Autobiography exist as a unit, and the space it occu­ pied, was never regarded as private and free from state intrusion. It was clearly not a space where patriarchy was free to dominate its female subordinates at will with the passive consent of the Writing Women state. The state usurped this repressive role from the African patriarchy, direct­ ly intervened in this private space, redefining it as public domain. African women’s lives, unlike that of their DESIREE LEWIS and ELAINE SALO compare two exile works white or even ‘coloured’ and Indian counterparts, would be policed in the which reflect different senses of identity and cultural allegiance same brutal manner as every other facet of African life. African women therefore fought to protect this space aggie Resha’s and Phyllis her marriage to Robert Resha, who was heads of the educational institutions as from white patriarchy, forming Ntantala’s autobiographies by this time a leading figure in the the hostile other. In fact her identifica­ alliances with African men in doing so. M are similar in a number of ANC, and her nursing experiences in tion grows closer to the life styles and This account sheds light on the inter­ ways. Both span the transition from the Transvaal; while the third period values of these white teachers and connectedness of nationalist and gen­ British colonial to Afrikaner extends from 1962 to 1993, and is an matrons while she becomes der struggles, and contests analysis by Nationalist rule in South Africa, and account of her life in exile. increasingly distant from the lives of feminists who portray the role of both deal with the writers’ growing Her story begins with her memories the rural villagers. African women as being nationalist involvement in South Africa’s national of a relatively carefree childhood, spent Her first rude awakening to the bla­ and not feminist. Maggie Resha’s liberation movement culminating in in an extended family living in a small tant crudity of racism occurs when she account of her own and other women’s their exile from the country in the village. It is a childhood peopled with a is employed as a qualified nurse at the experiences, at the hands of the pre­ 1960s. The autobiographers were bom warm grandmother who shares her bed Pretoria Hospital in 1947. Here she dis­ dominantly white male state, as well as into relatively privileged mission-edu­ covers that despite holding equal quali­ her later experiences as a single parent cated families and their narratives fications, she is only paid a quarter of during her husband’s exile, challenges unconsciously reflect the influence of My Life in the Struggle. her white colleagues’ salary, and she South African feminists to re-examine this background even while the authors has to reside in poorer quarters. Her the construction of the public and the write about conscious commitment to Mangoana o Tsoara thipa sense of despair and then anger at this private domain in our own context. populist politics. ka bohaleng seemingly irrational discrimination This section of the book also con­ Although the subject-matter of the by Maggie Resha becomes the groundswell of her later tains description of little-known events autobiographies is similar, the writers’ political activism. She meets Robert such as the dissatisfaction of some representations of their experiences are SA Writers, London and Resha during this period and he intro­ ANC members with what they per­ strikingly different: Resha’s account is COSAW, Johannesburg, duces her to alternative newspapers ceived to be the eurocentric character a compelling and unselfconscious one such as the Bantu World and to the of ANC politics. This ultimately led to of active involvement in everyday 1992, 269pp, £7.95/R40 ANC Youth League. This exposure the establishment of a Pan African township struggles, whereas Ntantala’s provides her with a meaningful context Congress. Her partisan interpretation of tends towards a passive and very self- A Life’s Mosaic for the initially obscure experiences of this conflict seems to simplify the com­ conscious reconstruction of events and by Phyllis Ntantala increasing poverty and racism during plex relationships which probably led personal experience. Resha’s autobiog­ childhood that have now become cen­ to this schism. raphy is likely to be inspirational to an David Philip, Cape Town; tral to her life. There are particular con­ Vignettes of daily township life form audience of black South African texts of personal conflict that she a backdrop to the central narrative of women because of her intimate knowl­ University of California becomes conscious of: the growing political activism and campaigns edge and insight into their day-to-day Press, Berkeley, 1992/3, divide between the intimacy of her throughout the book. The reader is lives. In contrast, Ntantala emphatical­ 237pp, 0 520 08172 2 rural life and the anonymity of urban given an entree into the private lives of ly positions herself between a South experience. This is reflected in what people such as Lilian Ngoyi, the African and metropolitan context, she perceives as Robert’s brusque man­ prominent anti — pass law campaigner seeming preoccupied mainly with ner of courtship unmediated by parents who nurses her crippled mother and translating local experiences for a and peers. Todd Siwisa (better known for his role Western audience. Her preface estab­ with her grandchildren, a shabbily- in the establishment of the PAC) as an lishes this mediating role when she dressed band of schoolchildren walking accomplished accordion player. writes: long distances to the nearest school­ The latter section of the book is an room, but also with mounted ‘red-faced account of the Resha family in exile Pavarotti’s voice filled the auditorium soldiers’ demanding poll tax receipts and Robert’s untimely death in with ‘Mama’, one of those arias he sings from frightened villagers, farm workers England. In many ways, this is not only so well, and the audience in appreciation brutally beaten by farmers and an autobiography, but also a biography gave him a thunderous ovation. As he migrants returning home to die from of a family — the two often becoming came back for yet another bow, my mind phthisis. Her simple reflection on these Maggie’s life, like that of all South intertwined because of Maggie’s cen­ suddenly flashed back, and that other incidents impress upon the reader the African blacks, is dominated by the tral role as a mother and wife, and also world to which I once belonged came human experiences of colonial experiences of discrimination as the because the African family becomes into sharp focus ... Little do these people exploitation that is belied by otherwise 1950 Group Areas Act and the 1952 the radical haven from the ruthlessness know that while 1 am a part of them ... I sterile sociological and historical Abolition of Pass Laws Act are of Separate Development. am part of another world of which they analyses of these events. imposed. Here she recounts two major know so little. Maggie’s relatively privileged resistance campaigns — the fight he strength of this book ultimately schooled Anglican background and the against the destruction of Sophiatown lies in Maggie Resha’s ability to Maggie Resha's autobiography, M y powerful influences of her grandmoth­ and the campaign against the extension Tsituate her autobiography skilfully Life in the Struggle, is an animated er, mother and aunt propel her into the of pass laws to African women. Her within the changing socio-political account not only of her personal histo­ world of ‘boy’s education’. This matri­ highly detailed accounts of these cam­ contexts of the transition from segrega­ ry, but also of the rich social history of archy shields her from the experiences paigns reflects her active involvement. tion to apartheid. The interconnected­ black South African life during the eras of gender discrimination, and allow her She indicates how women are pushed ness of the personal and the political is of colonial and Afrikaner Nationalist to continue with her education away to the forefront of defiance as their obscure initially, but as she becomes rule. Her biography extends over a from the village at a boarding school in mobility is threatened by the pass laws. more politicised, this interconnected­ period of eight decades, but includes a East London. The Welsh high school The ANC Women’s League is rede­ ness becomes the central theme of the brief account of family ancestry that was founded by Mr Ebenezer fined during this period from being narrative — to the extent where the spans four hundred years. The book is Majombozi, but could not be named ancillary to the male-dominated organi­ personal text becomes meaningful only divided into three periods: the first after him since it had to have a name zation to being the central organizer of when linked to the wider sociopolitical period is an account of her childhood that was more palatable to white fun­ the Defiance Campaign. context. in Matatiele district in the early 1920s ders. At this point her only conscious This account of repression and resis­ N tan tala’s autobiography A L ife ’s and her training as a nurse at a mission sense of stratification is that of class, tance clearly challenges the conven­ M o sa ic reflects, in contrast, the hospital in East London until 1945; the expressed in terms of a Christian edu­ tional feminist understanding of the author’s need to assert an independent second period from 1947 onward, cen­ cated elite, vis-a-vis the traditional illit­ public-private divide and the family as identity. As the wife of prominent tres around her growing political erate ‘red people’. She does not yet a site of women’s oppression. The scholar and writer, AC Jordan, and the activism in the ANC Women’s League, perceive the white missionaries and African family, where it was allowed to mother of ANC activist, Palla Jordan,

