history’ (p. 98) and it had something to do with the wars of dispossession generations back—what the whites called ‘the kaffir wars—but exactly, few could say’ (p. 99). This kloof is within walking distance from the dorp. Opperman covers this distance in half a day. Hlangeni, Mma-Tau, Murile, Madonele, and the praise singer Kobe all emphasise that the land from which they are being evicted is their land, the land of their ancestors who are buried there. To locate the dorp in the Western part of the Karoo would be historically inaccurate as Nguni settlements in this area were recent. Claims based on ancestors being buried in an area would be more convincing if the location of the dorp is interpreted as the Eastern Karoo.

Assigning the location of the dorp to the Eastern Karoo is not without problems. Firstly, the Karoo is not a mineral-bearing region; and the eviction of the Africans in the novel is done for the benefit of mining interests. Unless it could be proved that there was a specific instance of such an eviction in the Karoo on which La Guma has based his account—none available in the existing information on the author's life, or works—assigning the location of the dorp to the Karoo can be done only symbolically. Another difficulty in determining the exact location of the dorp in the Karoo is that the geographical boundaries of the Karoo are themselves undefined. There is no single accepted delimitation of its boundaries. The boundaries of the Karoo are different in Thomas Pringle's account,³⁰ the Carnegie Commission Report,³¹ and in the descriptions of professional geographers—Harm J. de Blij,³² for example. Interpreting the novel on the assumption that the dorp is located in a specific area of the Karoo would lead to misplaced expectations about the lack of correlation between the portrait of the social community of the novel and the tribal identity of the people of the identified locale.

While the geographical boundaries of the Karoo are ill-defined, it is more clearly distinguishable in terms of its climate, vegetation and landscape, which have underpinned thematically a number of literary works. The weather map published by the Weather Bureau of South Africa in 1959 marks the general Karoo region as an area of low rainfall of 4-12 inches a year.³³ The scanty vegetation in the Karoo is a result of this climate. The Karoo vegetation is short and thorny in order to survive the harsh climate. The harshness of climate makes the region less hospitable and the villages are far between. The sheer distances involved make the landscape appear vast and featureless except for small hillocks or kopjes punctuating the terrain.

The special nature of the terrain and landscape of the Karoo has attracted several South African writers to locate their novels in the Karoo. In the literature of the Karoo, the Karoo becomes a symbol of a human predicament that underlies the desolateness against which life has to struggle to survive. The desolation of the terrain reinforces the picture of a harsh, cruel and hostile social environment that the characters have to survive. Among the important prose works that used the Karoo as a part or whole of the setting prior to Time of the Butcherbird are Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm,³⁴ Smith's The Little Karoo,³⁵ Abrahams' Path of Thunder,³⁶ and Jacobson's A Dance in the Sun³⁷. With Time of the Butcherbird La Guma joins this tradition of writing in which the different aspects of the Karoo are interpreted to suit the themes pursued in the creative works. In Time of the Butcherbird the Karoo stands as a metaphor for South African society as a whole; the vast physical distances that isolate human habitations symbolise the social distance between the ethnic groups.

The presence of double oppression—of nature and man—seems to have attracted liberal-radical writers to use the Karoo as the setting for their novels. The streak of humanist empathy that runs through the Karoo tradition in the South African novel can be attributed to the radical world views of the writers. Schreiner's concern for the suffering people, probably one of the reasons why La Guma liked her writings,³⁸ can be traced to the ‘penetrating psychological and social sympathy’³⁹ in her writings.

The radical element of Karoo literature that is found in Smith's sympathetic treatment of the evicted bywoners, share croppers, in her Little Karoo is also traceable in the consistent sympathy she had towards the striking workers. The humanistic sympathy that illuminates her concern with the under-privileged both in the rural and the urban areas re-emerges in La Guma's In the Fog of the Season's End and Time of the Butcherbird. While Sarvan calls Smith a ‘gentle rebel’,⁴⁰ Driver finds a link between Smith's fictional works and the 1913-14 journal in which she shows herself to be ‘anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and, in a gentler way anti-clerical, anti-Calvinist and even in a sense odd with Christianity’.⁴¹ Driver cites an entry on the 1914 Railway Strike in Smith's journal:

I was told again and again how well-paid they are. Free coal, free schools, cheap groceries, etc. […] The Cape Times so hopelessly prejudiced, no possibility of getting at the truth from that at all […]. The partriotism—Red Cross nurses, girl and boy scouts,—all a bit sickening when it was justice one wanted to get hold of.⁴²

La Guma's concern with the social underdog in Time of the Butcherbird, thus, has artistic precedents in Schreiner and Smith. However, La Guma's work escapes the criticism levelled at the preceding ones. The treatment of the Nguni people by Schreiner in The Story of An African Farm is often considered unsatisfactory. Klima argues that ‘The main characters are all whites, the writer does not discuss the ‘natives’ in this early period [of her career]⁴³. Marquard disqualifies the novel from being the ‘great South African Novel’ on the grounds that Schreiner's political vision was limited in not being able to see the blacks ‘as more than part of the landscape’.⁴⁴ Similarly in Smith's works the black-white relationship is not ‘more than briefly dealt with’⁴⁵ and her works concentrate on the Whites. La Guma's Time of the Butcherbird represents a more extended and specific attempt at the articulation of the grievances of the African and Khoi populations as well. The Karoo has been the traditional area of the Khoi and the San until the introduction of water pumps changed the economy from a pastoral to an agricultural one in the nineteenth century. By using the Karoo as a symbolic landscape, and the dorp itself as a metaphor for South Africa, La Guma gives himself more artistic freedom to deal extensively with African community in the novel.

