BOOK REVIEW ASSIGNMENT EDITORS tend to be a harried lot, understandably. They like to categorize those in their reviewing stable for quick and very ready reference, or they used to do so when actual book reviewing was a thriving activity back in the days of flick-flicking desk Rolodexes, let’s say.
Any shred of alleged expertise can be valued: this writer knows something about horse racing, this one knows something about Asian cooking, this one knows an awful lot about FDR. Aware of my keen interest in Africa, especially after my trip to interview writers in Cameroon in 1979, editors of journals and magazines often assigned me books to review from or about Africa. It meant that I found myself in a fortunate position to keep up with the literature well after my time traveling there in 1979.
For a while I was a regular reviewer of fiction for the Jesuit weekly America, and sometimes books set in Africa came my way from their offices in midtown Manhattan. At the time America operated a thriving general-interest (surely not strictly religious) book section, and it was quite common to pick up a novel in a bookstore and see a quote from a review in America prominently displayed on the cover, a trusted source; among the better-known past contributors to the magazine was Flannery O’Connor. I also wrote a number of reviews for Africa Today, my association with that journal going back to the reconsideration piece on Dugmore Boetie’s nightmarish novel Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost, mentioned already in these pages.
What follows are some of those reviews, a selection of them and together a composite essay in a way, to provide discussion of a personal recommended reading list of books about the continent.
Reviews are what they are, usually not intended to last. Even when it comes to the work of skilled and prolific reviewers who qualify as major creative artists in their own right—Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, for example—their book-length collections of reviews, as undeniably strong as the work is, obviously aren’t supposed to hold up as well as their dazzling fiction over time. Which makes sense, because a review is more or less by definition news, a blaring trumpet call on pulpy pages—or, again, it used to be like that, anyway—from a hopefully well-chosen, knowledgeable, and engaging commentator to offer a meaningful discussion of a new release. (Sadly, we’re living in a time when the whole understanding of what constitutes a professional book review appears to be rapidly evanescing. Hard-copy space for reviews in magazines and particularly Sunday newspapers is, in fact, shrinking to near invisibility, going the way of that ancient Rolodex, and the online customer opinion appears to be taking over. Whether beefing or celebrating, the latter accompanied by a string of classroom-style gold stars, the customer opinion of a book does sometimes get labeled as—quite mistakenly, I think—an actual “review” on sites like Amazon and the social-media-oriented Goodreads, which is owned by conglomerative Amazon and where people often affix funny avatars, including the inevitable one I noticed the other day that showed the photo of a plump calico cat wearing a tiny beret and apparently seriously engulfed in reading a large open book. While the spiritedness of customer opinion is appreciated, even the honesty, for better or worse, of those opinions—which can be refreshing amid the outright puffery often surrounding the legitimate media reviews lately that sometimes seem mere extensions of a publisher’s publicity machine—nobody really expects—or gets—much more overall literary expertise from a customer opinion than when the same customer who wrote that opinion clicks to another site and offers his or her views on the performance of a homeowner’s mini-chainsaw or the comfort of a pair of memory-foam sneakers; also, when you read an entry where “author” is spelled “arthur,” it doesn’t exactly shout critical prowess). Not that now and then there haven’t been practitioners who have made mainstream book reviewing a devoted, full-time calling, producing work that does last and can rise to the level of true art. To name a couple of them as examples, there’s Britisher Cyril Connolly, the elegant and intellectually ruminating regular book columnist for the Observer and then the Sunday Times of London in the mid-twentieth century, as well as—uncannily insightful in his intimate prose, so much sheer voice to the writing—Sven Birkerts, who currently edits the respected literary magazine Agni at Boston University and has for forty years contributed outstanding literary criticism to many large-circulation outlets—Esquire, The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and others.
