African Novel: Color & Guilt

African Novel: Color &GuiltAuthor(s): Martin TuckerSource: Africa Today, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Feb., 1965), pp. 13-15Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184605 .

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color & guilt Martin Tucker

OVER ALL of modern South African literature hang the ugly shades of color. No other national or

regional literature is so infested with the racial problem. "South Africa . .. is primarily a land of racial problems," writes Sarah Gertrude Millin in "The People of South Africa," and this concern, now ap- proaching a paranoia, is manifest everywhere in its literature. Practically every book, whether by a white or black author or by a foreign or native writer, treats the color problem in one or more of its aspects. Even popular romances and thrillers have not escaped the racial virus.

And it was always so. South African literature differs from other litera-

ture in English about Africa in that so much of it is written by native writers. South Africa can claim what no other region in Africa can claim, a white native population, a white native literature, and an indigenous white native intellectual movement. Leav- ing aside the valuable Afrikaans cultural scene, white South African literary history is remarkable for its achievement and profusion. Although in recent years it has tended to be more an exploitation of surface violence than a study in depth, a number of serious writers have portrayed South Africans as caught in and by a political situation.

Yet South African writers sooner or later become propagandists of one view or another in their obses- sive concern with the color question. This concern cannot be explained away merely by the fact of the existent color problem. Not every novel written by an American contains a Negro character or a race-relations issue. Many American novels of the nineteenth century never once mentioned the American Indians or the Negroes, and both these groups were major "color problems" of the time. The answer appears to lie in the moral, puritanical attitude of the South African writers to their work. The South African

novel invariably has been a tract, and instruction- rather than appreciation-has been its rationale.

This puritanism of view is not necessarily destrue- tive of art, but it colors all of South African literature with an obsessional quality. An attitude of guilt and the recognition of a mighty sin pervades its pages. Some of these pages are oriented to gross propaganda, but many of them are serious, well-intentioned at- tempts to lay bare an overwhelming problem. Even the best of these works, however, suffer from the self- consciousness of their message, whether that message upholds apartheid or racial equality.

South Africa, mirrored in English literature since 1900, gives off several reflections. I have grouped this literature into three classes:

1. novels of isolation; 2. novels of violence; 3. novels of forgiveness and adjustment. The writers of these novels are natives and foreign-

ers. Yet differences in nationality and color play no definitive part in the determination of these writers' attitudes. The lesson that is to be learned about the image of Africa evolved in these novels is not found by separating the writers into national or color groups. The significance lies not.in their different beginnings but in their similar developments and aims.

Olive Schreiner is the foremost example of the writer of the literature of isolation, which has grown into a South African literary pattern. In large measure, this image of South Africa as a "wide, lonely plain," a "dry, sandy earth," with low-lying hills and stunted "karroo' bushes-terms found on the first page of her masterpiece, "The Story of an African Farm"-has been created by Mrs. Schreiner. It is the image found in more current anti-city novels, whether it is the black farmboy come to Johannesburg in "Cry the Beloved Country" or the white seeker after truth in Daphne Muir's "A Virtuous Woman." It is the coun-

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try of "level waste" and "rounding grey" that is the ultimate salvation of these people. They journey to the city to find destruction an'd waste there. They return to accept the unquestioning peace of the countryside, which they had e'arlier rejected. Their resolution is not defeatism but quietism.

Mrs. Schreiner's "The Story of an African Farm" is a record of the frustrations of people who strive for wider horizons than their veldt. Waldo, Lyndall, Em, Gregory, and Otto are defeated when they ven- ture beyond their garden, and those who survive their experiences return chastened and grateful to Jive on their isolated farm. Olive Schreiner was dealing with people of infinite psychological complexities, but all of them come to terms with their inner conflicts by re- turning home, to a country house, to a little world they had left for a bigger one. Psychoanalysts might see in this solution a desire to return to the cradle, the womb, and one literary critic has suggested that Olive Schreiner's work is a reflection of her inability to accept her ambivalence to her mother. The psycho- analytic interpretation is not at variance with the interpretation presented here: that Olive Schreiner's Karroo valley is a beginning and an end-but not the struggling middle-of life, that while it is described in naturalistic terms, it is a mythopoetic resting place. It is this image that has been especially influential on other writers, loosening in them surges of personal and unconscious memory.

