Njabulo Ndebele: from Rediscovering the ‘Ordinary’ to Redefining South African ‘Renaissance’

ANNE FUCHS Njabulo Ndebele: From Rediscovering the ‘Ordinary’ to Redefining South African ‘Renaissance’ JABULO NDEBELE WAS ONE OF THE FEW black South African writers renowned worldwide as an intellectual before the end of N apartheid; he continues today to write and reflect upon culture, in particular on the relationship between literature and politics. Each generation in the twentieth century had its intellectuals. This began with critics such as R.R.R. Dhlomo and Sol Plaatje, through the Drum generation with the Nkosis and Mphahleles. Black Consciousness took over in the 1970s with the influ- ence of Steve Biko and Pascal Gwala. Ndebele himself was of a slightly later generation and a slightly different category; he was very much involved in the magazine Staffrider and in 1987 became President of the Congress of South African Writers. Parallel with his creative and literary career, Ndebele also pursued a prestigious academic path. Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the National University of Lesotho, Head of the African Literature Department at the Uni- versity of the Witwatersrand, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the North, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, he had an ‘extraordinary’ knowledge of South African academia, which is evident in his essays. It was Ndebele himself who referred to the term ‘ordinary’ as far back as 1984 when he presented a keynote address at the conference on “New Writ- ing in Africa: Continuity and Change,” held at the Commonwealth Institute in London. The address, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” was, in 1991, included in a Congress of South African Writ- ers’ publication entitled Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South Afri- can Literature and Culture.1 In eight essays and an appendix, Ndebele here explores the present and the future of black South African writing and culture; these essays and the call for writers to explore the everyday lives of black 1 Njabulo Simakhale Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South Afri- can Literature and Culture (Fordsburg: COSAW, 1991). 82 ANNE FUCHS South Africans were, at the time, a revelation and were discussed at length by many prominent intellectuals and critics.2 What, in fact, does Ndebele say about the ‘ordinary’ in his earlier work but also in his latest collection of essays, entitled Fine Lines from the Box (2007)?3 How, if at all, has he inter- preted this notion through his own fiction, in particular in The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)? Writing a novel about Winnie Mandela is in itself emble- matic of his confrontation of the ordinary with the extraordinary, of the public with the private, and of his effort to explain private failures in the light of a South African renaissance. Published in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela and the negotiation between the ANC and De Klerk, but before the 1994 elections which gave power to the black majority, the individual essays in Rediscovery of the Ordi- nary date mainly from the 1980s. Judging from the preface, but also from other pieces, the main concern of Ndebele at this point in history is how to counter the “manipulation” of the black community by the whites. The preface, indeed, is quite surprising, in that Ndebele openly questions the good faith of the nationalist government in liberating Mandela: Suddenly the nationalist government also proclaims ‘human rights,’ and ‘non-racialism.’ It now expresses concern about ‘all our people’; declares its intention to ‘redress imbalances,’ and is determined to ‘turn away from the past.’ (8) Given the disastrous situation of the “vast masses” of the population, Ndebele considers that the nationalist government is just manufacturing “the illusion of freedom” in order to hold on to their own power. He also underlines the com- plexity of a situation in which the blacks have effectively been denied “the resounding defeat of an enemy. The Bastille has not been stormed” (9). The confusion caused in 1991 by the Afrikaner government’s concessions can be linked with another even more insidious “manipulation” dealt with in “Turkish Tales,” a piece written in 1983. In this text Ndebele points out that the reception of information in South Africa by blacks under apartheid was necessarily skewed in one of two ways depending on whether it was furnished 2 See Geoffrey V. Davis, Voices of Justice and Reason: Apartheid and Beyond in South African Literature (Cross/Cultures 61; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 287. 3 Njabulelo Simakhale Ndebele, Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about our Country, comp. Sam Raditlhalo (Roggebaai, SA: Umuzi & Houghton: Random House, 2007). .

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