SOURCE: Brink, André. “Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A Personal Testimony).” World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (winter 1996): 17-23.

1.

“Our continent has just invented another,” wrote Montaigne about the discovery of the New World. At the time, of course, to invent was a synonym for to discover; yet both readings of the word are relevant to a procedure which may well become, increasingly, a preoccupation of the literature produced in postapartheid South Africa. The need to revisit history has both accompanied and characterised the literature of most of the great “thresholds of change,” as Kenneth Harrow has called them—those periods in which, as Santayana had it, “mankind starts dreaming in a different key.” This need speaks as much from the inventive historiography of Herodotus as from the Icelandic sagas, the heroic epics of the Renaissance, the flowering of the historical novel in the wake of the French Revolution, the writings of early modernism (from Kristin Lavransdatter to Finnegans Wake), or the postmodernisms of our fin de siècle, which cover the spectrum from One Hundred Years of Solitude to The Satanic Verses, from Terra Nostra to The Name of the Rose, from John Barth to Italo Calvino, from Milan Kundera to Peter Carey.

In South Africa the change of direction signaled by the dismantling of apartheid (against the backdrop of the larger watershed marked by the breakup of the former Second World) coincided with the revisions wrought in historical consciousness by postmodernism, which may well have an impact on a novelist's view of history. It is likely to form part of an intensive endeavour in postapartheid literature to address the silences of the past, and the forms this may assume cannot but be informed by the peculiar concept of history the authors concerned bring to it. In general terms it would involve a choice between two kinds of concepts, two ends on a sliding scale: namely, “history as fact” and “history as fiction.” I know that in my own work I have moved from one notion to the other, not necessarily in a clear linear development, but as part of a continuing dialectic; and it seems to me that this may hold true of the larger territory of the South African historical novel as a whole. This is what I propose to address in the present essay in order to present, at least tentatively, some personal and subjective comments within a larger perspective.

It is important to remember that within historiography itself there has been a move away from the approach of the past as a set of “data,” a “reality behind the text,” toward the open-ended perception of history itself as text and as narrative. This move has accompanied the shift in the novel, from the realism of the nineteenth century (which, by and large, persisted in South African literature until well after World War II) to the constructions and inventions of modernism and postmodernism. Throughout this movement its dynamic has been provided by the underlying tussle between Europe and Africa, and informed by the need to bring under words the invention of a new continent.

2.

In older South African literature, whether written by black or white authors, in English or in Afrikaans,¹ the historical novel occupied a very minor place; and as might be expected, the approach was largely traditional—in the form of attempts merely to personalise and dramatise accepted renderings of history. In English, Thomas MacIntosh McCombie wrote Adriaan van der Stel; or, Two Hundred Years After in 1885, retelling the struggle of Dutch and Huguenot colonists against an autocratic Cape governor during the early years of Dutch settlement; and the black writer Sol Plaatje presented in Mudhi (1930, but written much earlier) the first attempt to retell an epoch from the country's history from the point of view of black experience. For much historical writing in the twentieth century, the tone was set by the popular but ideologically suspect novels of Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889-1968), which took the supremacy of the white race as their point of departure. Several other writers, including Stuart Cloete (1897-1976), veered toward an even more sensationalist approach. In Afrikaans, where for the better part of this century the genre has enjoyed considerably more popularity, novels by authors as disparate as J. H. H. de Waal (1871-1937), Elizabeth Vermeulen (1897-1978), and the much more modern F. A. Venter (b. 1916) invariably revisited the great moments of the Afrikaner past—notably the Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War—to rediscover a divine interest in the trials and tribulations of God's chosen people in darkest Africa. One of the few Afrikaans writers openly to challenge the Eurocentric approach has been Jan Rabie (b. 1920), who dramatically rewrote Afrikaner history from the point of view of “coloured” experience. But not one of these writers revealed any doubt about history as a collection of facts, objectively verifiable; not one of them challenged the underlying ideological assumptions of history as a representation of the real. Even if writers like Plaatje and Rabie do offer an alternative—black or “coloured”—view of the past, their acceptance of the status of history is identical to that of the other writers concerned; that is, the assumption that interpretations may differ but that behind the idiosyncrasies of personal perception, history exists as an acceptable record of an accessible reality. It is a map drawn of a real, existing land: the lines and contours and place-names may be refined and revised as we move toward ever greater precision, but given the right tools and the right experience, the map at the very least has the potential of becoming a wholly dependable representation of the thing itself.

