SOURCE: Gallagher, Susan Vanzanten. “The Backward Glance: History and the Novel in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 3 (fall 1997): 377-95.

[In the following essay, Gallagher offers a critical perspective on how several realist and historical South African novels written before the 1990s are being reinterpreted and recontextualized in the post-apartheid culture.]

Ever since Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) initiated analysis of the dynamics of decolonization, the postcolonial historical period has been recognized as having crucial links with culture. Fanon argues that the transformative process by which a colony becomes a nation is accompanied by, informed by, and perhaps even prompted by significant changes in culture. According to Fanon, this process has three phases: in the first, during the course of a colonial denial and suppression of the indigenous past, the native intellectual assimilates the literary tradition of the colonial country without qualification (writing sonnets, for example); secondly, the native intellectual “decides to remember what he is,” by looking to the past for indigenous forms and abandoned traditions (perhaps turning to tom-tom rhythms); finally, in “the fighting phase,” the nationalistic phase, the poet will “become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.”¹ This final phase is vague in Fanon's account, but it moves beyond an obsession with the past to participation in a present struggle and anticipation of a future as a nation: “We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a people in order to find coherent elements which will counteract colonialism's attempts to falsify and harm. We must work and fight with the same rhythm as the people to construct the future … A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people's true nature … A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence” (p. 233, my emphasis). In the inevitable move to establish a new national culture, Fanon warns that attempting to return to a pre-colonial past is not enough. A national culture cannot be purely recuperative or static; it will draw on the past, look forward to the future, and participate in the present. As Fanon defines it, the postcolonial is never a specific moment but an ongoing struggle, a continual emergence, a “zone of occult instability” (p. 227).

Such a zone currently exists in South Africa, where, in the 1990s, a postcolonial period has come into being, as signaled by the demise of apartheid, the first national democratic election, and the 1994 formation of the Government of National Unity headed by President Nelson Mandela. South Africa's status as a postcolonial nation was problematic before 1990, as Annamaria Carusi and Anne McClintock, among others, have pointed out.² For a minority of the country's population—those of Afrikaner descent—political, linguistic, and cultural freedom from colonial rule was achieved in the early part of the century through the Anglo-Boer Wars and the consolidation of an Afrikaner national identity, particularly following the move into power of the National Party in the 1948 elections. Nonetheless, with the subsequent institution and extension of apartheid, South Africa in many ways remained a colonial country, in that the vast majority of people were denied the rights of citizenship and were exploited economically as sources of cheap labor. For most South Africans, the country did not become postcolonial, politically speaking, until the historic elections of 1994, although numerous postcolonial resistance gestures had been taking place.³ Postcolonial South Africa in the nineties dramatically demonstrates Fanon's “occult instability.” In this uncertain time of national and cultural transition, as Fanon predicted, the relationship of history to the novel has become of increasing importance.

One of the more controversial assertions about history and the novel in South Africa was made by J. M. Coetzee during a 1987 Cape Town book fair talk called “The Novel Today,” in which he protested against the novel's supposed “colonization” by history. Commenting on the effects of apartheid on South African literature, Coetzee's essay suggests many of the key issues that arise in any discussion of history and the novel in South Africa. Speaking before the fall of the apartheid regime, Coetzee refers to “a powerful tendency, perhaps even dominant tendency, to subsume the novel under history, to read novels as what I will loosely call imaginative investigations of real historical forces and real historical circumstances; and conversely, to treat novels that do not perform this investigation of what are deemed to be real historical forces and circumstances as lacking in seriousness.” His analysis, he continues, does not refer to “historical novels,” those that set out to recreate in their own terms a given time in the past; rather, “we are talking about novels that engage with or respond to, or are said to engage with or respond to, the so-called historical present.”⁴ Such a novel, according to Coetzee, during “times of intense ideological pressure like the present … has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry” (p. 3). A supplementary novel, one that is colonized by the historical present, “aims to provide the reader with vicarious first-hand experience of living in a certain historical time, embodying contending forces in contending characters and filling our experience with a certain density of observation” (p. 3). This novel is documentary, reportorial, providing a camera-eye's view. The novel as rival, however, is one that “operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions, not one that operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history … [it] evolves its own paradigms and myths, in the process … perhaps going so far as to show up the mythic status of history” (p. 3). In arguing for storytelling over history, his primary point, Coetzee concludes, is “that history is not reality; that history is a kind of discourse … The categories of history … are a certain construction put upon reality” (p. 4).