All of which is to say, in offering a selection of my reviews of books by African writers or about Africa here, I know that when writing on each, I hoped, if nothing else, it would primarily provide a valid appraisal of a book upon its release. I personally have never seen reviewing as an opportunity to exhibit one’s own verbal flash, but rather it’s a straightforward contract to tell about the book, one way or another and as honestly as possible. Nevertheless, the reviews I’ve selected for assembly here (including the one reconsideration) deal with work I still admire, my having reread each book again long after the review appeared, and, true, all the books are most highly—even outright emphatically—recommended.
Besides the piece that takes a second look at Boetie’s novel, there are reviews of work by two other modern writers from South Africa, both internationally celebrated: J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. With Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, it was my second time writing on him, and I believe I hold the nice distinction of being the very first in the United States to review this eventual Nobel Prize winner (I later met him and he personally confirmed it) when his first novel—the not very well-known Dusklands, published by the small South African house Ravan—was assigned to me by Africa Today. My comment on Gordimer was delivered in a compound, two-book review that maybe yields a larger conclusion, which one does aim for with such a combination piece, in this case written for the opinion magazine The Progressive. The review posits Gordimer’s novel envisioning a dystopic postapartheid South Africa, July’s People, alongside a particularly thorough documentation of how that country’s media was frustratedly handcuffed at the height of strict enforcement of the policy that separated races—Up Against Apartheid, by a former editor at Newsweek and The Nation, Richard Pollak. Actually, during the stretch when I did most of this reviewing related to Africa, the late 1970s and early 1980s, the assignments frequently were books specifically from South Africa. South Africa was always in the news at the time, and taking a stand against the injustice of apartheid had become nothing short of a worldwide movement by then, something that review assignment editors would adopt as a loud, emphatic cause of their own as well. Though politics have indeed changed dramatically in South Africa since the publication of these books about the country, I believe they possess continuing relevance as both reliable documentation of the strange era, which should not be forgotten, and an especially apt warning today of what can happen when we let ingrained irrational hate block out better judgment and basic human concern.
Two writers from outside Africa I reviewed wrote telling novels growing out of time they spent on the continent. There’s John Updike, a wielder of jeweled prose who apparently based his book The Coup on material gathered when he made a hop-scotching U.S. government-sponsored lecture tour of several sub-Saharan countries with his wife in 1973; and there’s V. S. Naipaul, an always restless traveler whose various journeys of geopolitical investigation have also yielded much subsequent significant fiction. Bound galleys of Naipaul’s novel, A Bend in the River, were sent to me by America in the usual padded brown envelope, arriving only a few days after my return from Africa (how good it always was to receive a new book, usually accompanied by a typed or scribbled couple of lines on a letterhead slip tucked in the pages, giving a due date for the review and the number of words, the ground rules of the trade; you always had to be careful not to prick your finger on the padded envelope’s staples when you tore it open to see—or, more exactly, discover—what was inside); moved and surely still excited by my firsthand experience following my trip then in 1979, I took issue with Naipaul’s pessimistic portrait of Africa, a judgment I’ve since pulled back on, I must admit. A Bend in the River exudes dark anxiety bordering on existential dread, delivered with intense evocations of place and subtly revealing dialogue. The model for the novel’s unnamed country is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire and the territory of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well as, when Naipaul visited, an oppressive ruler who attempted to have himself declared President for Life, Mobuto Sese Seko of the dark sunglasses and trademark leopard-skin hats along with such exquisitely tailored, African-cut sharkskin suits; called the “Big Man” in Naipaul’s novel, Mobutu was a confirmed tyrant who developed a strong cult of personality, a figure no less crazed than the more flamboyantly bespangled Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa himself, who actually wore a jewel-studded crown and operated at the time over in the Central African Empire. For me, with that stay just the summer before in Cameroon—a country in 1979 still enjoying to a degree the spirit of optimism that spread throughout Africa after the first wave of independence in the 1960s and that lingered well into the 1970s—Naipaul’s grim conclusions seemed small, even mean-spirited. But, as said, I came to later recognize how undeniably prescient he was in warning what could happen—and in some countries was already beginning to happen—when much of the upbeat celebratory hope in these new African nations increasingly gave way to major disorder and a continent largely ravaged for over twenty-five years by wars and rampant corruption almost beyond belief, even mass genocide (Rwanda-Burundi the most tragic story on that count), with trouble spots remaining today (South Sudan, Somalia, and the Congo).
