Speaking of South Africa, the association of politics with literature produces a snap equation: censorship. But is that the beginning and end of my subject? Indeed, it may be the end, in a literal sense, of a book or a writer: the book unread, the writer silenced. But censorship is the most extreme, final, and above all, most obvious effect of politics upon a literature, rather than the sum of the subject. Where and when, in a country such as South Africa, can the influence of politics on literature be said to begin? Politics, in the form of an agent of European Imperialism—the Dutch East India Company—brought the written word to this part of Africa; politics, in the form of European missionaries who spread, along with their Protestantism or Catholicism, the political influence of their countries of origin, led to the very first transposition of the indigenous oral literature to the written word. When the first tribal praise-poem was put down on paper, what a political act that was! What could be communicated only by the mouth of the praise-singer to the ears of those present, was transmogrified into a series of squiggles on paper that could reach far beyond his living physical presence, beyond even the chain of memory of those who came after him. With that act a culture took hold upon and was taken hold upon by another.

Doesn't the subject begin quite simply, right there? And doesn't it extend—not simply at all—through the cultural isolation of whites who left their Europe over three centuries ago as the result of political events such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Napoleonic wars, the pogroms of Eastern Europe; does it not extend through the cultural upheaval of blacks under conquest; and the cultural ambiguity of the children one race fathered upon the other? The relationship of politics to literature in South Africa implies all of this, just as it does the overtly political example of writers forced into exile, and the subsequent development of their writings within the changed consciousness of exile. For some books are banned, and so South Africans never read them. But all that is and has been written by South Africans is profoundly influenced, at the deepest and least controllable level of consciousness, by the politics of race. All writers everywhere—even those like Joyce who can't bear to live in their own countries, or those like Genet who live outside the pale of their country's laws—are shaped by their own particular society reflecting a particular political situation. Yet there is no country in the western world where the daily enactment of the law reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South Africa. There is no country in the western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the overall social determination of racial laws.

I am not going to devote any time, here, to outlining or discussing how the Publications Control Board, the censorship system, works in South Africa. I take it that anyone interested in South African literature is familiar with the facts. But lest it be thought that I pass over that matter of censorship lightly, let me remark aside that personally, although I myself have continued and shall continue to bang my head in protesting concert against that particular brick in the granite wall, my fundamental attitude is that South Africans cannot expect to rid themselves of the Publications Control Board until they get rid of apartheid. Censorship is an indispensable part of an interlocking system of repressive laws.

There are other forms of censorship in South Africa. Anyone under a political ban may not be published or quoted; which means that the books of a number of white writers in exile, and those of a number of black writers in exile and at home, are automatically banned, no matter what their subject or form. Through this kind of censorship, the lively and important group of black writers who burst into South African literature in the 'fifties and early 'sixties disappeared from it as if through a trap-door. A young black writer, Don Mattera, went the same way in 1973. Only those of us who care particularly for literature and writers remember; by the time the newspaper has been left behind on the breakfast table, most people have forgotten the banned authors and books listed there—the ultimate triumph of censorship.

I have said that South African literature was founded in an unrecorded political act: the writing down in Roman characters of some tribal praise-song. But the potted histories in academic theses always set its beginning with the writings of a white settler, an Englishman, Thomas Pringle. He was born the year the French Revolution started and came to South Africa in 1820, under the British government scheme of assisted immigration resorted to because of the agricultural depression in England that followed Waterloo. For we white South Africans may somewhat unkindly be called, as Norman Mailer did his fellow Americans, ‘a nation of rejects transplanted by the measure of every immigration of the last three hundred and fifty years’. Pringle led a Scottish party to settle on the border of the so-called Neutral Territory of the Cape from which the Xhosa people had been driven. Thus far, he is a classic white frontiersman; but this Scottish scribbler of album verse at once felt the awkward necessity to adapt his late Augustan diction and pastoral sentimentality to the crude events of Africa:

First the brown Herder with his flock
Comes winding round my hermit-rock
His mien and gait and vesture tell,
No shepherd he from Scottish fell;
For crook the guardian gun he bears, …
Nor Flute has he, nor merry song …
But, born the white man's servile thrall,
Knows that he cannot lower fall.

Pringle was never quite to find the adequate vocabulary for what moved him to write in Africa (Coleridge deplored his archaisms) but he anticipated, astonishingly, themes that were not to be taken up again by any writer in South Africa for a hundred years, and longer. Unlike the majority of his fellow frontiersmen he refused to regard the cattle raids carried out by the Xhosa as proof that they were irredeemable savages. In a poem entitled ‘The Caffer’ he asks awkward questions of the whites:

He is a robber?—True; it is a strife
Between the black-skinned bandit and the white,
(A Savage?—Yes, though loth to aim at life,
Evil for evil fierce he doth requite.
A heathen?—Teach him, then, thy better creed,
Christian! If thou deserv'st that name indeed.)

He foreshadowed the contemporary South African liberal view—obliquely comforting to the white conscience, but none the less true—that any form of slavery degrades oppressor as well as the oppressed:

The Master, though in luxury's lap he loll
… quakes with secret dread, and shares the hell he makes.

Pringle was one of the first and is one of the few whites ever to grant that black men also have their heroes. He wrote a poem about the Xhosa prophet Makana who led an army of 10,000 tribesmen on the British settlement at Grahamstown in 1819:

Wake! Amakosa, wake!
And arm yourselves for war.
As coming winds the forest shake,
I hear a sound from far:
It is not thunder in the sky,
Nor lion's roar upon the hill
But the voice of him who sits on high
And bids me speak his will …
To sweep the White Men from the earth
And drive them to the sea.