Typical of Coetzee's dense thought, this brief statement uses at least three different meanings of history, obliquely and uncannily moving from one meaning to another. Despite some extreme postmodernist interpretations and charges of political evasion, Coetzee is not an anti-realist; he is not denying the existence of real historical forces, events, or people. History as reality, “the Real, the datum of the individual and collective experience of the past” does exist in Coetzee's paradigm.⁵ For example, Coetzee asks about the goals of novelists: “Are we trying to escape historical reality, or, on the contrary, are we engaging with historical reality in a particular way, a way that may require some explanation and some defence?” (p. 2). He clearly does acknowledge the existence of historical reality. David Attwell explains, “His emphasis on discursiveness is not necessarily an indication of the belief that history does not exist, so much as the conviction that since no discourse has unmediated access to history, any utterance, but the novel in particular, can claim a qualified freedom from it. But while the position Coetzee adopts might not necessarily deny the reality of historical forces, it is decidedly anti-political … Coetzee's polemics engage the politics of historical discourses; in order to preserve their rhetorical force, they are silent about the referents of these discourses. Elsewhere, he makes no apology when refering to the Real.”⁶ The issue for Coetzee is how to engage with historical reality as a writer, not whether such a reality exists. Coetzee's case against history refers to the discourse of history, a constructed text of what has happened, a myth, a metanarrative, which might be resisted, deconstructed, or even destroyed by a rival discourse of the novel. Much of Coetzee's own fiction operates in this fashion: rivaling historical discourse, revealing its mythic qualities, undercutting its authority, such as in Foe's revisionary account of Robinson Crusoe, Duskland's exposure of South African colonial history, and Age of Iron's deconstruction of both liberation and liberal rhetoric of the eighties. Coetzee's case against history addresses the text's linguistic and discursive strategies more than the contingent nature of reality.⁷ In his argument, Coetzee uses the term history to refer both to historical reality (events) and to historical discourse (historiography). Novels that represent historical reality can be further divided into those that engage the present moment and those that depict past events, suggesting a third meaning for the term. In South African criticism, as we shall see, this is also a crucial distinction. Although Coetzee appears to propose a simple binary opposition of rivalry between history and the novel, the subtleties of his diction suggest an elaborate complementary and interconnected dance occurring between “history” (in all three senses of the term) and the novel. This essay will examine some of the intricate steps in this dance as they take place in postcolonial South Africa by addressing 1) Coetzee's question of how writers should engage historical reality, 2) South African authors' recent Fanonian turn to the past for subject matter, and 3) recent, new postcolonial readings of old texts.

HISTORICAL REALITY AND THE NOVEL—THE QUESTION OF REALISM

Coetzee's question about the way that writers should engage historical reality, the kind of technique that South African writers should use, has appeared perennially throughout South African literary history, re-emerging with new vigor in the current setting. During forty years of opposition to apartheid, solidarity criticism—advocating social realism and critiquing texts in terms of their adherence to a materialistic dialectic—was a major force in South African politics and art. Influenced by the Black Consciousness movement and concentrating on chronicling contemporary life in the black townships, neo-Marxists advocated that writing serve as “a cultural weapon” in the service of the political struggle. During Fanon's “fighting phase,” according to this perspective, novels best engage and contest historical reality by employing historical representation; by accurately and minutely detailing contemporary life in material, economic, and ideological depth. “In any protest against particular social conditions,” Lukács posits, “those conditions themselves must have the central place.”⁸ This kind of “populist realism” characterized the Staffrider school of black writers that emerged in the seventies, who, according to Michael Vaughan, attempted to express collective experiences rather than the liberal novel's “individualist modalities of experience” and dispensed with subtle, elaborate, and detailed characterization.⁹ Vaughan compares the fiction of populist realist Mtutuzeli Matshoba with that of Coetzee, who, according to Vaughan, usefully problematizes liberal realism in his self-reflexive metafiction but ends up privileging a self-questioning internal consciousness over material forces and historic consciousness.¹⁰ “Coetzee thus casts himself in the role of a diagnostician of the malady of Western culture who is unable to propose any cure for this malady … His work partakes of the doom of which he writes,” Vaughan concludes.¹¹

Similar comparisons were drawn between Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer throughout the apartheid era. Gordimer herself in an unflinching review of Life & Times of Michael K in the New York Review of Books critically speaks of Coetzee's fictional “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions.”¹² Although her works have more psychological depth than most of the Staffrider school as she attempts to embody in her characters the social forces of her current historical situation, Gordimer repeatedly has affirmed that “the essential gesture” of the novelist is to be socially responsible by accurately depicting the truth of historical reality. She cites approvingly “the integrity Chekhov demanded: ‘to describe a situation so truthfully … that the reader can no longer evade it.’”¹³ As Stephen Clingman has traced, Gordimer's own narrative strategy moved from a liberal humanism in the late forties and early fifties to a somewhat uneven post-liberal, radical historicism in the sixties and seventies.¹⁴ Novels such as Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981) function as Coetzee's “supplements” to history: they contain detailed, realistic representations of apartheid's harsh realities as a form of political protest. Gordimer diligently attempted to avoid agitprop and overt didactic judgments, but she believed that “If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself.”¹⁵

Throughout the apartheid era, however, a few voices questioned the prescribed narrative (and political) strategy. Lewis Nkosi was one of the first critics to contest the aesthetics of social realism, claiming in 1967 that black fiction was filled with “journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature” and lacked artistic integrity.¹⁶ Njabulo Ndebele picked up Nkosi's argument in 1984 in a book review that subsequently became a frequently discussed critical statement, “Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction.” Much like Nkosi, Ndebele argued that South African writers had become so concerned with political relevance that they had neglected “the demands of the artistic medium.”¹⁷ Too many African writers, he said, are obsessed solely with imparting information, with exposing the horrors of social evil, and so resort to “an art of anticipated surfaces,” an easy stereotyping of good and evil, rather than an art of process, in either character development or social change. Surface realism, Ndebele continues, does not result in the reader's consciousness being transformed, for it only produces recognition: “Recognition does not necessarily lead to transformation: it simply confirms. Beyond that confirmation, it may even reinforce the frustration produced by the reader's now further consolidated perception of an overwhelmingly negative social reality” (p. 27). Ndebele's position accords with Coetzee's: both complain that the oppressive historical reality, rendered in “an exact and pungent description of the atrocities that make up the daily circumstances of [the writers'] lives,”¹⁸ was dominating the literary landscape to such an extent that the novel appeared only as a supplement.

