South Africa seen from beyond the border

By Leon de Kock

One of the effects of the globalisation of the novel, leading to that contentious creature referred to nowadays as "world literature" - a supposedly "post-national" phenomenon - is that anyone can now, more easily, write about anywhere, including South Africa.

In the old days of struggle literature, "outsiders" would tread warily on "insider" turf, and writing about South Africa from an outsider point of view tended to take the form of non-fiction rather than confidently imagined novels which delivered commentary on the "state of the nation". No more.
Two recent novels show that commentary from outside is both salutary and refreshing: Adrian van Dis's Betrayal (excellently translated from the Dutch, Tikkop, by Ina Rilke, Maclehose Press, London) and Patrick Flanery's Absolution (Riverhead, New York, 2012).
Flanery's novel attracted at least one local review in which his characterisation of South African mannerisms was questioned, but on the whole his novel is absorbing, if somewhat bland. It has received good reviews, especially in the international media.
Van Dis's Betrayal, the more recent of the two, raises some interesting issues. It is a riveting tale of post-apartheid disillusionment which plays out in a little Cape fishing village where Mulder, an old "struggle" collaborator from the Netherlands, meets up once again with a formerly exiled Afrikaner ANC comrade.
Their lives conjoin in the stewardship of Hendrik, an intelligent coloured teenager who is addicted to tik and who - at a critical moment in the novel - must choose between material and spiritual goods, raising the issue of what is known in contemporary scholarship as "uneven modernities".
Instead of accepting the good intentions of the two well-off former struggle "heroes" and their way of helping him get his life back into shape through education, Hendrik instead runs away with their stuff: a laptop computer, a hairdryer and the rich silver belonging to the wealthy old house where he's been put up by the rebel scion of patriarchal Afrikanerdom.
What else did these whiteys expect? Imagine for a moment the possibility - at this late stage in the post-industrial era, and more than 10 years into the new millennium - that you still have never seen a lighted oven, not to mention a gleamingly slim computer containing Google Earth and info on cool-dude Chinese punks?
Or, even worse - you see these goodies via their media representations, on massive advertising boards, flapping in the wind as newspaper images, mockingly out of your reach, but you're supposed to make peace with the fact that Facebook and Twitter are for the rich only. And for the most part, that means for whites only, even in 2013.
Hendrik's destiny, as he sees it, is a life without gadgets and connectivity, and although Van Dis occasionally pushes the limits in his characterisation of a rural coloured boy who has never before seen an oven, it's nevertheless a no-brainer when such a boy must choose between modernity's goodies on the one hand, and Protestant values like forbearance and patience on the other.

Morality of Border War goes unquestioned

By Gary Baines

The body of literature on the "Border War" has grown exponentially in the last decade or so. These writings have included veterans' memoirs, novels, unit histories and military histories.
Leopold Scholtz's work falls squarely into the last category for he posits that his The SADF in the Border War 1966-1989 (Tafelberg, 2013) is "primarily a military rather than a political history".

The eminent British military historian John Keegan was critical of practitioners who disregarded or downplayed the broader socio-political and economic context in which wars were waged.
He labelled the approach of those who argued that major changes were determined by the outcome of significant military engagements as "battle-centric" history. Scholtz does not fall into this trap but he comes close to doing so.
Scholtz is well qualified to write a military history of the border war but he feels a need to defend the role of historians in providing balanced, well-informed accounts of the border war against those who uphold the authority of the eye witness as somehow inviolable.
Contributors to the recent collection of SADF veterans' writings compiled by (retired) General Jannie Geldenhuys under the title We Were There claim to know what "really happened" by virtue of their participation in specific battles or campaigns.
But they merely offer a perspective that should be subjected to scrutiny as with any other version of the events.
Personal narratives or experiential stories have their own particular shortcomings as history. But, then, the same is true of other primary sources. Scholtz has drawn upon a vast array of documents, interviews and published accounts to provide a comprehensive history of the border war.
It surpasses extant works by military journalists such as Willem Steenkamp and Helmoed-R?mer Heitman because of the author's willingness to approach the subject of the SADF critically rather than as an apologist.
However, Scholtz still avoids addressing thorny questions about the morality of the war and the criminal conduct of the SADF.
Nor is he prepared to acknowledge that the armed struggle waged by military wings of Swapo and the ANC might have had significantly more political legitimacy than the counter-insurgency of the SADF and its surrogates.
Although there can be no denying that the liberation movements, too, were guilty of human rights abuses and the TRC pronounced all military formations "perpetrator organisations", the level of violence committed by the SADF was disproportionate to the perceived threat to the country - especially when it is remembered that most of the destruction was wrought upon innocent victims in neighbouring states.
Scholtz is critical of the upper echelons of the SADF for micromanaging the war and so limiting the freedom of the commanders on the ground.
He argues that the SADF's strategic objectives in Angola/Namibia were blunted by generals who were concerned about losses of national servicemen and the concomitant political fall-out among the white constituency.

