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General Overview
The key political party in the struggle for South African independence is the African National Congress [ANC]. The ANC has had to transform itself rapidly from a liberation movement espousing revolutionary socialism to a political party defending a culture of human rights, and Mandela reveals his indebtedness to several, not always compatible discourses that in both South Africa and the world opposed apartheid. After a struggle with his own early African nationalism, Mandela acknowledges that he was fighting for a truly united country devoid of class, race or colour. With the family as the model of community, Mandela states unabashedly, about solitary confinement that "nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship" and that his son's death while he was in prison "left a hole in [his] heart that can never be filled".
Literature in South Africa is a literature of commitment. Most of the writers write out of the desire to express the experiences in their environment politically and sociologically. They write to reflect and expose the oddities of their history and corruption in their polity. South Africa is rich in gold and diamond. Besides, they have a good natural landscape for agriculture and other forms of arts and crafts. These factors and other reasons were the major attractions to the European and Asian immigrants and/or merchants who decided to make South Africa their mainstay. They realized that political power would enable them control the natives and at the same time have more advantage in their trading. A resistance from the blacks resulted in apartheid policy which was aimed at checkmating the excesses of the blacks vis-à-vis their protest for independence. The situation became more complicated with years as there were interracial marriages and high level of racism. The South African novelists like Peter Abrahams and Alex Laguma amongst others reflected the evils of apartheid in their works.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Explain briefly the major trust of South African literature.
The Politics of Apartheid in South Africa
Under apartheid, whites were given a political-racial identity which - conterminous with superiority - utilized to its advantage either its Western European inheritance or its long African rootedness. Within this political-racial identity, Afrikanerdom saw itself as culturally distinct from English-speaking South Africans, who were regarded as derivative of the British and, since they had rapidly become townspeople, having little connection to the South African soil. Thus there were also "urban" and "rural" identities, but conveniently when the Afrikaners and the English ganged up against blacks, the common white identity tended to be regarded amorphously as Western and middle class. Under apartheid, black people were ethnicised by the State into Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, and so forth. While Indians and mixed-race "Coloureds" fell somewhere between whites and Africans, the State decreed a rural identity for all Africans: the journey to the city was by government permit.
The reality of urbanization, however, created in African communities both urbans and rurals so that while the majority ideal today might be post-apartheid nationals, many rural Africans cannot be sure where the power of the government - styled as nonracial and democratic - ends and where the power of the chief - local and ethnic - begins. When things do not go its way, the government has not been averse to stepping out of its nonracial role and calling the Africanist race card. The latest attempts at a national narrative is to explain these issues as they occur thereby reflecting the tensions in the people’s historical experience.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
What are the major factors that gave rise to apartheid?
The Politics of Apartheid in Peter Abraham’sMine Boy
Mine Boy (1946) by Peter Abrahams was published "two years before the Nationalists gained control of South African politics" and "just before apartheid became entrenched into the South African legal system and racialism became a sanctified governmental policy (Abrahams 5)."Xuma, the major character faces the complexities of urban life in Johannesburg. This was one of the first books to draw attention to the condition of black South Africans under apartheid. The novel started on the Eve of the Apartheid Era. One commentator has noted that Abrahams "is the first South African novelist to pose a possible solution to the continuing crisis of black experience in the industrial city."
Peter Abrahams fictionally recreates this area of colonial history, which presents us with characters who negotiate the uncertain and often tragic terrain of the colonial experiences introduced and induced by diseases. In particular, characters confront and deal, as best as they can, with somatic, psychological, and psychosomatic diseases in ways that highlight the racism of colonial South Africa. A striking revelation of the problems of apartheid as it affects the social and the mental balance of the people who perceive the negative effects of colonialism as something beyond human comprehension.
Peter Abrahams was born in 1919. He is a South African-born novelist and journalist. Mine Boy his first novel centres on the effects of the South African apartheid policy. Although Abrahams left for England in 1939 and in 1955 moved to Jamaica, Africa continued to dominate his work, including the short-story collection Dark Testament (1942), and Wild Conquest (1950), about the Boers' trek. His autobiography, Tell Freedom (1954), recreates his childhood in the Johannesburg slums. A Wreath for Udomo (1955), one of his most effective novels, tells of the murder of a native leader. Like Abrahams's first work with a Caribbean setting, This Island, Now (1966; revised 1971), it views the future of the Third World pessimistically. The View from Coyaba (1985) is the story of four generations of a Jamaican family and the struggle for black autonomy.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Critically assess the apartheid conditions experienced by Xuma
The Politics of Apartheid in Alex LaGuma’s A Walk in the Night
Alex La Guma (1925- 1986), a writer and political activist, was born to a "coloured" (mixed-race) family in Cape Town in 1925. Of French and Malagasy ancestry, he was involved in South African politics from an early age and was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre, he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. He died in 1986. His parents were active in left wing politics and the labour movement, and La Guma grew up conscious of the political and socio-economic implications of South Africa's separatist policies. He did not begin writing fiction until after he turned thirty. He wrote five novels, over a dozen short stories and many political essays. He was repeatedly harassed by the South African government as a result of his political activities, and emigrated to England in 1966. Most of his work, fiction and non-fiction deal with South African subjects, focusing on the conflict between the races. Throughout his work, he stresses the importance of collective action and the need to care for others.
