SOURCE: Parker, Kenneth. “Apartheid and the Politics of Literature.” Red Letters 20 (December 1986): 12-33.

All recent evidence—the events themselves, the pronouncements about them, the speculations about outcomes, the re-adjustments by the main actors—point inexorably to one inescapable future: that the apartheid state which has existed in more or less its present form since 1948 (and has its antecedents in policies of domination based on class, colour and caste dating from the mid-seventeenth century) will soon be replaced. The manner of replacement, when and by whom have become crucial questions because the apartheid minority white regime also exercises a regional hegemony over other states on the subcontinent, acting partly on its own account and partly as agent of certain dominant western ideologies. The transformation will almost certainly have significant consequences, not only for the people of that country but also for its neighbours and for the contending power blocs.

‘South Africa’ (I use inverted commas throughout to refer to the white minority regime and constructions which privilege the white society) has been an ever-present and intrusive presence in the British consciousness during the four decades since the end of the Second World War. That presence has been constructed through key myths, some of which are that ‘they’ fought on our side at Tobruk (with that defeat taking on the same status as Dunkirk), ‘they’ flew with us in The Battle of Britain, ‘they’ then lost an election and later ‘they’ left the Commonwealth. In all these constructions of ‘South Africa’ blacks are the excluded ever-present. The first two examples make no distinction between Boer and Briton; the last two signal the struggle for supremacy between the two competing white minorities. At all times in this British perception, an English heritage is seen as preferable to an Afrikaans one, standing for civilized, liberal, urban, constitutional values, as opposed to the unsophisticated, bigoted, rural ones of Afrikaans. Blacks do not feature in this model—not only for the old ‘reason’, that they are not ‘ready’ to assume the heavy burdens that rule imposes, but now also for new ones ‘self-evident’ in post-independence African history; powerful resonators in popular opinion such as the ‘Congo’, ‘Biafra’ and ‘Amin’. Ultimately the effect is that a dominant feature of representations of ‘South Africa’ in Britain continues to be (by the conscious choice of the British media) by white South Africans who represent and celebrate a belief in a lost ‘liberal tradition’ of relations with blacks. However well-meaning their intentions, the writers, artists, political commentators who make this representation are not only largely irrelevant to the processes by which a solution is being worked out, but also tend to articulate the case for a future in which somehow their dominance, and certainly their way of life, will be maintained.

There is, of course, another side, and the history of that is increasingly being written by the participants and by observers whose point of departure is not located within the dominant tradition of Bantu-Boer-Briton. One of the central features of this alternative tradition is that, while it is predominantly black (and increasingly so in ideology as well as in numbers), it is not exclusivist; it is truly nonracial (as distinct from the Anglo-American formulation of ‘multi-racial’, which seems to me to assert pluralism and difference, and it is paradoxically upon theories of difference that policies of subordinate-dominant are often created). The new history is that of several struggles which have been taking place at the same time, and often within the same movement—for political freedom, for economic repossession, for national self-determination, for the rights of women, for cultural liberation. The history of the South African liberation struggle is therefore in many ways an insight into strategies (sometimes competing, sometimes congruent) where class exploitation is obscured by national oppression and cultural alienation.

Most of these alternative stories and alternative strategies are contained in the books under review here, and it might therefore be prudent to say something about each in turn, before returning to the question of what radicals in this country might do to assist the South African struggle.

It is a privilege to welcome the appearance of a new impression of the selected speeches of Nelson Mandela, which provides a context for the other books. These addresses, No Easy Walk to Freedom, were first published in 1965, shortly after Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Since 1973 they have been re-issued at least eight times in their present form, with an introduction by Ruth First, herself a distinguished participant in the South African liberation struggle, who was tragically assassinated in 1982 by agents of the white minority regime. These speeches are remarkable first for their style. As examples of political rhetoric they will surely take their place alongside some of the classic speeches of their kind—Martin Luther King's ‘I Have a Dream’ or Robert Emmett's ‘Let No Man Write My Epitaph’, for example, come to mind when one reads Mandela's address to the court before his last sentence:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an idea for which I am prepared to die [because, as he pointed out in a speech in an earlier trial] … I would say that the whole life of any thinking African in this country drives him continuously to a conflict between his conscience on the one hand and the law on the other.