The African community in the novel is symbolic. The most prominent person in the community, Mma-Tau, the Chief's sister, is portrayed in symbolic terms. Going by the descriptions of the locale, one could identify the land that she claims as her ancestral land lies in the Karoo. The description given of her in the text indicates a connection with the Swazi or Pondo. The shepherd to whom Murile speaks on his way to the dorp tells him that ‘She [Mma-Tau] trumpets like a she-elephant. And is big as one’ (p. 84). The Queen-Mother of the Swazis is called ‘Ndlovukazi’ or ‘she-elephant’. ‘Ndlovu’ [the elephant] has symbolic connotations with the political leadership of events in Pondoland. Mbeki explains:

They [the Pondos opposed to government-appointed chiefs] coordinated their struggles and conducted it under a unified leadership. Ndlovu (the elephant)—the name given to the leadership of all locations—symbolised in their minds that in unity they had the strength of an elephant.⁴⁶

Mma-Tau, thus, remains a symbolic figure rather than emerge as an individual with characteristic features of speech or social customs attributable to any specific Nguni tribe or clan.

While the political symbolism of the ‘she-elephant’ helps La Guma to present a generalised picture, capturing the social situation of the Africans as a whole, it leads to an artistic problem connected with the use of appropriate language. The use of slang and words from Afrikaans and Arabic helped him in the portrayal of the Coloured and Cape Malay characters respectively. In both these cases La Guma was trying to portray specific communities that had parallels with identifiable social units of Cape Town. Capturing the precise linguistic rhythm, through the occasional use of slang words such as mos, bedonerd, Gwan, or salutations such as Salaam aleikum in the case of the Cape Malay, helped in authenticating the near-naturalistic descriptions in the earlier novels. But to do the same in the case of the symbolic African community—which in itself consists of different linguistic groups—is problematic. Added to this complexity is the problem of transcribing Nguni words in English. Conventional English rendering is the only hope of correct pronunciation for readers in English, without, of course, resorting to phonetic transcription. Using Eweh, for Ewe on p. 21 in the novel is an example of such rendering.

The critical opinion on the use of appropriate language in Time of the Butcherbird is divided. In Taiwo's opinion the novel is ‘a dramatisation of the limits of the language’.⁴⁷ The assumption behind such a view is that the language used in the novel is the most appropriate and has reached the limits of effective rendering. What is overlooked in this appraisal is that La Guma was venturing into a cultural scene with which he was less familiar. Such a handicap apart, La Guma did not feel comfortable in the rural environment. He could relate better to city life. La Guma admits:

If one has grown up and lived in a big city, it is great to go out into the countryside now and then, although I have always found that a short trip of a few days is enough before I long again for the concrete jungle of the big cities.⁴⁸

In contrast to Taiwo's opinion, Mbulelo Mzamane is of the opinion that La Guma's use of Nguni words is inappropriate: ‘There are mistakes [… in Time of the Butcherbird] such as putting Sesotho words in the mouths of Xhosa-speaking Africans from the Cape where his novel is set’.⁴⁹ Unfortunately, no specific examples are cited; nor is the extent of such (mis)usage indicated. However, in our private discussion on the use of Nguni words Mbulelo Mzamane told me that most of the Nguni words in Time of the Butcherbird are the root words that could be found in any of the Nguni languages. He also pointed out the spelling of some of the words is different from the way it is found in their day-to-day use: Hauw for Hawu (p. 13); Eweh for Ewe (p. 21); Nkosizana for nkosazana (p. 68); amalungu for abelungu (p. 68); Aibo for Hayibo (p. 72); Eyapi for Ziyaphi (p. 72), and elikle for elihle.⁵⁰ It appears that keeping the symbolic nature of the African community in mind, La Guma avoids using any specific Nguni language. While exposing himself to the charge of generalising, of overlooking the differences between the different Nguni linguistic groups, he compensates for his lack of intimate knowledge—at least as intimate as his knowledge of Cape Town—of the area. Symbolism in the novel is partly a consequence of the need to bridge the gap between authorial intentions and limitations of personal background.

The portrayal of the Africans as an ethnic group in the novel contrasts with the portrayal of the other ethnic group, the Afrikaners. In order to achieve the portrayal of the two groups with opposing claims to the ownership of the land La Guma uses the pattern of unnumbered parallel sets of short chapters. Each chapter is a separate unit focusing on the life of one of the two groups. The division is not totally schematic. The lives of two communities are interlinked, if only antagonistically, leading to cycles of injustice and revenge both at the level of the individual and that of the communities. The Afrikaners in the novel, as in the case of the Africans, are symbolically portrayed. La Guma explains, ‘Here [in Time of the Butcherbird] I portrayed people whom I hoped were representatives of the South African scene’.⁵¹

The interlocking aspect of the struggle between the Africans and the Afrikaner has been an attractive theme for writers and commentators on South Africa. Sol Plaatje's Mhudi⁵² dramatises the Afrikaner intrusion into Metabele lands. The theme is pursued in Abrahams' Wild Conquest.⁵³ The roots of the conflict that thematically underpins Time of the Butcherbird are captured by Abrahams in the conversation between Gubuza and Paul van As, the warriors who represent the Metabele and the Boers in Wild Conquest. Lying on the battlefield mortally wounded Gubuza and Paul converse:

Dying Gubuza whispered: ‘So long since I tilled the earth’.

Paul's eyelids flickered […]. He said: “I too have not tilled the earth for months.’

‘You understand’, Gubuza said. ‘Do you all?’

‘No. Only I … I was for peace’.

‘But you killed’.