When the safety net is removed: Wolf, Wolf

By Christine Emmett

Mattheüis Duiker walks into his father's study and cannot help but aspire to this as the domain of private reflection and exclusively masculine exchange.  In Michiel Heyns' English translation of Eben Venter's novel, Wolf, Wolf (Tafelberg), Heyns captures this pleasure, as well as the emphasis placed in the original syntax of the Afrikaans version. Mattheüis' father is dying, and the house will be part of his inheritance, "His, the study will be." This symbolically imbued space, positioned in a Cape Dutch house in Cape Town's southern suburbs, epitomises the Afrikaner patriarch, Benjamin Duiker's wealth.

A comfortable and secure prospect; though as Mattheüis is apt to point out, he will have to change aspects of the house to fit with the changing identity of Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa - "The Battle of Blood River picture, that can be chucked out".
This painting reappears throughout the novel indicating issues surrounding Afrikaner inheritance. In Afrikaner nationalist mythology, the Battle of Blood River was used to legitimate Afrikaners' role as an independent and politically dominant group in South Africa. The battle, taking place on December 16, 1838, purportedly involved a clash in which the Voortrekkers were vastly outnumbered by Zulu warriors. It's claimed that Sarel Cilliers made a covenant with God that would secure his people's victory. Because, among overwhelming odds, the Voortrekkers succeeded in winning the military encounter, this event became mythologised as proof of legitimate (because it appeared divinely ordained) occupation and political sovereignty in South Africa. It is no surprise then that Mattheüis, a young, gay, white South African, would want to leave this part of the past and his father's ideological beliefs behind. These ideologies, dated and prejudiced, are effectively the same ones which deny the legitimacy of Mattheüis' relationship with his lover, Jack. At his most accommodating, Benjamin Duiker can only say: "That's your business. But not in my house. I won't allow it. It flies in the face of my principles."

The house, the container of Benjamin Duiker's values and prejudices, is the same one which Mattheüis wants to inherit. This gives rise to a number of issues in the new South Africa: what is to be made of Afrikaner wealth and privilege? Bestowed on the previous generation by discriminatory policies which benefited both Afrikaner material wealth and Afrikaner culture, what is the new generation of Afrikaners to inherit? Can one appropriate the privileges of apartheid and use them to forge a new subject position? Can they be manipulated, changed, and have the core ideologies vacated, as the disavowal of the Blood River painting suggests?
The patriarch's death is a slow one. A significant part of the novel is dedicated to detailing this decline. Benjamin has lost his sight and his internal organs are deteriorating as a result of the chemotherapy administered to fight off his lymphoma. His son, nursing him, experiences both anger and guilt amid the forced intimacy which frailty necessarily effects. These details underlie the miscommunications and painful moments in which both parties hope to secure something of their lives before Benjamin expires.
In this way Venter represents both the anguish and ambivalence of familial passing, and the ambiguous and fraught relationship between Afrikaners and their past. Wolf, Wolf is at times graphic and visceral, but for the most part, remains an emotional and sensitive account of the slow and painful extinguishing of human life.
Within this bleak context, hope is vested in two aspirations: the fast food business which Mattheüis hopes to open in Observatory, and the house, which he is certain his father will pass on to him. This will be the place in which he will start a new life once his father has died.
This allows Venter to dramatise the struggle involved in the desire of a younger generation of Afrikaners to distance themselves from the prejudices and values of their cultural heritage, while holding on to the material legacy it facilitated. As an Afrikaner in the new South Africa, Mattheüis must adapt his inheritance - not only the house, with its emblems of Afrikaner nationalism, but the general way of life and world view passed down between generations. Venter suggests two problems inherent in this action: firstly, the extent to which people are able to choose their inheritance in this way; and secondly, what new values will substitute the outdated ones.