The problem of this approach, as Hayden White (89) has so convincingly argued, is that it is erroneous for a theorist/critic/reader to presume that the “context” or “historical milieu” of a literary text “has a concreteness and an accessibility” which the text itself lacks, “as if it were easier to perceive the reality of a past world put together from a thousand historical documents than it is to probe the depths of a single literary work that is present to the critic studying it. But the presumed concreteness and accessibility of historical milieux, these contexts of the texts literary scholars study, are themselves products of the fictive capability of the historians who have studied those contexts” (my italics).

3.

What is interesting, as a background to postmodernist forages into the historical novel in more recent South African literature, is a small clutch of early fictional writing in which a view of history-as-narrative, history-as-text, is already communicated. It may be significant for future development, as the evolving new South Africa tries to come to grips with its past, that the very first historical novel in the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit's Die Koningin van Skeba (The Queen of Sheba), first serialised in 1896-98, offered, in the guise of a factual account of a journey to Great Zimbabwe, a wildly imaginative invention about a distant African past, in the form of ancient documents “discovered” in the famous Zimbabwe ruins and allegedly translated by an expert in the group of travelers. So persuasive was the account that contemporary readers were horrified to learn subsequently that the respected clergyman du Toit had in fact “lied” to them. Inserting himself—unwittingly, quite probably—in a tradition of the textualisation of history at least as old as the Don Quixote, the Reverend du Toit may have unwittingly provided a model for much later postmodernist writing in South Africa.

Another significant forerunner of this trend may be A. C. Jordan's Imgqumbo Yeminyana (The Wrath of the Ancestors; 1940): although it cannot be regarded as a historical novel in any accepted sense of the term (it deals with a young man from the Mpondomise people who has to abandon his university studies in order to assume the kingship), the way in which the protagonist must reconcile his progressive ideas with the whole weight of his historical and traditional milieu does problematise the very notion of history. Of particular importance is the way in which any excessive or fanciful usage of history as an ideological tool in the community is persistently branded in the text as “Nongqawuse tales”—a reference to that key moment in Xhosa history when, in 1857, the young girl Nongqawuse played a Jeanne d'Arc role in persuading her people that mysterious voices had ordered the slaughtering of all the cattle and the burning of all the possessions of the Xhosa people in anticipation of an apocalypse in which the ancestors would rise from the dead to drive the white race into the sea. Jordan's skillful involution of myth and history, fiction and fact, paves the way for future revisitings of the past in order to evoke it, not as fact but as metaphor. In this way his text may be read as a dialectic between written history and oral tradition, producing a new form teeming with possibilities for future exploration.

4.

South African fiction began to interrogate history—not just different versions of history, but the very notion of its ontology, status, and structure—well before the rigorous certainties of apartheid began to crumble. In Afrikaans literature the decisive marker of this change was Etienne Leroux's Magersfontein, o Magersfontein (1976; Eng. 1983), in which textualisation runs riot. The narrative concerns the attempts of a present-day film company from Britain to make a film based on the crucial battle of Magersfontein, fought during the Anglo-Boer War; in the process there is growing confusion between the historical personalities, their fictionalised counterparts in the script, the actors involved in playing these roles, and the “real-life” characters of the actors. One of the consequences for the narrative (which ends in a literal “send-up” in a hot-air balloon) is that all sense of identity is dissipated in the endless postponements and distancings of Derridean différance, and the very notion of “historical origins,” of an ur-text, of a reality behind the textualising processes of a self-inventing narrative is left open-ended.