‘There is hate in my people’

‘Now there is hate in my people too’.⁵⁴

The same attitude of portraying the social conflict of South Africa as a conflict between Africans and Afrikaners can be noticed in Kuper. Discussing the different nationalisms in South Africa Kuper says, ‘Only Africans and Afrikaners are generally regarded as carriers of nationalism by students of South African society’.⁵⁵ For Mphahlele the Africans and the Afrikaners are the two communities of South Africa struggling for their ‘birthright’.⁵⁶

La Guma traces the history of the Meulens, the leading Afrikaner family in the dorp through three generations; Oupa Johannes Meulen, his son Christofel Meulen, and his grandson Hannes Meulen. Hannes Meulen is in love with Rina Steen. The Meulens and the Steens are well-to-do members of the community. Hannes Meulen is seeking election to volksraad, the Parliament. The Meulens and the Steens share the notion that ‘The Afrikaner people is not the work of man, it is the work of God. We shall prevail’ (p. 64). Dominee Visser delivering the Sunday sermon reinforces the exclusive nature of the Afrikaner people:

It is the duty of all of us to unshakeably keep to our aim, spiritual and earthly, which is to secure for our children their God-given land and soil on this earth.

(p. 106)

The idea of Afrikaners as ‘a chosen race’ is central to the self-identity of the community in the text. By emphasising this aspect La Guma puts the Afrikaner community in the novel in a historical perspective. The Afrikaners derive their self-image as an elect race from the ideas of John Calvin. Huddelston explains:

Here in this fantastic notion of the immutability of race, is present in a different form the predestination idea: the concept of an elect people of God, characteristic above all else of John Calvin.⁵⁷

And Calvin defended the idea of predestination by which

[…] eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others […]. God has attested this not only in individual persons but has given us an example of it in the whole offspring of Abraham, to make it clear that in his choice rests the future condition of each nation […] (Deut. 32: 8-9). More explicitly, in another chapter: “Not because you surpassed all other peoples in number did he take pleasure in you to choose you […] but because he loved you.

(Deut. 7:7-8)⁵⁸

La Guma counterbalances his portrayal of exclusivist attitudes among the Afrikaners with a depiction of certain practises that negate the premises both of their ‘divine election’ and ‘superiority’. The rhetoric of Steen's sense of superiority over the Africans, ‘a people who a century ago had not discovered the wheel’ (p. 63-64), is contrasted with the actions of Jaap's mother, Tant' Philipa. She ‘was a Christian, believing fast in the Living God […] but she also believed in the Devil and all his works, in witchcraft, spells, curses and ghosts […]’ (p. 97). Portraying her reaction to Japp's illness the narrator says:

Jaap recalled the time when as a child he had gone down with colic or inflammation of the bowels, and the mother had cured it, or so she insisted, by butchering and skinning a cat and plastering his abdomen with the smoking pelt.

(p. 97)

Philipa's cures for her own illnesses were no less dramatic:

When Tan't Philipa herself fell ill or suffered from ailment indivinable, she would dress in her best and take the train to a place where an important black magician and diviner held his court.

(p. 98)

In focussing on the attitudes among some of the rural Afrikaners such as Oppermans towards witchcraft La Guma fictionalises some of the findings of the Carnegie Commission:

It is astonishing how much superstition with regard to the causes of diseases, plagues and misfortunes still exists among many Europeans […]. The witch-doctor with his bag of bones is often secretly called in, and his findings are believed and obeyed. A certain respectable farmer in the Karoo not long ago summoned a witch-doctor from Port Elizabeth for his wife's sickness. After a stay of a few days the native assured the man that an enemy had bewitched his wife. After searching the yard for some time, he eventually unearthed the charm which he pretended was doing the mischief. The man and his wife firmly believed in him, and although they were poor paid £ 25 for his services. Such cases are not exceptional, and are even more prevalent in the North of the Union.⁵⁹

By contrasting the rhetoric of racial superiority with the actual practises, La Guma points to an irony in the Afrikaners' perception of the existence of a Cartesian dichotomy between the ‘rational’—‘intellectual’ Europeans and the Africans who did not possess such qualities. That La Guma intends such an interpretation is evidenced by an authorial intrusion in the description of Philipa's visit to an African magician:

Let it be recognised that she was not the only one of the chosen race to come from far and wide to pay a tribute, strangely enough, to this respected witch-doctor.

(p. 98)

Supernatural beings, particularly evil spirits, figure in La Guma's portrayal of the Africans as well. During the marriage celebrations of Berta, Oupa Meulen's grand daughter, Murile and his brother Timi get drunk, and in a tipsy mood stagger across the fields. Timi tells Stopes, ‘Hauw, what a terrible thing this liquor does to one. It is really tokoloshe eh?’ (p. 71). The reference to tikoloshe—more appropriately Tikoloshe—roots Murile and Timi to that part of African folklore which deals with supernatural beings and evil spirits. Woods, who grew up among the Xhosa, recollects the Xhosa folklore on tikoloshe:

Bomvana [one of the Xhosa-speaking communities] lore was full of bogeyman and sprites. The best known was Tikoloshe, the water-sprite who was only two feet tall and whose whole body was covered in grey hair. He had a long grey beard down to his knees and lived in the eroded banks of rivers. Tikoloshe would get you if you didn't behave. He could walk through walls, run like a horse and even fly. He could destroy entire herds of cattle, inflicting mysterious diseases on man and beast or causing people to act peculiarly against their better inclinations. He could also be blamed for anything that went wrong, so he was a scapegoat as well as a bogeyman.⁶⁰

Both the Murile brothers and the Oppermans come from the lower strata of their respective ethnic groups. Both had to work for Meulen for their living, and both had only a peripheral role to play in the inter-ethnic politics between the Africans and the Afrikaners. It is only after events overtake them, and under the persuasion of the politically-oriented members of their respective communities—Mma-Tau in the case of Murile, and Meulen in the case of Opperman—that they decide to join their groups. Before Mma-Tau's success in persuading him to join ‘a whole people […] collecting a collective debt’ (p. 80), Murile can only think of Meulen as an individual who killed his brother. He tells Mma-Tau, ‘I have no need of people. This [revenge] is my thing, and afterwards I'll go my way’ (p. 80). Similarly, Opperman who is advised by his mother to ‘treat them [the ‘Kaffirs’] strict but right’ (p. 99) tells Meulen ‘What shall we do [with the drunken Murile and Timi]? We'll have to take them in to the police station and lay a complaint’ (p. 73). When Meulen tells him it is a waste of time to drive them to the station Opperman's attitude changes to ethnic solidarity with Meulen and he shouts at Murile and Timi, ‘Get up you kaffirs, get up when a whiteman is near you’ (p. 75). Thus, La Guma shows the existence of a sense of trans-ethnicity in the lower strata of both Africans and Afrikaners until they are diverted by the political elite.