The contents of these speeches have been intensively and extensively dissected in order to establish the extent to which the ANC is seeking a bourgeois-democratic state, either as an end in itself or as a first stage on the path towards a socialist South Africa. That question brings us to their second remarkable feature: in addressing the masses, directly or indirectly, they are exercises in constructing a people's history as well as manuals for conducting a struggle. They deal not only with streams of African nationalisms and with what it is like to live under apartheid, but also all the time with the nature of the business of resistance. When the speeches touch on theoretical matters like the ‘Freedom Charter’ they might appear to yield contradictory statements; e.g., Mandela can say in one speech that he has always regarded himself as an African patriot, that, like democrats throughout the world, he venerates the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights, and that he is attracted to the idea of a classless society, which springs in part, he says, from his readings in Marxist literature and in part from the admiration for the structure and organization of early African societies in South Africa. I want to argue that it is this African model of a communal and libertarian structure, marked by the absence of exploitation based upon status or caste, rather than any European model, which is the key to our attempts not only to explain the course of the South Africa liberation struggle but also to predict the possible future form of the new state.

Our understanding of the course of the struggle and the debates around strategy can be established from Side to Side, the political biography of a remarkable woman in a struggle that has witnessed many remarkable women. Helen Joseph, eighty-six years old some months ago, is the most unlikely radical. She was born in Kent, went to India as a teacher, and came to ‘South Africa’ in 1931, where she served as an officer in the ‘South African’ Air Force during the Second World War. Against this impeccable Christian and liberal prologue she became in 1951 secretary to the Medical Aid Fund of the Garment Workers Union of South Africa, one of the most militant trades unions of the fifties, run by the legendary Solly Sachs. It was here that she commenced the lifetime of a politics which increasingly became more radical, in which she has been and continues to be a most distinguished participant, and for which she has suffered some astonishingly brutal treatment. What she chronicles then is more than the trajectory of her own radicalization, impressive as that is; this is also a popular history of the struggle, presented not only through the public campaigns but also through the private discussions of some of the main participants. It is, if you like, the detailed story of the actions which locate and contextualize the Mandela speeches: the fifties as the decade of protest, the sixties as the decade of the treason trials, the seventies as the years of state terror. But it can also be seen in another way: as the shift from a demand for freedom (Mayibuye!) to a demand for power (Amandla!). Within that broad framework other narratives co-exist: personal friendships with Mandela, with Bram Fischer, with Lilian Ngoyi, with Robbie Resha. (It is particularly noteworthy what she writes about Resha, who was in the late fifties and early sixties a figure on a par with Mandela and Tambo, but who was excluded from the leadership of the ANC-in-exile in the early seventies because of his opposition to turning the organization into a ‘multi-racial’ one. I should declare an interest which is more than merely theoretical: I owe a great deal of my own political formation to Robbie Resha, was a minor participant in that debate at the time, and still continue to believe that the decision to make the ANC open its doors to people of all colours and groups was incorrect.) Helen Joseph also writes about many lesser-known figures whose roles were nevertheless of great importance (Joe Morolong, Archie Gumede), and women of national stature like Lilian Ngoyi and heroines whose names are still retained in their local communities (Dora Tamana, Frances Baard). Finally, for the way in which it calmly but devastatingly chronicles what it is like to be on the receiving end of police brutality, I recommend it to those who exhort the liberation organizations to eschew violence.

People in this country have usually derived their perceptions of apartheid from literary texts (the comparatively high profile in television or radio is a relatively recent phenomenon). The image that we have is that created by, for example, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, John Coetzee; black people have their lives interpreted by white writers. The argument here is not that white writers cannot penetrate the lives of the people with whom their contact is mostly on a basis of inequality, but nearly so much exposure in British society as that of their white counterparts, despite the large body of skilful writing (much of which has received critical acclaim). This is particulary noteworthy because the texts, although many of them are prohibited in ‘South Africa’, are freely available in cheap editions in this country, notably in the now quite extensive Heinemann African Writers series.

New impressions appeared recently of Alex la Guma's A Walk in the Night and Other Stories and Bessie Head's A Question of Power but it is sad to record that this event more or less coincided with the announcements of their authors' deaths—Alex la Guma (one of my oldest friends, a mentor in both literature and politics) in Cuba, where he was the ANC Permanent Representative, and Bessie Head in Botswana, where she had lived in exile since the early sixties and where our paths crossed all too briefly at that time.