Once again, as Hayden White (91) formulates it, history itself becomes no more than an extended metaphor: “It tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about events with different emotional valences. The historical narrative does not image the things it indicates; it calls to mind images of the things it indicates, in the same way that a metaphor does.”²

In English South African fiction this process has been demonstrated in quite a variety of novels, including The Arrowing of the Cane (1986) and The Desecration of the Graves (1990) by John Conyngham, in both of which “real” or “imagined” texts from the past are reinvented in the present. In the narrative world of the first novel (by far the more convincing of the two) the narrator renounces the possibility of physical and emotional fulfillment in a love relationship with his fiancée to withdraw into a private world where sex is simulated by inserting a manuscript scroll (which represents his own biography and the written record of his white tribe) in a vaginal fissure in the cellar; from which it can be retrieved only in a postapocalyptic world. By reducing, in this way, his private and collective history to a written text, the narrator reminds the reader that, as a character in a novel, he is no more than text.

Likewise, the driving force behind Mike Nicols's three novels to date is the fictionalisation of history: in The Powers That Be (1989) the entire apartheid experience is reduced emblematically to the fantastic story of a small village in the iron grip of Captain Nunes (who, as a construct, is reminiscent of Brecht's Arturo Ui); in This Day and Age (1992) crucial battles from the history of the South African racial conflict are reinvented in a curious synchronic relationship (occasionally with a certain strained urge to allegorise) in which disparate incidents are retextualised to foreground the pervasiveness of evil; in the most allegorical and least successful of the three, Horseman (1994), an apocalyptic rider charges through a frightening world that ranges, in time and space, from medieval Europe to present-day Southern Africa to sow terror and confusion. The point is that by turning everything into story and thereby “dehistoricising”—and defamiliarising—known events and patterns from European and African tradition, Nicol restores an original violence to the reader's awareness of history. Precisely by shattering the perception of history as “something out there,” a record of distant times, people, and events, and drawing into the textual here-and-now of a story that exists within the physicality of a book held in the reader's hands, it assumes a new immediacy and in fact a new urgent “reality.”

The most impressive demonstration of the textualisation of history in recent South African fiction has been the novels of J. M. Coetzee, in which it assumes a dazzling variety of forms. It involves the literal rewriting—and reimagining—of a specific historical sequence of events in The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (in the diptych novel Dusklands, 1974); it also embraces the delineation of the patterns of power in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), in which the experience of empire acquires a heightened urgency precisely because the Empire of the text is not identified exclusively with any historical epoch (ranging from the Roman to the apartheid state) but spans and crystallises them all; elsewhere the process ranges from the recovery of a history already fictionalised by Defoe (Foe, 1986), to a history of a possible future already perceptible within the present (Life and Times of Michael K, 1983), to the diarising of a personal history in the process of unfolding (Age of Iron, 1990), to a reimagined and intensely fictionalised life of Dostoevsky (The Master of Petersburg, 1994).

Apropos of Foe, Malvern van Wyk Smith (128) comments on the text and the writing of Robinson Crusoe as “the archetypal text of the colonizing myth … capable of generating endless texts and readings … all re-inscriptions of the history of conquest which have powerful ‘meanings’ but no substance in a reality identifiable outside the discourse itself” (my italics). This, it seems to me, is precisely the point of the endless array of revisitations of history now opening up to the writer of the new South Africa. For a very long time (for eminently understandable reasons, and perhaps not without effect) South African fiction has been intimately tied up with the need to record, to witness, to represent, and to interpret the unfolding of a historical process and its effects on the lives of women, men, and children caught up in it. At a time when the media were prevented from fulfilling their basic function of reportage, fiction writers had to assume this burden. But as the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev once said, this activity could be compared to the uses to which furniture might be put in time of war, whether as barricades against the enemy, or as firewood in a winter of deprivation, or as blunt weapons of defence and attack; yet when peace returns, furniture is set free to become once again no more—and no less—than “mere” furniture. Similarly, if in a state of emergency writing assumes functions of representation and persuasion, its “true” function ultimately, always, and already lies in being what it is: a text and a process of textualisation, a narrative and a process of narrativisation. And when it turns to history, as it may feel inspired to do in a time when the processes of history are themselves highlighted, it can explore the kinship of story and history precisely by recognising the story nature of history itself—that is, its textual status, and its recourse to the forms and processes of storytelling, emplotment, characterisation, et cetera. Hayden White once again: “In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (82).