The ongoing debate over the novel's employment of documentary social realism as a means of commenting on and affecting historical reality came to a climax in the nineties, with the publication of a paper by Albie Sachs, a white ANC lawyer and autobiographer who had lived in exile for many years. In 1989, Sachs wrote “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” for an in-house ANC discussion in Lusaka, and the essay was later published in the Johannesburg Weekly Mail in February 1990 on the very same day that F. W. de Klerk stood up in Parliament and shocked the world by announcing the beginning of the end of apartheid. The tumultuous response to this brief essay was unprecedented, revealing the volatile interconnections between culture and politics during the decolonization process that Fanon outlined. As one observer commented, “Albie Sachs's paper … evoked a response unrivaled in our recent cultural history. It was energetically debated at cultural locals, COSAW meetings, academic seminars, and even by Members of Parliament.”¹⁹ Sachs returned to South Africa later in 1990 to participate in a series of public forums on the essay. A South African poet notes, “The responses drew a wide range of cultural organisations into an extensive, self-critical and reflective debate. It was also a freer and more public airing of positions and differences than had been heard for decades.”²⁰ Within a year of the essay's publication, two books were produced that chronicled and continued the debate. Spring Is Rebellious (1990), edited by Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press, includes Sachs's original paper, twenty-two responses that appeared in the first four months after the essay's initial publication, and an “Afterword” with Sachs's response to the controversy he had generated. The second book, Exchanges: South African Writing in Transition (1991), edited by Duncan Brown and Bruno van Dyk, contains a collection of interviews with South African writers, cultural workers, and academics about the issues raised in Sachs's paper. References to the Albie Sachs debate soon spread to international forums, appearing in such American publications as PMLA, diacritics, and Transition.

This critical commotion was caused by Sachs's suggestion that South Africans abandon a long cherished belief: ANC members, he began, “should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle.”²¹ Sachs makes such a radical proposal, he says, because this approach has resulted in a diminished art. Themes are narrow, characters are stereotyped, and ambiguity and contradiction are missing. “Instead of getting real criticism,” Sachs continues, “we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work, it is enough that it be politically correct” (p. 20). Literature has become a slave of the dialectic of apartheid: “if you look at most of our art and literature you would think we were living in the greyest and most sombre of all worlds, completely shut in by apartheid. It is as though our rulers stalk every page and haunt every picture; everything is obsessed by the oppressors and the trauma they have imposed, nothing is about us and the new consciousness we are developing” (p. 21). Trapped in a sterile rendition of the past and present, artists were not looking forward to the future.

Although he was writing before the fall of apartheid, Sachs already was anticipating a changed historical reality: “What we have to ask ourselves now,” Sachs says, “is whether we have an artistic and cultural vision that corresponds to this current phase in which a new South African nation is emerging?” (p. 19). As the new South Africa struggles “to give birth to itself,” what role should culture play? Sachs does not want South African artists and writers to become trapped in either the present or the past; he is urging that literature—which he admits played an important role in the liberation struggle—take on a new, but vital, role in the postcolonial process of rebuilding. In the movement from “the fighting phase” to the construction phase, the identity of a new nation will be built through culture, as Fanon projected. Consequently, rather than functioning as a weapon, literature should become a tool: culture should play a significant role in “building national unity and encouraging the development of a common patriotism, while fully recognising the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country” (p. 24). This last phrase demonstrates Sachs's careful attempt to avoid ethno-nationalism and to build a nation that supports ethnic variety. The example of the Balkans looms large before every South African. He insists, “this is not to call for a homogenised South Africa made up of identikit citizens. The objective is not to create a model culture into which everyone has to assimilate, but to acknowledge and take pride in the cultural variety of our people” (p. 24).

The vociferous debate over Sachs's paper, which in many ways did nothing more than repeat an argument that had been made before,²² dramatically reveals Fanon's “occult instability” at work in the process of nation building. As Sachs himself realizes, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” represents a significant change in his own position; he describes himself as “someone who has for many years been arguing precisely that art should be seen as an instrument of struggle” (p. 20). Some respondents felt that Sachs was repudiating his former position, admitting in retrospect that critics like Nkosi had always been correct, but Brenda Cooper argues, “he is by no means returning, penitent and reformed, as some would have us believe to the old and deceptive bourgeois fold.”²³ Cooper is correct: despite a degree of mea culpa in his tone, Sachs is not simply adopting a position previously endorsed by less revolutionary critics. Rather, he is responding to (or rather anticipating with some prescience) a new situation, “pointing to a new space.”²⁴ Sachs appears to hold that one's view of culture will always be under re-formation as historical reality changes: “A conversa continua—may the debate continue,” he says in the final sentence of Spring Is Rebellious (p. 148).

After the passage of only a few years, Sachs's manifesto no longer looks as controversial; in a 1993 interview, South African poet Mongane Wally Serote commented that the furor surrounding Sachs's pronouncements had “petered out” since “there are other issues on the table.”²⁵ But history has proven Sachs correct in at least one respect: as the historical reality of South Africa changed, so did the functions of literature. Sachs still believes that culture has an important role to play in history, but that role has changed from resistance to reconstruction, from protest to construction, from anger to reconciliation. The documentary tendencies of earlier protest literature now appear in new cultural forms—particularly in television docu-drama and in the rapid establishment of a number of new museums chronicling the apartheid era, such as the Kwa Muhle Museum in Durban (explaining the Durban Pass System, which was used as a model for the national pass system that developed); the Police Museum in Pretoria (displaying instruments of torture used by police against detainees and prisoners), and the District Six Museum in Cape Town (depicting the once-thriving multicultural community in the heart of Cape Town that was bulldozed as part of the resettlement process).²⁶ The literary spotlight, on the other hand, now has shifted to a concern with what Ndebele calls “the ordinary.”