The social picture in Time of the Butcherbird is not, however, wholly concerned with how the politicians manipulate the ordinary people for their own self-interest or megalomania. The generalised use of ‘them’ and ‘us’ antagonism by Africans and the Afrikaners receive different levels of approval from the narrator whose sympathies overlap with those of La Guma. By dedicating the novel to ‘The Dispossessed’ and not specifying the ethnic group La Guma hints at his interest in trans-ethnicity from the very start. By virtue of the dispossession of the Africans that looms large in the novel the dedication, at the obvious level, refers to Mma-Tau's people. Tucked away in the description of the Oppermans is the dispossession of the ‘poor white’ in the consolidation of land holdings, which in practice meant that bigger land holders such as the Meulens gobbled up the lands of small farmers such as the Oppermans. Describing the dispossession of the Oppermans the narrator says:

The Oppermans were small farmers—a patch of land, a few cows and sheep, some chickens. After old Opperman had been stomped [… to death] by an infuriated bull, the farm had passed to the wife and Jaap […]. Farming interrupted schooling; then they had found the farm too profitless to run, so it had to be sold to the Meulens to be annexed, and young Jaap accepted paid employment […].

(p. 99)

By portraying the fate of the Oppermans La Guma recreates in the novel the social history of the ‘poor white’ whose dispossession and dislocation figure prominently in the writings of Smith.

The theme of dispossession and displacement in Time of the Butcherbird was foreshadowed in La Guma's earlier treatment of the problem as it affects the Coloureds. In his radio play The Man in the Tree⁶¹ and in In the Fog of the Season's End he deals with the eviction of the Coloureds from certain areas of Cape Town to make way for White occupation. Man in the Tree opens with an estate agent showing round a house in such an area to the Geslers, the prospective buyers. While the agent and Mr. Gesler get busy inspecting the house, Mrs. Geslers goes to the backyard where she sees Abrahams, an old Coloured man, who tells her the tragedy of Mr. Edwards with whom he was ‘close, very close’:

[…] Mr. Edwards he lived here all his life and his mother and father for many years before him. […] when the government came and said this street was for White people only […] and no more for Coloured people […] he couldn't bring himself to go. He couldn't leave his old home. So one morning, just before everybody had to move, he came out here and hanged himself.⁶²

The ghost of Edwards haunts the play till the end when Mrs. Gesler finds ‘THERE'S A MAN HANGING IN THE TREE’.⁶³ The story is left open ended with two possible conclusions: that Mrs. Gesler is having a hallucination, and that the Abrahams—who wanted to stay on to give ‘company’ to Mr. Edward, but was chased out of the house—hung himself in the same tree. In In the Fog of the Season's End Beukes refers to ‘That poor bloke in Sea Point [who] went and hanged himself when they had to move, after living there God knows how long’.⁶⁴

The emphasis that La Guma gives to the dispossessions of different races, rather than the dispossession of just one group, constitutes a key trans-ethnic factor in his writings. Such an emphasis saves him from becoming a ‘one-eyed Dickens’,⁶⁵ a complaint that Mphahlele has against Afrikaans poetry that concentrates on the sufferings of the Afrikaners only. La Guma's trans-ethnicity is linked to the persecutions and sufferings that people face, rather than to their ethnic origins, a belief that he expresses through George Adams in The Stone Country, ‘You were on the side of the mouse, of all the mice’.⁶⁶ At the same time La Guma's sympathy for the underdog portrayed in the novel recognises, in fact emphasises, the different degrees of dispossession and their historical relationship to action in Time of the Butcherbird. The author's insistence that the Africans have suffered the most—‘the most oppressed of the nationalities’ [in South Africa], as he describes them—sometimes leads to authorial intrusions into the narrative.

The narrative point of view in the novel keeps shifting. It moves back and forth, empathetically recreating the life of the ethnic group from whose point of view narrative proceeds at a given time. But La Guma violates the neutrality of the narrator at times in his eagerness to emphasise the sufferings of the Africans. One such instance occurs in the scene where Kobe and his associate take a long walk in the hot sun to meet the Bantu Commissioner to express the unwillingness of their community to be moved out of their land. In the preceding scene he has already given a detailed account of the oppressive heat in the dry Karoo in which Stopes makes his journey to the dorp. It is, therefore, sufficient for the narrator to rely on the readers' expectation of seeing Kobe and his associate get a sympathetic reception at the Bantu Commissioner's office for walking all the way in the heat. It is the negation of such an expectation and the consequent enhancing of the reader's sympathy that the author expects to achieve in the portrayal of the White clerk at the office. Unable to trust the text to the job, the narrator intervenes with a suggestive observation: ‘It did not occur to him [the White clerk] that they had walked a long way in the heat’ (p. 10).