The Problem with Being Zimbabwean

NoViolet Bulawayo at the Open Book Festival 2013 in Cape Town

By Mary Corrigall

Noviolet Bulawayo  looks as if she is preparing to attend a funeral. In a black dress and jacket and wearing a grave expression, she strides along the pool outside a Rosebank B&B to meet me on the veranda.
Her demeanour matches the bleak heaviness that pervades her first novel, We Need New Names, which deals with Zimbabwe in a state of "falling apart" and the pains and struggles of living in exile in the US. To say it has been well-received is an understatement; it's the first Zimbabwean novel to crack the Man Booker short-list, making her the first black African woman to have received this accolade.
"For a fresh face it gives you courage. Writing is a very difficult career. You don't know what is going to happen; you write because you must write," she says, before adding the ubiquitous, "it has been very humbling."
Ironically, part of the novel's acclaim is linked to the humour that undercuts her dark subject-matter - the back of the book's cover carries an excerpt where the word "laughing" is reiterated. Her humorous side is well disguised during the interview. She's prickly, only smiles once and in response to comments or questions she often nods her head and offers a brusque response: "yup, yup".
At first I put this down to a reticence to being interviewed - writers tend to shy away from such encounters - but later decide it could be a consequence of her immigrant status in the US, which has made her sharply self-conscious and aloof. Another consequence is her attachment to her identity as a Zimbabwean and African.
"The States is one country that sharpens your identity, for me because I am not an American and it is a space that boxes people. It never occurred to me that I was black and African until I got to the States and those categories mattered. I grew up in a township and went to schools were everyone was like me. I never experienced life in racialised degrees. When I got to the States I realised I am black but not part of black America and that consolidated my identity as an African."
It is not easy holding on to that identity after living in the US for over a decade, Michigan at first and then spells at Cornell (Ithica, New York) and Stanford (Stanford, California) universities. Yet she doesn't speak with an American twang.
This is a surprise - Lauren Beukes, the celebrated local author, still proudly sports one after living in that country for a few months 10 years ago.
"I didn't want it," she asserts, as if adopting an accent is a choice. Claiming or holding on to her identity isn't incidental to the novel; it is her way of maintaining a link with her homeland, coming to terms with what it has become in her absence and, as the title implies, it speaks of the nature of redefining oneself elsewhere, a condition that has, in the wake of the mass exodus of its citizens, become a characteristic of being Zimbabwean.
In one of the final chapters where Bulawayo slips into a diatribe about an immigrant's existence and reflecting on the psychological cost of being "illegal", she writes: "We did not want their attention. We did not meet their stares and we avoided gazes. We hid our real names and gave false ones. We built mountains between us and them, we dug rivers, we planted thorns."
Perhaps it was too much to expect her to operate like the narrator, Darling, a sassy and sarcastic character who shoots from the hip and is able to detect when something is "kaka". Significantly, Darling loses this fiery spirit when she immigrates to the US, shifting the narrative voice into a different gear, where she seems more of an observer, working in low-level jobs as a cleaner or at a recycling centre, where she sifts through |the detritus of this consumerist society. Bulawayo says she didn't consciously plan this change in the narrative voice.
"It's not her, it is the space, voice is tied to geographic space. I spent my first year in silence in the US. People thought I was quiet and shy. In reality at home I was one of the noisiest rowdy kids. When I got there I died down. Every time you encounter Darling in Zim she is with friends. In the US she is behind closed doors, looking at the snow. It is the space that stifles the individual and for immigrants, just not being able to express yourself in your language makes you a different person. I am one person when I am speaking Ndebele, but I am also a different person. That is what is happening to Darling. She is a changed person because the space changes her."
Bulawayo frequently switches between talking about herself and Darling. It's as if they are one and the same. It's easy to draw parallels between Bulawayo and Darling; their lives are mirror images of each other. Well, to a point. Both women are born-frees in that they arrived in the world after Zimbabwe gained independence and both eventually settled in the US and struggled with adapting to life in that country and with their voluntary form of exile.
Where their lives differ is quite significant and has an impact on the book's credibility to some degree. While Bulawayo's childhood in Zimbabwe was "beautiful and normal", Darling's is marred by extreme poverty, violence, instability and the sorts of horrors no child should be exposed to. She is rooted in a society that seems to have collapsed; there isn't enough food, none of the children attend schools or live in regular homes. This community has become so twisted that even a preacher humiliates and abuses a woman in front of his parishioners under the guise of ridding it of sinful behaviour. This isn't just a community that has lost its moral compass, it seems to have lost its humanity.