In an influential essay called “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” Ndebele contrasts the spectacular with the ordinary. Black South African literature, he claims, has long been dominated by the former: “The spectacular documents; it indicts implicitly; it is demonstrative, preferring exteriority to interiority … It is the literature of the powerless identifying the key factor responsible for their powerlessness.”²⁷ In “the rediscovery of the ordinary,” on the other hand, authors “break down the barriers of the obvious in order to reveal new possibilities of understanding and action”; they go beyond documentation to offer methods for oppression's “redemptive transformation” (pp. 50, 49); they present the reader with “the self in confrontation with itself,” undergoing change, learning to grow (p. 53). Ndebele's call for a move from exteriority to interiority is reminiscent of the evolution of the nineteenth-century British novel from the social realism of a Dickens or a Gaskell to the twentieth-century psychological realism of a Joyce or a Woolf. As historical reality changes, the means by which the writer engages it also changes. While Coetzee argues for other discursive strategies, especially those offered by metafictional techniques, as valid means of expanding the writer's repertoire for engaging with historical reality, Ndebele proposes a wider consideration of what the real might consist: embracing both the ordinary and the spectacular, oppression and competence, protest and celebration.

Such debates over realism, modernism, and metafiction will no doubt continue in postcolonial South Africa, but the general critical trend, which follows a similar political movement, is toward granting novelists greater latitude and freedom in choosing rhetorical and discursive strategies with which to engage the historical reality of the post-apartheid era. South Africa is presently experiencing the postcolonial drive to develop a national culture that Fanon chronicles so well. In South Africa's “fighting phase,” the call to build a national culture was an integral part of the political program of most wings of the liberation movement, including the ANC (African National Congress), the PAC (Pan African Congress), and the UDF (United Democratic Front). But currently, despite the danger inherent in the process of nation-building of creating a new form of imperialism through ethno-nationalism, South African writers, politicians, and media commentators enthusiastically speak in nationalistic rhetoric. As Karen Press notes, “The idea of creating a national culture must be seen as a political need, arising from a desire on the part of a government or the leadership of a liberation movement, to create an independent, unitary nation out of a diverse range of social groups that were previously seen (and saw themselves) as separate political entities.”²⁸ Such a desire is manifested, for example, in the theme of the 1994 ANC national conference planning political strategies for the next three years: “From Resistance to Reconstruction and Nation Building.” Sachs's “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in retrospect, marks the inauguration of this postcolonial nation-building impetus.

THE HISTORICAL PAST AND THE NOVEL—HISTORICAL NOVELS

Because of its unique history, South Africa has not faced in its nation-building process the problem of what Appiah calls “nativism,” an attempt to return to an idealized, pre-colonial, indigenous culture, although certain impulses in the Inkatha movement are nods in that direction.²⁹ Press points out at least two reasons for this historical divergence: first, South African industrialization is so extensive that it is not possible to project a revival of a peasant economy and culture; second, “any attempt to retrieve a typically African set of cultural practices in South Africa would be highly problematic, given the fact that the ruling National Party has built the entire structure of the apartheid system with the help of precisely such a retrieval.”³⁰ South Africans realize the inevitability of their involvement in a modern, global world economy and culture. Even though the country is currently hearing many calls for “Africanization,” there are few attempts to return to a pre-modern past. Nonetheless, a new interest in history and historical fiction has emerged as one of the marks of the new South Africa.

Under apartheid and with the understanding of literature as a tool of the struggle, most fiction concerned itself with self-consciously representing, in vivid sensory (if not psychological) detail, the current moment. During the forty years that apartheid dominated South African life, writers often could not afford either the time or energy to examine the past. Speaking in 1979 about the prevalence of social realism and protest literature, Nkosi lamented the fact that “in South Africa the pressure of the future is so enormous that looking backwards seems a luxury.”³¹ The backward glance in South Africa is further hampered by the fact that colonialism frequently erases the traces of its own violence in its construction of historical discourse. A colonial culture, South African novelist Dan Jacobson says in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, “is one which has no memory,” which represses the truth of its violent history.³² South African colonial historiography played a crucial role in constructing a particular kind of past for both the indigenous people and the first European visitors. In the process of conquest, according to Fanon, “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”³³ Historical myths of the empty land, the innocent and childlike Bushman, the irrationally violent Zulu, the Afrikaner calling as a Chosen People have all dominated South African historical discourse. Postcolonialism involves a new writing of history, a recuperation of the past in new terms. Post-apartheid literature has begun this backwards glance, the recovery of memory necessary for the formation of a truly postcolonial society, the rivaling of historical discourse for which Coetzee called, without resorting to a native romanticism.