La Guma's artistic expression of his interest in the Africans predates Time of the Butcherbird. The earliest instance of his interest is expressed in the little-known cartoon series Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala which he produced for New Age in 1959. Mrs. La Guma gives the background to Little Libby:

He [La Guma] actually did the cartoons himself and wrote the script on Little Libby, which was a great seller. It was quite strange. It [New Age] was a very serious paper and to bring out a lighter side in the paper was this script on Little Libby. Eventually it emerged that the sales were doing quite well because people were trying to get hold of Little Libby.⁶⁷

Little Libby is a political cartoon strip that recreates in its episodes some of the political campaigns of the Congress Movement in the late fifties. Each episode in the series concentrates on an ‘adventure’ of Libby, a young African school boy. Movement from one episode to the other is achieved by using the word ‘Asihamba’ [‘as we go along’] as a link. Or sometimes the connection is made more obviously: ‘And our hero is off on a new adventure’.⁶⁸

The first ‘adventure’ of Libby starts with his kidnapping by Kasper Katchum, a labour recruiting agent who sells Libby for ‘five bob’ to Oom Veld-skoen van der Mealie-blaar, an Afrikaner farmer in a remote area. Libby is forced to do hard labour. Little Libby then takes its readers through the harsh conditions in the farm. The conditions on the farm in Little Libby are similar to those on the farms to which the Pass Law offenders were sent in the 1950s, by revealing which the investigative journalism of Drum⁶⁹ raked up a national scandal. Libby organises a revolt of the farm workers by demanding a wage of £ 1 a day, an action reminiscent of the ‘Pound a Day’ campaign of the Congress Movement in the late fifties. Libby escapes along with other inmates by setting off a bull against the farmer.

In the following episode Libby arrives in a big city. Rhumba, a smart African woman, accidentally meets Libby and takes him to a cafe for some ‘vetkoek and coffee’.⁷⁰ They are watched and followed by the ‘Ghost Squad’, the popular name for the special police squad which rounded up Pass Law offenders in the 1950s. The ‘Ghost Squad’ is annoyed with Rhumba for participating in anti-Pass demonstrations, and finding a good opportunity they kidnap her into their ‘Kwela-Kwela’, a type of police van that was used to carry people arrested during Pass Law raids. The police pushing Rhumba into the van shout ‘Inside Meid! We haven't Time to Waste’,⁷¹ which gives the English translation of ‘Kwela’ [‘jump in quickly’] that gave the infamous van its name. The Ghost Squad gets rid of Libby by hitting him on the head, and drives away the Kwela-Kwela with Rhumba.

Sorrowful Libby is seen by Mustapha Moonsamy, a symbolic Indian character whose name combines Mustapha, an Islamic name, and Moonsamy—a South African adaptation of the name Munuswamy—a Hindu name. Libby gets into Moonsamy's jalopy and they follow the kwela-kwela taking Rhumba to Marshall Square [a police Station], indicating the that the big city in the cartoon series is a fictionalised Johannesburg. In trying to take a short cut the police van collides with the jalopy which, a little earlier breaks down in the middle of the road. The prisoners escape, but in the commotion Libby gets separated from Rhumba. Libby's next ‘adventure’ begins.

The later ‘adventures’ are set in the big city and follow the same trend of combining the pranks of Libby, and a political message reminding the readers of the different campaigns of the Congress. These ‘adventures’ deal with a police raid on a ‘Shebeen’, an illegal drinking place, and a lengthy encounter with a gang of ‘tsotsis’, the street hooligan mafia of African townships. Advertisement slogans in Little Libby for ‘New Age’ served both a political and a commercial purpose.

The use of cartoons to discuss political issues was a practice that New Age shared with Drum, even though the latter was not consistent in its use of cartoons. However, an example of exploiting the comic note in the over-enthusiastic application of Pass Laws is seen in Jo-Jo, a cartoon series published in Drum around the same time. In an instalment entitled ‘Twixt Law and Deep Blue Sea’⁷² an African and a White policeman go for a swim into the sea from secluded beaches, but are washed into the deep sea by a current and get drowned together. While under water the policeman asks the African for his Pass, and handcuffs him for not producing it. When the African is rescued a man-eating shark is found hanging to his handcuff. His story hits the headlines ‘Man Saved From Sea Found to Have Caught Man-eating Shark’. In comparison, Little Libby makes a more political use of the comic.

The concern with the literary portrayal of blacks in Time of the Butcherbird, thus, represents a continuation of La Guma's early interest in going beyond his Coloured origins. Libby, Rhumba and others in Little Libby are followed by Panther, the boxer, in his short story ‘The Gladiators’. Brother Bombatta and Missus Nzuba in And A Threefold Cord represent some more examples of La Guma's interest in portraying African characters. Jefferson Mpolo in The Stone Country, and Elias Tekwane in In the Fog of the Season's End are more developed figures who have received greater attention in the critical assessments of La Guma. Mma-Tau, Murile, Hlangeni, Kobe and other African characters in Time of the Butcherbird between themselves constitute a social group which, as a consequence of some historical developments and environmental factors, has acquired an ethnic identity—or is considered to have one in the maze of ethnic loyalties in South Africa. In the portrayal of African characters in Time of the Butcherbird one of the problems that becomes more significant than in the earlier works is that of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity.

La Guma's approach to the question has been to hint at the existence of both the identities. The self-perception of the African community in the novel as a distinct group is based on having its own folklore of which the symbolism of butcherbird is a part⁷³; modes of social behaviour such as respect for the elderly, and for the Chief; and claims to have an identity rooted to the land that they lived on for generations. This self-identity merges into an externally determined identity ascribed to the group. The enforced identity operates in the realm of social attitudes of the White characters, and the administrative structures that govern the Africans in their politically disenfranchised state. An example of such an externally ascribed ethnic identity is the scene at the Bantu Commissioner's Office, an ethnic-specific administrative apparatus to which Kobe and his associate are forced to go. To the White clerk at the office ‘all Kaffirs smelled’ (p. 10).