Both A Walk in the Night and A Question of Power are now, in their different ways, classic texts; they represent different approachs not only to technique but to the purpose of writing. La Guma, from the outset, dedicates his literary skill to furthering the liberation stuggle, specifically in the interests of a communist South Africa. He writes with passion and subtle perception about the impact of apartheid on the lives of ordinary people and addresses a mass audience, deploying many techniques of popular media—cinema, jazz, detective fiction, slang. His is an art that conceals art, and nowhere is that shown more skilfully than in the novella which gives the title to the collection. The surface is shatteringly simple. Michael Adonis, a young but not very bright man, loses his job because he is rude to the white overseer at his work. He returns to District Six (that part of Cape Town which took its name from the ejection en masse of a community which was first stripped of the vestiges of a franchise and thereafter bulldozed out of existence, the residents dispersed and the area transformed for commercial and industrial use) where he accidentally stabs and kills an old Irish actor, and equally accidentally, precipitates the death of a petty criminal, Willieboy, who had no hand in the matter. But, as La Guma is at pains to show (in a spirit that, Lewis Nkosi asserts without much exaggeration, owes a great deal to Dostoevsky), this is not accidental, this is the nature of the white state—it preys not only on its political opponents but infects the lives of all those it oppresses. It is this awareness that drove the young La Guma (who volunteered for the International Brigade in 1938, when he was thirteen) to become a distinguished leader of the ‘coloured’ (mixed race) community in the Cape, for which he suffered several lengthy periods of bannings, house arrests, imprisonments. He was the first person to be served with a 24-hour house arrest restriction, which lasted for five years, until he was allowed to leave the country on a one-way exit permit. His subsequent writings, And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons End (1972), Time of the Butcherbird (1979) as well as an uncompleted novel, show the same trajectory as Mandela's speeches and Helen Joseph's biography: the inevitability of military confrontation with the apartheid state, forced upon the liberation organizations by its responses to their initially peaceful and constitutional requests.

Bessie Head's situation is rather different—in her own life history as well as her art. The former tells us a great deal about the real nature of ‘South Africa’. Bessie Head's mother was the daughter of a wealthy white racehorse owner, her father a black stablehand. Despite the fact that the mother was not the victim of a rape, she was confined to an asylum, where Bessie was born, later to be transferred to a mission orphanage, which she left to qualify as a teacher and to work as a journalist until she moved with her young son to the then Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1964, after her own marriage had come to an end, to carve a new future in a new state—an urban single parent in a rural and communal environment. It is a world that she charts compellingly in this novel, of a woman's descent into insanity and her subsequent recovery. But while the surface theme of this, as well as her other novels (When Rain Clouds Gather, 1969, Maru, 1971, and The Collector of Taxes, 1977) is that of the alienation of individuals, allied to a profound meditation on the nature of exile, it is also social: it explores the ways in which institutionalized evil disrupts personality. Hers was a singular and rare genius.

Alex La Guma and Bessie Head were recent contributors to a tradition of writing in English by black South Africans that goes back to the times of the earliest contacts with the missionaries, and two recent books seek to make available part of that record. Allan Findlay's Root and Branch: An Anthology of Southern African Literature is an idiosyncratic collection, not simply because it includes selections from states adjacent to ‘South Africa’ and in languages not indigenous to it, but primarily because of certain questionable assumptions. There is, for instance, the belief in linear progress, ever upward—from ‘Roots’ via ‘Storm’ to ‘Branches’. ‘Roots’ is devoted to the oral tradition of songs, aphorisms and narrative under the recent generic coinage of ‘orature’ (presumably to distinguish it from something elite and alien called ‘literature’). The other collection, Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Short Stories, edited by Mbulelo Mzamane, assumes the same pattern. He writes of ‘the Pioneers’ and then follows it by creating discrete categories like ‘the Drum era’, ‘the Sophiatown era’, ‘the Soweto era’, accepting some crude determinist nineteenth-century notion of progress.

I doubt that either the distinction between elite and popular literature which underpins Findlay's collection, or the notion of progress which is shared by both editors, is sustainable in the context of black South African literature; the distinction does not arise for either the writer or the reader because the context of their oppression foregrounds colour, not class, and although that might well be categorized as ‘false consciousness’, the nature of the process by which blacks acquire education and pursue leisure in ‘South Africa’ has always meant that the high culture/popular culture debate impinged on a tiny minority only, and that rather recently, as is admirably shown in Njabulo Ndebele's stories, to which I shall refer later.