In rereading this work I notice in my observations how the very dreamlike quality that has characterized Africa for both me and others does emerge as a recurring motif, whether in an author’s exploring it via a mythic approach, as in Updike, or its expressing the unreality of life becoming an unsettling nightmare, as in the apartheid-haunted South African writers (foremost Boetie) whose books I wrote on.
I’ve also tacked on here a poem of my own, hopefully not too presumptuously, “African Airports.” It isn’t any accurate record of my own travel, though maybe calls to mind the essential tenor of such travel in general. Also, for purposes of its serving as an addendum to my essay in this collection “Honorary Africanist,” which deals directly with my time in Cameroon, the poem might provide a brief sample of the creative writing and actual product—mostly short stories and some poems, too—that grew out of that stay in Africa. Ben Lindfors, the respected, very well-known Africanist at the University of Texas where I teach, once told me that he’d made a copy of the poem from the literary magazine in which it appeared and had it mounted and framed, to hang in his bedroom at home. The magazine, William and Mary Review, illustrated the poem with an etching of a giraffe, and I guess it suggested Africa, an easy symbol; while said graceful, long-necked wild animal had nothing whatsoever to do with the work, it added visual artistic flare to the two-page spread that Ben had framed.
I can be frank (sane?) in saying I’m pretty sure I’ve never written any poem that deserves to be mounted and framed anywhere. But with that gesture coming from somebody like Ben, a generous man who dedicated his career to the literature of Africa (he constantly took up the cause of African writers, often broke, when he knew they could use help landing a visiting teaching slot at a university in the U.S.; there were always wonderful reception parties for any African writer passing through Austin at the rambling old wood-frame house of Ben and his wife Judy near campus, with faculty, students, and the African writer happily mixing and the talk probably some of the best in all my years at the university; he recently donated his entire library of thousands of books from or about Africa to a university in South Africa), true, merely Ben’s approving of my poem with an African subject, never mind framing it, meant a good deal to me.
As did just the opportunity to write these reviews of such solid books about Africa when younger, assigned by those harried editors who always so kindly kept me in mind.
A Reconsideration of Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost: The Story of a Black Man in South Africa, by Dugmore Boetie
In the midst of all the television reports and newspaper stories in the past year about racial confrontations in South Africa, I found myself turning to books I had read by writers from that country. What first came to mind was that of a South African black—Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost. In fact, I realized I wanted to reread it before going back to some of the better-known South African writing in English.
Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost originally appeared in England after Boetie’s death in 1966. It was issued later in the U.S. as a hardbound and subsequently a Fawcett paperback. Barney Simon, a white South African playwright and publisher, believed in Boetie’s innate writing ability and was the editor for the author’s rough manuscript. In an afterword, Simon explains how he gave money and raised more from his own friends to allow Boetie, sick and testy, to leave his Johannesburg factory job and write the “true” story of his checkered life in South African slums, the segregated townships of the big cities. As it turned out, the factual truth didn’t interest Boetie, despite Simon’s pleas for it.
Boetie exaggerated enormously. The result is a bragging first-person narrative of the often absurdly far-fetched exploits of a one-legged, streetwise petty thief named Dugmore Boetie trying to survive in the 1930s through ’50s. It is therefore not really an autobiography because of that exaggeration, and not really a novel because of its basis in the facts of Boetie’s life. The book in the Fawcett edition bears the simple subtitle, rather noncommittal, “The Story of a Black Man in South Africa.”