The articulation of ethnic identity of the African community in the novel proceeds at two levels—self-perception and ascription. The ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude both of the African community and of the White community reinforce each other to portray social polarisation along the lines of visible distinctions such as racial features. Such a division gives the African community a Pan-African identity, and portrays its problems as ‘the problem of colour’, which Du Bois claims is the problem of the twentieth century.⁷⁴ The notion of ethnic identity based on the historical experience of having been exploited as a group lies at the root of such perceptions, a notion that underpins the anti-British Afrikaner identity of Christofel Meulen in the novel. La Guma, thus, recreates in the novel the crises of non-class and class identities that lie behind Sultan Galiyev's claim that ‘since almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed formally by the colonialists, all are entitled to be called proletarian […]. The Muslim peoples are proletarian peoples’.⁷⁵

Opposed to the ethnic identity of the Africans is their trans-ethnic identity as members of a larger group that goes beyond the colour or certain specific cultural traits. Mma-Tau asserts such an identity based on the idea that they are victims of an exploitative relationship whose ramifications go beyond South Africa. Arguing her case in the indaba, the meeting, held to discuss the response to the proposed eviction, Mma-Tau says:

They [the White law-makers] exist in a false happiness of guns and laws, they exist in a false laughter, for the laughter is not really theirs.[…] The meaning [of their laws] is this: that the people demand their share of the fruits of the earth, and their rulers, of whom the white man is a lackey, a servant, refuse them a fair portion.

(p. 47)

Mma-Tau's view that the problems of her community have international linkages and that the oppressive ‘they’ whose ‘laughter is not really theirs’ represents a fictionalised account of La Guma's own views. La Guma's editorial work in Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans clarifies his stand on the issue. La Guma says:

Superficially the country is ruled by White South Africans. In essence, however, the power rests with the South African monopolists and the international consortium of imperialism. The combination of racialism, capitalism and international imperialism has made South Africa a colony of a special type.⁷⁶

Thus, Mma-Tau is supported in the text by the author's attitudes, and approximates the author's vision of a political leadership that goes beyond chauvinistic politics of ethnicity.

The sub-plot of Time of the Butcherbird allegorises the history of industrial South Africa, particularly of the Rand, by following the family history of the Barends, their daughter Maisie, and their son-in-law, Stopes. The Barends ran a grocery and general store near a mining locality which allegorically stands for Fordsburg, the last stronghold of White miners in the 1922 strike:

After the big strike the white miners who lived there had trickled away, but her [Maisie's] father stayed on […]. The artillery of the government, the rifles, shot-guns and sticks of the defeated miners had passed into history books but the little shop stood still. […] Gradually […] the coolies, the coloureds and the bloody chinamen moved in to surround them.

(p. 30)

There are also references to Taffy Long, the Fordsburg commando leader who ‘went to the gallows singing the “Red Flag”’,⁷⁷ and to the African miner's strike after the War about which Barends ‘read the newspaper accounts’ (p. 32).

La Guma's account of the Barends provides a sample of life in the run-down mining area with a predominance of Indians, Africans, and the Coloureds who migrated to the area. Barends' shop caters for these people till the place is declared an industrial zone under the Group Areas Laws forcing the Coloureds and Indians to move from the area. As in the case of the descriptions of Africans and Afrikaners in the dorp, the account of the Barends, and Stopes is portrayed through the eyes of English-speaking Whites, the ethnic/cultural group to which they belong. Thus, once the White miners move away Barends finds that the place is not the same:

‘A man couldn't get into proper conversation with the population. What could you talk to a damn applesammy about? (p. 30). [And] ‘Past the shop windows the dark people went by outside and there was a perpetual smell of oriental spices in the air’.

(p. 33)

Maisie is ashamed of bringing her boyfriends home:

God, how could she bring any fellow home? Right on the edge of coolieland? […] Indian women in saries jabbered on the pavements. She usually came alone on the tramcar that stopped a little distance away, running the few blocks, so the boys really didn't have to see where she lived.

(p. 34)

The attitude of the English-speaking Whites towards the Africans is no less ethno-centric. The image of the African man as a rapist, or as being endowed with great sexual energy, pervades the fears and sexual fantasies of at least three female characters. Mrs. Barends warns her daughter Maisie about returning home late: ‘In future it'll be straight home from the pitchers [film shows] for you. One night the kaffirs will get you, you'll see’ (p. 34). In the gun club that trained White women in the use of firearms a women tells Maisie ‘One never knows when some terrible kaffir will run amok’ (p. 50). And Maisie, who finds the woman's horror contrived, thinks: ‘You'll probably enjoy it,⁷⁸ you bitch’ (p. 50). If the sexual (bodily) energy of the Africans illuminates the perceptions of the three women characters, a notion of the absence of its Cartesian opposite—mental powers—underpins Stopes' attitude. Commenting on the Africans who, on account of their poverty, find themselves unable to pay enhanced bus fares, Stopes tells Maisie:

Poor; there's no need to be poor. Are you poor, am I poor? No, because we got initiative, hey. We got brains. Look after number one, that's what I say. If it wasn't for people like us, why the country would never be civilised.

(p. 36) [Emphasis in the original]

The sense of ethnic superiority in the microcosm of English-speaking Whites, further affects the way the Afrikaners are perceived. They are seen as a group of unsophisticated people lacking finesse. Maisie finds the Afrikaner police inspector at the gun club ‘bloody awful’. Maisie's distaste of the instructor is related partly to the fact that he had ‘a gutteral Boer voice’. The narrator explains:

He [the instructor] smelled of stale tobacco and there was the beginning of a boil on his jawbone as he stood close to her, showing her how to point the pistol […] He had a gutteral Boer voice and she hated the sound of it and smell he gave off, which was probably why she had stopped going to the shooting lessons.

(p. 50)

The social distance that separates the English-speaking Whites from the Afrikaners is further illustrated in the scene at Stopes' flat, a converted outhouse of a bungalow, to which he takes her during their courtship. An item that Maisie finds out of place in the flat is a picture of voortrekkers: ‘[…] that must have come with the place […]. She couldn't imagine him buying a print of ox-wagons crossing the veld’ (p. 39). Stopes who serves as the direct link between the sub-plot and the main-plot in the novel shares Maisie's unease with Afrikaner culture and ‘spoke Afrikaans language with a slight hesitation that came basically from reluctance’ (p. 4).