5.

In looking, with the advantage of hindsight, at a few moments in my own writing as a new kind of historical consciousness surfaced, I do not presume to attempt anything more than to clarify for myself, après coup, certain issues of which I may not even have been conscious at the time (which is why I am intrigued enough to look at them now) and which may or may not illustrate, in one concrete example, the development of this consciousness at a time when a “threshold of change”—in contemporary South African history, and in the possibility of a new kind of literature emerging within it—is being crossed.

Returning reluctantly to South Africa in 1961 after two years of study in Paris and still enthralled by the world I'd discovered abroad, I found that the last subject that interested me as a writer was this country; my centre of gravity was elsewhere. But after another year in France, the watershed year of 1968, my second return was different in every respect from the first: this time I wanted to come home to “know the place for the first time.” What fired my writing was no longer what I had in common with writers in Europe, but what tied me to Africa. For the first time I was possessed by the passionate need to define my roots and invent my subcontinent. And the first form this took was Looking on Darkness (1974; first published in Afrikaans in 1973), in which the “coloured” narrator attempts to reconstruct his own history (an exercise which, in one way or another, appears to obsess all my other narrators). His sources are twofold: the oral tradition passed on to him by his mother, in which at least some of the original “voices” attempt to find an articulation within Joseph Malan's reconstructions; and external materials, written documentation in books and archives. He inevitably finds that sources are suspect, and so his preoccupation is not primarily with an “accurate” or “objective” report (although at times his conditioning by traditional mind-sets is still evident) but with the appropriation of a personal history through the imagination. (In later novels like An Act of Terror [1991] the writing of a personal or tribal history would be extended to involve the gradual transition from mythology to historiography.) The suspect nature of the verbal construct is signaled to the “objective” spectator/reader—personified by Joseph's jailers, who survey his every move and scrutinise his every word—by the thirteen Shakespeare sonnets he leaves behind as his disguised written testimony. (Whatever else he writes he flushes down the toilet, which means that the text that meets the reader's eye is quite literally an impossible text which cannot exist except in the narrator's mind—and he, of course, is dead by the time any outsider can enter the narrative world.) These sonnets are Joseph's “purest” testimony, into which his whole life history has been distilled; and they are literally the words of “someone else” (Shakespeare). Furthermore, even as quotations they are not dependable, as there are errors of transcription in each of them. As an actor, Joseph has a trained memory; it is his only certainty in a world of endless shifts and changes. But the actor's profession is notorious, not only for its “secondhand” quality, but also for the futility and unreliability of its sound and fury. And if the sole dimension of existence in which Joseph presents himself as reliable—his ability to memorise the texts of others—is revealed to be dubious, then everything else in his confession, including most notably his narration of his history, is open to question. But this ambiguity remains vested in the role of the narrator, rather than the perception of history as such—except if the interposition of the narrator between reader and story is to be read as a demonstration of the opacity of language, which presents language not as an access toward history but as a displacement of it—i.e., language not as a transparent sheet of glass but as a stained-glass window (which still requires the light from the “real” world to bring it to life, but which focuses the attention on its intrinsic colours and patterns).

Unreliable narrators of one kind or another recur in Rumours of Rain (1978) and A Dry White Season (1979). In the first, Martin Mynhardt demonstrates the apartheid mind at work, as he desperately tries to impose a rigorous separation on the different clusters of data that constitute his life, one set surrounding his son, another his best friend, or his father, or his mistress; and this severe ordering of his various worlds—until they are all swept away by a more fluid and chaotic course of events—must inevitably raise questions about his presentation of history as well. In A Dry White Season the narrator, a hack writer, is let loose upon an assortment of notes, diaries, press cuttings, et cetera, and the tension between the attempt to “do justice” to the documents and his professional inclination to sensationalise his material coincides with the tussle between different perceptions of history, even though the novel as a whole, geared toward representation-as-protest, does not radically question the status of history.