Novelist Nadine Gordimer visited Boetie several times in a Johannesburg hospital before he died. Prefacing the Fawcett edition, she praises Simon for his kindness and patience in dealing with Boetie and says that Simon “Asked him [Boetie] for his confidence and received deception. Asked for the truth and received lies. How could it have been otherwise, if Dugmore Boetie were to remain true to himself? What should he know of gratitude, the South African black who must take off his hat and say Thank you, baas, not for what comes to him as a right—for nothing comes to him as a right—but for the tithe of the white man’s abundance handed out at the back door?”
However, once you start reading, you soon realize that the exaggeration evokes a dreamlike atmosphere, which in a way must accurately portray the essential feeling of what life is like for so many blacks in the bleak South African slums. There, the odds against a normal existence continue to be so stacked that existence itself must seem routinely unbelievable. In short, Boetie’s inability to stick to the facts paradoxically results in an alternatingly comic and horrifying picaresque odyssey of deeper insight.
Dugmore—the formal first name came from Duggie, which in turn was the name of an elephant whose feet he washed on a circus job—drifts in and out of gangs and louse-infested prisons. He steals with dash, cons drinks, looks for work only occasionally because work is never available, suffers brutality in enormous doses and inflicts it likewise. A good sample of the writing’s tenor is the opening scene. His mother beats him as a child with a strap and then a frying pan to make him say the word “Mother.” He reacts: “I pushed and her skinny body fell into the greedy flames of a healthy fire-galley. Maybe I had broken her back, or maybe she was just too exhausted to lift herself. Anyway, my mother just fried and fried. . . .” The story may ramble, but an ability to write clear, painfully precise description shouldn’t be overlooked: “The streets were muddy and slimy because they were without gutters. They were strewn with dirty dishwater. The air reeked of overflowing latrines. Naked children with bloated bellies stood lined up, staring at us with mouths hanging open. . . .”
Rereading this book reaffirmed my belief in the paramount importance of books in a society such as ours—one that can rely too heavily on the noisy, more popular mass media—when it comes to understanding political issues abroad. So, I don’t limit that importance to only nonfiction books which directly address themselves to politics. Boetie’s penetrating prose gives a sense of the stakes involved in South Africa, a sense of the people. And it is an element that brief newspaper and television attention usually fails to convey. Even the so-called in-depth analyses fall short.
In this writing there are no hidden solutions to apply to the turbulence that now rages in South Africa, though if a solution hopefully does materialize the media will report the news of it effectively. Meanwhile Boetie doesn’t report. He tells us, mysteriously whispers to us, something very powerful indeed.
—Africa Today, 1978
The Coup, by John Updike
John Updike has written a novel about a black dictator named Elleloû in an imaginary contemporary upper-African state called Kush, which penetrates the Sahara in the north and is fertile enough for peanut production in the south.
Now it may seem strange that Updike has turned to such an alien setting when the bulk of his fiction has been set in the small-town Pennsylvania of his youth and the suburban New England of his adulthood. But Updike traveled throughout Africa as a Fulbright lecturer in 1973, and his obvious enthusiasm for literature from that continent is attested to by how much criticism about it he has contributed to The New Yorker over the years.
Elleloû (the concocted name supposedly means “freedom”) grew up in Kush when it was a French colony and still known as Noire, studied at a small private college in bucolic Wisconsin, and returned to his homeland to take over the government in the name of revolutionary socialism. When the story begins in 1973, a sensitive, cynical President Elleloû (who narrates in the first person, though he often refers to himself in the imperial third) realizes that he is losing his power as a drought plagues the country, leaving the people restless and his untrustworthy lieutenants very itchy for upheaval. The main lines of narration deal with the building governmental imbroglio, Elleloû’s own search to find himself, and the tales of his earlier life with his four wives. The wives range from a hefty Kush woman of his village to a complaining white Wisconsin girl he met in college, who comes to his country only to miss the conveniences of America and be absolutely miserable.