SOUTHERN AFRICAN REVIEW OF BOOKS July /August 1993 Ntantala has often been seen as an Bantu Education, the inferior educa­ States during the Sixties, Ntantala takes ancillary figure. Her life story reflects tional system designed to create a sub­ her story of political struggle outside her determination to affirm her own servient black work-force. Capturing the South African environment. The voice and experience. the optimism and vitality of anti­ political scope of her account is there­ The autobiography opens with a apartheid politics in the Fifties, the fore a pertinent counter to the exclusive description of the author’s childhood in author outlines the activities of the preoccupation with local oppression in the Duff Mission of Transkei’s Idutywa CATA (of which she became an active much South African writing. It is also a district. Because this was one of the member after moving to Cape Town) as judicious response to the optimism first missions established in the area, well as the Teachers’ League of South about exile which one finds in autobio­ While Ntantala’s account of her and because the region was one of the Africa and Society of Young Africans. graphical writings by, for example, active public role appears to support first to fall under the control of the By 1957 Ntantala was writing arti­ Sindiwe Mangona and Noni Jabavu. her opposition to being stereotyped, British, Ntantala provides an informa­ cles on the diverse consequences of much of her interpretation of her life tive sketch of the transformation of apartheid. Her knowledge of specific s in the case in all autobiogra­ draws on conventional gender stereo­ indigenous society. Dealing with issues individuals and events in struggles dur­ phies, what is of considerable types and hierarchies. In one of her like relations between missionaries and ing the Fifties flesh out details that are Ainterest is not simply the life con­public speeches, for example, she calls local people, the role of white traders, frequently lost in standard historical sciously exposed by the autobiograph­ on women to become politically active and the class dynamics within African accounts, although Ntantala’s preoccu­ er, but the ambiguity of the ‘self’ in their prescribed roles as mothers, society, the author identifies key socio­ pation with a united front against which the autobiographer constructs. wives and nurturers, and it is signifi­ logical patterns in early twentieth-cen­ apartheid leads her to underplay impor­ One notable ambiguity about the cant that she quotes this exhortation as tury South Africa. Her references to the tant divisions among oppositional ‘autos’ of A Life’s Mosaic is the contra­ one of her definitive political state­ evolution of class divisions — influ­ organisations. diction between the author’s middle- ments. Moreover, her veneration of her enced by both the settler-colonial sys­ class position and outlook on one hand, father, her relative silence about her tem and the indigenous political struc­ and her claims to a popular identity and gendered experience in family life, her ture — are particularly revealing. By voice, on the other. Ntantala, clearly frequent self-definition as the object of tracing her genealogy, the writer aware of her roots in ‘me landed gentry male approval and desire, and her uncovers the intersecting class struc­ of the Transkei, me kulaks of mat area’ belief in the need for a husband who tures which shaped the African elite believes she transcends her status would be central to her personal matu­ into which she was bom. through her political opposition to ration implicitly endorse a patriarchal While the opening chapters are infor­ racism. Yet her writing remains power­ order. Resha, while avoiding any mative in their treatment of the dynam­ fully moulded by her elitist outlook. ‘direct opposition to patriarchy’ con­ ics of rural South Africa in the late For example, she is often at pains to stantly challenges the conventional 1800s and early 1900s, Ntantala’s writ­ stress the aristocratic credentials and gender identity that Ntantala implicitly ing lacks the nuanced detail and com­ class superiority of her forebears. Her countenances. pelling inside views which animate a father is described as a ‘gentleman to A Life’s Mosaic, then, frequently recalled period and social atmosphere. his fingertips’; her mother’s position in confronts the reader with the interpre­ Her childhood experiences are very a family which had strong ties with tive challenge of its silences and similar to those described in Resha’s Scottish missionaries is exalted; and unconscious meanings. We may gain book, but a comparison of the two her childhood in a family which clearly insight into me author and her milieu authors’ works reveals the flatness of exploits the labour of others is romanti­ not only by accepting the surface Ntantala’s writing. For example, when cized. Interestingly, Ntantala dwells on meanings of the text, but also by she describes her encounters with rela­ the racism of ‘coloured’ women who decoding its gaps and contradictions. tives who adhere to a traditional way of are reluctant to work for Africans, yet Maggie Resha (now) life, she does not (unlike Resha) cap­ underplays her own exploitative role as ince the first wave of black South ture the subjective and~psycnoiogical African writi«g-4n the-Fifties,-the dimensions which often give such first­ The focus on education is broadened Another site of contradiction in A Sgenre of autobiography has tended to hand views ilie edge uvei sociological in her account of the consequences of Life’s Mosaic revolves around fall into two categories. Writers who accounts. Generally, her treatment of the Extension of University Education Ntantala’s ambivalent perception of her went into exile during the Sixties often her experiences as a child, an adoles­ Act in 1959, an act which prescribed status and role as a woman. She chal­ reflected crises in identity and spiritual cent and a student at Healdtown and separate university education for differ­ lenges her sexist designation as ‘AC alienation, expressing a powerful sense Fort Hare are cursory and unvaried; ent racial and ethnic groups. Ntantala’s Jordan’s wife’ or ‘Pallo Jordan’s moth­ of their South African identity while one gets the impression that the author husband was the first fully-fledged er’, and towards the end of her autobi- remaining acutely aware of and recep­ has been motivated primarily by the black staff member to be appointed at tive to the needs of an overseas audi­ need simply to testify to her past expe­ the University of Cape Town, and ence. Recent writers, however, have rience rather than to convey its com­ began teaching there twelve years been far more attuned to a local reader­ plexity. before the act was passed. Ntantala ship and have also been far less From ‘Kroonstad’, the chapter deal­ consequently writes from a privileged ambiguous about their identity and cul­ ing with her first teaching appointment, vantage point, exploring some of the tural allegiances. Even though both Ntantala develops a thematic focus on more immediate and obscure events Ntantala and Resha write as exiles, My education. Her recollections as a young surrounding the university’s formal Life in the Struggle has much in com­ teacher in the Orange Free State offer transformation into a white institution. mon with the recent South African- glimpses into the impoverishment of a After the Sharpeville massacre and centred writing. typical location school in the 1930s. the government’s declaration of a state My Life in the Struggle and A Life’s The chapter is also a gauge of the of emergency, Ntantala’s husband Mosaic both offer insight into the way seclusion of me class into which she is received a grant to tour America but racism has affected the lives of black born: it is only when working in the was refused a passport. Ntantala and women in South Africa, and testify to location that she is struck by the enor­ her family consequently left me coun­ the uniqueness of black women’s, as mous iniquities of the government’s try on exit permits. The final section of opposed to ‘black’, history. As revela­ racial laws: ‘I often tell people that it her autobiography therefore deals with tions of black women’s actual lives, was my experience in the Orange Free her life in exile. Interestingly, Ntantala they intervene in the space of black State that really roused to anger my writes in more detail about life in exile women’s experience that has been social consciousness. As I looked at than Resha. This seems to reveal their dominated by historians and sociolo­ my class of forty or forty-five students, awareness of the different audiences gists who are usually white and male. knowing that of these only ten could for whom they write as well as their Phyllis Ntantala (then) But the autobiographies have different say for certain that they would go different levels of involvement in local resonances. Resha’s testimony of strug­ beyond what our school gave, I often struggles. Ntantala’s role as a conven­ ography condemns the convention gle, determination and triumph offers asked myself “Why? But why?”’ tional mother clearly made this experi­ whereby: an explicitly instructive message for Subsequent chapters go on to explore ence particularly trying and burden­ women in the country; in Ntantala’s her developing political awareness. some: she testifies to the pressures At academic lectures, the professor’s studied account we are likely to be fas­ When her husband obtains a teaching placed on her to give emotional and wife is regarded as an ornament, a beauti­ cinated by the highly ambivalent and post at Fort Hare, she is alienated by the psychological support to her dislocated ful flower the professor is wearing in his tortuous definition of‘self’. ■ complacency of the African elite, and and demoralized family. For Resha the buttonhole. And if anything is referred to disillusioned by the apathetic Cape nurturing, domestic role becomes pro­ her, it is a question about exotic African African Teaching Association. Ntantala gressively redefined by her constant cuisine — if she comes from Africa — or Desiree Lewis teaches in the English applauds the rejuvenation of the organi­ public political involvement. how does she like her American house, Department and Elaine Salo in the zation when it confronts the Nationalist By exposing the harassment of polit­ American foods and shops — of she is a Sociology Department at the government’s measures to introduce ically active foreigners in the United foreigner. Univeristy of the Western Cape.