Pringle even wrote of love across the colour-line, long before miscegenation laws made it a statutory crime and the Immorality Act provided the theme of so many South African novels and stories. A young Boer speaks:

Our Father bade each of us choose a mate
Of Fatherland blood, from the black taint free
As became a Dutch Burgher's proud degree.
My brothers they rode to the Bovenland,
And each came with a fair bride back in his hand;
But I brought the handsomest bride of them all—
Brown Dinah, the bondmaid who sat in our hall.
My Father's displeasure was stern and still;
My Brothers' flamed forth like a fire on the hill;
And they said that my spirit was mean and base,
To lower myself to the servile race.

The young Boer asks:

Dear Stranger, from England the free,
What good tidings bring'st thou for Arend Plessie?
Shall the Edict of Mercy be sent forth at last,
To break the harsh fetters of Colour and Caste?

Pringle himself was back in England after only six years in South Africa, hounded out of the Cape Colony by the English Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, for his fight against press censorship. This had been introduced to protect the British colonial regime against any mention of those controversial issues of the time, slavery, the condition of the black, and the anti-British feelings of the Boers.

After Pringle had been packed off ‘home’ in 1826, a long colonial silence fell. Diaries were kept, chronicles were written by white missionaries and settlers, but no soundings were put down to the depths reached only in imaginative writing until Olive Schreiner wrote The Story of an African Farm in the 1880s. It is a very famous book and one that, as a South African remembering it as a mind-opening discovery of adolescence, one tends to think of as all-encompassing: that is to say, that final accomplishment, the central themes of South African life given unafraid and yet non-exhibitionist expression by a writer whose skill is equal to them. But reading it again—and it is a book that stands up to re-reading—one finds that of course it isn't that at all. It is one of those open-ended works whose strength lies at the level where human lives—our own and the book's characters'—plunge out of grasp. The freedom that Lyndall, one of the two extraordinary main characters, burns for, is not the black man's freedom but essentially spiritual freedom in the context of the oppression of women through their sexual role; yet the passion of revolt is so deeply understood that it seems to hold good for all sufferings of oppression. The society Lyndall rejects is the shallow white frontier society; yet the rejection questions societal values that gave rise to it and will endure beyond it. It is a book whites in South Africa like to think of, also as transcending politics; I have never met a black who has read it, with—ironically—the important exception of Richard Rive, who has just completed a book about Olive Schreiner's life and work. Certainly no black could ever have written African Farm. The alienation of Lyndall's longing to ‘realize forms of life utterly unlike mine’ is attempted transcendence of the isolation and lack of identity in a white frontier society; in the final analysis, this is a book that expresses the wonder and horror of the wilderness, and for the indigenous inhabitant that wilderness is home. The novel exists squarely within the political context of colonialism. Olive Schreiner's conscience was to reject colonialism, and her creative imagination to disappear in the sands of liberal pamphleteering, many years later. Perhaps she would have written no more imaginative work, anyway. But perhaps she took the conscious decision that Jean-Paul Sartre, in the context of the Pan-African struggle, has said any writer should make—to stop writing if he is needed to do any other task that, as he sees it, his country requires of him. It is certain that political pressures, in the form of a deep sense of injustice and inhumanity existing within their society, can cause certain writers to question the luxury value of writing at all, within a country like South Africa.

The establishment of South African literature in English and (so far as it existed) in African languages as a literature of dissent came in the 1920s and early 'thirties. The white man's military conquest of the blacks was over. The war between the whites, Boer and Briton, was over; the white man's other war, in which Boer and black had fought under the British flag along with the Briton, was over. In the State of Union of the four South African countries, the British Cape Colony and Natal, the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, blacks had been deprived of such rights as they had held at the pleasure of the more liberal of the separate governments. The black man's trusting willingness to identify his destiny with the white man's is expressed in the victory praise-song-cum-poem of Samuel Mqhayi, a Xhosa poet of the time, who assumed a common black-white patriotism after the 1914-18 war: ‘Go catch the Kaiser, Let the Kaiser come and talk with us / We'll tell him how the Zulus won at Sandlwana / Of Thaba Ntsu where the Boers were baffled …’ The assumption was met with rebuff and betrayal; only white men could be heroes, at home or in Valhalla.

Then William Plomer, aged 19, published in 1925 a work of genius, a forced flower fertilized upon an immature talent by reaction against the racialism which had by then become entrenched under the name of a union of the best interests of all people in South Africa. Turbott Wolfe (Plomer's hero as well as the title of the novel) trails the torn umbilical cord of colonialism; Wolfe is not a born South African but an Englishman who plunges into Africa from without. But he understands at once: ‘There would be the unavoidable question of colour. It is a question to which every man in Africa, black, white or yellow, must provide his answer.’ The colonial cord is ruptured, early on and for ever, for South African literature, because Plomer's novel does not measure Africa against the white man, but the white man against Africa. With it, a new literary consciousness was born: that no writer could go deeply into the life around him and avoid some sort of answer. Laurens van der Post's In a Province is awake to it, concerned with modern Africans in conflict with white-imposed values rather than Africans as exotic scenic props in the white man's story. So, fighting against it all the way, is Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren. This extraordinarily talented novel begs the question, as a kind of answer, by revealing the morality South Africa has built on colour and the suffering this brings to people of mixed blood, but nowhere suggesting that the sense of sin suffered by Barry Lindsell, play-white grandson of a white missionary and a Hottentot woman, is tragically, ludicrously, and wastefully misplaced, until Barry Lindsell confesses to his young English wife that he has black blood and she says in surprised relief: ‘Is that all?’

Meanwhile, the novel has shown that it is, indeed, everything, in the life around her from which the author drew her substance.