In contrast to the ethno-centric perceptions of the Barends, Maisie, and Stopes is the trans-ethnic attitude of Donald Harris, a friend of Maisie who is imprisoned for ‘messing with blacks’. Maisie learns of Harris' imprisonment from her lover Wally Basson who tells her that Harris

Got himself mixed up with niggers. Coons. The damn fool thought it was a good idea to help the darkies with trade unions or some thing, true as God. Reckoned they're having a rough time, hey. Politics […] I don't know the exact details. Illegal organisations and stuff. Communists. So he got ten years, I think—no, twelve.

(p. 52)

Harris' trans-ethnic sympathies spring from the feeling that the ‘darkies’ are ‘having a rough time’. Thus, he emerges as the spiritual counterpart of George Adams of The Stone Country, who was ‘on the side of the little animals, the weak and the timid who spent all their lives dodging and ducking’.⁷⁹ The means they both employ in working towards a trans-ethnic society in South Africa are also similar: both belong to political organisations that are illegal under the legislation that upholds ethnicity. Adams, Mpolo and Harris represent the ‘threefold cord’ of characters of La Guma's fictional world united in their suffering for the cause of a trans-ethnic society.

Notes

1. La Guma, Alex, Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979).

2. Ravenscroft, Arthur, ‘Alex La Guma’, in Vinson, James, ed., Contemporary Novelists (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 378.

3. La Guma, A., ‘Apartheid: The Imperialist Monster’, Tricontinental, vol. XXVI, Sept 1971, p. 53.

4. Asein, S. O., Alex La Guma: The Man and His Work (Ibadan: New Horn, 1987), p. 158.

5. La Guma in his interview with Robert Serumaga in Duerden, D., and Pieterse, C., eds., African Writers Talking (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 93.

6. SASO defined Black Consciousness as a search ‘for a Black identity, self-awareness and self-esteem and the rejection of White Stereotypes and morals’. [Cited in February, V. A., Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature (London: Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 102.]

7. Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1985), p. 99.

8. See Appendix II.

9. Mphahlele, Ezekiel, ‘The Tyranny of Place and Aesthetics: The South African Case’, English Academy Review (South Africa), 1981, p. 12.

10. Mphahlele, E., The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962; 1974).

11. Mphalele, E., ‘The Tyranny of Place’, p. 1.

12. Matthews, J., and Thomas, G., Cry Rage: An Anthology (Johannesburg: Sprocas Publications, 1972).

13. February, V. A., Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature, p. 173.

14. Levin, Bernard, ‘“Art Must Wait Until the End of the Struggle”: Review of Gordimer's A Sport of Nature’, The Sunday Times (London), 5th April 1987, p. 57.

15. Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 116.

16. Cited in Heywood's introductory remarks to Heywood, C., Aspects of South African Literature (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. ix.

17. Roux, Edward, S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography (Cape Town: African Bookman, n.d.), p. 89.

18. Roux, Edward, S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography, p. 96.

19. Cited in Gerhart, G. M., Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkely: University of California Press, 1978), p. 60.

20. Bernstein, Hilda, Steve Biko (London: International Defence and Aid Fund, 1978), p. 14.

21. La Guma, A., ‘Apartheid: The Imperialist Monster’, Tricontinental, vol. XXVI, Sept 1971, p. 47.

22. La Guma, A., A Walk in the Night (Ibadan: Mbari, 1962).

23. La Guma, A., The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1967).

24. Peires, J. B., The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Johannesburg: Raven, 1981), p. 73.

25. Ringhals (Hemachatus haemachatus) is a cobra found in Africa, and is very poisonous. La Guma's spelling of the word ‘ringhal’ is inconsistent; on page 66 it is spelt as ‘Rhingal’ and on page 101 it is spelt as ‘Ringhal’.

26. ‘The guiltless must fall with the guilty, for they cannot avoid profiting by sin, and so have committed the sin too.’ Cited in Bowers, Fredson T., Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), pp. 44-45.

27. ‘At the level of the individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’. [Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963; 1974), trans. Constance Farrington, p. 74.]

28. Ngugi wa Thiong'o,Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1977).

29. La Guma in his interview to Abrahams; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 115.

30. ‘The Great Karoo is an arid desert about three hundred miles in length, by from seventy to eighty in breadth; bounded by Sneeuberg and Nieuweld ridges of mountains on the North, and by Zwartberg, or Black Mountain ridge on the South’.

    Pringle, T., Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1966), p. 163.

31. Carnegie Commission Report: The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission, Part IV (Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia Drukkery, 1932).

    The map facing Page Number 14 of the Report divides Karoo into the Little Karoo, the Cental Karoo, and the Upper Karoo. The Little Karoo is marked by the coastal belt on the South and West, and on the North by a demarcation stretching from van Rhyns drop on the West to Albany on the East. This demarcation forms the Southern limit of Cental Karoo. The Northen boundary of the Cental Karoo is marked by the Great Escarpment, which in turn constitutes the Southern limits of the Upper Karoo. Priesha in the North, Winberg in the East and Calvina in the West demarcate the area of the Upper Karoo.

32. de Blij, H. J., A Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa (Chicago: Rand Mc Nally, 1964); see Maps 14 and 15 on pages 82 and 86 respectively. To de Blij the Karoo is a relatively narrow stretch of land sandwiched between the Highveld on the North and the Cape Ranges on the South. Lengthwise it extends from the Southern Namibia on the West to the Foothills on the East.

33. See the Weather Map facing page no. 52 in Wilson, M., and Thompson, L., eds., The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol. II(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

34. Schreiner, O., [pseud. Ralph Iron] Story of an African Farm (Edinburgh: New University Society, 1883; n.d.).

35. Smith, Pauline, Little Karoo (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925).

36. Abrahams, Peter, The Path of Thunder (London: Faber, 1948; 1952).

37. Jacobson, Dan, A Dance in the Sun (A Dance in the Sun (London: Weidenfield, 1956).

38. See Appendix II.

39. Heywood, Christopher, ‘Olive Schreiner's influence on George Moore and D. H. Lawrence’ in Heywood, C., ed., Aspects of South African Literature, p. 42.