It all works wonderfully well. Updike has hit upon an effective semicomic tone. Such lightheartedness may preclude this from becoming a major statement on the Third World (a surely sober subject) but it also ensures against it degenerating to dull sermonizing, which has been the downfall of too much literature setting out to make such a major statement. There are, the semicomic tone notwithstanding, substantial measures of genuinely insightful cultural and political observation here. There are fine mythic echoes, too. In one sequence, Elleloû ventures into the desert in search of the severed head of the ex-king, a father figure whom he ordered decapitated. The head reportedly is spouting invective against Elleloû from a cave in the barren northern regions. There are haunting passages recounting dreams, thoughtful reflections on the Koran, touching exchanges between Elleloû and those wives, and a packed-to-capacity crowd of intriguing minor characters.
And there is Updike’s rare gift of language. An Updike sentence has always been easily identifiable by its poetic flare—a combination of full vocabulary and intense sensuality. It seems to me that the vividness of the African scene is made for these sentences, maybe as the vividness of the South Seas was made for Gaugin’s canvases. As a quick example, here is Updike describing a desert caravan: “We were awakened beneath the stars—the stars! in the midnight absolute that arched above Balak the constellations hung inflamed like chandeliers—and we made our way, tinkling and sighing and snorting, toward the pearl dawn whose blush was as delicate as the pink tinge of nacre, to that point in mid-morning when the camels began to squat down simply of despair.”
Updike has previously made brief excursions away from his standard domestic settings, in some of his short stories, for instance, and in his linked collection Bech: A Book, which brings a traveling American writer to Eastern Bloc communist countries. But with The Coup he has gambled in taking on the African setting so wholeheartedly in the person of a contemplative revolutionary dictator. The gamble has paid off, proving Updike’s versatility beyond denial. It may be that such versatility is what will keep this major American novelist ranked as just that for many, many years to come.
—America Magazine, 1978
Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee
Readers will recognize that the title of this new novel by South African J. M. Coetzee is taken from that of a poem by Constantine Cavafy, who wrote in Greek and died in his native Egypt in 1933. Such borrowing seems appropriate, because in careful language and narrative intensity, this slim book does read very much like a poem.
Coetzee sets his tale in the harsh, semiarid frontier of a major power called the Empire. An aging man in charge of a settlement there, the Magistrate, is content to live out his days quietly, administering over the small community, visiting a gentle prostitute at the local inn, and collecting anthropological artifacts in casual excavations manned by his soldiers. But Colonel Joll from the Empire’s Third Bureau of the Civil Guard arrives for an investigation of supposed plotting among the “barbarians,” peaceful indigenous tribes who dwell beyond the settlement. Joll brutally interrogates barbarians taken as prisoners; eventually, a beaten boy gives him a story that his people are organizing for war, the child fabricating the information obviously out of sheer fear. Joll leaves and the prisoners are released to go off on their own, all except for a young barbarian woman who is left behind, half blind and with near-crippled bloody feet, another victim of Joll’s cruel interrogations. The compassionate Magistrate develops a strange fascination with her and brings her into his own chamber, as he bathes and oils her feet nightly in a ritual of sorts and nurses her back to health. When he sets out on an expedition across the frozen, treacherous outlying wastes in March to return her to her people, and when the Empire, acting on Joll’s findings, launches a military campaign against the barbarians and dispatches a dashing young officer in a lilac-blue uniform named Mandel to take over the Magistrate’s outpost, the Magistrate is charged with consorting with the enemy. His agonizing but defiant downfall follows, in a long series of humiliations and tortures.
This is an extremely powerful and intoxicating piece of writing, haunted by Kafka, with the creation of a mythic setting that gives a sense of the surreal and, in turn, the symbolic, and haunted by Conrad, too, with the probing of just how dark the human heart must sometimes be to act on such absurd irrationality that has dictated too much of history. Because Coetzee is South African and because the details of the novel (the uniforms, the horses, the soldiers, etc.) seem of the nineteenth century, it would be easy to view this as only a story from his own troubled land’s past. But again, there is something much larger about the material here, and it also has echoes of the American West, where the Native Americans were seen as “barbarians,” or even, more recently, Vietnam, where a communist people were often considered the same. Much of the comment cuts to the bone in its universality. For instance, when the Magistrate is frustratedly heartbroken at the sight of the battered prisoners, he tries to imagine the convoluted way the leaders of the Empire rationalize their assaults: “It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these people were obliterated from the face of the earth in order to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more justice, no more pain.”