One of the most frequently commented-on phenomena of post-1990 South Africa literature is the new fictional interest in the past. In 1992, expatriate novelist Christopher Hope traveled across his homeland on behalf of the BBC, asking South African writers what kind of future they anticipated for “literary life after apartheid.” Hope notes the “growing desire for … tales and fictions from the badlands and backwaters of South African history.”³⁴ E. Pereira, the co-editor of a forthcoming new edition of the Companion to South African English Literature, records “an upsurge of autobiographical writing,” “radical rewriting of history,” and “a revival of interest in the travel journals, letters, and memoirs of explorers, hunters and missionaries.”³⁵ In commenting on the popularity of the historical novel in post-apartheid writing, André Brink provides a historical perspective: “In older South African literature, whether written by black or white authors, in English or in Afrikaans, 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.”³⁶ The recent turn to history is not taking place out of a desire to “go native” and embrace an idealized tribal past. Rather, it is a recuperation that, as Fanon suggests, works in tandem with the present historical reality to form a future. Philosopher Johan Degenaar proposes that post-apartheid South African writing should include stories with historical resonance in order to work towards the future: “Events in the past have to be interpreted in an imaginative way. Storytelling is the most appropriate way of doing this. Stories about the past enable us to create and share a common future. They contribute to the production and consumption of an informed culture, for it is through the art of storytelling that a culture is enriched with intertextual significance.” In the postcolonial moment, as a new nation struggles to define itself, “the unfinished business of our collective history” needs to be addressed.³⁷ As South Africa sheds the last political vestiges of colonialism and works to eliminate other social and economic legacies of colonialism, South African writers are practicing the backward glance. Representing an important stage in Fanon's evolution of a national consciousness, the renewed interest in historical writing is providing the documentation and narratives that dismantle and counter the myths propagated by official Afrikaner historical discourse, a strategy that Coetzee had begun some twenty years earlier.

In the backwards glance, South Africans are also insisting that the evils of the past not be suppressed and are decrying the readiness with which some of those who had been responsible for apartheid are forgetting their own culpability. Speaking at the “New Nation Writers Conference” in 1991, Ndebele asserted, “we have to cry out when the past is being deliberately forgotten in order to ensure that what was gained by it can now be enjoyed without compunction. It is crucial at this point that the past be seen as a legitimate point of departure for talking about the challenges of the present and the future. The past, no matter how horrible it has been, can redeem us. It can be the moral foundation on which to build the pillars of the future.”³⁸ The riveting storytelling that occurred at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings on human rights abuses throughout 1996 provides one such ritual means of remembering the past; more formal remembrances through storytelling are appearing in novels and short fiction of the nineties.

Although Nadine Gordimer's first post-apartheid novel, None to Accompany Me (1994), continued to provide a realistic examination of a current situation in its account of life in post-apartheid South Africa, it is striking how many of the recent publications of some of the best known South African writers have been historical in nature. Coetzee's first post-apartheid novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994), is set in the nineteenth-century revolutionary turmoil of Dostoevsky's Russia; his next novel, Boyhood, scheduled to be published in the fall of 1996, is a wryly humorous autobiographical account of growing up in the Karoo that participates in the current nostalgia for the fifties in South Africa. Poet Chris van Wyk's first novel, The Year of the Tapeworm (1996), creates an alternative history for the early seventies, but also evokes the fifties and the Drum era in its satirical account of a black journalist who works for Black World, hangs out in shebeens, and reports on gangster violence. André Brink, who throughout his writing career had moved back and forth between fiction set in the present and historical fiction, took on a much more self-reflexive historicism in The First Life of Adamaster (1993), which attempts to rebut, from the “inside,” two key stories in African historiography: Camões's account of Europe's encounter with Africa personified as a black giant-monster, and the common European myth of black African sexual potency. Brink's On the Contrary (also published in 1993) returns to the seventeenth century for another reconsideration of South African colonial history, concentrating not so much on providing an alternative “inside” account, a revision of history, as on revealing the unreliability of historical documentation of any kind. Ostensibly narrated by one Estienne Barbier, a historical figure, the novel repeatedly gives varying and conflicting accounts of certain events. Barber has served as the official scribe during an exploration of the interior, but although he is careful to omit certain “less delicate” details from the record, he eventually falls into disfavor with the commanding Lieutenant, who turns the Journal over to one Otto Mentzel to be revised. “He can copy your early pages to cover our progress thus far, correcting whatever mistakes he encounters,” the Lieutenant tells Barber, “We shall submit to the Governor a narrative both correct and gratifying. Every page in this one, as he progresses, he shall dispose of.”³⁹ This may be how the documents upon which we rely for our “true” accounts of history are constructed, according to Brink.

The various relationships of history and the novel that we have been discussing come together in a particularly exemplary fashion in one of the most controversial, highly praised, and frequently discussed recent novels from South Africa, Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (published as Die reuk van apples in Afrikaans in 1993, in English in 1995). Immediately heralded as that oxymoronic entity in the publishing world—a new classic—The Smell of Apples won the South African Academy of Arts and Science's prestigious Eugene Marais Prize, the CNA Literary Debut Prize, the M-Net award for fiction, and the Betty Trask Award (presented annually to the best first novel published in England). Unquestionably, a great deal of the novel's notoriety stemmed from the fact that it included one of the first straightforward South African accounts of homosexuality, long a forbidden topic under the strict censorship laws, and was written by an openly gay author. What might have been presented as spectacular in Ndebele's terms, though, is rendered ordinary through the novel's point-of-view: it is narrated by an eleven-year-old Afrikaner boy named Marnus Erasmus. Marnus is undergoing the usual trials and tribulations of growing up—sibling rivalry, making friends, academic challenges. But his home and life are imbued with Afrikaner nationalism: he attends Voortrekkers every Friday afternoon, eats bobotie and rice with raisins, attends a Dutch Reformed Church, and idolizes his father, “the youngest major-general ever in the history of the South African Defence Force” (p. 14). In its winningly naive perspective and adolescent voice (reminiscent of Roddy Doyle's stunning accomplishment in Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha), and its unprecedented depiction of homosexuality, The Smell of Apples is more daringly realistic than many South African novels had been for some time.

