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White Angst in South Africa the Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham

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White Angst in South Africa the Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham White Angst in South Africa The Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham JOCHEN PETZOLD PEAKING OF ‘WHITE ANGST’ and ‘apocalyptic visions’ in con- nection with contemporary South African literature may at first sight S seem somewhat outdated in the new millennium, more than fifteen years after the racist and repressive system of white minority rule known as ‘apartheid’ came to an official end early in the 1990s. My emphasis on ‘white angst’ also runs counter to the observation made by the South African writer Ashraf Jamal, who perceives a tendency in recent criticism that establishes a ‘liberal teleology’ at work in South African fiction – a teleology that postu- lates an increase in liberal open-mindedness and literary sophistication cul- minating in post-apartheid literature.1 Yet fears of a black rebellion, civil war, and imminent doom were certainly important issues treated in South African novels of the 1970s and 1980s, as a number of critics have pointed out.2 According to David Attwell and Barbara Harlow, “anxiety about the future fuelled a number of writers” since the 1960s,3 and many South Africans had 1 Ashraf Jamal made this comment repeatedly during the proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held at the University of Erfurt, 8–11 May 2002. 2 For example, see Elmar Lehmann, “Katastrophe oder Versöhnung? Beobachtungen zu südafrikanischen Romanen der Gegenwart,” in Current Themes in Contemporary South African Literature, ed. Elmar Lehmann & Erhard Reckwitz (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1989): 9– 25; John Povey, “English-Language Fiction from South Africa,” in A History of Twentieth- Century African Literature, ed. Oyekan Owomoyela (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 1993): 85–104; Theodore Sheckels, The Lion on the Freeway (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 3 David Attwell & Barbara Harlow, “Introduction: South African Fiction After Apart- heid,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 4. 142 JOCHEN PETZOLD ¸ seen the country on a road towards civil war. This becomes apparent in novels like Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972), Sipho Sepamla’s A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981) or Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981). In the 1970s and 1980s, especially among white South Afri- cans, the future was frequently imagined as an apocalypse, as in Nadine Gor- dimer’s July’s People (1981); a South Africa after apartheid could only be thought of as post-apocalyptic, as in Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987). While the literature of the ‘new’ South Africa has brought forth texts that are much less pessimistic – André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand (1996) would be one example – I will focus on a South African author for whom apocalypse remains a predominant theme, even after the end of apartheid. Examining John Conyngham’s first novel, The Arrowing of the Cane (1986), and his most recent one, The Lostness of Alice (1998), a pattern of anxiety and apo- calyptic visions becomes apparent that is only interrupted by a small flicker of hope expressed in The Desecration of the Graves (1990).4 In all three novels, but particularly in the first and the third, an unspecific threat from ‘outside’ is utilized to create an atmosphere of violence and utter hopelessness. It is this form of a ‘negative embrace’ of the Other that strengthens white fears of black South Africans and reinforces xenophobic tendencies. If apocalypse was a common theme for white writers in the mid-1980s, John Conyngham’s first novel, The Arrowing of the Cane, is a typical repre- sentative of such writing. Interweaving the story of a sugar-cane farmer’s personal decline into loneliness and alcoholism, and mounting threats from arsonists’ attacks in the cane fields of Natal, Conyngham creates a dense atmosphere of fin du monde. The title already hints at decline: when sugar- cane ‘arrows’ (i.e. produces seeds), its sugar-content is reduced; hence it loses in economic value;5 thus, the arrowing cane represents a (natural) develop- ment that threatens a sugar farmer’s survival. Two aspects of the novel are important for my discussion: its setting on a farm; and the narrator’s insis- tence that danger comes from ‘outside’. The farm is a setting that is highly charged with political and emotional implications in South Africa. As J.M. Coetzee points out in White Writing, for “two decades of this century, 1920–40, the Afrikaans novel concerned itself 4 John Conyngham, The Arrowing of the Cane (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1986); The Lostness of Alice (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1998); The Desecration of the Graves (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1990). Quotations from the three novels will be marked in the main text as AC, LA, and DG respectively. 5 See “Saccharum officinarum,” http://www.fao.org/AG/AGP/agpc/doc/GBASE/data /Pf000310.htm [accessed 5 February 2007]. .
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