The first-person narration is expertly paced, seething with suspense. In Coetzee’s first book, Dusklands, which juxtaposed two interacting novellas, he demonstrated a striking ability to describe the physical, often in all of its bodily rankness, and that ability is equally evident here. And the scenes involving the Magistrate and the young barbarian woman work so well, each character emerging as a convincing jumble of strong and sometimes contradictory emotions. In short, this is a novel that does deserve the appellation tour de force, and I suppose that for me the sole problem, albeit a minor one, is the tendency to overdo and turn heavy-handed with the several passages concerning a symbolic dream of a child in the snow the Magistrate repeatedly has.
At end of Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the people in an unnamed land don’t know what is going to happen to them; the barbarians never showed up, and having the barbarians to fear and think about offered “a kind of solution,” gave them something with which to occupy themselves. At the end of Coetzee’s novel, the situation is somewhat similar. Is our lot as supposedly civilized human beings hopeless, and is Coetzee telling us that we need, and always have needed, somebody to persecute and hate? Or is the Magistrate, the figure Joll charges with attempting to egotistically make a name for himself as “the one just man,” a valid hope? Can we, in fact, believe in the individual who, because he won’t readily submit, won’t easily be broken, even after much brutally inhuman treatment, possesses the power to prove that history isn’t an unfeeling and frightening machine, and it doesn’t have to repeat itself, after all—if somebody simply takes a stand to announce a saner way?
—Africa Today, 1983
A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul
A few years ago, V. S. Naipaul published Guerrillas, a novel set in an imaginary Caribbean country. It didn’t paint a very becoming picture of the contemporary political situation in that part of the Third World, to say the least. His latest novel, A Bend in the River, takes place in an imaginary African country, and it seems to use similar brush strokes to paint the same type of picture of this developing area.
The story is narrated in the first person by an East African of Indian descent, Salim. He leaves his cushy, but doomed, life in his troubled native land on the Indian Ocean to take over a general goods store in an alternatingly dusty and jungled African country, well inland. His narration builds in introspection and digression, as a lonely Salim slowly chronicles his several years in the city located at the bend in a river. The principals include: a cold, politicized son of a trading bush woman who sees himself as the New African; an old friend of Salim’s family who sets up an African exchange-scholar program, which he knows from the start is a total sham; the handsome Belgian wife of a burnt-out white Africanist at the national university, a woman whose perfunctory lust has no chance of rescuing Salim from his growing malaise; and, ominously, the Big Man. Salim never meets the Big Man, but this dictator of the country, so named, haunts the lives of all the characters. His blown-up photograph in traditional garb is posted throughout the city, and youth squads are made to parade along the red-dirt streets, through the shantytowns and past the high garbage heaps, each marcher brandishing a booklet of the Big Man’s quotations as if it were a powerful weapon.
The novel is essentially plotless, though anything as positive as a well-defined, structuring plot would be at odds with the underlying mood of pessimism—a feeling resulting from the country’s pandemic listlessness, confusion, and even unmitigated evil. That isn’t to say the novel lacks drive. Salim’s voice alone becomes the real attraction. It is an intriguing running commentary built on precise detail and probing intelligence. For instance, plagued by guilt after an afternoon tryst with the Belgian woman Yvette, Salim thinks: “I had my first alarm about myself, the beginning of decay of the man I had known myself to be. I had visions of beggary and decrepitude; the man not of Africa lost in Africa, no longer with the strength of purpose to hold his own and with less claim to anything than the ragged, half-starved old drunks from the villages who wandered about the square, eyeing food stalls, cadging mouthfuls of beer, and the young troublemakers from the shantytowns, a new breed who wore shirts stamped with the Big Man’s picture and talked about foreigners and profit and wanting only money . . .”