Roy Campbell was the third of the famous triumvirate—Plomer, Van der Post, Campbell—who began in the 'twenties the tradition of exile, often self-imposed, that has afflicted South African literature ever since. Although accepted and anthologized as one of those who (in his words about William Plomer) ‘dared alone to thrash a craven race / And hold a mirror to its dirty face’, Campbell provides a fascinating example of the strange and complex mutations brought about by the effect of politics upon writers and literature in South Africa.

Campbell was a writer whose work may be lifted like a transparency to show against the light certain dark and tangled motivations where politics and the psyche struggle to accommodate one another in the South African personality. It is there that South African defence mechanisms are made. We shall see them reflected in the work of other writers, too, subconsciously producing work in answer to the need for various justificatory myths of political origin. It is believed, certainly Campbell believed, he left South Africa because the colour bar was abhorrent to him. In his poetry, he made biting and elegant attacks on white complacency. He wrote sensuously incomparable poems about blacks. But he dismissed political and social aspirations with indiscriminate contempt as ‘the spoor and droppings of … the crowd emotions’. The attributes of the brave black hunter with which he identified were élitist rather than humanitarian, let alone egalitarian. In the context of a white man's life the hunting spirit is employed only for play, in blood-sports which are not dictated by hunger; for tribal Africans themselves, hunting is a means of existence.

I would say that Campbell left South Africa out of vanity—he did not think the whites capable of appreciating his genius. It was true; they were not. But his work did not ally itself in any way with the destiny of the blacks, either, in whose hands the culture of South Africa must ultimately become definitive. The brilliant satirical poet South Africa has never replaced ended as the last colonial, romanticizing himself as ‘African’ abroad, and irrevocably cut off from all but the white minority he rejected at home.

Campbell's justificatory myth was tailored to an individual need. But Pauline Smith, living in the 'twenties in the isolation of the Karoo as Schreiner did before her, created a justificatory myth of the Afrikaner people that continues to answer, in literature, to certain political pressures to this day. (I use the word ‘myth’ not in its primary dictionary sense of a purely fictitious narrative, but in the sense the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss does, as a psychologically defensive and protective device. A myth is an extra-logical explanation of events according to the way a people wishes to interpret them.)

Pauline Smith, a writer of Chekhovian delicacy, was not an Afrikaner and she wrote in English. She wrote of rural Afrikaners, in whom her stories see poverty as a kind of grace rather than a limiting circumstance. Why? I believe that she was faithfully reflecting not a fundamental Christian view, but the guilt of the victor (British) over the vanquished (Boer), and also the curious shame that sophistication feels confronted by naivety, thus interpreting it as ‘goodness’. One of the main points represented by her characters is their total unfitness to deal with the industrial society that came upon them after their defeat by the British. Her story ‘The Pain’ shows an old man and his dying wife terrified even by the workings of a hospital; the husband's humbleness is emphasized almost to the point of imbecility. This virtue in helplessness, in the situation of being overwhelmed by poverty, drought, economic depression, was to become a justificatory myth, in literature, of the Afrikaner in relation to the development of his part in the politics of domination. Based on it, at least in part, is the claim of Afrikaners to be a white African tribe. From Pauline Smith's stories in The Little Karoo through the long series of stoic novels in Afrikaans that André Brink has called ‘a literature of drought and poor whites’, to the tender and witty stories of an Afrikaner writing in English, Herman Charles Bosman, are Afrikaners not shown living as close to the earth and natural disasters as any black man? The measure of poverty as a positive value and the romanticizing of pre-industrialism into a moral virtue are important aspects of Athol Fugard's plays, when these are about whites. His white characters are the children of Pauline Smith's rural Afrikaners, forced to the towns by drought and economic depression, and their virtues lie in their helplessness, their clinging to the past, and their defeat by an ‘English’-dominated industrial society. The myth poses the question: how can such people be held responsible for the degradation that racialism imposes upon the blacks? And also they themselves represent victims within the white supremacist society; are they then not in the same boat as blacks? But we know that these are the people who (like English-speaking South African whites) conquered the blacks; who built a national pride out of their defeat by the British; these are the people whose votes gained political power and legislated, once and for all, the white man's will to overlordship.

It is an ironic illustration of the effect of South African politics upon literature to remark that while, in the 'twenties, Plomer and Van der Post were writing novels exposing the colour-bar, they probably were not so much as aware of the existence of two remarkable fellow novelists of the time. The novelists were black. Thomas Mofolo's Chaka, written in Sesuto about 1910, was published in English in 1931, and is as extraordinary an achievement in terms of the writer's background, if not his age, as Plomer's Turbott Wolfe. It is, of course, a very different novel, in a way that was to be significant of the difference between white liberal or radical writings and the work of black writers themselves. It is written not about blacks, but reflects the identity of a black man. It is both an historical and political novel, based on fact and legend about the King Chaka, and its theme is dealt with in accordance with the author's own sense of the innate conflict in invoking Christian values to interpret an African power struggle. Mofolo, writing for original publication in a missionary journal, tried to approach the life of Chaka, the great despot, the Black Napoleon, as whites have called him, in the light of the Christian text: What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? But although Mofolo presents Chaka's brutal conquering excesses against his own people as sinful blood-lust, they also represent the neurotic paroxysm of a dying nation, turning to rend itself before colonial conquest. When the spears of fratricidal assassins are meeting in Chaka's body, Mofolo has him cry: ‘It is your hope that by killing me ye will become chiefs when I am dead. But ye are deluded; it will not be so, for uMlungu [the white man] will come and it is he who will rule and ye will be his bondmen.’