In his first novel, A Walk in the Night (1962), La Guma describes the political and social existence of the "coloured" people of the District Six slum in Cape Town. He examines the life of the district through the actions of four characters during the course of one night. He focuses on the decay and despair of the slum, whose residents are frequently too absorbed by their own miserable state to react to it, and thus suffer alone. In doing so, he explores the connection between rights and responsibilities through the unfolding of his characters' decisions and actions. La Guma describes the South African struggles through characters who are involved in political resistance, unlike the lonely victims of his earlier works. Although the main character reached the conclusion that collective action is essential to solving the problems of South Africa's system, the author uses flashbacks to reveal the squalor and despair which are the source of the political movement. The characters overcome the isolation and disconnectedness which plague the subjects in his earlier works in order to work together towards their goal.
Throughout his fictional writings about South Africa, La Guma explores the tension between human rights and social responsibility against the backdrop of the nation's separatist policies. The moral development of his characters is closely tied to their potential to improve their country's future. A Walkin the Night and Other Stories reveals La Guma as one of the most important African writers of his time. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shanty-towns.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
As a coloured, Alex La Guma reflects on his apartheid experiences. How true is this in the story?
The Politics of Apartheid in other Novels
Many African writers wrote about apartheid in South Africa. They wrote to criticize the evils against blacks in South Africa. Many poets, dramatists and novelists revealed in their works the various evils associated with apartheid. Literature is a product of environment. South Africans were shocked at the imperialists’ posture of treating them like animals. They were reacting just the way the other parts of Africa were reacting. The world also reacted and imposed sanctions on the country. Nelson Mandela was used as super hero by some novelists in their works and in most cases there are typologies of him. The experiences of colonialism in Africa brought with it several odds in African continent because of the imperialists’ economic interests. The colonial masters wanted to use every means possible to subject Africans towards accepting their religion and their political power.
West Africa battled indirect rule system with its incessant constitutional odds. The francophone were made to accept alien cultures as superior to theirs. In all these policies, the total aim is to make the Africans feel inferior and subjective in their own land. The imperialists applied every diplomatic and practical means towards actualizing their economic interests. The first step was to make the Africans feel inferior and thereby have feelings of underdevelopment. Most times, the imperialists used arms to achieve their aims. African writers recorded these dark historical days of Africa. However, the South African experience marked the height of these human degradations in Africa. Many African writers lamented the carnage and brutality. They wrote to express their belief in Africa and the hope that peace would return.
Many African novelists who wrote in the 60s and 70s reflected the South African experiences in their works and each of them wrote with the utmost desire to criticize the deadly system and draw world sympathy towards eradicating it. In some ways it worked as the world imposed sanctions on the system and forced them to step down.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 5
Many African writers criticized apartheid. Explain thoroughly the experiences of colonialism in other parts of Africa.
CONCLUSION
Apartheid was a very ugly experience for Africans as it marked the height of imperialists’ injustice. Africans were made to become slaves in their own land. They were subjected to all manners of injustices just to allow the whites have full control of the country. The black South
Africans and the coloured were the most discriminated as they received all manner of ill-treatment from the whites. Apartheid is not an experience to be forgotten in a hurry in African colonial history because Africans were not only brutally murdered, they were imprisoned, impoverished and enslaved. They were treated like animals, especially like beasts of burden. They were incarcerated, dehumanized and subjected to the most denigrated height of human injustice. Justice took time to come because the imperialists had to satisfy their greedy lusts against the backdrop of human justice and equity. Before sanctions began to be imposed on the traumatic government, many human rights bodies especially Amnesty International amongst others fought to ensure clear measure of justice.
The fight against apartheid was not easy. It took time, many years to be reacted to. Many South African writers were arrested, incarcerated and imprisoned. Most of them went on exile. They wrote mainly from outside the South African shores for fear of being killed. The two authors treated in this unit: Peter Abrahams and Alex La Guma were among the South African writers who told their apartheid tales from the outside. Most of them went back home after democracy was enthroned and peace, justice and equity returned.
SUMMARY
From the study of Peter Abraham’s Mine Boy and Alex LaGuma’s A Walkin the Night, we see two different accounts of the apartheid politics in South Africa. Peter Abrahams is black while Alex Laguma was Coloured. Both races were the most affected in South Africa. Mine Boy accounts for the injustices meted out to the blacks even in a black enclave where they were subjected as miners to excavate minerals for the development of the white enclaves. The blacks were ill-treated and made to live in utter impoverishment in shanty towns were no infrastructure is provided. There are clear pictures of anarchy, injustice and dehumanization as clearly presented in Xuma’snarration.
A Walk in the Night paints clearer pictures of poverty and anarchy. The stories are written in gutter language for the realization of the true picture of things. We read the story and see the scenes painted in reality. We feel the pains of the people and record the memories of trauma. The South African political history is never a story of lies rather it is the story of a people who became victims of their environment because they have some natural resources which attracted the imperialists. South Africa is rich in diamonds and gold. In order to control these natural resources, the imperialists made life unbearable for the helpless indigenes of the land. The fight to restore democracy in the country took the joint efforts of the church, the people, their writers and the humane world to actualize.
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