While Findlay's heart is obviously in the right place, he offers a kind of uncritical and undifferentiated vanguardism which panders to the worst kinds of separatist ideologies. For instance, he advocates that ‘Legislation should be used to promote and strengthen indigenous languages against the needs for a lingua franca, of social ambition and of international inducements which endorse the use of the elite's language.’ Which, and how many, of the several indigenous South African languages should be so protected? Which not? On what basis? Would his advocacy of protecting indigenous languages extend to Afrikaans? It strikes me that he might have done something toward putting his theory into effect, especially in his selections from the oral tradition, by printing the originals alongside the translations (as do Copland and Kavanagh).

But it is not simply a matter of presentation and style; Findlay's case rests on his continuing confusion of a language—especially English—with a particular class and a particular geographical space, and with the notion that those of us who had to learn it as a second language are merely recipients, making no contribution to its development. He also fails to recognize problematical areas; e.g., he comments that ‘the bête noire [sic] of the African writers is the defeatism that springs from excessive introspection or the crippling neurosis that can arise even when self-acceptance wards off defeatism.’ This in an anthology where he has selected extracts from Mazisi Kunene, Alex La Guma, Thomas Mofolo, Oswald Mtshali and Njabulo Ndebele! He also happily asserts that ‘Like West Indian calypso or British medieval ballads, African oral literature is strongly spontaneous.’ What is disquieting here is not that he fails to take into account the impressive body of work that contradicts his proposition about Caribbean, Medieval British and African traditions, but that the statement simply underpins the idea of the happy blacks before the arrival of the white man produced what he refers to as the ‘westernized surface of literature.’

So, what utility has the book? If readers can restrain their reaction to Findlay's headnotes, the selections provide a mine of excellent material. Aphorisms like ‘one day is not enough to rot an elephant’ and stories for children like ‘How the Moon Fathered the World’ and ‘Why Cock Crows at Dawn’, as well as extracts from contemporary writers, should send readers to search out the complete texts.

Mbulelo Mzamane's collection is useful if only because it makes available cheaply a good selection of stories, clearly intended for schools and colleges, especially in Africa. (Mzamane now teaches in a Nigerian university, having completed his doctorate in England.) The claim that it is ‘representative’ is contestable; it not only excludes, for instance, Lewis Nkosi (who is relegated to the role of critic merely), but even more odd, given the editor's own past in South Africa, revealed in his novel The Children of Soweto, no space is given to some of the key writers from Black Consciousness—no Achmat Dangor, no Mafika Gwala, no Miriam Tlali. But, as with Findlay's book, my main concern is the assumptions in the introduction.

Mzamane's notion of progress might be challenged in many ways; at the most basic level the fact is that many of the works he includes simply were not available until quite recently—because they were banned or not in print many were not accessible to the writers of the sixties. His acknowledgements show this to be particularly true for those writers whom he calls ‘the pioneers’, R. R. R. Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams (‘who followed in Dhlomo's footsteps’, though we are not told how), Mphahlele. Mzamane is also sometimes perverse in his interpretations; e.g., asserting that the novels of La Guma and Head illustrate ‘the double-edged effect of apartheid whereby the oppressor becomes a victim of the same vicious and malevolent forces he has helped to unleash upon society’ is a nonsense which has recently been enthusiastically promoted in certain liberal circles. It has to be nailed. It is certainly one of the themes of white writers, and Jack Cope's The Fair House and Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country are key texts. They express liberal concern, a genuine desire to see apartheid destroyed, but an equally spirited desire to see white hegemony maintained, even if via black proxies. La Guma and later writers, because they understand power relations, grasp an over-arching fact that Mzamane fails to recognize: the white oppressors can make choices, including that of not being oppressors (as Helen Joseph's text shows), whereas black people cannot avoid being victims and therefore must retaliate. The stories themselves show this: from the way in which the black miner deals with racism in the Dhlomo story, through the wonderfully sharp delineation of survival strategies in Bloke Modisane's ‘The Dignity of Begging’ to the resistance by the young boy on the ‘whites only’ swing in ‘The Park’ by James Matthews. In sum, this is a timely and valuable collection, unfortunately vitiated by its introduction.