July/August 1993 SOUTHERN AFRICAN REVIEW OF BOOKS ulticulturalism’, like ‘postcolo­ ernism; its impulses are a radical democ- acknowledged that injustice’. White the journal Research in African nialism’, is the most recent ratisation of society in the direction South Africa is even more vulnerable to Literatures, is currently editing Carribean M invention of cultural theory, recently expounded by the African such anamnestic readings of its founda­ and African Writers, Vol. 3, for The with powerful investments on both sides American scholar, Cornel West: tion. Dictionary of Literary Biography. My of the divide that separates the proponents own contribution is a biographical essay from the opponents. South Africans who Distinctive features of the new cultural poli­ on Njabulo Ndebele. For the same vol­ have spilled so much blood in their resis­ tics of difference are to trash the monolithic US Diary ume I myself happen to be the subject of tance to apartheid would most likely be and homogenous in the name of diversity, an essay by Prof. Brian Worsfold, Head -confused by the current celebration in the multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the of English at the University of Barcelona United States of what is called ‘identity abstract, general and universal in light of the at Lleida. Brian flew into the United politics’ by native, African, Spanish and concrete, specific and particular; and to his- States for the interview while regrettably I Asian Americans, also by gays and femi­ toricize, contextual ize and pluralize by high­ was unable to do the same for my assign­ nists, indeed by many hitherto margin­ lighting the contingent, provisional, vari­ ment on Ndebele. Telephone conversa­ alised groups. As NJichael Geyer put it in able, tentative, shifting and changing... tions were all we could manage. a recent issue of Critical Inquiry (Spring Two contrasting commentaries on 1993, Vol.19, No.3) multi-culturalism Ndebele’s writing have preceded mine. expresses ‘the weight of manifest despair One is a careful, deeply thought 18-page over a long history of physical and cultur­ If multiculturalism is an attempt to open essay by Anthony O'Brien in the 1992 al violation.’ up a cultural space for the ‘creative pro­ Spring issue of Diacritics, a powerful Paradoxically, after the integrationist ductivity’ of ethnic minorities and journal of literary theory which has fea­ struggles of the 1960s and the early ’70s women, postcolonial discourse is con­ tured work by such diverse critics as the notion of America as a ‘melting pot’ cerned with exploration of the space Frederic Jameson, Jonathan Culler, Terry is now taken seriously only by Anglo- between the metropolitan centres and Eagleton and others. The other commen­ Saxon white males desperately trying to their colonised outposts. What shifting LEWIS NKOSI tary consists of ad hoc literary judge­ cling to the normative values of a domi­ identities fill up that space? The invisibili­ ments by Martin Trump in the London nant monoculture deriving from a Euro- ty of the colonised even as they continue Laramie, Wyoming Magazine purporting to be a report on the Western tradition. According to Geyer, to disturb the sleep of the colonial masters New Nation Writers Conference held in ‘This monoculturalism gravitates toward is one of those mysteries which postcolo­ Nevertheless, with the present relentless Johannesburg two years ago in which notions of white supremacy.’ At any rate, nial texts are forever attempting to unrav­ production of theoretical texts explicating Trump summarises our critical positions it now appears that most marginalised el; it is a phenomenon which can only be the postcolonial condition, do we know at in one-liners with the aid of quotations, groups do not wish to be ‘melted’ at all, understood by enlisting among others, the this stage what discursive field is covered often wrenched out of context. Trump an unexpected development, which psychoanalytic tools of the great Doctor by ‘postcolonial discourse’? Hodge and who was given no opportunity to play his offends not only liberals like historian of the Unconscious or by seeking guid­ Mishra approvingly cite Ashcroft, role as putative spokesperson for black Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. but also the ance from one or the other of his numer­ Griffiths and Tiffin's postulate in their popular culture sourly dismisses the pro­ very conservatives who have all along ous disciples. Guilt, repression, displace­ influential book, The Empire Writes ceedings of the conference as having been sought to thwart any movement toward ment; these are the names of the game, Back (1989) where they state: ‘We use ‘plodding and conservative’, refers to the genuine integration. A certain desperation and, after the sins of commission and the term ‘postcolonial’ to cover all the so-called ANC 'apparatchiks’ as reveal­ can be detected in the way Establishment omission, always the return of the culture affected by the imperial process ing ‘surprising disjunction between seem­ figures from Saul Bellow to Alistair repressed to take revenge on the sleepless from the moment of colonisation to the ingly progressive politics and a reac­ Cooke bemoan the erosion of the Western censor! present day’. But can this term survive tionary view of literature’; Mphahlele foundations of American culture once An intriguing question raised by recent the strains of such an expanded definition offers ‘little break with Leavisite stan­ guaranteed by the hegemony of the commentaries on postcolonial narratives without bursting at the seams, in which dards of European aesthetic excellence English language; in States like Florida, or histories is the place to be assigned to case Zimbabwe or Kenya will now be and superiority’; I on the other hand Texas and California the massive written more than a of Hispanic Americans, in some commu­ and Australia, which in the process of before they were Zimbabwe or Kenya? quarter of a century ago that too often nities constituting voting majorities, has cutting loose from the imperial centre The writers also note ‘the equivocation black boulli African literature exploits equally ensured a growing influence of were simultaneously the instruments of with history contained in the prefix the ready-made plots of racial violence the Spanish language. conquest and imperial expansion, an ‘post”. They point out that as with 'post­ without any attempt to transcend or trans­ As to be expected, the emphasis on plu­ embarrassment which leads Lawrence modernism', the ‘prefix seems to con­ mute these ‘given social facts’ into artisti­ ralism, on the pluribus versus the u n u m , Buell in a recent essay in Am erican struct a simple version of history in which cally persuasive works of fiction’. has had a decided impact on cultural and Literary History (‘American Literary ‘modern' or the ‘colonial’ is totally Presumably Trump thinks a simple political institutions; on school and uni­ Emergence as a Postcolonial superceded’. In contrast, they seek to schedule of the discriminatory laws versity curricula; on the politics of repre­ Phenomenon’) to question the ‘the possi­ ‘distinguish between the postcolonial as would have served just as well as an artis­ sentation; among ethnic minorities there ble hypocrisy of an exercise in imagining an historical moment, and something tic creation just as a telephone directory is a clamorous demand for a truly decen­ America of the expansionist years as a broadly akin to Lyotard’s postmodernism, might serve as an example of textual pro­ tred, multicultural America in which postcolonial rather than proto-imperial a postcolonialism ... in which certain ten­ duction, which explains what seems to us power is no longer the exclusive monop­ power’. Nevertheless Buell does a good dencies are always inherently present'. a patronising devotion to such deformed oly of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants job of analagously reading seminal Such a reading of history posits postcolo­ works as The Marahi Dance. (WASPS). According to Geyer ‘multicul­ American texts - Whitman, Mellville, nialism as always having been there at the As for Njabulo Ndebele’s aesthetic: turalism has recovered the boisterous Cooper - against the texts of the postcolo­ beginning of the colonial enterprise, the ‘Notwithstanding the topicality of politi­ excess of a multiplicity of voices that has nial literatures of the Carribean, African ‘underside of colonialism’, as Hodge and cal reference in his writings, Ndebele’s burst the seams of academic and public and India (Rushdie, Achebe, Ngugi, Mishra put it, which ‘can appear almost asthetic norms remains [sic] constant and propriety.’ but occasionally, beneath Okigbo. Lamming and Walcott) while fully formed in colonial societies before conservative’. Ndebele’s aesthetic appar­ Geyer's own approbation of the new mul­ admitting that 'this analogizing also risks they have formally achieved indepen­ ently conies fully-fledged from E.M. ticulturalism, one senses a certain unease, blurring the distinction between the dence’. Hodge and Mishra claim to dis­ Forster’s Aspects o f the Novel. even scepticism, about the separatist European settler as colonial and the indi­ tinguish between ‘oppositional postcolo­ Apart from my dismissal of The strains that run through so many of its gene as colonial'. nialism and complicit postcolonialism', Marabi Dance in which Trump seems to versions, evoking in the process images In a recent book by Bob Hodge and but one wonders if anything is served by have invested heavily (he wrote his dis­ of the murderous conflicts in the Balkans, Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: replacing that old-fashioned but political­ sertation at York on this novel), in in the territories of the former Soviet Australian Literature and the ly charged prefix ‘neo' which used to Johannesburg I also put forward the view Union, and even much closer home, Postcolonial Mind, the construction of an • characterise complcit postcolonialism. that the time was long past when white South Africa. ‘The fiction of autonomy is Australian national identity, which they However, once they get into their stride, critics and academics, using gestural a powerful way to represent identities in argue, was ‘characterised by forced dis­ Hodge and Mishra’s readings of Marxism as irrefutable credentials, can an age in which spatial and temporal dis­ possession of Aborigines, with Australian literature, especially of aborig­ claim to speak on behalf of a silent black tances dissolve’, Geyer argues, ‘and to Aboriginal resistance crushed brutally’, inal texts, can be used to illuminate cul­ majority. I used as an example the anthol­ present elevated images in an age in serves ‘as analogical confirmation’, to use tural production in most postcolonial ogy of critical essays which Martin which the discrepancy between privileged Foucault’s phrase, of the ambiguous sta­ societies, including post-Apartheid South Trump edited, from which he excludes all and underprivileged groups has dramati­ tus of America as a postcolonial society. Africa but one black critic who writes on black cally increased. Multiculturalism in this Referring to the construction of this Afrikaans literature. I thought this an rendition is as suspect as mono-cultural- national identity, Hodge and Mishra example of paternalistic white attitudes ism’. Nevertheless, beyond the rhetoric speak of ‘the massive effects of this enter­ which still survive even among the so- of, say. the zealots of Afrocentrism and prise that arise from the nature of the Bemth Lindfors of the University of called progressive white academics and other advocates of autonomous identides, foundation of the modern Australian Texas, familiar to readers of African liter­ critics. 1 am not surprised that Trump the politics of difference has obvious state, as the unjust act of an imperial ature as among the foremost non-African thinks my criticism is an example of anti- links with the best versions of postmod­ power whose beneficiaries have still not critics of Afftcan literature and founder of whitism. ■