Writing of this mythical country, Naipaul repeatedly uses the general term “Africa” and he seems to be addressing himself to all of independent sub-Saharan black Africa. So, finding this book waiting for review upon returning from a stay in that Africa, as happened to me, is somewhat troubling. I must say that Naipaul takes on the task that many non-African novelists who have written well lately about the continent have usually avoided. He delivers serious realism, without using Africa for fantasy, as John Updike did in The Coup, or dark humor, as Paul Theroux has done in a couple of novels. I also have to admit that there is much to support his grim conclusions in today’s Africa—frequent bloodshed in local wars and the high life of Mercedes and posh villas for corrupt government officials while the rest of the population can often find just feeding itself a perpetual harrowing struggle.
On the other hand, I like to think that Naipaul’s assessment of independent Africa’s present situation is accurately reflected in the title, A Bend in the River—a wrong turn, the worst that could happen in many new African countries and probably already has happened in a few, certainly the Central African Empire and Uganda. Truth of the matter is that I can’t completely go along with this pessimism when I remember many scenes from my own travel, sometimes only an incident very minor, a single passing moment in the course of a day, but revealing the larger, nevertheless. Once while walking around in downtown Yaoundé, Cameroon, I took a small plastic bag of orange peelings and crumpled candy bar wrappers out of my shoulder bag and tossed it in a streetside litter basket, despite the fact the street itself was heaped with foul-smelling refuse. The men selling cheap shirts and flimsy suitcases spread out on the dusty sidewalk smilingly watched me, maybe perplexed at first but then shouting their approval, a bunch of them, with one offering the universal salute sign.
Naipaul has delivered an artistically deft and fully worthwhile book. Again, though, I personally would have appreciated some mention of that optimistic spirit, if only in a character who gets trampled in life, sad to say, for bravely espousing it. At least it would have been there. And, believe me, granting there are so many major problems and looming woes, it is there in Africa.
—America Magazine, 1979
July’s People, by Nadine Gordimerand Up Against Apartheid, by Richard Pollak
In one of her earlier novels, The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer told the story of a rich white South African businessman. The book’s essentially realistic portrayal often shifted to an almost surrealistic plane. Gordimer seemed to be saying that life in contemporary South Africa was often such a lunatic affair—for whites as well as nonwhites—that it could take on the texture of an ominous dream.
July’s People, Gordimer’s latest novel, is set in a near future, at a time when South Africa has exploded in civil strife. Black revolutionaries strike from bases permitted them by the black government in neighboring Mozambique. They battle the forces of a weakening white government in the big cities, while the white civilians flee abroad. In the midst of this, a white family, the Smales, abandon their once-comfortable home in the Johannesburg suburbs to hide in the village of their longtime black servant, July, far out in the veldt.
One one hand, Gordimer is creating a situation that is hypothetical and futuristic. However, she also may again be probing that dreamlike plane. For many whites in South Africa today, the looming disaster of a successful black revolt must be a constant concern, the kind of thought that presses on the brain, what one surely dreams about, nightmarishly.
Bam Smales and his wife Maureen are liberals. He is an architect and she a former ballet student, both with records of deep social concern for blacks and condescending distaste for many of their racist Afrikaner compatriots. They escape the tide of battle with their three children in a yellow bakkie, a rugged sport utility truck. From the beginning they are uneasy as July’s guests. He is a polite and unusually quiet man, who used to be given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays off and would return then to his village (actually just a cluster of huts) to visit his wife and own children every two years.