The guns of white conquest are cocked over Mofolo's novel, but there are no white characters in it. In Sol Plaatje's Mhudi, also based on historical events, and set slightly later in the nineteenth century, uMlungu makes his entry for the first time in South African black literature. The Boers appear, trekking north: ‘travelling with their families in hooded wagons and driving with their caravan their wealth of livestock into the hinterland in search of some unoccupied territory to colonize and to worship God in peace’. ‘But’, asked Chief Moroka, ‘could you not worship God on the South of the Orange River?’

‘We could’, replied Cillier, ‘but oppression is not conducive to piety. We are after freedom. The English laws of the Cape are not fair to us.’

‘We Barolong have always heard that, since David and Solomon, no king has ruled so justly as King George of England!’

‘It may be so’, replied the Boer leader, ‘but there are always two points of view. The point of view of the ruler is not always the viewpoint of the ruled.’

Despite its stylistic crudities, the novel skilfully explores the white man's double standard slyly posited here. Barolong and Boer find a temporary identity of interest in military alliance against the armies of another African tribe, Mzilikazi's Matabele; but once the battle is won, the white man expects to dictate the sharing of spoils, that is, keeping the land for the Boers and handing over the captured cattle to the Barolong. ‘What an absurd bargain’, says the Chief, ‘will cattle run on clouds, and their grass grow on air?’ Similarly, although the white men will fight alongside the blacks, they want no personal relation with them. Juxtaposed with the power struggle between white and black there is in this book the sort of dream of its resolution in non-military, non-revolutionary, non-political terms that was to become the particular justificatory myth given expression by white liberal writers thirty years after Plaatje: a friendship between a young black and a young white. It is the literary wish-fulfilment of what South African society could be, would be, if only the facts of the power struggle conveniently could be ignored. The proposition cancels itself out. Ignored, the facts remain; they are not to be changed by turning to loving without changing the balance of power—to paraphrase Alan Paton's prophetic dictum in Cry the Beloved Country that by the time the whites have turned to loving, the blacks will have turned to hating. Perhaps the vision of black-white brotherhood reached its symbolic apotheosis in Athol Fugard's tragedy as The Blood-Knot between two men who are actual brothers, the skin of one reflecting the white side of their ancestry, the other the black. This friendship is a justificatory myth that embodies the yearning of many whites—and even some blacks—to escape the ugly implications of a society in which such apparently transcendental private relationships are in fact pretty meaningless, trapped in political determinism. Several of my own books explore these implications. In Occasion for Loving a young Englishwoman destroys a black man by indulging in a love affair with him. His flouting of the power of segregation laws leaves him, once she has gone back to England, exactly where he was: carrying a pass and drinking himself to death in the black ghetto. The prototype friendship of Ra-Thaga and Viljoen, Barolong and Boer boys in Sol Plaatje's novel survives until Viljoen sincerely offers Ra-Thaga all that a white man can, in a white-orientated society: ‘I will catch Mzilikazi alive, and tie him to the wagon wheel; then Potgieter will make me his captain, and you will be my right-hand man.’ And Ra-Thaga sincerely rejects the hand-out: ‘Oh no! … what would my children think of me if I were to be the right-hand man of a wifeless youth?’

South African literature seems to have developed by curious fits and starts; the explanation lies close to political developments in the country. In the 'thirties and 'forties, of those writers whose work had been the most innovative in the 'twenties, Plomer and Van der Post were in exile, and Millin had turned her attention mainly to the domestic dramas of Pauline Smith's poor whites, now becoming industrialized in the towns. There were no more novels from Mofolo or Plaatje. Nor did any black writer emerge to follow their bold example of how black writers might (as Claude Wauthier suggests in The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa) reaffirm their origins, and use their present position.

For an explanation of this situation we have to look to the position of black intellectuals at the time. With General Hertzog's ‘final solution’ to the ‘native question’, as exemplified in laws such as the Land Act of 1936, blacks were beginning to realize that in South Africa, the Booker Washington faith in education as a means of gaining acceptance and a share in a common society was getting them nowhere. The eloquence of a scholarly leader like Dr Jabavu had not succeeded in gaining a recognition of civil rights for blacks when the constitution of the South African Union had been drawn up more than twenty-five years before. The eloquence of a Benedict Vilakazi, outstanding Zulu poet of the 'thirties and 'forties, did not succeed in rousing the white man to recognition of the black man's humanity, although he had the courage to tackle subjects such as the condition of black labour. A creative apathy took over among blacks, born of frustration; not for the last time.

By way of comparison, for Afrikaner writers, this was a period of consolidation, through literature, of the importance of their possession of a mother tongue distinct from those imported from Europe. In a movement that finds its parallel with the négritude movement among Caribbean and American Negroes, and Africans outside South Africa, Afrikaners were engaged in affirming their political claim through a cultural identity. Afrikaans had been a patois; it rose to become rich enough to be literary language, hand over fist, so to speak, with the climb to political power. Fine Afrikaner poets, such as Langenhoven, made it so; others, such as Van Wyk Louw and Uys Krige, internationalized it by bringing consciousness of the literary developments of the world outside into its orbit, in the field of poetry. The novelists continued to sing the saga of the rural Afrikaner, dealing with the black man as with the elements.

From the English-speaking population, little came but some poetry, sometimes fine, but often widely generalized in emotion—rather boring ontological thoughts on the Second World War. The war years had the effect, inhibitory to the development of an indigenous literature, of throwing the country back upon cultural links with Europe.