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Cape Fred E m ery’s Watergate: The Corrup­ tion and Fall of Richard Nixon (April, £17-99), linked to a new BBC television five-hour documentary series, draws on hitherto scattered and secret sources. In Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (March, £18-99) Milton Viorst explores the contradic­ tions of a world in which no single Arab nation has ever existed yet has 200 ■ million Arabs in many countries. ___— The Rift: The Exile Experience of South A fricans (February, £25) by Hilda B ernstein is a reco rd o f South Africans who, by choice of necessity, fled ap artheid. Lonely courage of the anti-apartheid exiles P EOPLE in Bri­ the sense of not belong­ tain rarely BY JULIA NEUBERGER ing. For these South Afri­ can emigres, largely ban­ understand (Cape, £25) by Hilda one of the interviews, it is ned or imprisoned, or the nature of Bernstein records the tough for them to recog­ both in South Africa, exile South African poli­ histories of a few of nise that this is the only was often as a result of tics in the Sixties those exiles. Some are function they will really their political activities. now back in South have now, because they They hoped to return. If and Seventies. Africa — for the first are too old, or have been you think you might go People of middle-of- time, they do not look away too long. He left back, it is a powerful dis­ the-road politics in behind them for the South Africa as one of incentive to settling. this country were per­ security police, fearing a “two most dangerous agi­ But there is one criti­ ceived as Communists blow or a shot. tators”, witn Oliver cism of this fascinating there. But others, less Tambo. work. It is full of mis­ Action against apart­ strongly politically com­ Ronald became very takes. mitted, left too. Not frightened, living in a heid could land you in Collective prison. Political activ­ activists, they were sim­ hotel on his own. One ply appaliea at what night, he found a large Sir Raymond Hoffen- ity could mean you went on. They could see parcel on his bed, and being blown up, as berg was President of the no future there. thought: “Well, this is it. Royal College of Physi­ Ruth First was. It must be a bomb.” cians, not Surgeons. Ruth Disagreeing with the Recognise But it was a packet of Weiss came originally treatment of blacks as Many of them also Matzos, the unleavened from Fuerth, not Furht. inferior beings could never settled, and do not bread eaten at Passover, For many of these peo­ mean your family dis­ feel at home wherever brought by a friend of his ple, this is a collective owning you. Thousands they now live. This vol­ m other’s. He cried. “I’m autobiography. They are of people felt that they ume tells the story of not a crier. . . I felt such a entitled to accuracy, and could not stay. what it is to be an exile. wild longing for my home so are the readers. THE RIFT: THE EXILE It tells it lyrically, in peo­ again, and it was a long, But, quibbles apart, this EXPERIENCE OF ple’s own words. long time.” book gives courage, hope, SOUTH AFRICANS As Ronald Segal says, in This book is full of tears, and understanding. BBC HOLIDAYS 101 Biykin Street Londos KU1 OAG ISSUE H0HTHY DATE

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Happy Sad Land South Africa and its South African society a by Mark M cCrum issues too com plex for voice and, more than (Sinciair-Stevenson, com prehension, this that, pays tribute to the £16.99; published book might make the astonishing human 31 January) place seem a little resources that adversity Seeking diversion from less intimidating. can sum m on up. a London career gone Absorbing reading. stale, journalist The Rift by Hilda Bernstein Visitor’s Guide to (Jonathan Cape, the Treasure £25; published Houses of 17 February) England South Africa’s April by John Barton and elections presage a Lindsey Porter rash of books about a (Moorland country in the throes Publishing, £9.50) of transition. This England’s stately one is destined to be hom es o pen their doors a classic. From the to the public again at late 1950s until the Easter, so here’s your relaxation of chance to find out apartheid laws in w hat’s on offer at eight 1990, hundreds of of the mos t famous - thousands of W oburn Abbey, Castle South Africans H ow ard, W arwick left the country. Castle, Broadlands, Bernstein, Beaulieu, Blenheim herself an exile, Palace, Chatsworth and Mark McCrum interview ed a w ide toured South Africa in cross-section, both 1992, his interest black and white, sparked by a brief visit who remade their 15 years earlier. This lives abroad or amusing account of left w ith the sole what he''found focuses purpose of on the often bizarre returning as part contrasts apartheid of the ANC’s offered travellers - one underground day drinking Fanta army. Her with the King of the book gives Zulus, the next partying this hitherto with Johannesburg's neglected bohemians. If you find sector of

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J u lia n O ’ H a u o b a n

TAMBO’S LONG MARCH walk about three hundred miles! (LAUGHS) Through the bush!’ The R ift: The Exile Experience of Morodi and his fellow fighters killed buffalo and zebra to South Africans stay alive. They also killed, without a second thought, a ★ group of black Rhodesian soldiers who tried to surrender By Hilda Bernstein and join them. They went for ten days without food. One (Jonathan Cape 500pp £25) day fifty men fed on a dove cooked in a tin. Morodi is one of more than three hundred people ques­ T he YEAR is 1967. The place, the banks of the Zambezi tioned by Hilda Bernstein for this book. Indeed she River. The mission, to strike a blow against apartheid, recorded so many talks that most had to be discarded. which is in its first full decade, and to show that the What is left cannot be disguised as anything other than a African National Congress can hit back. series of interviews. Some are dull. Others are vivid and This side is Zambia. The other side is Rhodesia where compelling. The author inteijects only here and there to the white breakaway regime of Ian Smith is yet young. To fill in background. get to South Africa hundreds of miles away you must cross The line-up includes Oliver Tambo and Ronnie Kasrils, these swirling crocodile-infested waters. Then tramp the ANC’s former military intelligence chief, as well as through the vast Wankie game reserve and through leading lights from the London anti-apartheid scene such as Botswana. Only then, scorched, starved and almost dying Abdul Minty and Trevor Huddleston. I suspect these are of thirst, are you on the threshold of South Africa. names which will have some Literary Review readers with Then what? Ignite the revolution? Not even the most less than complete revolutionary credentials reaching for optimistic ANC guerrilla can have expected that. But even their sjamboks. a minor shoot-out with ‘the Boers’ would encourage those But read on. Put away your whips and service revolvers. within South Africa’s borders not to give up hope. The The Cold War is over, and there are other exiles in this struggle continues. story who have channelled their feelings into literature, Among those crossing the river is Oliver Tambo, Nelson drama or music rather than politics. The writer and actor Mandela’s friend and leader of the ANC. Telling the story Antony Sher found he was prepared to own up to being is Graham Morodi, who joined the ANC in 1950 when it Jewish and gay, but ‘...with being a white South African, I was still a legal organisation. ‘We cross Zambezi in a very knew very quickly it was something I wanted to disown’. dangerous boat — the enemy could not believe that we Whitbread Prizewinner Christopher Hope, author of have crossed there...Then after crossing we are forced to Kruger’s A lp and White Boy Running, assumed that as an

English-speaking South African he where they could be seen by the would have something in common condemned men in their cells. with the British people, but found ‘When you see the coffins outside, them more foreign than the French. you are going — there’s no way His is a story of voluntary exile. ‘The o u t.’ effect, I think, is rather like bereave­ But they were saved by the inter­ ment. It can be got over, but it takes nal struggle between the Smith a considerable time and some people regime and the Rhodesian judiciary. never get over it.’ Maphoto ended up being freed after But most gripping are the tragi­ twelve years when Mugabe came to comic camp-fire tales of the fighters. power. But even then there were a Their raids usually got nowhere near further twelve years of exile to a solid South African target, and endure, and this is where we get to ended for many of their comrades in the real point of the story. When a dusty death in the middle of the Maphoto was interviewed he had bush. Graham Morodi was lucky to been an exile half a lifetime, with a survive. When he crossed the son left behind in South Africa. Zambezi a second time, the boat ‘When I left home he was four sank, and he was left floundering months old; he is now twenty-nine among the hippos and crocodiles in years old. He has never seen me, coat and boots trying to save two only he sent me the pictures, I sent suitcases of hardware and eight hun­ him pictures. Yesterday I talked to dred rounds of ammunition while him on the phone.’ his escorts swam to safety. South Africa: those who stayed behind Many of those exiled were given Another fighter, Isaac Maphoto, only an hour or two to pack and go. recounts being sentenced to death in Rhodesia following Others planned their own escapes but could say no good­ the Wankie raid. ‘We stayed in the condemned cell for a byes for security reasons. When the end of exile came and long time. So we sent one of our comrades, Moto — he’s the ANC was unbanned it was almost as sudden. But there still alive — to go and tell the superintendent that we are could be no complete return. You can’t undo half a life tired, we want to be hanged.’ spent as an outsider. And, as Hilda Bernstein points out, Coffins were then prepared and placed in the courtyard the place you return to is not the same place you left. The return of the natives cated them, telling them the his­ A recent US report identifies The interviews are straight THE RIFT tory of their immediate past. 13 such Truth Commissions recordings, full of detail but low . by Hilda Bernstein “The Movement... gave back to worldwide, and many, although in intensity, which gives them a Jonathan Cape, £25 these young people their own interestingly not all, in the ANC rather detached, but historically history, and with it an under­ are staking their claim now to more valuable, import, so that NOBODY knows how many standing of the nature of soci­ their own cleansing of the this book tells us more about the people left South Africa to go ety. The anger remains, but the apartheid legacy, so that the repression years than many into exile over the apartheid racial direction of it has memory does not return one learned or more passionate vol­ years (1948-1990). Hilda changed. They speak of radical day to fester. umes have done. The book, Five Bernstein, herself an exile, esti­ change, but not of revenge. For Bernstein interviewed more years in the making, is the first mates 30,000 to 60,000, defining all its failings and omissions, than 330 exiles, but limits the to collate the exi!,e story. It is an exile as “those who leave this is the gift bestowed by the number of published interviews also the first to give many exiles with the intention of returning”. ANC on the future of South to 105, extending over 516 an opportunity to relate their Whatever the true figure, it was Africa.” pages: an immense assignment. experience.s - “I ’ve never spo­ a vast exodus, and an appalling A rem arkable gift it is, too. The interviewees, ranging from ken about this,” was a frequent tale of uprooted and often bro­ The ANC has resolved there the famous, such as Oliver response, because “the pain of ken lives that Bernstein chroni­ will be no Nuremburg trials in Tambo and Anthony Sher, to the memories and the fear of the cles in this massive work. South Africa. But, as the day the relatively unknown, are Death Squads ... closed their “An extraordinary feature of approaches for the ANC to be grouped into (sometimes arbi­ mouths”. the exiles’ politics,” writes installed in government, the trary) categories. Among the Above all, this book acknowl­ Bernstein, “is the absence of a repressed debate on whether the interviewees are Africans, edges the tenacity of human spirit of revenge.” The young­ apartheid crimes should be for­ whites, colourds and Asians,* beings; that people can have 20 sters who erupted from the gotten as well as forgiven is sur­ veteran activists and one-time or 30 years wrenched out of townships schools in 1976 “went facing. In August liftt year, the Soweto youngsters; the three their lives and still be ready, not out fired by anger, seeking ANC proposed that a National Slovo daughters. Robyn, Gillian with bitterness but cheerfully, revenge, their intention to get a Truth Commission should be set and Shawn; and even Captain to return to their native land to gun and shoot those who had up to investigate “all abuses Dirk Coetzee, who headed one help rebuild it, is a marvel of been shooting them”. Once out­ that have flowed from the policy of the notorious government the human spirit. side, however, the ANC re-edu­ of apartheid”. death squads. Stanley Uys very so often, an author ries Bernstein has chronicled ai uniquely matches a sub­ famous, such as Oliver Tambo, Ror ject — Carl Sandburg as A world apart aid Segal and Hugh Masekela. Otf the biographer of Lin­ ers are leading figures of the Ionj coln comes to mind — rican cause and their South African It is the account of his and Fritzy’s anti-apartheid campaign abroat E and here we have the subjectorigins. of T h e R if t : The Exile battle to come to terms with their such as Kader Asmal, Abdul Mint) South African exiles dealt with by For me, the most moving account Experience O f South Africans shock and their loss which makes and Ronnie Kasrils. Most of the ea one of the finest writer* of that same of all is that of Marius Schoon, this section the highlight, for me, of iles reported here are otherwise o j exile community. It is a community whose wife and baby daughter were by Hilda Bernstein this extraordinary book. dinary people whose idealism an already rich in writers such as blown up by the South African sec­ Cape £25 pp5I6 Another riveting account, from a principles forced them to leave thei Breyten Breytenbach, Christopher urity police death-squad in Angola. totally different point of view, is that homes in order to carry their ow Hope, Wally Serote, Mazizi Kune Marius and his little son, Frilzy, sur­ Donald Woods of Captain Dirk Johannes Coetzee, anti-apartheid struggle further. and Anthony. Sher, but Hilda Bern­ vived this ordeal at terrible cost to former field commander in one of Here then are the many and varie- stein brings special credentials to the their psyches, and spent the rest of and house arrest orders which had the South A frican death squads. In a accounts of people ranging across task. In exile since 1964 when she their Lives in Dublin until able to re­ made getting a job impossible, and chilling section of the book, Coetzee spectrum of occupations, trades, an crossed the bonder into Botswana on turn to South Africa. in order to marry Jenny Curtis, who describes in matter-of-fact tones the professions, from professors to pol foot to escape arrest, she is the au­ Marius, a gentle and quixotic soul, was also banned, he bad had to ar­ most horrifying murders ordered by itical activists, priests to carpenters thor of several books of rare quality had been in prison in Pretoria from range for them to decamp to Bots­ his superiors, including that of the doctors to teachers — men, women on the concerns of South Africans, 1964 to 1976 ifor trying to blow up a wana, where they worked as Durban lawyer, Griffiths Mxenge, and children, black and white, witJ and The Rift, appropriately, crowns government installation to register teachers for six years. who was stabbed to death and muti­ sdories of heartache and hope, su< the collection. his own protest at the iniquity of the Regardless of the pacific nature of lated. Coetzee also talks in detail of cess and failure, ruined childhood: It is a big book in more ways than apartheid system. The attempt had their work, there they were deemed the murders of Ruth First and other and marriages, all resulting from lh< one. At more than 500 pages, it been inept enough to m ake Inspector by the South African security police exiled activists who were deemed in impact of the apartheid policy. chronicles the experiences of many Clouseau appear a model of eff­ to be a dangerous threat to the state, Pretoria to be enemies of the state. Yet, as the book establishes, eh« South African exiles with total iciency by comparison, yet the and orders were issued for their After this section, readers will be South African exile community ha repoitorial integrity, letting them viciousness with which Marius murder. in no doubt about what all the exiles proved to be one of the rnos speak for themselves from a variety Schoon was pursued by the assassins- The ANC got wind of this and were fighting against in their various successful exile communities in th( of categories such as art ists, fighters, of the security police bespoke the sent them to Angola for their protec­ ways. Most of the accounts, how­ world in terms of achieving its goals activists, and lobbyists,_all of them special hatred the apartheid system tion. However, after they had spent ever, are more mundane recitals of That is what makes this boo) having in common their South Af- reserved for those they saw as rene­ six months in Angola, !he South Af­ families being forced to flee the particularly timely. Its publicatior gade Afrikaners — their own kind rican death squad caught up with country for political reasons, and the coincides, appropriately, with Soutl D onatd Woods u a journalist living in refusing to be part of their system. them. Marius was out of the flat enormous difficulties in adjusting to Africa’s first-ever democratic elec Britain since I97X. when he was banned by After serving out his term, he had when the bomb went off that killed new ways. lion, the long-awaited day for which the South African government been released under strict banning Jenny and their daughter Katryn. A number of the exiles whose sto­ so much was sacrificed by so many i ) TEL: 071-588-3671 103 WHITECROSS STREET. LONDON EC1Y 8QT I

THE TINES 1 Peaiiijtoi street/ London El

ABC CIRC. 420,127 SS4E 24 MAR 1994

THE Sharpeville massacre of the objects of Munnion’s scorn 1960, in which 69 protesters — the new breed who speak in were killed and 180 wounded, computerese and write their was the first major catalyst for Old hands, stories with “a Diet Coke and an exodus, spanning three a hygiene-wrapped sandwich" decades, of tens of thousands beside their word processors. of South Africans opposed to The collection of anecdotes apartheid. Some went by severed limbs is hilarious. Munnion almost choice; in search of an educa­ out-scoops Scoop (with ful­ tion denied to them under the themselves and slowly, frag­ delightful and a must read for some acknowledgement). In privations of “Bantu Educa­ ment by fragment, their indi­ any aspiring foreign corres­ doing so, he also manages to tion”, or to help more actively vidual voices join together to pondent, who would do well to instruct us, at a romping in “die struggle". But most form a chorus of experiences emulate some of the light­ canter, about the decades of were forced to leave, often that is both chilling and hearted attitudes of the “the continent’s painful shed- under cover of night, on foot affecting. GOAHs and avoid acting like . ding of its colonial skin”. over hundreds of miles and It is not a balanced book — across crocodile infested riv­ but Bernstein makes no bones ers, to escape a fiercely oppres­ about her political sympathies sive regime which was and that, in the end, is not the suffocating all forms of point. The R ift’s most impor­ opposition. tant role is to fill the gaps of experience censored by the Samantha Nationalist government dur­ ing 46 years of rule, and to Weinberg hold up as examples the dedicated and committed T H E RIFT people — artists as well as The Exile Experience of freedom fighters, children as South Africans well as senior politicians — By H ilda Bernstein who devoted their lives to Jonathan Cape, £25 fighting a repugnant political system, often at the expense of BANANA SUNDAY personal happiness and fulfil­ Datelines from Africa ment. By Chris Munnion For their trials will not end William Waterman, £16.95 with majority rule. Even as Bernstein coilected her inter­ views, the exiles started to return. For many, this has Most of the exiles had little been almost as traumatic as idea what was in store for the original flight into exile. them. Many had left in a The land they found is not the hurry, without being able to same as the one they left: “All notify their family where they through the years the South had gone, even that they were African exiles sang songs, the alive — these were the days of songs they brought with them detention without trial, of from home. But at home they mysterious deaths in police are singing different songs custody — and with no clue as now,” Bernstein writes. "The to how long they might be rift can never be healed.” away. In Banana Sunday, there Hilda Bernstein, a writer are more tales of treacherous and artist who left South trips across croc-infested wa­ Africa illegally in 1964, spent ters. Only this time the protag­ the last four years travelling onists are journalists, more the world to interview more specifically GOAHs (Genuine than 300 fellow exiles; about Old Africa Hands) — an elite the forces that propelled them club of which the author, into exile, their experiences Chris Munnion, is a fully outside South Africa, and their paid-up member. They were expectations of the future. the boozy hacks who called The R ift is a collection of each other “old boy” and who, some of those interviews, armed only with a battered linked only by short introduc­ Remington typewriter, a tions and explanations. It is couple of cleft sticks and ten not, as may be expected of a trunks of appropriate cloth­ work of this kind, a real page ing, risked life and limb to turner — but it deserves send back vivid — and imagi­ persistence. Instead of plung­ native — dispatches from the ing the reader headfirst into a “dark continent". shocking account of the hor­ M unnion’s book is often rors of apartheid, Bernstein irreverent and frequently po­ lets her witnesses speak for litically incorrect. It is also South Africa Ironies of exile T.l.S. s j ^ H 'r Post-colonial homelessness and the anticlimax of return

LEWIS NKOSI sition to the government), was so incensed by the callous procedure that he decided to comb the statute book for any law which might provide a Hilda Bernstein loophole, and he discovered the Departure from South Africa Act. One of its provisos was to the T H E R IF T effect that the government had no legal powers The exile experience of South Africans to prevent a South African citizen from leaving 516pp. Cape. £25. the country, provided he was prepared to sign a 0224 03546 0 declaration undertaking never to return. In other words, for the price of an exit permit one was forced to sign away one’s citizenship. This I did. n 1873, dreaming of exile from the Church, It is my favourite irony that through Harold from France, the “eldest daughter of the Wolpe I earned myself a footnote in the history I Church”, from family and from the culture of the struggle for the freedom to opt for exile of the Enlightenment, Arthur Rimbaud from South Africa. Many South Africans were wrote in A Season in Hell: “My day is done. I am later to use this loophole to escape from the leaving Europe.” He, or the persona of his poem, clutches of the South African regime. was off to foreign climes which would darken his If for no other reason than nostalgia, a desire skin. For good measure, he added: “Now I am an to refresh childhood memories, exiles always outcast. I loathe my country.” As Alain Borer hope for a return to their roots, to the graves of put it in his amusing Rimbaud in Abyssinia, their ancestors. When for four years I lived in “Rimbaud escapes us. After his adolescent Warsaw, I used to encounter Polish emigres, adventures (endless tramping through the town mostly Jewish, from all over the world, who and country), real flight. . . . It is there, in Rim­ frankly confessed that they had come back for baud, the poetry of departures.” Surprisingly, it sentimental reasons to visit the graves of their is an African poet, the late Tchicaya U’Tamsi ancestors, and, in the case of Jewish offspring, to from the Congo, who pays Rimbaud the best visit the “scene of the crime”. tribute by interminably parodying his Angst, his In 1992, after thirty-one years of exile, I surreal flights of fancy, his insurrectionary tem­ returned to South Africa for the first time, in per, his flights across borders. In one poem, order to attend a writers’ conference in Johan­ U’Tamsi writes: “Behold me here in Europe / no nesburg. For thirty-one years I had carried the cane in my hand / mouth bunched into a trumpet country inside my head; I had read of events / expansive / more French than Joan of Arc .. . I there, of the heroic resistance to apartheid, of the spit into the Seine like all honest poets”. And detentions, the tortures and the community then adds: “Ah what continent lacks its false John Matthews and Vayiswa Charlie, farmers, from Reiner Leist’s Blue Portraits (172pp. Munich: removals; of brutal wars waged openly or clan­ negroes / 1 have them to spare / Even Africa has Nazraeli, distributed in the UK by Cornerhouse. £30.3 923922 23 X) destinely; of the personal and national mutila­ some”. tions. Then, first sceptical, then credulous, 1 had Rupture, exile, abandonment and departures, they tEnk of exile, most people fiave'in mind' serving moments, A more cynical expression of learned of the changes Which were taking place, we are told, are typical symptoms ofa condition those individuals forced out to foreign lands, but this view is contained in Cabrera Infante’s the transformations to the landscape and the at once local and universal, which has become very rarely do they think of that oxymoron famous maxim: “Nothing succeeds like exile”. national psyche, and the indefinite postpone­ associated with the culture of modernism, with “internal exile”. A critic properly reminds us that In consequence, from time to time we are con­ ment or deferment of what everyone had for so the “radical instability of contemporary experi­ “modern exile is not exclusively confined to the fronted with the crowning irony of exile, long dreaded: that great South African night­ ence”. Michael Seidel writes in a recent study massive displacement of peoples from their described by Bernstein as a “paradox”, of indi­ mare conjured up by writers from Alan Paton to that exile has become “a metaphor for the alien­ homelands but can also be located in the specific viduals who no longer wish to return home: Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, the final ated or marginalised modem consciousness”; forms of silencing opposition without expul­ Abdul Minty and Dumisani Kumalo have each catastrophe, the great apocalypse, a final reckon­ and Nikos Papastergiadis makes the point that it sion”. In this connection, we can immediately spent a major portion of their lives - up to thirty ing with apartheid in the form of a race war can be “a rewarding adventure into the un­ reflect on that supreme irony of the twentieth years - working full-time in the Anti-Apartheid between black and white. Instead, the blacks known, or .the melancholy trauma of moral and century, when hundreds of black South Africans organisations, sacrificing their educational and were now fighting it out in the townships. In spite spiritual abandonment”. He adds: “Modernity is were banished from the cities in which they were career opportunities, to concentrate only on this: of many minor shocks to the system, in spite of a sensibility which is obsessed with journeys.” born to what were called their “homelands”. to end apartheid. And now they stand face to the bombings and the shootings, the real storm, it In Africa, too, the moment of modernism is They were in fact exiled to “homes” they had face with the reality that they do not wish to live seemed, had not broken; it had drifted past with­ invariably associated with displacement, impris­ never known or simply banished to empty land­ in South Africa again. out anybody even knowing. onment, and exile. Almost all the leading scape; but those of us who were left behind in the y own experience of exile, in spite I had dreamed, of course, of some final return African writers who became part of the mod­ urban areas were daily hounded at night under of periods of great deprivation, has in the future and had silently wondered what that ernist movement, which for reasons too compli­ the curfew laws and expelled from city centres to M never been one of relentless, unmit­ would be like. In my fiction I had even prefigured cated to explain here also entailed an immediate the unlit townships infested with crime. In conse­ igated suffering. As an orphan and imaginatively staged that final return. Then, conflict with post-independence governments, quence, when my time came to leave South brought up by a grandmother, like many of my suddenly, there we were at Johannesburg Air­ have either been imprisoned, banished or made Africa, I already felt as if I were an exile; Sophia- contemporaries so crucially marked at birth by port - Mbulelo Mzamane, Daniel Kunene, to feel unwelcome orphans in their own coun­ town, which had offered us some kind of identity, the transition from a rural to an urban culture, I Mandla Langa, and others - on a fine and beauti­ tries: Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winner, had been destroyed; thereafter I lived every­ was already an exile before I knew it. Leaving ful morning exactly as I had imagined it and imprisoned during the Biafra war, then exiled in where. sometimes boarding illegally with white South Africa had a kind of ambiguity of a jour­ described it in writing. But what was missing - Ghana; Kofi Awooner, the Ghanaian poet, for a friends in the white suburbs or sleeping on chairs ney both forced and willed, for, after all, I could apart from Mandla Langa’s luggage, which had while detained in Ghana, who left for Britain and in the newspaper office where I worked. hare stayed in South Africa if I had wished. The gone astray with his valuable manuscripts - was America; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, novelist and play­ What finally emerges from books about exile - South African government merely refused to the drama of arrival that I had envisioned in wright imprisoned by the Kenya regime and now especially in Hilda Bernstein’s various accounts grant me a passport to take up my one-year fel­ thirty years of exile. The wind did not hold its living in Britain and America; Nurrudin Farah, of it - is that it is never a uniform experience. lowship at Harvard University; my sin appar­ breath; no crowds applauded at the airport; for the Somali novelist, for years in exile from Siad Political activists, more than writers and artists, ently was only to write against the government, the most part writers and academics rather than Barre’s regime; Dambudzo Marechera, for years invariably characterize exile as a source of pain but I was not a political activist in the sense that I political activists, we were not known to the gen­ in exile in Britain from the Ian Smith regime, and privation, and rightly so, since, as Bernstein recognize that term. In those days (the end of the eral public. We were no political returnees arriv­ then returning home to find himself in constant points out, many of them find in exile only a 1950s), most of us had become quite fatalistic ing amid organized fanfare to the land we had conflict with the Zimbabwe government. It “sharper sense of loss”. Writers and artists are about our chances of obtaining a passport to not seen for more than a quarter of a century. comes as a shock, in fact, to realize that as a tem­ usually more ambivalent toward that experience travel abroad, although I know of one instance Few people knew we had come back. It was an poral concept, “postcoloniality” spells not so of exile; some may even seem embarrassed about when a young African suffered a mental break­ anticlimax. much - as we thought back in the 1960s - a kind being included in such a category. As Breyten down after being refused a passport to travel to The final shock was being herded into one of of homecoming after decolonization, as the cre­ Breytenbach expresses it from the perspective of the United States where he had been offered a those queues emblazoned with the sign for alien­ ation of new conditions of homelessness. his many years of Parisian exile: “I’ve a split scholarship to study. ation: FOREIGN PASSPORTS. So here we So far I have not mentioned any South mind about the notion of exile. I reject it because In my case, after six months of waiting, I was were at last: thirty years before, we had left as Africans; this is mainly because, as Hilda Bern­ there’s the immediate tendency to self-dramatise finally informed that my application for a pass­ South Africans, and we were now returning as stein makes clear in her book of interviews, The or to self-pity. It’s a very sterile category to be fit­ port had been turned down; no reasons for this “foreigners”. Rift, for thirty years, exile, both internal and ted into.” One can even argue that for writers, were offered. At that point, I decided to give up, external, became for many South Africans the artists and academics, severance and displace­ but a friend, the left-wing lawyer, Harold Wolpe Lewis Nkosi’s books include Home and Exile, very condition of their existence. In fact, when ment from home are not always without self­ (who was later chronically imprisoned for oppo­ 1965.

- 5 - T L S APRIL 1 1994 SOUTH AFRICA . • ^ Home is where >

,J S S F 3 I the heat is By Adani Kiiper

THE RIPr: The Exile Experience of South Africans by Hilda Bernstein, Cape £25

HILDA BERNSTEIN, a journalist strictly an exile, and a couple of high- and political activist, is herself an exile profile artists, the actor Antony Sher from South Africa, and for many years and the novelist Chistopher Hope. , she collected the stories of others who The political activists who left were were forced abroad by the apanbeid Often fleeing from hardship, torture, system. Presenting more than 100 such imprisonment, abuse; but once out of testimonies, her book is a moving the country they could feci rootless and record of disrupted lives, the pain of lost. “Being in exile means you are con­ dislocation and the longing for tbe stantly on the watch,” sa>i Alpheus place these disparate South Africans Mangezi, who became a soaa! workei stubbornly insist on calling “home". in Britain, Sweden and Mozambique When public negotiations between “You are constantly thinking about the Afrikaner Nationalist government home.” Gloria Nkadimeng fled when and the ANC began after the release of she was 14 and did not see her mother Nelson Mande la in February 1990, one for ten years, hut says: “I think the only of the most urgent issues was the par­ time that my soul can settle is when I'm don of the many thousands who bad in South Africa.” It was the same for left illegally or been expelled on exit Ruth Weiss who had escaped from permits, and the tens of thousands Germany with her parents and wa^ more who bad trained and fought in later forced out of South Africa too. the ANC army, Umkhonto we Sizwc. She yearned for the African country­ When at last the government agreed to side: “my emotional development and the unconditional return of an esti­ my political development happened mated 40,000 exiles, the UN High there. So that is where my home is - if Ccaimss£k>R?r for Refugee spake cf I auj S*OiiiC. “the begjamniof the end of a 30-ycar- But in time some did find new -j^oW human tragedy”. homes. Those who left in the Sixties It was almost exactly 30 years since have grown old in exile, and although the shooting of unarmed demonstra­ they longed for South Africa for most tor* at Sharpeville, in March 1960, had of their adult lives, they may find that precipitated the first wave of political they cannot now go back. Freddy emigration. More followed after the Reddy was a poor Indian hospital por­ imprisonment of Mandela and bis as­ ter who became a trade unionist and sociates in 1963, when Oliver Tambo then hiked through Africa to find an left to organise an external resistance. education. With the help of the In 1976 a student-led “black conscious­ Anti-Apartheid movement he eventu­ ness" uprising broke out, centred in ally found bis way to to Norway, where Soweto. After the brutal suppression he qualified as a doctor. He worked of the unrest, angiy, determined young from time to tune as a psychiatrist in people surged abroad to continue the ANC camps, but married a Norwegian, fight, and a great many found their way raised a family, served as a city council­ to the armed camps of the ANC and lor in Oslo. “Now I am nearly 60 years the PAC in East Africa and Angola. old, and I think it is time for me just to Hilda Bernstein is a South African live my life.” Communist Party stalwart, and she has The children of the activists are also selected testimonies mainly from activ­ often reluctant to return. The choicc ot ists of the SACP and the ANC. The exile was not theirs, after all, and then liberal professionals who were driven parents’ absorption in foreign political out of the country, or who found it im­ affairs made assimilation in the new possible to live and work there in good country difficult. “I’m so angry with conscience, are represented only by him stffl," the film-maker Sliawn Slow Archbishop Timor Huddleston, not says of her father, Joe Slovo. the leader

angiy with him all my life.” Oliver Tambo’s son, Dali, was sent to an English public school, and by the time he was Zl he felt more British than South'African. He resists the political commitment of his family. “My moth* er’i always saying to me, Took at Mbeki’s son! Look at Z u lu ’s son! Where are yon?" Which 1 think is quite a cruel thing to say." ExOcs who do return are going back to a changed country. Tfc*y nw.> find that their dain*' *_ joos, Houses, even im c x iw , are le>s readily granted thus they had anticipated. And as they sake their way hoaie, tbeir paths cross those of white conservatives running away from racial equality and the risks of the pew South Africa. These new exiles will probably not return, but they Oliver Tmfcr U* *o» f*ci* BrftkJT wS also, no doubt, pine for home.