Njabulo Ndebele's Fools and Other Stories appeared originally in 1983, under the Raven Press imprint, from Johannesburg and won the highly-regarded Noma Award for Commonwealth Literature. The collection, containing five stories (one of them, ‘The Music of Time’, is also anthologized by Mzamane), has now been reprinted by Longman, but without any reference to the publishing history. Ndebele, who was born in Johannesburg but grew up in the Charterston ‘location’ attached to the nearby ‘white’ city of Nigel and later studied in Swaziland, Cambridge and Denver, is now Head of the Department of English in the University of Lesotho. These stories are not as directly political as, say, La Guma's, but they are suffused with politics. More importantly, they register a break with a literary practice which, quite properly, emphasizes oppression and resistance. Ndebele's stories assume that the present dispensation is, to all intents and purposes, at an end, and the author is therefore concerned to meditate on the preparations for life in the aftermath of apartheid. They are also new in involving issues of art and cultural politics in this era of transition. This is a very important feature, since one of the criticisms that might be levelled at the political organizations is that there was hardly any encouragement of such an approach. There was the feeling that political statements had to be made politically. Ndebele tackles these issues with great skill. Primarily his world is that of the ‘middling classes’ who value and privilege education, intelligence, high culture, and who therefore establish quite complex (sometimes contradictory) relationships with the middle-class white world from which they continue to be excluded. Mandla, the sculptor, who carves a figure of a hunchback in the alien medium of marble, did not mind the adulation heaped upon him by the white world, but

… there was something missing: there was no history to it. It was one of those things I had stumbled across by chance. It did not consist of anything in me or in the surroundings I live in day in and day out. I felt I was an eagle that never learnt to fly, and when eventually it was taught how to, it was taught to fly like a butterfly. There was no tradition.

Ndebele, who is affectionately and appropriately nicknamed ‘Jigsaw’, shows that these blacks do not simply mimic white practices; they are deeply skeptical, yet they recognize their attractiveness, as is shown in the attitudes of the boy driven by his parents to learn to play the violin, or that of Zani, the young intellectual, who

had become his books. And when he moved out of them, he came out without a social language … I wondered if he was not another instance of disembodiment: the obscenity of high seriousness.

It is a brave writer who can draw his society, warts and all, at a time when such observations might be seen as ammunition for the enemy; who can create, for instance, a disgraced, fornicating, drunkard schoolmaster who is, nevertheless, clinically percipient not only about his own situation but also about that of those around him; who can challenge conventional wisdom by making Zani state:

… I learnt one lesson out of all this. It is that we should have stuck to our science. You see, too much obsession with removing oppression in the political dimension, soon becomes in itself a form of oppression. Especially if everyone is expected to demonstrate his concern somehow and then mostly all it calls for is that you thrust an angry fist in the air.

To state the case in that manner may be to overstate it, but to state it at all is to demonstrate a liberation that augurs well for the future.

Given the existence of a considerable body of work produced, particularly over the past half-century, allied to an increasing interest in the excavation of the past, and in the context of an increasing awareness that apartheid is now shuffling towards an end, an increasingly influential group of white ‘South African’ academic critics, assisted by their colleagues in the UK and USA, have sought to remap the field in order to construct a model of an overarching ‘South African’ literature. Such an approach is signalled sharply in the Introduction to Literature and Society in South Africa. The editors argue that to speak of distinct literatures (e.g., Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English) is to separate the literature from the society, and

in particular from the fact that South Africa is a capitalist state with, by and large, a unified and dominating economy. While the ‘literatures’ might see themselves as separate and as expressing rival nationalisms with their own characteristics, the pull of the economy is ultimately a stronger centripetal force than any centrifugal forces at work.

Now, this formulation might appear unexceptional and even bravely radical, but it is embedded in a confidence trick: the issue is not the critical one of ‘culture and society’, but the one of why it takes on such a peculiar formation in ‘South Africa’ and how it will be changed—and when—in the process of the liberation struggle. The fact that there exist within the same country (based upon boundaries externally imposed) examples of literary production in several languages but using more or less the same literary forms is not a sufficient basis for claiming a national dimension for them. There may or may not evolve an entity which can be described as a South African nation, but I doubt that any of the present black writers would wish to be annexed to the current white construction in the manner, or for the reasons, adduced by the editors of this compilation. What we have here is a further expression of a liberal, white society seeking to adapt to a state after apartheid yet seeking to maintain hegemony. Is it not ironic that after at least a century when class exploitation and colour oppression combined to make vast profits, we are now contemplating the next stage where apartheid will have to go in the interests of the survival of ‘free’ capitalism!