40. Sarvan, Charles Ponnuthurai, ‘Pauline Smith: A Gentle Rebel’, World Literature Written in English, vol. XXIV, no. 2, 1984, pp. 244-50.

41. Driver, Dorothy, ‘Pauline Smith: A Gentler Music of Her Own’, Research in African Literatures, vol. XV, no. 1, 1984, p. 48.

42. Cited in Driver, D., ‘Pauline Smith’, p. 49.

43. Klima, Vladimir, South African Prose Writings in English (Prague: Czechoslavak Academy of Sciences, 1971), p. 22.

44. See Gray, Stephen, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town: David Philip, 1979), p. 157.

45. Driver, D., ‘Pauline Smith’, p. 50.

46. Mbeki, Govan, South Africa: The Peasants' Revolt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 128.

47. Taiwo, O., ‘Language and Themes in Three African Novels’, Literary Half-Yearly, vol. XXII, 1981, p. 44.

48. La Guma, Alex, A Soviet Journey (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 117.

49. Mzamane, Mbulelo, ‘Sharpeville and its Aftermath: The Novels of Richard Rive, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma, and Lauretta Ngcobo’, Ariel, vol. XVI, pt. 2, 1985, pp. 40.

50. La Guma, Alex, Time of the Butcherbird, marked copy with annotations by Mbulelo Mzamane; author's collection.

51. La Guma's interview with Abrahams. Cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 117.

52. Platjee, Solomon T., Mhudi (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1930).

53. Abrahams, Peter, Wild Conquest (London: Faber, 1950).

54. Abrahams, P., Wild Conquest, p. 97.

55. Kuper, L., ‘African Nationalism in South Africa, 1910-1964’ in Wilson, Monica, and Thompson, L., eds., Oxford History of South Africa Vol. II (London: OUP, 1971), p. 425.

56. Mphahlele, Ezekiel, ‘South Africa: Two Communities and the Struggle for a Birthright’, Journal of African Studies, vol. IV, no. 1, 1977, pp. 21-50.

57. Huddleston, Trevor, Naught for Your Comfort (Collins: London 1956; 1957), p. 63.

58. Calvin, J., ‘Eternal Election by Which God Has Predestined Some to Salvation, Others to Destruction’, in McNeill, J. T., ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles; Vol. XXI of The Library of Christian Classics Series (London: S.C.M., n. d.), pp. 926-27.

    New Englanders, another European group that carried Calvinism to a non-European setting, had similar ideas of being an elected race. Peter Bulkeley wrote: ‘We [the people of New England] ‘are a City set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth, the eyes of the world are upon us, because we profess ourselves to be the people in Covenant with God’.

    Cited in Miller, Perry, ‘God's Controversy With New England’ in Kerr, Hugh T, ed., Protestantism: A Concise Survey of Protestantism and its Influence on American Religious and Social Traditions (New York: Barron, 1979), p. 73.

59. Carnegie Commission: Report, ‘Sociological Report’, Part V, p. 40.

60. Woods, Donald, Asking for Trouble: Autobiography of a Banned Journalist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, 1987), p. 18.

61. La Guma, Alex, Man in the Tree: A Play for Radio, The Literary Review, vol. XV, 1971, pp. 19-30.

62. La Guma, Alex, Man in the Tree, p. 24.

63. La Guma, Alex, Man in the Tree, p. 30.

64. La Guma, Alex, In the Fog of the Season's End (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 21.

65. Mphahlele, Ezekiel, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 108.

66. La Guma, Alex, The Stone Country, p. 127.

67. See Appendix II.

68. La Guma, A., Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala, New Age, vol. V, no. 24, 2nd April 1959, p. 8.

69. ‘The Story of Bethal’, Drum, vol. II, pt. 3, March 1952, pp. 4-9.

70. La Guma, A., Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala, New Age, vol. V, no. 26, 16th April 1959, p. 8.

71. La Guma, A., Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala, New Age, vol. V, no. 27, 23rd April 1959, p. 8.

72. Sak, L., ‘Twixt Law and Deep Sea’, Jo-Jo, Drum, vol. 109, March 1960, p. 69.

73. In the popular Nguni custom, as Mbulelo Mzamane explained to me, the butcherbird is an auspicious bird. In the rural areas the farmers are happy to welcome the butcherbird, particularly during the agricultural season, as it kills the insects harmful to the crops.

74. See DuBois, W. E. B., Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903).

75. From an address by Sultan Galiyev to the Regional Congress of the Russian Communist Party at Kazan in March 1918; cited in Hodgkin, T., ‘Some African and Third World Theories of Imperialism’, Owen, R., and Sutcliff, B., eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), p. 112.

76. La Guma, Alex, ed., Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1971, 1978), p. 13.

77. Simons, J., and Simons, R., Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1983), p. 297.

78. In the mind of the white woman, the negro is a superior sexual animal. […] She believes it because her culture has taught her to believe it. She also fears Negro sexually because her culture has instructed her to fear him. Unable to experience the Negro in fact [on account of social taboos], Negro in fantasy becomes the centre of white woman's sexual life—she elevates him to the status of a god-phallus; she worships, fears, desires, and hates him. Oh, how she hates him! Everywhere he is in her midst, and she can neither embrace nor destroy him. Deep in her heart, she knows she does not have to be protected from him. It is the society from which she needs protection, especially if she acknowledges her interest in a Negro. Yet, since she cannot touch him, she desires to be ‘protected’ from him, she desires that the Negro touch her, indeed, ‘rape’ her.

    Calvin, C. Hernton, Sex and Racism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965; 1969), pp. 32-33 (emphasis in the original).

79. La Guma, Alex, The Stone Country, pp. 127-28.