Psychic and Political Conundrums: Call It Dog

By Rob Gaylard

Call it Dog (Atlantic, Penguin) is not an easy book to get your head around. Essentially, it is a quest narrative: the protagonist, Jo Hartslief, returns to South Africa after a 10-year absence to cover the xenophobic violence sweeping the country in 2008, but this soon evolves into a cross-country road trip with her semi-estranged father, Nico.
He enlists her help to try to prove his innocence of complicity in the death of an ANC cadre who was tortured and murdered by operatives of the apartheid-era CCB (succinctly described by Wikipedia as "a government-sponsored hit squad".)
What is the truth about her father? The novel takes us into murky territory, and its keynote is uncertainty or indeterminacy. Is her father a pathological liar and devious manipulator, or was he a man with some elements of decency who found himself in over his head? What is, or was, he guilty of? Is he just the fall guy?
What are Jo's obligations to him? Should she help him prove his innocence - or should she turn him over to the police?
Whatever he may have done, he is also Jo's father - and "the only family (she) has left". (Her mother died when she was 12.)
Much of the novel consists of a verbal sparring match between Jo and her father as she (vainly) tries to establish the truth. Is she simply "indulging his bullshit"?
Does she become his accomplice, or even his hostage? "You have no idea who I am," she tells her father at one point, but this comment could just as easily have come from him.
And what should you make of the shadowy Gideon van Vuuren, the "star player" for the notorious Koevoet, whom we never actually meet? He seems to be the "Prime Evil" in this scenario, inspiring fear in former colleagues - and he is possibly responsible for the car crash that killed Jo's mother, and for the crash that nearly kills Jo, and that results in the disappearance of her father (he exits about two-thirds of the way through the narrative). But does Gideon even exist, or is he a figment of Nico's imagination?
To further complicate the situation, we have Paul Silongo, son of the murdered man, with whom Jo (rather improbably?) develops a relationship.
He is a rising star in the ANC in Gauteng, and seems plausible and likeable. But how much does he know - and is he in turn using or manipulating Jo?
It is just plausible that he might meet her at the airport - she had spoken to him on the phone, and arranged to interview him in South Africa, but would he go to so much trouble on her behalf? Is he flirting with her, or is he stalking her (and using her to get to her father)? As with so much else in the novel, the reader can't be sure - but Paul does seem a whole lot nicer than her father.
The meticulously detailed descriptions anchor the novel in reality, and reinforce the impression that Jo often feels like a stranger in what is (or was) her own country.
However, a novel can stand only so much indeterminacy and uncertainty: one expects some degree of clarity to emerge, even when one is dealing with events back in the Eighties that were never fully uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and with people who would never willingly appear before the TRC.

An unflattering view of South Africa: Zebra Crossing

By Michiel Heyns

It is one of the surprising aspects of Meg Vandermerwe's debut novel, Zebra Crossing (Umuzi), that her main character and narrator, a young albino Zimbabwean girl adrift in Cape Town at the time of the football World Cup, should be reminiscent of the most demure of Victorian heroines.
In her self-denying, self-effacing timidity she recalls such outsider figures as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre or Charles Dickens's Esther Summerson in Bleak House. (The fact that Dickens is mentioned twice may suggest that the author was aware of this connection.)
But if there is indeed this parallel, its significance may lie in the point at which the lines diverge: whereas the Victorian heroine typically overcomes her undervalued state to marry the man she has quietly been in love with for several hundred pages, Chipo – well, suffice it to say that her novel does not end on wedding bells and general merrymaking.
Vandermerwe, then, has succeeded in welding an adapted marriage plot to a far grimmer form, |the immigrant-narrative, and to adapt the Victorian social-problem novel to South African realities. She gives us a recognisable Cape Town: the novel's main locale, President's Heights, is a thinly disguised version of the slum block, Senator Park in Keerom Street, now being refurbished.
Here Chipo and her brother, George, sharing a single room with two other Zimbabweans, the brutish Peter and the gentle David, experience the rigours of émigré life: the crowded accommodation, the exploitation by locals and fellow-émigrés, the long, futile waits at Home Affairs and, above all, the xenophobia.
The émigré community is abuzz with rumours that they are being tolerated only until the closing match of the World Cup, after which they will be "burnt".
Chipo, an albino, is up against a double prejudice: not only is she a makwerekwere, she is also a "monkey" or "sope", as albinos are called in Zimbabwe. And, as a young woman, she is subordinate and subservient to her demanding brother and the other males in the makeshift household.
Her life is made tolerable by the kindness of David and the concern of Jean-Paul, the reclusive tailor from Rwanda, with his own memories of atrocities. Indeed, such joy as she has is provided by her fantasies of being loved by David, and by the new clothes that Jean-Paul insists she wear.
A pitfall of the first-person narrative of a self-denying person, such as Dickens's Esther and Vandermerwe's Chipo, is that the voice may come to seem self-pitying, even a bit self-admiring: "My hands smell of Omo and my skin is red and irritated," Chipo says. "When there is money I must ask George to buy me a pair of rubber gloves." Or: "Little Sister's job is to cook and clean, not to to stick her nose where it does not belong."

Living on the Edge: White Dog Fell from the Sky

By Rob Gaylard

This is a large, capacious, generous novel which celebrates human staying power, courage and honesty. White Dog Fell from the Sky (Penguin), by Eleanor Morse is set in Botswana in 1977, and takes in the vast landscapes of that dry land - "this world of interminable blue sky, heat that scoured your brains clean".
It takes us to some remote places. It moves from the lives of the !Kung San (the name used in the novel), struggling to survive on the edge of the Kalahari, to an old woman digging for tubers in the sand, to the rather more comfortable lives of the expatriate community in Gaborone, to the stark terror of torture in an apartheid prison. Morse tackles these different experiences with an unflinching honesty.
The novel owes a great deal to the author's experience of living in Botswana in the mid-1970s. She is an American who lives on Peaks Island, Maine. This is her third novel (and the only one set in Africa). One senses that it must have been brewing in her mind for a long time. The setting (Botswana) enables her to move beyond the ordinary securities of suburban life. Her citing of Faulkner's Nobel address is a clue to her approach to the writing of fiction: "I wanted to write about the human heart, its losses and joys, its separations and connections".
This is an ambitious project, and the novel does not fail. Essentially, it is the story of three intersecting lives (the author admits that her novels are driven more by character than plot).
At the novel's centre is Alice Mendelssohn, an American who works for the Ministry of Local Government and Lands: her work partly explains her concern with the fate of the San/Bushmen (and in particular their claim to the land and to a way of life that has been theirs for thousands of years). Early on in the novel she discovers that her husband has been cheating on her (although their marriage seemed to be heading for failure anyway) and they separate.