So far it had become a literature of dissent, although it was soon to build up to its strongest impetus ever, South African literature began again, after 1945, at a position somewhere behind that of William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe. It made a new beginning with Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, which suggested the need of a Christian solution to the political problem of racialism. It was a book of lyrical beauty and power that moved the conscience of the outside world over racialism and, what's more, that of white South Africa, as no book had before; Turbott Wolfe had been too radical for them. No piece of writing was to have this effect again until the advent of Athol Fugard's plays, The Blood-Knot and Boesman and Lena, in the late 1960s and early seventies.

The decade-and-a-half through the fifties to the mid-sixties produced a paradox between English-language literature and politics. The Afrikaner Nationalists, who were to codify and implement a long-entrenched colour prejudice as apartheid, had come to power in 1948, and yet it was while this final processing of racialism was in progress that a wave of new South African writers, white and black, suddenly appeared to dig deep into the subsoil of South African society and give expression, in the dimensions of the creative imagination, to the kind of answers that ‘every man, black, white or yellow’ had given to Turbott Wolfe's ‘question of colour’. Peter Abrahams, whose talent was given early encouragement by white leftists—for so many years the only whites prepared to take seriously the possibility of a black writer being more than a sort of quaint freak, a literary albino—wrote the first proletarian novel, Mine Boy, story of a black man confronted with the twin experience of industrialization and race discrimination in a city. My first novel, The Lying Days, published in 1953, was essentially about an experience many young white South Africans have shared. They are born twice: the second time when, through situations that differ with each individual, they emerge from the trappings of colour-consciousness that were as ‘natural’ to them as the walls of home and school. In his brilliant first novel, A Dance in the Sun, Dan Jacobson returned South African Literature to the Karoo, making of the old colonial wilderness the stony ground of self-deception, doubt and questioning. The emphasis is on what happens to whites as oppressors. White Fletcher's attitude to black Joseph, whose daughter has had a brat fathered on her by Fletcher's brother-in-law, is shown as the whole process of action and interaction between the personality of a man and the morality within which it exercises itself. The old woman in Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope, a later novel exploring the same moral theme, this time through a variation of Thomas Pringle's prophetic ‘Brown Dinah’ story, states a conclusion: ‘We are not as other people any more.’ Jack Cope, in a novel called Albino, made an ingenious attempt to side-step the white writer's problems of politically decreed isolation within his white skin; this is a novel about a young white boy brought up as a Zulu—in the words of one of the characters, ‘a white with a black mind’.

In this period, black South Africans were beginning again to write about themselves, not in terms of the epic past but in direct terms of the present.

The central experience of urban life on the dark side of the colour-bar was bringing to paper ‘the stench of real living people’, as one of those writers, Lewis Nkosi, has said. The short stories of Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, carried in Mphahlele's case by a sullen force, and in those of Themba and others jigged with a jaunty wit and self-lacerating humour, reflected survival characteristics developed by the nature of life in those human conglomerations, neither city nor suburb, now called black ‘townships’. The ‘townships’ had in the past been more accurately called ‘locations’, sites chosen by whites to dump blacks outside the city limits, after work, just as they choose sites well out of the way for the city trash heap. Lewis Nkosi, in Home and Exile, a book of essays and literary criticism unique in South African literature, where literary criticism can scarcely be said to exist, wrote from the audacious, acrobatic position peculiar to African intellectuals in the fifties: simultaneously he is a young black who has a foot in the white liberal world, while holding his place in the black proletariat of the ‘township’. Though their boldness was a reflection of confidence stemming from the existence of such movements, none of these writers gave direct expression to the black liberatory movements that drew mass support at the time, the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress. Subconsciously their writings were aimed at white readers and were intended to rouse white consciousness over black frustration. Even in the writings of the most talented black novelist since Peter Abrahams, Alex la Guma, who was a political activist, and the poetry of Dennis Brutus, both later to be political prisoners on Robben Island, there was no overt commitment to a particular political line, nor did they use the vocabulary of political clichés. La Guma's moving novel A Walk in the Night, like his short stories set in prisons, backyards, and cheap cafés, presents men and women who don't talk about apartheid; they bear its weals, so that its flesh-and-blood meaning becomes a shocking, sensuous impact. Few South Africans have been exposed to it, however; La Guma was a banned writer before it was ever published abroad. As the black-white political tension rose, exploded at Sharpeville and culminated in mass imprisonments and the outlawing of black political movements, all these writers and more, with few exceptions, were forced into exile.

Work by white writers who tried to trace, through imaginative insights, in terms of political, social, and spiritual options open to South African whites, the motivation of the young whites who turned to sabotage against the regime in the late sixties, was banned. My novel The Late Bourgeois World, Mary Benson's At the Still Point, Jack Cope's The Dawn Comes Twice, C. J. Driver's Elegy for a Revolutionary—none of these has been read by South Africans themselves, who lived through the experience of that period. It all happened; it certainly exists within their memory; it does not officially exist in South African literature.

Again, by comparison, how was writing in Afrikaans developing in the sixties? The changes were regarded as so fundamental that their decade provided a generic term for the writers who emerged: the ‘Sestigers’. In the words of one of them, André Brink, ‘a conscious effort was made to broaden the hitherto parochial limits of Afrikaans fiction’, to challenge certain cultural taboos in Afrikanerdom, especially the Calvinist taboos on uncompromising religious exploration, and the challenging of old moralities, especially on sexual matters. Against the background events of a country that seemed on the brink of a revolution, the Sestigers preoccupied themselves with just precisely these things, and with William Burroughs-inspired experiment in literary form. They challenged with sexual candour and religious questioning, taunting the church and the Afrikaans Academy of letters; but the evidence that not one of them published anything that was banned shows how they turned away, astonishingly, from the deepest realities of the life going on around them. The Sestigers' outstanding prose writer, and indeed the most sweeping imaginative power in South African literature as a whole, Etienne le Roux, makes the lofty claim that his trilogy, Towards a Dubious Salvation, is a ‘metaphysical’ novel; but if a writer is part of the creative consciousness of the society in which he lives, is it not a form of betrayal, of creative as well as human integrity, to choose to turn away from the messy confrontation of man with man, and address oneself to God? In fact, reading this dazzling book, you sometimes have the feeling that Etienne le Roux is God, an infinitely detached Olympian observer, amusing himself by recording all those absurd and dirtily flamboyant little battles and copulations way, way down on earth.

