"There's no such thing here (in South Africa). The facts may be correct but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else. Every inch of our soil is contested, every word in our histories."
– Rian Malan, The Lion Sleeps Tonight 2012
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
– Rian Malan, The Lion Sleeps Tonight 2012
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
– Nelson Mandela
 |
| Truth and Reconciliation Commission |
“It is precisely these contradictions, the ability to say
radically incompatible things in the same breath, that reveal the true nature
of politics here. A Government minister declares, in a week when a Government
order has forbidden any protests over
the detention of thousands of prisoners and has even forbidden prayers on their
behalf, that he is opposed to detention without trial. This from a member of a
government, which since it has introduced detention without trial in the
sixties, has wielded the weapon with pugnacious relish! I feel as I would were a practicing cannibal to tell me that he
disapproved of human flesh. My range of
responses is limited when faced with brazen hypocrisy or hypocrisy enthroned;
to laugh or to cry, or run. Or maybe to do all three.”
– Christopher Hope White Boy Running, 1988
“The country [under apartheid] was a giant menagerie where
zookeepers who claimed to divinely appointed presided over less-than-human
others, who were locked into the prisons of their skins.”
– Christopher Hope, The
Café de Move-on Blues, 2018
A World Apart was written by Shawn Slovo who grew up in South Africa in the 1960s, while her parents, Ruth First and Joe Slovo, were involved in the anti-apartheid movement, and it is very much a daughter’s story. Even though her parents were brave and dedicated, their child still nurses a sense of resentment because she did not get all of the attention she felt she deserved. A World Apart is both political and personal – a view of a revolutionary as the middle-class mother of a normal 13-year-old girl.
'The memoir, Every Secret Thing, is "a passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, a daughter
who always had to come second to political commitment. Whilst recalling the extraordinary events which surrounded her family's persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents' relationship and her own turbulent childhood, Gillian Slovo has also created an astonishing portrait of a courageous mother and a father of integrity and stoicism."
(author unknown)
 |
| Steve Biko
“His message to the youth and the students was
simple clear: Black is Beautiful! Be proud of your Blackness! And with that he
inspired our youth to shed themselves of the sense of inferiority they were
born into as a result of more than three centuries of white rule.”
– Nelson Mandela from
the Preface of Biko A Biography
"Steve " more than any other
person I have encountered had the most impressive array of
qualities and abilities in that sphere of life which determine the fates of
people-politics."
– Donald Woods, Biko, 1978
|
"Cry Freedom is based on Biko and Asking for Trouble,
books by Donald Woods. The movie shapes itself around the friendship between
Woods, a smug white liberal journalist, and (Steve) Biko, the gentle intellectual who
expands Woods' cozy horizons. At first, Woods attacks Biko as a black
supremacist, but he revises his opinion when he meets with the activist. The
first half of the movie traces the friendship, concentrating on Biko's career,
but the second concerns Woods' escape from South Africa with Biko's contraband
biography.
(Richard) Attenborough has been
criticized for the second half, an action thriller that tags a white hero onto
what some felt was a black hero's story. But that's a little like whipping Paul
Simon for introducing Ladysmith BlackMambazo to American audiences. In both
cases, the ends justify the means. And here that end is to expose the spiritual
and physical genocide of apartheid. South Africa hides behind a press blackout;
Cry Freedom exposes it in the bright
and persuasive light of Biko's consciousness."
From being a cheerful
child, Sandra now grows into a troubled adolescent (Sophie Okonedo) who
tries to bleach her skin. Her parents set up two disastrous dates with white
boys. She falls in love with Petrus (Tony Kgoroge), a young
market gardener who is black, and her father chases him away with a rifle.
Pregnant, she runs away from home, but now since she is officially considered
white, it is a crime under apartheid for her to live with a black man.
The story of Sandra Laing (her real name) played out into the
1970s, and fascinated South Africa like no other. It cut directly into the
official fiction that the races were separate and would never meet. She was
proof that they'd been meeting a lot in the 400 years since the Dutch landed at
Cape Town.