Marnus's narrative also re-writes Afrikaner patriarchal discourse by evoking and subtly undermining the standard mythology supporting apartheid. In the first chapter, in what initially appears to be a typically rambling boyish story, Marnus unwittingly uncovers two equally self-serving but contradictory histories used to justify the Afrikaner occupation of the Southern Cape:

One afternoon we went into the National Museum to look at all the exhibitions. There's even a permanent exhibition of stuffed-up Bushmen. They're not real Bushmen and they're actually made of plastic, but they look like they're alive. Frikkie says his oupagrootjie used to get hunters to hunt the Bushmen on his farm in the Cedarberg. The hunters from Cape Town could come and they had to pay twenty pounds for each Bushman they shot … When we learned about the Bushmen in history class, Frikkie told the story of his oupagrootjie. Miss Engelbrecht said it wasn't true. It wasn't the Boers that killed off all the Bushmen, it was the Xhosas. She said the Xhosas are a terrible nation and that it was them that used to rob and terrorise the farmers on the Eastern frontier, long before the Zulus in Natal so cruelly murdered Boer women and little children.⁴⁰

Tales of the great white hunter have been replaced by tales of the savage native, but both mythologies are used to dehumanize South Africa's indigenous people and to vindicate the European invasion. Lying behind Marnus's childish fascination with the “stuffed-up Bushmen” is a more mature perspective on European interactions with the San people, who were transformed from objects of the hunter's gaze into anthropological oddities on public display. The treatment of the so-called “Bushmen” both in history and by history is one of many controversial historical concerns emerging in South Africa in the nineties. In 1996, the National Gallery, only a short garden's walk away from the National Museum, hosted a disturbing exhibition called “Miscast” that exposed the systematic dehumanization and extermination of the San. “Miscast” included, among other items, the actual plaster molds formed on the living bodies of San people that were used to create the plastic replicas still on display in the National Museum. On another wall, a placard explained that the British Museum refused to loan out two of the “Bushmen trophy heads” in its permanent collection, apparently succumbing to a sudden concern for the lack of respect to a human being. The treatment of the San is only one of many ways in which Behr's novel participates in a reconsideration of historical discourse. Its Huckleberry-Finnesque perspective also extends to the political and social turmoil of the seventies, and in the unmasking of General Erasmus's moral, social, and political rigidity as a self-preserving cover for his own homosexual urges, Behr damns what he sees as the moral hypocrisy and sexual repression of Afrikaner ideology. As a coming-of-age novel, The Smell of Apples depicts Marnus's growing awareness of his family's self-delusions and corruption, but his initiation also exemplifies all Afrikaners' recent reconsideration of their history and heritage.

Finally, as many other novels of the nineties, The Smell of Apples is a historical novel set in two key crises of the South African past. The narrative proper, told by an eleven-year-old Marnus in the early seventies, is interspersed with italicized passages given in the cynical voice of his twenty-six-year-old self, fighting a hopeless and absurd war in Angola. Behr thus examines both the domestic oppression that eventually led to the Soweto uprising and, for white males of his generation, the emotionally wrought history of South Africa's Vietnam, the armed struggle against Angola into which the government poured vast resources and sacrificed many (conscripted) lives, while publicly lying about their incursions into neighboring territories. The dust, mayhem, terror, fragmentation, and absurdities of the Angolan passages embody a disillusionment that is familiar to American readers of the current spate of Vietnam novels. The Angolan war novel is one of many new historical genres that we can continue to expect from South African postcolonial writing.

EPILOGUE: NEW READINGS OF OLD TEXTS

As historical discourse and reality change, so do our readings of works from a previous era. The texts produced during apartheid have a different meaning for and are being understood in fresh ways by post-apartheid readers. For instance, apocalyptic novels, one popular genre of South African fiction in the seventies and eighties, take on entirely new resonances now that the long-expected period of political liberation has actually happened. As Nick Visser points out, the realities under which South Africans lived may not have changed dramatically, but the “possibilities under which people lived … had undergone an epochal shift.” Consequently the novels of what Visser calls “future projection” have also been modified, since “the future they project is no longer experienced as the future which South Africans confront.”⁴¹ In both July's People (1981) and A Sport of Nature (1987), Gordimer depicts the future destruction of apartheid as occurring through a brutal and chaotic revolution. Similarly, Karel Schoeman's Promised Land (1978) describes the misfortunes of a group of rural Afrikaners after a violent revolution. Coetzee's account of the end of South Africa is more obliquely rendered in Life & Times of Michael K (1983), but he also forecasts that change will occur in South Africa only at the point of a gun, as the novel's epitaph makes clear (“War is the father of all and king of all”). What do we make of such novels now that Mandela has been released, democratic elections have occurred, and the African National Congress is in political control of South Africa? Visser notes that for readers of the nineties, such texts are now “historically framed, no longer speaking with the same immediacy.”⁴² Rather than projecting a world to come, they now depict the anticipations and beliefs of a world that has passed.