An altogether different situation obtains in An Instant in the Wind (1976; Afrikaans edition 1975), in which the illusion is created of a “true story” based on authentic archival documents. These documents do not exist, however, at least not in the Cape Archives; inasmuch as the story has an original source, it is Sidney Nolan's account of the famous Australian history of Mrs Frazer, which also formed the ur-text of Patrick White's novel A Fringe of Leaves, published—by a curious coincidence—simultaneously with the English edition of An Instant in the Wind. The novel is presented explicitly as a modern reconstruction and a reimagination of an “original”; but the point is, of course, that this “original” is transposed to a different century and a different continent, which effectively deauthenticates it as a history (even though most of the historical information about the Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth century is based on travel documents from that time and place).

The differs from A Chain of Voices (1982), in which the narrative of a slave revolt in the Cold Bokkeveld in 1825 is indeed inspired by existing documents (the 2,000-odd pages of documents surrounding the trial of the slave rebels). What struck me at the time was the way in which the depositions of all the witnesses and accused in the trial had been transcribed by court officials (and, in fact, the scribe[s] had occasionally left more than one version of his/their transcriptions behind, in various stages of legibility and stylistic competence). Only occasionally, in unguarded moments as it were, one could hear, in an unexpected or ungrammatical turn of phrase, the “original” voice of the speaker sounding through the palimpsest of transcriptions. (And even in these cases it was a mere hunch, a personal opinion, a “feeling”; there was no external proof in the documents themselves.) So here I was exposed to history itself; it was the most direct access to “what really happened” I could ever have hoped for. Yet even in these circumstances my most painful discovery was the unreliability of historical documentation. (Even on “basic facts” like the ages or names or family relationships of some deponents the documents turned out to be fairly unreliable.) Moreover, on one absolutely crucial issue the documents were conspicuously silent: toward the end of the proceedings the judge referred to “certain rumours” surrounding the relationship between the slave Galant and the white woman Hester and ordered an in camera hearing of evidence in this respect. Nothing further was recorded about the enquiry—which was enough stimulation for the dirty mind of the novelist to take over.

But what is really at issue is that the archival material demonstrated at this point quite dramatically that history, even in the most traditional sense of the word, is not only composed of texts (written and otherwise), but is also strung together from silences. And this, it seems to me, is what primarily attracts the novelist (as it originally attracted the historiographer?). Throughout the apartheid years whole territories of silence were created by the nature of the power structures that ordered the country and defined the limits of its articulated experience. Some of these silences were deliberately imposed, whether by decree or by the operations of censorship and the security police; but in many cases the silences arose because the urgencies of the situation presented priorities among which certain experiences simply did not figure very highly. (In crude terms, if at a given moment I had to choose between writing a love story and the story of a life disrupted by the machinations of apartheid, I would opt for the latter—not because it was “expected” of me or “imposed” on me, but because in those circumstances I would choose to.) In yet other cases the silences had to be discovered below the clamour that filled certain gaps: the clamour of “official versions” and “dominant discourses,” which caused such a din that one often did not even realise the noise existed, not for its own sake but purely as a cover-up for the silences below. It is the inverse of what George Eliot intimated in that wonderful line from Middlemarch, “There is a great roar at the other side of silence.”

A completely different relationship with history informs The First Life of Adamastor (1993), originally intended as the first of thirteen chapters in a novel to be entitled The Lives of Adamastor (and which was eventually reshaped into Thomas Landman's invention of a family history in An Act of Terror, 1991). This was, explicitly, an attempt to counter, from the “inside,” two key myths of the dominant historical and ethnographic discourse about Africa: Camões's version of Europe's early encounter with Africa, personified as a monstrous black giant who resists all attempts to be conquered from abroad and who is finally punished by Zeus, the god of European patriarchy, for having dared to love the (white) nymph coveted by the Father himself; and second, the persistent European myth about black African sexual potency. In both cases a “send-up” technique of gross exaggeration is used, deliberately couched in the shape of early European narratives but incorporating stories and story forms from various African oral traditions. This, I hoped, would result in something more complex than a simple refutation of the prevalent discourse, or the positing of a simple alternative: because part of the narrative wealth of Africa lies in moving beyond the simple dichotomies of either/or, to arrive at more syncretic and holistic patterns of narrative thinking. (And “narrative thinking” is, of course, what writing is about: discovering for the novel, and rediscovering in each new novel, that which, as Kundera said, can be articulated only by the novel and not by any other form of discourse.)