In 1974, for the first time, a book by an Afrikaans writer was banned. André Brink has written a novel that breaks the political taboos answering the challenge he himself published in a newspaper five years ago: ‘If Afrikaans writing is to achieve any true significance within the context of the revolution of Africa (of which we form part) … it seems to me that it will come from those who are prepared to sling the “No!” of Antigone into the violent face of the System.’ Not unpredictably, his novel suffers from the defiant exultation and relief of that cry, coming so belatedly from the Afrikaans novel, looting a newly seized freedom of expression on whose validity the seal of ‘banned’ was almost sure to be set. Perhaps it was inevitable that this novel should demand of its creator that it encompass all that is forbidden in the ninety-seven definitions of what the Censorship Act finds ‘undesirable’; that it should roll up pell-mell all the forbidden themes and many of the cliché situations written about already by others. It follows that this novel cannot do André Brink justice, as a writer. Yet its exaggeration, its stylistic piling-up of words, images, events, like a series of blows—Take that! and that! and that!—remind one of the works of certain black South African writers, in which the truth is in the excesses and even absurdities because this is the fantasy bred by our society, it is the truth as evidence of the kind of nightmares that grow out of our kind of daylight.

That ‘No!’ of Antigone has come out loud and clear from Afrikaans literature only once before, and from a poet, Ingrid Jonker. Somehow she managed, without compromising her great gifts, to write a poem of the sixties that sets the era's events in a perspective that takes in past and present and projects the future as no writer, black or white, has done after her. The poem refers to the pass-burning campaigns of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress, when women and children were killed in the course of police and military action:

The child is not dead
the child lifts his fists against his mother
who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath
of freedom and the veld
in the locations of the cordoned heart
The child lifts his fists against his father
In the march of the generations who are shouting Afrika! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride
The child is not dead
not at Langa nor at Nyanga
nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police post in Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain
the child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with their rifles, saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving
the child peers through the window of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who wanted only to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks on through all Africa
the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world
without a pass.

What is the position of South African literature in the mid-seventies, the era of Bantustan independence within the country while former guerrilla movements become constitutional governments in countries round about; the era of dialogue on black-white federalism; of streaky, if not exactly thoroughly mixed sport; and of the re-emergence of mass black action in the form of striking labour forces? The series of blood-lettings over the years—writers going into exile—emphasizes the enormous influence of politics on literature not only in the obvious way—that so many writers are in imposed or self-imposed exile—but also in the state of South African society as reflected in their work if they continue to live here in South Africa, as opposed to the vision of the place held by writers now removed from the actual scene. A writer as immensely gifted as Dan Jacobson, after a series of novels rooted ‘from memory’, so to speak, in South Africa, has begun to write novels thematically remote from it. Perhaps this is a liberation. Alex La Guma, in the gentle, beautifully written In the Fog at the Season's End, writes, like so many black exiles, as if life in South Africa froze with the trauma of Sharpeville. Since he is a good writer, he cannot create at the newspaper-story level, and cannot, from abroad, quite make the projection, at the deeper level, into a black political milieu that has changed so much since he left. Ezekiel Mphahlele's novel The Wanderers also suffers from this lack of connection. Only the poet Dennis Brutus seems to have drawn strength from the ‘bitter bread of exile’ and to have developed his gifts fully, if perhaps differently from the way he might have at home. In a collection of poems that places him perhaps higher in achievement than any of the younger generation, Arthur Nortje, exiled and dead before his book Dead Roots was published in 1973, writes the spiritual autobiography of exile on the most harrowing level. In the end, he who has had to make do with crumbs from the white man's table at home may find no stomach left for Europe's bounty: ‘I drag my shrunken corpulence / among the tables of rich libraries. / Famous viands tasted like ash …’ These are the terrors of exile, for a writer; and the extinction of a literature.

At home, significant South African drama in English has been created, single-handed, by Athol Fugard. The obvious major influence of Beckett on his work is a fascinating example of an esoteric mode, in which character is sacrificed to symbolic abstraction, and dialogue largely disembodied, returned to flesh and the individual involved rather than alienated. This is an interesting example of a writer's methodological response to his sociopolitical situation.

Of the new novelists—few and far between—who have emerged lately, a black one, Bessie Head, in exile but still on the continent of Africa, expresses an indiscriminate repugnance for all political aspirations in all races, and a white one at home, Sheila Fugard, takes into the arcane realm of Buddhist mysticism the old white liberal justificatory myth of the power of love to melt racialism. One of the two most interesting newcomers, J. M. Coetzee, with his two-part novel, Dusklands, links the behaviouristic conditioning of peoples by other peoples as a congenital flaw in human nature. His first narrative, that of a South African working in 1970 as a United States government official on a ‘New Life Project’ for the people of Vietnam, posits the choice offered by the anthropologist Franz Boas: ‘if we wish to take over the direction of a society we must either guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose new structures’. It does not require much insight to understand where the reader's eyes are being turned: to that other society, in South Africa, where both these techniques of socio-political manipulation have been tried upon the indigenous population. And this could lead us obediently to a conclusion: if white South Africans are no better, they are merely just as bad as other people with the will to follow up military with psychological conquest. Like them, they run the risk of losing their own souls in the contest—the narrator retreats into madness in which he has ‘high hopes of finding whose fault I am’.

The second narrative is a superbly written attempt of a dubious kind to which South African white writers are beginning to turn, it seems, in unconscious search of a new justificatory myth: the explanation of the present in terms of the past; and therefore, does it not follow, a present as helplessly inexorable as the past? The narrator in this story set in 1760 goes hunting elephant and falls ill among hostile Hottentots. With a putrefying backside as the sum of his pain and humiliation, he enters the old Conradian heart of darkness. In order to survive, he must live as the people he despises as savages manage to live; he must admit, in himself, hideous instincts that he had attributed only to them. The final irony of some of his reflections would seem to make them those of a twentieth-century Coetzee, rather than an eighteenth-century one: ‘To these people [the Hottentots] for whom life was nothing but a series of accidents, had I not been simply another accident? Was there nothing to be done to make them take me more seriously?’ And again, ‘I am an explorer. My essence is to open what is closed, to bring to light what is dark. If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way’. After his recovery and return to white settlement he goes back with a punitive expedition to the Hottentots who had both succoured and tortured him. He wipes them out in ‘the desolate infinity of my power over them’. The fatalism, the detachment borrowed from history in this novel are best signified by the choice of epigraph for the second narrative, a quotation from Flaubert: ‘What is important is the philosophy of history.’

Another newcomer, D. M. Zwelonke, apparently a member of Poqo, the underground wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, has written a first novel in exile after a spell on Robben Island. His book takes its title from and is set on that prison island where once Makana, the prophet who wanted to drive the white man into the sea, was also imprisoned. Much of the writing is naïve and sometimes even nonsensical, but where he deals with the dreams and nightmares that spring from spare diet, solitary confinement, and the repetitious labour of endless stone-breaking, no polished ‘imagining’ of the situation by anyone, even a black writer, could achieve his branding-iron impact. As for the book's vision of the white man, here it is another new myth-making:

We have seen the mole and a curse has befallen us. There is a time-old legend that he who sees the mole shall hear of a friend's relative's death. An evil omen was forecast: we have seen the colonial monster in his bathroom, naked, playing with his penis and anus. In consequence he was enraged. He caught us and dragged us to Makana Island, and there we were his prisoners. A curse has fallen on us. He is like the mole because he cannot see. He gropes in the blind alley of the tragedy of history.

All this is a long, long way from the world of the black writer Lewis Nkosi in the fifties, the mixed parties where black and white argued politics, arms around each other's necks, glass in hand. And it is the vision, too, that hovers in incantation over the resurrection of black writing after the apathetic post-Sharpeville silence induced by censorship and the relentless equation, in the minds of the security police, between black articulateness and subversion. I believe these new young black writers instinctively attempt poetry rather than prose because poetry is the means of literary expression least accessible to the rules-of-thumb employed by the Censorship Board. The deracination of their predecessors of the fifties does not attract them; they are street-corner poets whose work reflects an affirmation of black identity aimed at raising black consciousness rather than rousing white consciousness to the black man's plight. Blacks have seen white culture, naked, for what it has proved to be, for blacks: posited as an absolute value, and eternally withheld from them. These writers are interpreting the assertion of a particular kind of black separatism which exists concurrently with, if discounted by, the official kind accepted in dialogue between Bantustan leaders and white leadership in and outside the South African government. Mongane Wally Serote makes the black claim to the right to dictate terms:

White people are white people
They must learn to listen.
Black people are black people
They must learn to talk.

Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali takes hold of the everyday intrusion of horror into his people's lives, unafraid to write the elegy of the black prisoners who suffocated to death in a van that had broken down on the route from prison to court:

They rode upon
the death chariot
to their Golgotha—
three vagrants
whose papers to be in Caesar's Empire
were not in order.
The sun
shrivelled their bodies
in the mobile tomb
as airtight as canned fish.
We're hot!
We're thirsty!
We're hungry!
The centurion
touched their tongues
with the top
of a lance
dipped in apathy:
‘Don't cry to me,
but to Caesar who
crucifies you.
A woman came
to wipe their faces.
She carried a dishcloth
full of bread and tea.
We're dying!
The centurion washed his hands.

Irony is perhaps the best literary mode of expression, where passionate assertion will not pass the censors. James Matthews' book of poems, Cry Rage!, plumbs with passion not always matched by skill the hollowness of high-sounding apartheid terms such as ‘separate development’ and ‘surplus people’, and is banned. Another of these young poets, Don Mattera, has recently been declared a banned person; one wonders how long the better-known Adam Small, who (like Mattera) has taken the decision of many people of mixed blood to see themselves now as blacks rather than half-whites—will go on being published if along with that abandoned half-white status, he also abandons the idea of love always acceptable to whites, as a weapon of a struggle. Judging from some of his statements lately, I do not think he will again be writing in terms such as these:

You can stop me
goin' to Groote Schuur
in the same ambulance
as you
or tryin' to go Heaven
from a Groote Kerk pew
you can stop me doin'
some silly thing like that
but O
there's somethin' you can
never never do:
true's God
you can stop me doin'
all silly things of that sort
and to think of it
if it comes to that
you can even stop me hating'
but O
there's somethin' you can
never never do—
you can't
ever
ever
ever stop me
loving
even you!

In conclusion, to return to the situation in which all South African writers find themselves. Black or white, writing in English, Afrikaans, Sesuto, Zulu, even if he successfully shoots the rapids of bannings and/or exile, any writer's attempt to present in South Africa a totality of human experience within his own country is subverted before he sets down a word. As a white man, his fortune may change; the one thing he cannot experience is blackness—with all that implies in South Africa. As a black man, the one thing he cannot experience is whiteness—with all that implies. Each is largely outside the other's experience-potential. There is no social mobility across the colour-line. The identification of class with colour means that breaching class barriers is breaking the law, and the indivisible class-colour barrier is much, much more effective, from the point of view of limiting the writer's intimate knowledge of his society, than any class barrier has ever been. The black writer in South Africa writes from the ‘inside’ about the experience of the black masses, because the colour-bar keeps him steeped in its circumstances, confined in a black township and carrying a pass that regulates his movements from the day he is born to the status of ‘piccanin’ to the day he is buried in a segregated cemetery. The white writer, aseptically quarantined in his test-tube élite existence, is cut off by enforced privilege from the greater part of the society in which he lives; the life of the proletariat, the 19 million whose potential of experience he does not share, from the day he is born baas to the day he is buried in his segregated cemetery.

The black writer would seem to have the advantage here; there are only 4 million whites. But this compartmentalization of society works both ways. The black writer is extremely limited in his presentation of white characters—witness the frequency with which his are no more than cardboard or caricature. What he cannot know about the white man's life because of those large areas of the white experience he is excluded from by law, he supplies out of a fantasy distorted by resentment at the exclusion. The very force of the accusation he feels he must make against the white man sometimes loses the strength it should have. So it happens that you come across, in the work of a talented black writer, a white character so clumsily presented that he seems to have no place in the work. A black South African, in exile in a near-by territory I visited recently, challenged my assertion that the presentation of white characters in work by black writers is limited by caricature: on the contrary, he countered, this is the way whites are, so far as blacks are concerned. I think he makes an interesting point. Caricature under these circumstances is perhaps not a deliberate distortion of the subject but a form of truth about those who see the subject that way. The idea relates to my own observation about André Brink's novel.

In the work of white writers, you often get the same gap in experience between black and white lives compensated for by the projection of emotions about blacks into the creation of a black typology. Guilt is the prevailing emotion there; often it produces cardboard and unconscious caricature just as resentment does.

Professor Harry Levin defines cultural identity as ‘nothing more nor less than the mean between selfhood and otherness, between our respect for ourselves and our relationship with our fellow men and women’. The dilemma of a literature in South Africa, where the law effectively prevents any real identification of the writer with his society as a whole, so that ultimately he can identify only with his colour, distorts this mean irreparably. And cultural identity is the ground on which the exploration of self in the imaginative writer makes a national literature.

Selected Works and Studies

Works

Thomas Pringle, African Sketches (London, 1834).

Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (London, 1883; Penguin, 1972).

Sarah Gertrude Millin, God's Stepchildren (London, 1924; 1951).

Pauline Smith, The Little Karoo (London, 1925; 1952).

William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe (London, 1925; new edn with introduction by Laurens van der Post, 1965).

Roy Campbell, Collected Poems, 3 vols (London, 1949-61).

Sol Plaatje, Mhudi (Grahamstown, 1930; new edn with introduction by T. J. Couzens, Johannesburg, 1975).

Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, translated by F. H. Dutton (1931; London and New York, 1967).

Laurens van der Post, In a Province (London, 1934; 1953).

Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy (London, 1946; 1969).

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

Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London, 1959); In Corner B (Nairobi, 1967); The Wanderers (New York, 1970).

Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile (London, 1965).

Herman Charles Bosman, Unto Dust (London, 1963).

Athol Fugard, The Blood Knot (Penguin, 1968); Port Elizabeth Plays (London, 1975).

André Brink, Looking on Darkness (Kennis van die Aand) (London, 1974).

Nadine Gordimer, Occasion for Loving; The Lying Days; The Late Bourgeois World (London, 1963, 1958, 1966).

Jack Cope, Albino; The Dawn Comes Twice (London, 1964, 1965).

Can Themba, The Will to Die (London, 1972).

Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night; In the Fog of the Season's End (London, 1967, 1972).

Mary Benson, At the Still Point (Boston, 1969).

C. J. Driver, Elegy for a Revolutionary (London, 1969).

Etienne le Roux, Towards a Dubious Salvation (London, 1973).

Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust (London, 1968).

Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (London, 1972).

Bessie Head, Maru (London, 1972).

Mongane Wally Serote, Yakhal N'komo (Johannesburg, 1972).

James Matthews, Cry Rage! (Johannesburg, 1972).

Benedict Vilakazi, Zulu Horizons, translated by D. M. Malcolm and J. Mandlenkosi Sikakana and rendered into English verse by Florence Louie Friedman (Johannesburg, 1973).

Arthur Nortje, Dead Roots (London, 1973).

Sheila Fugard, The Castaways (London, 1973).

D. M. Zwelonke, Robben Island (London, 1973).

J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (Johannesburg, 1974).

Studies, Anthologies

Ezekiel Mphahlele, ed., African Writing Today (London, 1967), contributions by Casey Motsisi and others.

Jack Cope and Uys Krige, ed., The Penguin Book of South African Verse (London, 1969), poems by: Ingrid Jonker; Uys Krige; C. J. Langenhoven; N. P. van Wyk Louw; Samuel Mqhayi; Adam Small; and others.

Rowland Smith, Lyric and Polemic: the Literary Personality of Roy Campbell (Montreal, 1972).

Harry Levin, Essay in Comparative Literature Studies, 10 (1973; University of Illinois).

Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, translated by Shirley Kay (London, 1966).