2 1 JUNY 2000 -j •& ?3 32- Representations of Masculinity in Wilbur Smith's Courtney Saga. Contextual Causes and Strategies of Authorial Control i* Mi, M. Isabel Santaulària i Capdevila Blacks under apartheid 549 Chapter 14: Blacks under apartheid. Performance and representation in the Courtney saga 14.1. Apartheid and race discrimination Ever since the nineteenth century, skin colour and biology have been functional to discriminatory practices aimed at dividing humanity into inferior and superior, subservient and hegemonic peoples. As Benedict phrases it, "According to racism, we know our enemies, not by their aggressions against us, not by their creed or language, not even by their possessing wealth we want to take, but by noting their hereditary anatomy."1 If in the past, a belief in 'true religion' was supposed to distinguish the superior from the inferior peoples of the world, by the beginning of the nineteenth century in Africa, "the old theory of a division of the human race into 'believers' and 'unbelievers' no longer corresponded to the facts."2 The nature of the interactions between black and white people during colonial times and the necessity of erecting geopolitical frontiers separating the oppressors from the oppressed, so that the former could exercise their authority - and thus manipulate their resources - over the latter, determined the articulation of a discourse of oppression based on race. Colour, therefore, enfronted the opposing parties on the frontier as religion no longer did. In South Africa, where a tiny group of whites maintained hegemonic power over a major black population, whites also relied on racist parameters for the continuity of race supremacy. Colonial assumptions about the essential, racial superiority of whites were integrated into the racist apartheid discourse and entrenched themselves behind a super-stringent legislation that guaranteed white supremacy by marginalising blacks. Although the roots of these apartheid statutes lay in earlier colonial legislation and racist colonial assumptions, "the absoluteness of qtd. in John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance. A Critical Investigation of the Writing of Joy Packer (Uppsala, Sweden: Swedish Science Press, 1996) 141. 2 Ruth Benedict qtd. in John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance, 141. 550 Representations of Masculinity... apartheid's intentions [...] marked a revolutionary break with the past [...] which was to be repeatedly underlined by the Nationalist regime's attempts to counteract the influence of trends in contemporary western societies towards granting individual rights."3 Although more poignant and stringent than colonial legislation, apartheid laws were based, therefore, on the same racist assumptions: the belief in the inferiority of blacks because of the colour of their skin. Now, the validity of biological racism has been discredited in our post- Holocaust world: if anything, the atrocities committed during the Nazi's rule in Germany served to awaken people's consciences about the absurdity of separating and abusing people only on the basis of their physiques. As John Stotesbury explains: "The physical expression of the intellectual tradition of biologically-determined racism in the Nazi death camps of Europe destroyed [...] its acceptability."4 However, in spite of the apparent condemnation of racism in our present world, even the more advanced countries rely on biological theorising about human difference when faced with internal or external problems. This racism, as John Rex underlines, is given public visibility in popular culture, which is "suffused with racist ideas"5 and gives an overtly racist interpretation of contemporary social contexts. Smith's fiction, as I have attempted to prove so far, is an obvious example of the application of biology to support the separate development of blacks (and implicitly, the superiority of whites) under apartheid. True to apartheid and colonial perceptions of colour, he perpetuates and intensifies, via his fiction, the perception of blacks as essentially and naturally debased. However, he does not rely on race alone to validate the apartheid "system of embargoes and embarrassments calculated to sabotage all human bridges between the races." His main aim is to endorse the might and right of his British heroes who are both ideals of western masculinity and of western political adequacy within a sanctioned context of white supremacy under apartheid and, to do this, he needs to John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance, 140. John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance, 142. qtd. in John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance, 143. 6 Joy Packer, qtd. in John A. Stotesbury, Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance, 140. Blacks under apartheid 551 debase the threatening blacks. Aware of the fragility of biologically determined discrimination, Smith resorts to more than just biology and race for his representation of whites and blacks in his fiction. In fact, Smith draws on both the blacks and the whites' political and social performance under apartheid to exonerate the British from all responsibility for the mighty apartheid superstructure, which he maintains is solely an Afrikaner creation, and, on the other hand, to justify the necessity of the apartheid supremacist policies and the consenting attitude of the British and their participation in its maintenance. Below, I analyse the representational practices Smith makes use of to achieve these ends, focusing first on how he exonerates the British from the political cesspool of apartheid's most stringent measures, and then by providing an account of how he finds an excuse in black political attitudes and reactions to subscribe to the perpetuation of the selfsame apartheid system he presents as a form of unacceptable intolerance and discrimination. 14.2. Exonerating the British In Smith's Courtney saga, apartheid is an Afrikaner construct. He follows its creation from its supposed origins in the Boers' belief in their exclusive ownership of the South African territory which was given to them by God "as the promised land flowing with milk and honey." (Sword 36) He focuses on how this belief affected the Boers' perception of the British, who, with their political and economic supremacy, had turned the Boers into "squatters in the land that their fathers had wrested from the savages and the wilderness at the point of their long muzzle-loading guns." (Sword 36) He particularly highlights the resulting resentment the Boers harboured against the British and any other powerful social group in the country, especially the Jews. He explains how this resentment provided them with a political agenda that resulted from an awakening of nationalist consciousness and the need to erect an Afrikaner front, which would include the pure-blooded remnants of the scattered Boer communities, against the British. In Birds of Prey and Monsoon, Smith depicts seventeenth-century Boers living in the Cape colony as racists, never allowing blacks to penetrate the walls surrounding the colony, using blacks as slaves and mistreating them on a regular basis. 552 Representations of Masculinity... In Smith's account, therefore, the Afrikaner politicisation process is based on hatred for the British and a desire to regain absolute power over South African political life, which, they assumed, belonged to them as a birth right. The aims of Hertzog's National Party and, in particular, that of the militant secret societies created by extremist Afrikaners, the Broederbond and the Ossewa Brandwag, therefore, were "to gain control of every facet of [South African life], from the minds of the young to the machinery of justice and government, and to prefer their members above all consideration of merit or worth." (Sword 157) Inspired by Hitler and "his gang of political thugs," (Sword 144) Afrikaner Nationalist policies are presented as "the counterpart of the rising wave of National Socialism in Germany under Herr Hitler" (Sword 158) and are, therefore, violently racist. The Ossewa Brandwag is, for instance, described in the following terms: Extreme right-wing nationalists, anti-Semitic, anti-black, blaming all the ills of their world on perfidious Albion, secret blood-oaths and midnight rallies, a sort of Neanderthal boy scout movement with Mein Kampf as its inspiration. (Sword 414) The associations between Hitler's Nazism and Afrikaner policies is constantly highlighted in order to disqualify their validity. Mein Kampf, in fact, is assumed to include everything Afrikaners believe in and feel. Their objectives are the same: "to safeguard the existence and reproduction of [the Afrikaner] race and [the Afrikaner] people, the sustenance of [Afrikaner] children and the purity of [Afrikaner] blood, the freedom and independence of the father land." (Sword 460) This philosophy, which in itself bespeaks the Afrikaners' obsession with their race's supremacy to the detriment of the well-being of the other peoples in the country, is further discredited by the comments of British heroes who regard Mein Kampf as "a rat-bag of nightmares and obscenities, a manual of naked aggression and bigotry" (Sword 415) and Hitler's military advances in Europe as "the propagation of cancer" or "Genghis Khan's campaigns." (Sword 415) Given the racist, anti-British and anti-black premises of Afrikaner nationalism, the impending victory of the National Party is predictably presented as "some fateful Blacks under apartheid 553 cross-roads," like "heading