In yet another way my involvement with history expressed itself in On the Contrary (1983), where the mendacious and imaginative nature of the historical character Estienne Barbier prompted a continuation, in the novel, of the self-inventions in which Barbier indulged through the writing of his letters (still available in the Archives) to successive governors at the Cape of Good Hope. Accompanied by the fictional character of Don Quixote and by a Jeanne d'Arc as much imagined by Barbier as drawn from the popular mythologies surrounding her historical role, the new hidalgo sets out on several journeys (all three of them imagined, by the writer or by the narrator or by both) into the African interior, an interior whose geography is as suspect as its history; it is, in fact, an interior composed not so much of landscapes and climatological conditions as by the texts of numerous eighteenth-century travelers through the Cape hinterland. The key figure among them, whose voice is often allowed to speak for itself in the text, is a German of whose very name we are not quite sure: he might be Peter Kolb, or Kolbe, or Kolben, and he apparently spent some time at the Cape at the beginning of that century—but considerable doubt exists about his veracity. Some commentators have even suggested that he wrote his extensive travelogues without ever setting foot beyond the immediate environs of Cape Town. (And yet, in his imaginative reconstruction of an African Other without which the self could not come to know itself, Kolb[e][n] might have ventured closer to grasping an elusive truth about the continent than many others who observed, named, and recorded, in meticulous detail, every little plant, insect, animal, or human being encountered on their journeys of exploration.)

One step further, and one would not even require the pretext (in the most literal sense of a pre-text) of historical “sources” to reinvent the past in order to valorise—and validate—it for the narrative in which the writer is personally implicated. In Imaginings of Sand (due for publication in 1996) the compulsively narrating grandmother, mouthpiece of a long line of silent and/or silenced women in South African history, no longer relies on “evidence” or “references” of any kind: her narratives are their own raîson d'être and derive from the individual's need to insert her/himself, through storytelling, within the larger contexts of space and (historical) continuity. Where sources are used in recognisable form, they function on at least three levels: sometimes they are “informal” by nature, like the Great Trek diaries of Susanna Smit; on other occasions they are subjected to transference, as happens in the case of the well-known seventeenth-century figure of Krotoa (known as Eva to the Dutch), who acted as interpreter between the Dutch and the indigenous Khoikhoin until she became the victim of both groups. This chapter from history is transposed in the novel to the fictitious character of the woman Kamma,³ whose involvement in the story is based on a particularly illuminating feminist reading of the Adamastor myth (cf. Driver, 455-57). In other words, the concern of the narrative here is not the “facts” but the patterns of already-narrativised history. A third level on which “historical sources” function in the narrative involves the complete abandonment of that “reality identifiable outside the discourse itself” to which van Wyk Smith referred: for instance, one of the instigators of a crucial episode in the grandmother's family history is borrowed, not from historiography, but from another novel, An Act of Terror.

In all these instances the importance lies in the recognition of the need to storify, not in the specifics of the remedies each individual may bring to the situation. Passing beyond the intertextualities of separate documents, and relying more on images and metaphors than on the grammars of language, the grandmother reverts to pure invention—as an acknowledgment of that primal urge described by Russell Hoban in his famous dictum, “We make fiction because we ARE fiction.”

6.

And this is, ultimately, the only answer one can give to the inevitable question, “Why?” Why resort to fiction? Why reduce history to storytelling? Why confront a demanding and turbulent “real” world with the inventions and fabrications of narrative? Why, at a time when South Africans are expected to be preparing to face present and future, should one waste time by an invention, rather than a strict discovery, of the past? We are moving toward the persistent objection against all postmodernist writing, but most pertinently against its practices within the dimensions of history and of morality. For surely, if anything may be invented, why should any one particular invention carry more weight than another? If all is text and there is nothing outside the text, how can anything be morally or historically valorised?

The answer, I have already suggested, lies in that leap of the imagination (and, it should be added, of reason) that prompted Hoban to say, “We make fiction because we are fiction.” Whether one composes a c.v. for a job application, or reviews a day or week or year or a life traversed, or relates a crucial experience to someone else, or writes a letter, or describes an event—however one sets about it, it is inevitably turned into narrative, within what Brian Wicker called a “story-shaped world.” This, as Hayden White (87) argues, provides a key to psychological analysis as well: “The therapist's problem … is not to hold up before the patient the ‘real facts’ of the matter, the ‘truth’ as against the ‘fantasy’ that obsesses him. … The problem is to get the patient to ‘reemplot’ his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and the significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life.” The same process, he indicates, occurs in historiography: “Historians seek to refamiliarize us with events which have been forgotten through either accident, neglect, or repression.”

Whether this occurs in therapy, in historiography, or in literature, the powerful act of appropriating the past through imaginative understanding—that is, through the devices of metaphor rather than through a “scientific objectivity” which tries to mask its own uncertainties—is necessary for the sanity of the whole community. And this is not a random act at all. It is not a matter, as critics of postmodernist discourse often pretend, of “any invention will do.” What this kind of invention effects is to open a door to comparative reading. The new text has to be evaluated against the whole spectrum or palimpsest of available texts, and so a polylogue is opened through which versions of the past are drawn into the present, confronting the reader with the need—and above all with the responsibility—to choose.

Since we experience our own lives as a compilation of narrative texts, this approach to historiography within the novel introduces (a) history into the whole collection of narratives that constitute us, both as individuals and as a community. And because the text is not offered as definitive, final, absolute, but as the exploration of a possibility among others, it invites the reader to keep her/his critical faculties alive by pursuing the processes of imagination in order to arrive at whatever proves more relevant, more meaningful, or simply more useful in any given context. It intensifies the relationship between the individual and her/his spatial and temporal environment. And learning to inhabit the continent of our invention may well be one of the most rewarding challenges facing South Africans—readers and writers alike—in this time of change, knowing that neither its history nor its moral boundaries are fixed and final, but remain constantly to be reinvented and, in the process, revalorised.

Notes

1. For equivalents of “historical novels” in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other indigenous literatures, one would have to explore oral tradition. The influence of this tradition on a novel like A. C. Jordan's Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors) is discussed elsewhere in this essay.

2. This functioning of metaphor White explains by referring to the familiar metaphorical equation of “my love” and “rose”: it does not suggest, he points out, that the beloved is actually a rose; nor does it suggest that the loved one has the specific attributes of a rose—i.e., that s/he is red, or yellow, is a plant, has thorns, needs sunlight, “should be sprayed regularly with insecticide,” et cetera: “It is meant to be understood as indicating that the beloved shares the qualities which the rose has come to symbolize in the customary linguistic usages of Western culture. … The metaphor does not image the thing it seeks to characterize, it gives directions for finding the set of images that are intended to be associated with that thing” (91).

3. The Khoikhoin word kamma means “water,” which refers to a creation myth in which the first woman (in Africa) emerged from water; in Afrikaans it refers to the realm of the imagination, of illusion, and of fiction.

References

Driver, Dorothy. “Women and Nature, Women as Objects of Exchange: Towards a Feminist Analysis of South African Literature.” In Michael Chapman et al. Perspectives on South African English Literature. Parklands (Johannesburg). Donker. 1992.

Harrow, Kenneth W. Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition. Portsmouth, N.H. Heinemann. 1994.

Smith, Malvern van Wyk. Grounds of Conquest: A Survey of South African English Literature. Kenwyn (Cape Town). Jutalit. 1990.

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978.