Olive Schreiner has been called a psychological real- ist and a crusading intellectual, but she is also a romantic harking back to the Adamic universe before the capsule of knowledge infested it. It is this romantic image of the gray-tinted veldt innocent of everything save space that was to become, in one guise or another, the prevailing image of South African literature for the first twenty years of the twentieth century. This literature of geographic isolation and spiritual apartness has its racial analogue. The clash between black and white is sensed but not felt in the gray desert. The lack of violence is due not merely to chronology. In the historical novels written by Stuart Cloete and Daphne Rooke, and in H. Rider Haggard's South African quest novels, wars and murder occur frequently. Against the lonely mountains and kopjes of the Karroo, however, hate bows its head. White and black wait alike, in patient suffering, in the African countryside; only in the cities does the vital issue explode. This literature of aloneness is the least race- ridden of any South African literature. It is another of the ironies that a literature in which people find themselves alone should be the place where they can live together without the impact of clash.

The influence of Olive Schreiner is apparent in the work of Sarah Gertrude Millin, a Jewish South Afri- can author who published her first novel, "The Dark River," in London in 1920. Mrs. lIillin writes of the lives of people in small cities and On farms whose bleakness of attitude is mnatched by the austerity of the land. Frust;ration is the keynote of the lives of most of her characters, a frustration compounded of

a hostilely Indifferent land and a cruelly ironic un!. verse. Mrs.. Millin's heroines are women with ambi- tions greater than the opportunities for reaching them, and in the depiction of their defeat there is a bitter, austere tone and style. It is in her style and her outlook that she reveals the distance she has gone from Olive Schreiner, and the identity that separates her from the first great South African writer. Olive Schreiner was a romantic writer whose depiction of worldly defeat was enshrined in a saintly triumph. Undine crawling in the mud to her death, Lyndall dying on the plains, Bertie closing the fitfulness of her tubercular life in a Capetown brothel-these women could all glory in the purity and innocence of their outlook opposed to a corrupt and expedient so- ciety. But Mrs. Millin's heroes and heroines are different: they are shown as weak but neither pure nor innocent. Mrs. Millin does not idealize their defeat; Gideon Aab, Miriam Hugo, Mary Glenn, Johannes van der Kemp, Henry Ormandy, Edith and Barry Lind- sell resent their frustrations and get no pleasure from their pain.

It is in the delineation of the differences between the lives, emotions, and potentialities of white and black men that is found the spirit that unites Mrs. Millin's work with what has been termed novels of violence. Mrs. Millin does not believe that under- standing will triumph over the differences of races in South Africa. While most of her novels avoid the motif of the riot, the underlying tension of racial conflict is present. Mrs. Millin's lifelong fascination has been the black and Colored man, but she has pre- ferred to keep the black mystery un-illuminated by any notions of equality. Instead, every one of her novels is at least in part an attempt to, show the limitations of the black man. In this she shares a similarity of outlook with Stuart Cloete ("The Turn- ing Wheels," "The Curve and the Tusk," "The Hi'll of the Doves," "Mamba," "Gazella") and Alexander Noble ("The Boy with a Flute"), all three of them professing an affection for the black man tempered with paternal restraint. She is further similar to them, especially in her historical novels, in her expression of belief that miscegenation is the prime cause of disturbance in the black-white, subject-master re- lationship:

This justification of apartheid and human restric- tion on the basis of race or color is the subject of her most famous novel, "God's Stepchildren," which traces the result of the Rev. Andrew Flood's decision to marry a Hottentot woman in order to prove that in God's eyes all people are white. The point of Mrs. Millin's novel is that the Reverend Flood is mad, and that not everyone is God's child. Only white people are, as she illustrates by a conversation between Flood and Calchas, a Hottentot woman:

"We are all God's children," the Rev. Andrew Flood said.

"Bult is not God himself white?"? asked Calchas. And, as the Rev. Anldrew Flood hesitated for a

14 AFRICA TODAY



reply, she made a suggestion: "Perhaps we brown people are His stepchildren,"

she said. Flood's decision sets in motion a family history that ends in the sacrifice by its last descendant of his wife and child and his comfortable family home in Johannesburg. To make restitution for his great- great-grandfather's transgression Barry Lindsell goes back into the desert to preach Christianity to black and Colored natives.