Events are seen from the alternating points of view of the different characters, though most of the story is devoted to Maureen. She waits and watches: as her children learn to eat with their fingers and soon are part of the shabbiness of the village scene; as her husband has to back down and lose face in arguments with local men over the use, and even the ownership, of his truck and hunting rifle; and as a portable radio, their sole contact with the outside world and their former life (repeatedly referred to as “back there”), tells of only more rocket attacks and confused fighting.
This is a stunning, very moving novel. Gordimer’s observation is poetically exact, especially in chronicling the hard and seamy life of the rural blacks that assaults Maureen’s senses. The uneasy apprehension over what will become of Maureen and her family soon gives way to a more compelling suspense: What will come next in their crash-course in deep self-discovery (she has already figured she is not what she thought she was, an understanding, compassionate liberal) now that survival is at stake? The dialogue has all the intensity of searing stage drama, and the strongest exchanges pit her against July. She at last realizes that July is a man with needs and aspirations of his own, somebody with as little understanding of her as she has of him.
But her family’s lives depend utterly on him; eventually he will let her know it.
Richard Pollak’s Up Against Apartheid offers a fresh study of the media in race-mad South Africa. Pollak, the literary editor of The Nation, provides a grim account of government censorship under apartheid. Journalists supposedly are allowed a good deal of freedom, but for a conscientious reporter the country’s mine field of strict press laws can lead to imprisonment and even torture. It is not a question of an outright totalitarian control; it is the trickier situation of the reporter constantly not knowing where he or she stands vis-a-vis the byzantinely repressive statute books. Pollak reports in detail on the so-called Muldergate scandal (named after a past minister of information, Cornelius P. Mulder), which involved a massive government propaganda effort. One of the improprieties was the secret transfer of substantial government money in a far-fetched attempt to buy the Washington Star daily newspaper in 1975 and use it as an international propaganda outlet. Pollak also argues particularly well the need for the English-language press in South Africa as opposed to the Afrikaans, claiming that it remains truth’s last hope in the country as currently governed.
Much of the book echoes Gordimer’s sense of the dreamlike—how again and again apartheid has given South Africa a life that must not seem real whatsoever. Case in point: In an introductory discussion of the general situation in this country where nonwhites outnumber whites by approximately five to one, Pollak quotes from a report on token integration found in the Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, an annual compendium and assessment of actual racial policies, focusing on Johannesburg: “Only black visitors bearing foreign passports could use all hotel facilities. Other blacks could not drink in men’s-only bars. . . . They could swim if resident at the hotel, and be served liquor at mixed-sex bars if resident or bona fide guest of a resident. Blacks who were not resident could be served liquor only if they were taking or about to take a meal on the premises, or attending a function, such as a conference.”
You know, it would be laughable, if it weren’t so, yes, truly nightmarish.
—The Progressive, 1982
African Airports: A Poem
Long after returning
You dream of them incessantly.
It seems you are always en route,
Always late and waiting
To lift off again,
Inside the cramped DC’s cabin or slouched
In a waiting room chair, sculpted fiberglass.
In Lagos’ futuristic concrete monstrosity,
You wander through
The deserted Transit Passenger gift shops;
In the bar of Lome’s little facility,
You sit amid sunglassed blacks
(their sport shirts pink from the dust)
Imbibing tall bottles of local beer.
In Cameroon in the rainy season—
The jungle beyond the airstrip’s velvet
So gray—the banker from Morgan
Sitting beside you on the plane says he read
Of golden lions yesterday attacking
Three baggage handlers at dawn;
Only one is expected to live.
Mechanical problems,
And the dark-uniformed stewardesses are
Again telling you to get off
In the night; you learn to distinguish the styles
Of berets the military men wear.
You try to overhear
Some ragged Congolese women chatting in French.
And back home,
In the outskirts of Boston or hushed New York,
You awake in the blue moonlight,
Careful not to disturb your wife,
And go to the kitchen, where around
The yellow appliances you know
You will find all the tired travelers,
Talking of exchange rates and delays,
The wonderful ways of the weary.
—William and Mary Review, 1982