The collection might be judged in terms of what it excludes. While it deals with the journal Staffrider, which gained international importance in the aftermath of the Soweto 1976 events, it says very little about either the objective conditions which gave rise to the journal, or to the Black Consciousness Movement with which it is sometimes associated. This again raises the question of what kind of ‘South Africa’ is being constructed. The editors can find space for an article on Stephen Black, an obscure white dramatist whose works are not only out of print but apparently have not been performed in living memory, but it does not have space for a dramatist of much greater artistic skill and ideological importance like Lewis Nkosi. It has an article on ‘Writing in a Fractured Society’, using Nadine Gordimer, quite appropriately, since to exclude her would be bizarre; but there is no space for what it is like to live in a fractured society from the perspective of a black writer—no La Guma, no Head, nothing around the writers of the sixties in Johannesburg. The massively influential Peter Abrahams does not even merit an entry in the index.

The indefensibility of this view of an over-arching ‘South Africanness’—indeed, of a ‘Southern Africanness’—is evident also in The Penguin Book of Southern African Stories, edited by Stephen Gray, who is Professor of English in the whites-only Afrikaans University which was set up in Johannesburg in order to counter the University of the Witwatersrand. Gray wants to ‘interfile’ the various literatures ‘with references to their common experiences.’ One of the key points I want to continue to assert is that these so-called ‘common experiences’ are experienced differentially. Not only was the world of R. R. R. Dhlomo different from that of the ‘English’ Fitzpatrick or the Afrikaner Van den Heever (the editor makes no mention of the racist language used by these two writers as an index of apartheid ideology) but I doubt that the South Africa about which Achmet Dangor or Ahmad Essop writes is the one that the white Hennie Aucamp or even the ‘coloured’ Richard Rive would like to see. This is an idiosyncratic collection, which privileges minor white writers (Delius, Black, Cripps, Rose Moss) to the exclusion of artistically more important black writers—no La Guma, no Themba, no Ndebele. Is it cynicism that suggests that what we have here is a collection sanitized for ‘South African’ consumption?

Some of these absences are redressed, and some of the issue of cultural politics in relation to the struggle for liberation are addressed in two contrasting yet overlapping books: David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre and Robert Mshengu Kavanagh's Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa. Coplan, a musicologist, traces the history of urban music, dance and theatre against the background of social, economic and political changes from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He depicts black experience under the impact of industrialization, and the ways in which resistances became embodied in a tradition of performance. While I have reservations about the distinctions drawn between elite and popular cultures (as I have already stated) and about the whole of his case being based upon city music in Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand), this is a pioneering work in its detail and in its approach that recognizes the collective nature of creating style. It is particularly valuable in recovering early pieces and composers and for its accounts of their relations to the demands of the dominant society—reactions in music and song to dispossession, to Christianization, to the growth of new forms (e.g., marabi in the slumyards, famo, a form of working-class women's song, jive, makwaya, the sacred and secular choral music that developed in the missions).

Theatre and Cultural Struggle, in many ways an even more important text, is a study of culture and social relations of a kind wholly new in respect to South Africa. It skilfully examines such fundamental themes as race, class and nationality, to argue that in ‘South Africa’ there are at least two ways in which the system of domination is different: first, the element of rule (expressed in coercion) is proportionately greater—what Gramsci defines as ‘crisis’ is the norm; second, the dominant group does not seek to legitimize itself in the ways described by Gramsci and others (it has not felt the need to do so, and even recent attempts at what appears to be incorporation need not be so construed). What is additionally striking about this book is the way Kavanagh shows the growth not only of an alternative hegemonic force, but also of black theatre since 1950 (coinciding with the life of the modern apartheid state), via Fugard, the independent black commercial theatre, and up to the theatre of black consciousness. After careful analysis of the documentation, he concludes that the theatre of black consciousness's ‘effectiveness did not derive from the development of a sophisticated theory of political and cultural domination. It derived rather from the uncompromising application of a few clearly-grasped principles to the full gamut of social relations’ so that it therefore remained ‘predominantly a movement of the intellectual and the non-commercial intermediate classes.’ Kavanagh illustrates this through the drama Shanti, and shows in his analysis of the 1950s success King Kong how

liberal capital and its associated intellectuals conceived of their relations with urban blacks as tutelary. However, their political and cultural relations were based in the crucial facts of capitalist economic relations … multi-racialism in the context of cultural disparity and economic exploitation characterized their relations.