– Roger Ebert full review
 |
| Soweto uprising June 1976 |
 |
| Pass laws under Apartheid |
 |
| Rivona Trial (1963-64) |
 |
| Robben Island |
“The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting
wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not
generations, recovering from that profound hurt but the dictates of oppression
and brutality had another unintended effects, and that was it produced … men of
such extraordinary courage, wisdom and generosity that their like may never be
known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such
heights of character.”
Mandela
– From an excellent article
– Bill Keller The New York Times December 18, 1994
"In fact, and to
give [the film] its due, Nicholson's screenplay... shows the burly young trial
lawyer and amateur boxer joining the ANC to fight apartheid and police
brutality, getting radicalised by the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, passionately
leading an armed struggle and then once in prison transforming his anguish and
rage into a Zen mastery of exile. He disarms his guards with a politician's
knack of remembering their children's names and birthdays.... His very retreat
from the world gradually feeds his prestige and once free he is able to bring
off a remarkable new metamorphosis into South African president and
inspirational world leader."
"Red Dust is
an exciting and, at times gripping film which manages to bring the complex
mechanism of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to a wider
public…. The film is a truth reflection of the TRC process – especially with
regard to the amnesty hearings.”
– Annelies Verdoolaege, from an essay in Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Modern Cinema edited by Nigel Eltringhan, 2013
 |
| Mandela and Francois Pienaar |
The film tells the inspiring true story of how
Nelson Mandela joined forces with the captain of South Africa's rugby team to
help unite their country. Newly elected President Mandela knows his nation
remains racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Believing
he can bring his people together through the universal language of sport,
Mandela rallies South Africa's underdog rugby team as they make an unlikely run
to the 1995 World Cup Championship match.
"Mandela is a unique human being; indeed, he is the George
Washington of South Africa who inspired millions of blacks to end their
feelings of revenge in order to create a great, new country. Morgan
Freeman's portrayal of Nelson Mandela creates a superb moment in time on the
movie screen."
“He’s got so much to teach us about
forgiveness. It isn’t about soft-headed and kind-hearted and essentially weak.
Mandela found that forgiveness was a tragedy for survival. Because he found a
forgiving heart under the most adverse
circumstances, because he learnt to hate the apartheid cause without hating
white South Africans, he had space left inside to grow and become great. In the
process he freed not only Black South Africans but he freed White South
Africans too.”
– Bill Clinton cited by Peter Hain in Mandela: His Essential Life 2018
“Madiba's light shone so brightly, even from that
narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late '70s he could inspire a young
college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities,
could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the
world towards justice.”
– Barack Obama speaking at the 2018 Nelson Mandela
Annual Lecture
To read the complete speech
"What's the price of being a bystander? Sidney Bloch is an internationally recognized professor of psychiatry, ethicist, loving father, singer and author of books on mental health. He is also a man with a troubled conscience. In this film, Sid returns to South Africa for his medical school reunion, determined to resolve the guilt that has troubled him for forty years. He's accompanied by his teenage son, Aaron who turns out to be his harshest critic.In the Apartheid era, Sid had benefited as a 'White', contributed negligibly to the struggle against racism and then left for Israel the day after his medical graduation in 1964.
A sense of guilt and shame accompanied him throughout his later move to Australia. Growing up in Apartheid South Africa, Sid abhorred the system but did almost nothing to oppose it. So how does a man who lost fourteen relatives in the Holocaust become complicit with a racist system? In 1964, twelve of the one hundred medical graduates in his class were classified 'Non-White' and were subject to a myriad restrictions–blacks couldn't examine white patients, they couldn't attend post-mortems on white bodies, they couldn't socialize equally and their prospects were limited. Sid and his white colleagues barely registered this reality. Returning to Cape Town to share his past with Aaron, Sid wants to confront his lack of courage during the Apartheid years."
– Author unknown
What the documentary fails to explore is the position of Jews during the Apartheid or Post-Apartheid eras.
The final ninety pages switches to the third person and may be the novel's most poignant and powerful with revelations about the disenchantment with the new South Africa, corruption and greed from former resistance fighters, as well as a new anti-Semitism veiled under a hostility towards Zionism. The novel also features a riveting climax.
"All this makes Always Another Country, a graceful
memoir by Sisonke Msimang, a welcome novelty. Msimang, a South African writer
and political analyst, charts an alternate course to the now familiar
conclusion that home is not always a place on a map. Her story begins in exile.