Similar changes have occurred in our reading of novels of social realism. What had provided documentation in order to stir up outrage about the present now recounts a time past. Es'kia Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue (1959), for example, an autobiographical account structured much as a novel,⁴³ chronicles in sharp detail the brutality of apartheid, the harsh physical realities of life in an urban location, and the oppressive conditions that eventually drove Mphahlele into exile. As documentary testimony, Down Second Avenue viscerally depicts location life as an urban jungle of malnutrition, squalid poverty, crowded communal water taps, and raw sewage in the streets. The random violence of tsotsis and police breeds terror; the humiliation of pass violations breeds shame. The narrative teems with the sights, smells, and sounds of South African life, chronicling the exact names of people, streets, and shops. Written while the banned Mphahlele was in exile in Nigeria, Down Second Avenue for many years informed American, European, and Asian readers about apartheid life, primarily serving as a testimonial to the world community. In this context, the novel was extremely popular; excerpts were frequently anthologized, and the entire book was translated into German, Hungarian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian, French, Swedish, and Japanese.⁴⁴

Today, Down Second Avenue leads a new life. Along with many other narratives from the apartheid era, it has been transformed from a work of protest to a work of nostalgia. These novels and stories now teach young, contemporary South Africans about aspects of the past that they might not know—the pastoral life of a rural village before enforced relocations, the thriving vitality of the once-integrated urban centers such as Sophiatown, Alexandra, and District 6, before the bulldozers came in. Some South African teachers have even found themselves recently explaining the pass system to their black African students in an attempt to make sense of a work of literature. Originally read as a literature of protest, these works are now read as a literature of affirmation. For Down Second Avenue, along with its vivid depiction of the physical and social constraints of apartheid, also captures and celebrates the vitality of the location, the shared joys and sorrows of the people on Second Avenue. Its interior account of its protagonist's growth and development is often “ordinary,” in Ndebele's terms. In the new South Africa, Down Second Avenue is a frequently taught text; according to a survey conducted by Bernth Lindfors in 1992, it was on the prescribed reading list at ten different South African universities (and this was before the current push to “Africanize” the curriculum).⁴⁵ What originally provided testimony about current events to the world and a call for change has become history, a chronicle of the past, for both the world and for South Africans.

Another significant work experiencing a renaissance is Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, first published in 1948 and often heralded as the first anti-apartheid South African novel. Enthusiastically received by many black South Africans in the fifties, Cry, the Beloved Country's critical stock fell throughout the seventies and the eighties with the advent of the Black Consciousness movement. Noted authors such as Mphahlele, Nkosi, and Dennis Brutus derided the novel's stereotyped African characters, naive political stance, and apparent paternalism. Mphahlele, for example, complained that “Kumalo … remains the same suffering, Christlike, childlike character from beginning to end. He is always trembling with humility.”⁴⁶ Within the perspective of a political struggle that had grown increasingly violent, others wondered if Paton's liberalism provided any kind of solution to the problems of apartheid.⁴⁷ As was vividly demonstrated in the apocalyptic novels, most South Africans believed that political change would occur only after a bloody civil war. Instead, a route of tenuous reconciliation was carefully negotiated, in large part because of Nelson Mandela. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela recalls that even when the ANC established Umkhonto weSizwe (the MK), they deliberately rejected strategies of guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution in favor of sabotage for purposes of reconciliation: “because it did not involve loss of life it offered the best hope for reconciliation among the races afterward. We did not want to start a blood feud between white and black. Animosity between Afrikaner and Englishman was still sharp fifty years after the Anglo-Boer War; what would race relations be like between white and black if we provoked a civil war?”⁴⁸ Mandela's longstanding commitment to reconciliation and political pragmatism has resulted in a post-liberation South Africa that can only be termed liberal, in a political sense.

In postcolonial South Africa, with a universal franchise, a democratically elected government, and an attempt at national rapprochement underway in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many of Paton's ideals appear to have been realized. One of the novel's most famous pronouncements takes on an entirely new resonance in the light of recent history—the Anglican pastor Msimangu predicts, “I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it.”⁴⁹ The striking image broadcast around the world of Mandela and de Klerk standing side-by-side and shaking hands symbolizes such interracial cooperation, despite the fact that it is hard not to suspect the National Party leader of still desiring and striving after power. Nonetheless, the spirit of the times is such that a new appreciation for and reading of the novel is taking place, as is epitomized by the fact that the widely heralded first international movie production in the new South Africa was Anant Singh's remake of Cry, the Beloved Country in 1995. At the United States premiere in October, guest-of-honor Nelson Mandela praised the film's evocation of “such strong emotions about the terrible past” and declared it “a monument to the future.”⁵⁰ President Mandela's enthusiastic support for the new film signals both a pragmatic interest in promoting the South African film industry and a political embrace of the film's ideology. Justin Pearce, writing in the Mail & Guardian notes, “Our own dear Y-fronted South African flag appears at the bottom of the ethno-abstract poster for Cry, the Beloved Country. This may seem odd considering that the film is set nearly 50 years before that flag was hoisted over the Union Buildings, but the message is clear enough: this is a film about the new South Africa. Or at least this is a film that points forward to the new South Africa.”⁵¹ Long-time Paton scholar Colin Gardner says, “in my judgement, Cry, the Beloved Country has become a far more generally acceptable and in several ways a distinctly inspiring text because it can now be largely stripped of the wrong sorts of political assumption and expectation.” In arguing for the new relevance of Paton's work Gardner continues, “Understanding and reconciliation and mutual recognition of the other's human feelings … have become central to the idea of a newly constituted South Africa.”⁵² From a daring protest against an ideology in its infancy to an outdated relic in its middle age, Cry, the Beloved Country has now become a postmodern symbol of the postcolonial South Africa.⁵³

Notes

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 222, 228. Subsequent references to this text will be given parenthetically.

2. Annamaria Carusi, “Post, Post and Post, Or, Where is South African Literature in All This?” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989): 79-95; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 84-98.

3. I am defining postcolonial as that historical period in which a people who were once colonized (politically, economically, and culturally) have achieved political independence and are attempting to establish a new national identity. The difficulties with the term have been frequently discussed; for example, see McClintock, or Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?” Textual Practice 5 (1991): 399-414. Some have called post-1994 South Africa neocolonial, since many economic, educational, and social inequities remain to be solved.

4. J. M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6.1 (1988): 2. Subsequent references to this essay will be noted parenthetically in the text.

5. David Attwell, “The Problem of History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1990), p. 128.

6. Attwell, p. 103, his emphasis.

7. For readings along these lines, see David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1993) and Susan VanZanten Gallagher, A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991).

8. Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 29.

9. Michael Vaughan, “Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies,” Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 131.

10. Vaughan, p. 137.

11. Vaughan, p. 134.

12. Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening,” New York Review of Books, 2 Feb. 1984: 6.

13. Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 299.

14. Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).

15. Nadine Gordimer, “Interview,” by Pat Schwartz, in New South African Writing (Hillbrow: Lorton Publications, 1977), p. 81.

16. Lewis Nkosi, “Fiction by Black South Africans,” in Introduction to African Literature, ed. Ulli Beier (London: Longman, 1967), p. 222.

17. Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Johannesburg: COSAW, 1991), p. 23. Subsequent reference to Ndebele's essays are to this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

18. The phrase is John F. Povey's description of social realism in South African fiction. See his “English-Language Fiction from South Africa,” in A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures, ed. Lyekan Owomoyela (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 89.

19. Duncan Brown and Bruno van Dyke, “Introduction,” Exchanges: South African Writing in Transition, eds. Duncan Brown and Bruno van Dyke (Pietermaritzburg: Univ. of Natal Press, 1991), p. vii.

20. Ingrid de Kok, “Introduction,” Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom, eds. Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), p. 9.

21. Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in Spring Is Rebellious, p. 19. Subsequent references to this version of the essay will occur parenthetically in the text.

22. In his introduction to the British edition of Ndebele's Rediscovery of the Ordinary, Graham Pechey, for example, calls Sachs's paper “a very much diluted version of the Ndebele argument,” lacking the relative depth and scope of the latter's analysis but conveniently bearing “a brand name” (that of the ANC). See his “Introduction,” South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary by Njabulo S. Ndebele (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 4-5.

23. Spring, p. 52.

24. Ibid.

25. Wally Mongane Serote, “Black Man's Burden: A Conversation with Mongane Wally Serote and Andrew McCord,” Transition 61 (1993), p. 183.

26. On the new prominence of television documentaries, see Mbulelo Vizikungo Mzamane, “From Resistance to Reconstruction: Culture and the New South Africa,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 27 (1996): 11-18.

27. Ndebele, p. 46.

28. Karen Press, “Building a National Culture in South Africa,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1990), p. 23.

29. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), p. 47.

30. Press, p. 29.

31. Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981), p. 79.

32. Dan Jacobson, “Introduction,” Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 7.

33. Fanon, p. 210.

34. Christopher Hope, “Moving Targets,” The Guardian, 12 Feb. 1993: 4, 10.

35. E. Pereira, “South African English Literature in the 1990s,” Unisa English Studies 31 (1993): 1.

36. André Brink, “Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A Personal Testimony),” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 17.

37. Johan Degenaar, “How Texts and their Reception will Change in the Post-Apartheid Era,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa 4 (1992): 11.

38. Ndebele, p. 155.

39. Brink, On The Contrary: A novel, being the life of a famous rebel, soldier, traveller, explorer, reader, builder, scribe, latinist, lover and liar (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 40.

40. Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples (New York: St. Martin's, 1995), p. 8.

41. Nicholas Visser, “The Politics of Future Projection in South African Fiction,” Bucknell Review 37 (1993): 62.

42. Visser, p. 62.

43. Down Second Avenue is sometimes referred to as an autobiographical novel and sometimes called a novelistic autobiography. Its exact genre is less important to me than its continued relevance and new ways of being read.

44. Ursula Barnett, A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (1914-1980) (Amherst: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1983), p. 220.

45. Bernth Lindfors, “African Literature Teaching in South African University English Departments,” Aternation 3, 1 (1996): 5-14.

46. Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 157.

47. See A. A. Monye, “‘Cry, the Beloved Country’: Should We Merely Cry?” Nigeria Magazine 144 (1983): 74-83; Stephen Watson, “Cry, the Beloved Country and the Failure of Liberal Vision,” English in Africa 9.1 (1982): 29-44.

48. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 246.

49. Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (New York: Scribner's, 1948), pp. 39-40.

50. Mandela's speech is on the World-Wide Web at http://www.miramax.com.

51. Justin Pearce, “Feel-Good Film of the Decade?” Mail & Guardian, 27 Oct. 1995: 1.

52. Colin Gardner, “Paton in the 1990s,” Southern African Review of Books, Jan./Feb. 1996: p. 19.

53. I'm very grateful for the support of the Pew Charitable Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities in providing time and travel funds that assisted in the writing of this essay.