10AWUI. tw* THE INDEI’ENDKNT t)N SUKDW THE GUARDIAN Tuesday April 26 1994 Books 1 0 Home is where the hate is

, vtr?.

it’s a challenge that must have Mark Gevisser spurred Bernstein on. The Rift is an attempt to bear witness to, and thus The Rift: The Exile demystify, the condition of exile. Bernstein has already related her. Experience of South own story in her autobiography, The Africans World That Was Ours. Here she tells the stories of others. While The Rift by HILDA BERNSTEIN is suffused with her personal con­ 516pp £25 cerns — motherhood and struggle, the effect of apartheid and exile on Jonathan Cape women and the family, the wages and rewards of commitment, frac­ tured identity — it is only in this unexpected moment of interaction On May 26,1948, the Guardian half a century, and the Guardian front page that year.” The Legacy S OMEWHERE, buried deep in that we feel, obliquely, the author’s noted that a Nationalist victory in has faithfully reported “the facts, * of Apartheid, edited by Joseph these tales of South African own pain; hfer own role in the history the South African election would the details and the horrors”, in Harker (£19.95), is an evocative exile, of struggle and solidar­ she documents. be a disaster, won on “the worst the words of Guardian editor collection of writing and photo­ ity, dislocation and separation, there The interviews were conducted be­ possible policy” — apartheid. It Peter Preston. “They say that for­ graphs published in the Guardian. is a quiet but astonishing rupture to tween 1989 and 1991. Many thus was, suggested the paper, “not so eign news does not sell papers, The famous iconic photograph, of the narrative: one of the hundred spoke while they were still unable to much a policy as a neurotic fan­ but the issue of the Guardian police attacking women demon­ interview subjects, all of whom are return to South Africa, and many tasy”. That fantasy has been a after Nelson Mandela’s release strators in Durban, was taken in recorded in first-person oral-history more in that fraught time when reality in South Africa for nearly sold more copies than any other 1959 by Laurie Bloomfield style, turns on her interviewer: “You South African exiles were making say the secrecy was to protect u§ and difficult decisions about whether to protect yourselves; but there’s an­ they would go home; decisions which Some of her subjects are remark­ pregnancy rates among teenage girls Ultimately, the book does not other element — I think it’s also to led them to question the very mean­ ably articulate and reflective, and in ANC settlements; of alcoholism blame Gloria Nkadimeng's father. protect yourselves from having to ing of “home”. others shadow their re-telling with a and fatalism. But many others talk of Nor even the paternal — and often deal with the consequences of your Many have since returned, and so longing so ragged and haunting that the community they found; of the inadequate — ANC. Culpability for political activities on your children. I The Rift exists in a curious time- their tales become poetry: Marius solidarity, the “new families” they the tragedies of South African exile liiiiik k's much easier notto hctve lo w&ip, gttasiftg- thtreriticm Fifth Act— Schoun, fur example, lost his wife rnaue among exiles; the opportuni­ is placed squarely on the explain than to trv to explain, isn’t — the homecoming, the resolution or and daughter in a bomb-blast in ties they had that, as black people, shoulders of an oppressive apartheid it?” lack thereof — to these peoples’ per­ Angola. He distills his anguish into would have been denied to them system which forced South Africans The challenge is issued by Shawn sonal dramas. Nevertheless, by inter­ the cry of his surviving son, who back home. to leave home in the first place. How Slovo, daughter of Joe Slovo and viewing them at so volatile a time, develops a phobia for Angola’s omni­ But even those who found meaning appropriate, then, that it should Ruth First and maker of the film A Bernstein captures an instability in present monkeys. Wherever the wan­ in exile acknowledge the immense come out now, at this critical junc­ World Apart. Her interlocutor, the her subjects that moves this book dering father and son go — to Devon, personal toll on their lives. And ture in South African history, at this author of The Rift, is Hilda Bern­ from being merely a social document to West Cork — the monkeys follow among the children of exiles, such moment of “reconciliation” where stein, herself a politial activist who of South African exile towards a them. When the child finally con­ bitterness. Gloria Nkadimeng, who even the National Party has reconfi­ took young children into exile. And meditation on exile in general. quers the phobia, it is as if both went into exile to be with her father, gured itself as a non-racial organisa­ father and son have been liberated. remembers that when she asked him tion claiming to have “liberated” But most of the testimony is the for gifts, he responded that he could South Africa from the chains of mundamty of dates and moves; a not single her out for special atten­ apartheid. Upon reading the testimo­ train-timetable of displacement. This tion because “all these children who nies in The Rift, it is hard not to be in itself is immensely po werful: are here are my children.” From that shocked by the audacity and cyni­ GITA MEHTA’s much as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah day, she says, “I just closed myself cism of such claims. rendered the Holocaust translucent up, and I told myself that I no longer ‘Exquisitely wrought parables with its obsessive mechanical detail, have a father . . . He’s much more in Mark Gevisser is the co-editor of The Rift demystifies the grand pro­ love with his cause than with us, his Defiant Desire, essays about being gay of human frailty’ ject of struggle with its repetition of children.” in South Africa the mechanics of upheaval. Sunday Telegraph Which is not to say that this book is without an ideology of its own. perhaps because these testaments READINGS • DISCUSSIONS • TALKS ‘Life-enhancing gem of a book’ were recorded when a culture of se­ Observer crecy — a war ethos — still pervaded the South African liberation move­ ment, Bernstein’s project often veers ‘Elegant, exquisite picture unfortunately towards partisan Events struggle-history. Criticism of the Literature of “spiritual India’” African National Congress is care­ fully managed, and there is far too FATAL ATTRACTION Guardian much dull lionisation of the interna­ AN EXPLORATION OF FEAR AND FICTION tional Anti-Apartheid Movement. No-one directly challenges ANC lead­ ( v "> 4 MAY JONATHAN MEADES & LISA TUTTLE ‘This book is a delight’ ership, and there are none of the Two writers consider interest in vile things that disgust Time Out horror-stories of human rights abuse 11 MAY PATRICK MCCABE in ANC camps in Angola that have Reading from his powerful and deeply disturbing hovel. The Butcher Boy. come to light through commissions 16 MAY JOHN BANVILLE, ELSPETH BARKER & PATRICK MCGRATH established by the ANC itself. Gothic readings sometimes exuberantly oVer the top Due to a brilliant international publicity campaign, the ANC man­ aged to convince the world that it POETRY EVENTS was a driven, organised liberation A RIVER movement, and Bernstein upholds 3 MAY NEW GENERATION POETS: this image in her introduction. But MICK IMLAH, ELIZABETH G ARRETT, DON PATERSON The Rift reveals just how aimless & PAULINE STAINER and arbitrary exile really was. Many Four of the most exciting younger poets of Bernstein's subjects were — and still are — isolated and lost; in snow­ 10 MAY BLAGA DIMITROVA SUTRA bound Canada; in provincial Den­ Courageous and compassionate work from Bulgaria's finest contemporary poet mark; in lonely flats in London or 15 MAY ADRIENNE RICH AND MICHELE ROBERTS Available now from bookshops New York. One of America’s major poets and theorists joins ‘one of the most powerfully creative South African exiles — numbering forces’of a feminist generation' (Herald Tribune) perhaps 100,000 — were stateless, 19 MAY JON GLOVER AND JON SILKIN everywhere or for further details many entirely dependent on a libera­ call 0933 410511 tion movement that had neither the Powerful and lyrical poems from two leading British poets resources or the time to look after them properly. Many of the subjects To book tickets call 071 928 8800 I ^ - T H E £5.99 |m I N E r v A speak of the psychological fallout A full literature programme runs throughout the year. % SOUTH For information and to join mailing list call 071 921 0906 • BANK from this; of the stunted and de­ The South Bank Centre Is a registered charity stroyed lives; of the horrifically high ( n r . CENTRE

Collection Number: A3299 Collection Name: Hilda and Rusty BERNSTEIN Papers, 1931-2006

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