Her parents, members of the African National Congress, then fighting to
overthrow South Africa’s apartheid regime, have fled to Zambia, where they have
three daughters. 'We are raised on a diet of communist propaganda and schooled
in radical Africanist discourse, in the shadows of our father’s hope and our
mother’s practicality,' Msimang writes. Her father is a soldier in the A.N.C.’s
armed wing — its 'illegal army' — a job that has taken him across the world,
from Russia, for training, to Tanzania, where he helped establish a military
base, and, finally, to Zambia, where he met and married Msimang’s mother. As a
result of their work, Msimang spent her childhood calling a different country —
Zambia, Kenya, Canada, Ethiopia — home every few years. 'My parents were
freedom fighters,” she writes. 'So they cast our journeys around the world as
part of a necessary sacrifice. Our suffering was noble.'
Msimang’s parents
believed in an exceptional South Africa, one whose future would be free of
injustice. Their daughter learns not to see the world this way. In Canada, a
boy in her grade-school class calls her an African monkey, and a group of white
girls with whom she became close abruptly exclude her. These moments reveal
racism’s 'sharp little teeth'; before long, she realizes she has been spoiled
as a child, bred to believe that she and her sisters weren’t just children — we
were representatives of ideals.' Living abroad, far away for the sake of
freedom,' her family was 'no more special than anyone else.'"
– Lovia Gyarakye,
The New York Times November 9, 2018
Post-Apartheid novels: literary, mystery and thrillers
Both of these novels are worth reading, especially Disgrace in part because of Coetzee's powerful rendering in the second half of a violent assault upon the protagonist and his daughter, and the slaughter of her dogs on an isolated farm on the East Cape.
"It is therefore
curious that their most recent books seem so oddly similar, as if the end of
apartheid has brought them closer together.
Both Gordimer's 1998 novel The House Gun and Coetzee's (1999) Disgrace – winner of this year's Booker Prize – develop out of judicial procedures: a murder trial in Gordimer's work, and in Coetzee's the charge of sexual harassment that separates his protagonist, David Lurie, from his profession. Neither of these books sits easily as anything like an allegory of the fact-finding commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; still, the judicial connection can be no accident. Yet neither book stops with such procedures. Though most of Gordimer's novel does in fact deal with the trial, she ends by exploring the mystery of the transition from life to death. Disgrace finishes quickly with the question of judgment; its real interest lies in what comes after, when all one's days are stamped with the word of its title. And the way the novel develops suggests that it is perhaps Coetzee, despite his resistance to a historically conditioned realism, who has the more deeply political mind."
Both Gordimer's 1998 novel The House Gun and Coetzee's (1999) Disgrace – winner of this year's Booker Prize – develop out of judicial procedures: a murder trial in Gordimer's work, and in Coetzee's the charge of sexual harassment that separates his protagonist, David Lurie, from his profession. Neither of these books sits easily as anything like an allegory of the fact-finding commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; still, the judicial connection can be no accident. Yet neither book stops with such procedures. Though most of Gordimer's novel does in fact deal with the trial, she ends by exploring the mystery of the transition from life to death. Disgrace finishes quickly with the question of judgment; its real interest lies in what comes after, when all one's days are stamped with the word of its title. And the way the novel develops suggests that it is perhaps Coetzee, despite his resistance to a historically conditioned realism, who has the more deeply political mind."
"The sense of an on-going betrayal of people's lives — in the
past and into the future—is the wounded territory of Achmat Dangor's novel.
Set in Johannesburg in the closing months of Nelson Mandela's presidency, it
charts the open wounds and disintegrating relationships in a
"coloured" family caught up in the "grey, shadowy morality" of an ANC government
"bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither
principle nor compromise".
Silas Ali, the father, is an old ANC activist whose government
job in the justice ministry is to liaise with the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. A South African spin doctor, his fate is to watch the passing of
his own life marginalised on TV, "as if it was foreign, fictional".
His wife, Lydia, goes to work as a nurse researching HIV transmission while
entrenching her distance from an emotionally shell-shocked husband. Their son,
Mikey, gets caught up with Muslim activists associated with the vigilantes of
Pagad, known for their involvement in the bombings of Cape Town. All the bases
are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no
box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where
all unresolved conflicts might find resolution."