One cannot help but observe that in this last sentence there might be a lesson for the ‘multiracialists’ in this country.

While I have reservations about some aspects of Kavanagh's theoretical position (he is quite right to privilege class, but I suspect that he does not take sufficient cognizance of other potentially contending elements, notably religion, especially the break-away sects) this is a marvellous book, and the publishers should be congratulated for incorporating so much of the primary material in the original as well as in translation (much of it, incidentally, is translated by the author, who is apparently fluent in several of the indigenous languages which form the basis for his study).

The social reality that underlies the cultural changes is well documented in Julie Frederikse's South Africa: A Different Kind of War and in Joseph Hanlon's Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in South Africa. I would recommend both books without reservation. Frederikse's book is a revelation because it is a popular history of the last ten years, in newspaper cuttings, graphics, oral history. Two examples are especially relevant for British readers. The first, an advertisement from the Pick'n Pay shopping chain, congratulating Zola Budd on her selection as a member of the Olympic squad, reads: ‘Congratulations Zola our supergirl. You've won the hearts of a nation. You'll always be first in our eyes.’ And since there were other ‘South Africans’ who were selected for Olympic teams of other countries, the advertisement concludes: ‘We wish all South African competitors selected for other national teams luck in the Olympics.’ Equally cynical is a Barclays Bank advertisement addressed to white conscripts in the ‘South African’ army. Underneath a photograph of a pair of standard issue army boots shown as if they were marching out of the billboard, the caption reads, ‘If you've received your marching orders we'll get you started on the right foot.’ One presumes that is what the Bank means by staying in ‘South Africa’ in order to influence change!

Hanlon's book is important because he documents in considerable detail the ways in which ‘South Africa’ has resorted to a deliberate policy of destabilization of her neighbouring states in order to secure apartheid at home, to establish a regional hegemony, often with the assistance of the UK, USA or Israel; how, since 1980, it has invaded three capitals, tried to assassinate two prime ministers, backed subversive dissident groups in independent states, disrupted the oil supplies of at least six countries and attacked and destroyed the railways of seven neighbours. In such a context, for the British Foreign Secretary to preach ‘non-violence’ to the ANC is an obscenity. The point here cannot be sufficiently emphasized: it is no longer simply a question of apartheid, of what happens inside the borders of the country; it has now become a critical matter of peace on the subcontinent. As long as the apartheid state exists, it threatens all around it.

Yet the future has never looked brighter. There is every reason to believe that the ANC will at some date (now sooner rather than later) form the first democratic, black-dominated government of South Africa, since whatever reservations we may have, theirs is the genuine and authentic voice of all the oppressed peoples; that is, unless an accommodation is attempted with some puppet figure. Radicals in this country therefore have a three-part task: to seek to ensure, first, that those who made the liberation struggle inherit their revolution; second, that until that moment, pressure should continue to isolate not only ‘South Africa’, to treat it like a polecat, but also those individuals and institutions which have dealings with it; lastly, that when that day of democratic government arrives, the revolution is not betrayed by the blandishments of a spurious ‘South Africanness’ in the interests of capital.

Works Cited

Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk to Freedom. Heinemann Educational, 1986.

Helen Joseph, Side by Side, The Autobiography of Helen Joseph. Zed Books, 1986.

Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night, and Other Stories. Heinemann Educational, 1986.

Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann Educational, 1986.

Allan H. Findlay, Root and Branch: An Anthology of Southern African Writing. Macmillan, 1986.

Mbulelo Mzamane (ed.), Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Stories. Longman, 1986.

Njabulo S. Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories. Longman, 1986.

Landeg White & Tim Couzens (eds.), Literature and Society in South Africa. Longman, 1985.

Stephen Gray, The Penguin Book of South African Stories. Penguin, 1985.

David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. Longman, 1986.

Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa. Zed Books, 1985.

Julie Frederikse, South Africa: A Different Kind of War. James Currey, 1986.

Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa. James Currey, 1986.