Miscegenation in this novel is not a social problem but a moral one. Mrs. Millin's attitude is that of the hero and his sister, both of whom accept the fact that Barry is guilty of sin for having "colored" blood. Barry's English wife Nora cannot understand the moral issue that plagues Barry and his sister Edith. Shle is commonsensical in her approach and tells her husband that all they need to do is to suppress the fact. In the war that ensues for Barry's spirit, his sister triumphs. Her fervor is that of the fanatic. Her shame is that of the Puritan: "Down the future generations would run that black blood mingled with her father's. And Barry spoke as if the color of his child's skin was all that need trouble Nora."

The terrible spectre of miscegenation -is again the obsessional concern of Mrs. Millin's heroine.

If there- are novels on the right-that is, novels defending the Boer and white-supremacist point of view-there are also novels on the left-novels championing the rights of all men, black and white. Novelists from the "right," like Sarah Gertrude Millin, Stuart Cloete, and Alexander Noble, blame the fact of violence in Africa on the speed with which African political independence has been granted. In large measure these novelists are gradualists in the sphere of political and social relations. Their novels are pleas for a slower, more conservative pace; their affection for the black man is deep-rooted, but it is an affection for the "darkies" they have grown to regard as their charge. Novelists on the "left" angrily demand more political rights and freedom for the Africans, and their novels reflect the bitterness with which they view the delay of these rights. These novelists of the "left" may be just as shrill as those on the "right," and ultimately just as propagandistic. Some of these novelists on the "left" are William Plomer, Laurens van der Post, Harry Bloom, and David Lytton. Both groups are examples of novelists of violence.

While the work of Sarah Gertrude Millin and Wil- liam Plomer typify the novel of violence, the novels of Alan Paton, Peter Abrahams, Nadine Gordimer, and Dan Jacobson may be said to represent the spirit of forgiveness in South African fiction. Significantly, while the work of Mrs. Schreiner and her literary descendants centered on farms and small towns with the concomitant of psychic loneliness, the emphasis in these later novels of violence and forgiveness is on the city with its obstacles toward a social harmony. The conflict in the novels of Olive Schreiner is mainly within the characters. In these later writers it is out- side the characters, in the working out of a peaceful

entente between them. The most famous expression of the literature of forgiveness is Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country."

Novels of forgiveness and adjustment exist on the same level as novels of violence-that is, they are pre- eminently situated in the racial and social tensions of South Africa. Some novels of violence end on the same note of compassion, the same plea for under- standing, as the novels of adjustment, but they tend to be more "black-and-white" in their portraits and closer to propaganda literature. The essential differ- ence between the two types is that novels of adjustment and forgiveness see the ultimate sanity and spirit of humanity triumphing over racial misunder- standing, violence, and bitterness. They do not see an easy solution. Actually their view is often more subtle and complex, and less hopeful of an immediate solution than that of novels of violence, which end the problem by the facile riot and sentimental lament.

The theme of the revolution of thought, the beginning of forgiveness by both black and white, distin- guishes the work of Peter Abrahams, Dan Jacobson, Nadine Gordimer, and Alan Paton, all born in South Africa. In the work of these novelists, temporary political and social defeat is secondary to man's eternal spiritual resistance to isolation by color. The rationale for this belief is neither intellectual nor social; it is spiritual. Hate contracts and dries up the inherent spiritual powers of man; love expands them into a glo;rious sea of potential experience. Miscegenation in these novels of adjustment and forgiveness occurs as frequently as in novels of violence, but the differ- ence lies in the author's attitude. For Abrahams, Gordimer, Paton, and Jacobson, miscegenation is a painful but necessary evolution, and the act is as full of happiness as of conflict.

The most famous, and one of the earliest, of these novels is Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country." This novel and "The Story of an African Farm" are the two best-known works of fiction in English to have come out of South Africa. Ironically, though Paton's novel has spawned a host of imitations and has been highly praised as propaganda, most contem- porary South African writers deny any literary influence through Paton. Yet "Cry the Beloved Country" is at least as well-written a novel as the many novels that have followed its lead. Today also Paton's human- ism is being attacked as old-fashioned and sentimental. Ezekiel Mphahlele in "The African Image" ac- cused Paton of falsifying human nature because he divides people into good and bad and then lays on these cardboard figures a heavy liberalism and a ''monumental sermon."

Undoubtedly Paton's work is more significant as propaganda than as literature, but it should be re- peated that his work is not poor literature. If his tal- ent lies in his ability to project the fervor and senti- ment of his liberal views rather than in his ability to convey full-blooded human beings, it also contains much literary merit.

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African Novel: Color & Guilt

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