– Gabriel Gbadomsi, The Guardian
An excellent review of both Water Music and Cobra can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books in a piece by Glenn Harper. I highly recommend both these compelling mysteries set in Cape Town. Orford's novel may be one of the most disturbing of the South African crime fiction that I have read as she portrays the stark vulnerability of women and children in a macho culture.
Rarely does a novel so forcibly demonstrate how history can
seep into and poison peoples' lives in the present in the manner of Damian Barr's ironically-titled novel, You
Will be Safe Here. Although the plotting is dissimilar, the novel does share with Orford's Water Music a concern for the vulnerability of women and children as well as the toxicity of male masculinity. Not surprisingly in Barr's acknowledgments there is an appreciation of Orford's conversation with him.
"Damian Barr’s debut novel, set across
more than a century of South African history, has an unusual structure in that
the first third initially seems unrelated to what follows but it soon becomes
clear that the experiences of the earlier characters resonate through the lives
of those who subsequently pick up the story.
It begins in 1901, during the
second Boer war, with a diary kept by a young Afrikaans woman, Sarah, who along
with her six-year-old son, Fred, is interred at a British concentration camp in
Johannesburg. Sharing an account of the many hardships and indignities that are
visited upon the women, the medicines they are denied, the food they’re
deprived of and the lengths they will go to in order to keep their children
alive, it’s an authoritative recreation of a time that is rarely talked about
in history classes....
A hundred pages in, the
story skips forward to the 21st century, where another mother, Irma, is
complicit in allowing her 16-year-old son to be sent to another camp, New Dawn,
where sadists in uniforms, masquerading as soldiers and awarding themselves army
titles, welcome troubled teenage boys for three-month stays where, they
promise, they will be turned into men, or at least what their unenlightened
understanding of that word means."
– John Boyne, The Irish Times August 31, 2019
"Mike Nicol
is the best stylist writer in the thriller genre in South Africa today—his
staccato language, tense plotting, and nice and nasty backdrop of Cape Town
makes each of his books impossible to put down. Nicol’s novels just keep
getting better. And if you’ve never read a South African thriller before, try
SLEEPER—you’ll be hooked.
Cool-cat surfer Fish Pescado and his ex (maybe) spy girlfriend,
Vicki Kahn, are back. The minister of energy is murdered and his lover hires
Fish to find the killer—but then disappears herself. A much deeper game is
going on, and one that sucks Vicki back into her old profession. Spies,
terrorists, a briefcase of enriched uranium, and a sleeper all come to a head
at a farm in the Agter-Paarl."
– Michael Sears, Africa Scene, November 30, 2018.
– Michael Sears, Africa Scene, November 30, 2018.
I agree with these sentiments with the caveat that the earlier novel, Agents of State, may even better. Set also in Berlin, the novel explores the trafficking of children, the widespread corruption and violence of the Zuma years, and how the South African spy agency operated during the apartheid years. Read it first.
 |
Most of Wessel Ebersohn's
novels, that extend back to the apartheid years, feature the prison
psychologist, Yudel Gordon, a privileged white, albeit Jewish who is regarded with suspicion by Afrikaners. Ebersohn's early
novels such as the 1981 Divide the Night
were so attacked by the regime that he was banned and his family was so
threatened that he went into exile. This novel features a psychopath who kills
young vulnerable black children and yet he is regarded as a hero by both his
family and the security police. What
makes the novel most interesting is that Yudel witnesses an event that deeply
troubled him, an experience that has haunted him and is referenced in his most recent
post-apartheid novel, 2018 The Robben Island List.
In October Killings as well as in The
List, Yudel works with Abigail Bukula, a talented African lawyer who works in the
Justice Department with a fascinating back history that is relayed in October Killings. In The List a sniper is killing former
liberation activists, old men who spent times on Robben Island yet no longer
play any role in politics. An early suspect is a white farmer who feels that
the ANC government ignores the concerns ofwhite farmers who he feels are oppressed. Ebersohn is very perceptive at providing a
critical yet sympathetic portrayal of the man and his family. Ebersohn's novels
are not easy to find but they are well worth reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment