Writing Black
WRITING BLACK: STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN SHORT STORY 1930-1990
KEY WRITERS: R.R.R. DHLOMO * MPHAHLELE * MODISANE * THEMBA * RIVE * MATTHEWS * LA GUMA * MZAMANE * MATSHOBA * TLALI * NDEBELE * MATLOU * WICOMB
1. BRIEF DESCIPTION
This study attempts a re-reading and re-evaluation of the work of black South African short story writers from R.R.R. Dhlomo (circa 1930) to Zoë Wicomb (at the end of the 1980s). The short story, along with the autobiography, was the dominant genre of black writing during this period. The title – “Writing Black” – alludes to well-known works by Richard Rive (Writing Black) and J.M. Coetzee (White Writing), and foregrounds the issue of race and racialised identities. While one would not want to neglect other factors (class, gender), it is hardly possible to underestimate the impact of racial classification during the apartheid era. However, the difficulty of asserting the unproblematic existence of a homogenous “black” identity becomes evident. The working premise of this study is that there is in fact no such thing as a simple, homogenous “black” identity.
The approach adopted here reflects the need to recognise both the singularity of particular texts (their “literariness”) as well as their embeddedness in their particular place and time (their “worldliness” or their “circumstantiality”). Literary texts are complex verbal artefacts of an unusual kind, but they cannot be separated from their contexts of production and reception; black writing in this country would be largely incomprehensible if this were not taken into account. Close attention is given to the obvious spatial, temporal and ideological shifts in South African cultural production during this period, and to the two major phases of black writing (the Sophiatown and District Six writers of the 50s, and the Staffrider writers of the 70s and 80s).
The work of these writers is not, however, subsumed into a political meta-narrative. In particular, this study resists the tendency to lump the work of black writers into one large, undifferentiated category (“protest writing” or the literature of the “spectacular”). This has had the effect of flattening out or homogenising a body of work that is much more varied and interesting than many critical accounts would suggest.
Finally, the contribution of three writers of the “interregnum” (Ndebele, Matlou, Wicomb) is explored. What is of particular interest is their break from established conventions of representation: their work reveals a willingness to resist over-simplification, to experiment, and to explore issues of identity and gender. By examining these texts from the perspective of the post-apartheid present, one is able to arrive at an enhanced understanding of the form that black writing took under apartheid, and the pressures to which it was responding.
2. SCOPE
The study tracks a series of fundamental shifts in black writing, politics and culture from the 1930s (R.R.R. Dhlomo) to the 1950s (Drum and the District Six writers) to the 1970s (the Staffrider generation of writers) and beyond. The one constant factor in the literary production of black South African writers has been the short story. This means that this study is able to make comparisons and focus on trends that might not otherwise be apparent.
One reason for focussing on the short story is, of course, its popularity, its accessibility and its ubiquity. It was through the medium of the short story that black writers were able to reach a wide audience. Individual chapters focus on the nature and significance of particular publications (Drum in the 1950s, Staffrider in the 1970s) which have been crucial for the development of black writing in this country..
While drawing on the insights of literary and postcolonial theory and criticism, this study attempts to reach beyond a narrow academic audience, and uses a non-specialist register where possible.
3. TABLE OF CONTENTS WITH CHAPTER SUMMARIES
Chapter 1: Introduction
This outlines the nature of the study, defines objectives, and looks at the critical reception of black writing in this country. Relevant aesthetic and theoretical issues are discussed. In particular, the claims often for “literature” (at least in the Western aesthetic tradition) are weighed against the need to recognise the ways in which texts are inescapably products of their place and time. The chapter includes a discussion of the resistance (in the academy and elsewhere) to the recognition and valuation of black South African writing – a situation that only began to change in the late-1970s. The final section explains and justifies the focus on black writing in general, and the short story in particular.
Chapter 2: R.R.R. Dhlomo and Early Black Writing in English
By starting with R.R.R. Dhlomo, one of the early exponents of the short story, this study contests the frequently held view that modern black writing effectively begins with the Drum writers of the 1950s. It traces important continuities between the writers of the 50s and an earlier generation of writers, represented by the Dhlomo brothers. It takes into account the role of Stephen Black and his journal Sjambok, and it explores Dhlomo’s somewhat equivocal position.
Chapter 3: Drum, Sophiatown and the Fifties
This chapter situates the Drum writers socially, historically, geographically and ideologically. It discusses Sophiatown (their informing context) and looks at the modern, cosmopolitan influences to which this generation of writers were exposed – in particular the influence of American and African-American popular culture and music. It examines the crucial role of Drum in creating an enabling (and sometimes, perhaps, a disabling!) environment for these writers. This is a necessary precursor to the following chapter.
Chapter 4: Drum: the Stories
This chapter looks in some detail at the work of four leading (but rather different) Drum writers, Dyke Sentso, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba and Es’kia Mphahlele. It examines the extent to which Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was a counter-text against which they wrote, and explores the complexities of their situation as members of a “repressed elite”. Modisane’s and Themba’s writing memorably defines a predicament which they were unable to transcend or escape in their own lives. The section on Themba argues against reductive judgments of his work, and suggests that it has greater interest, vitality and variety than is generally acknowledged. The section on Mphahele explores his development as a writer and argues that his early work for Drum (of which he was fiction editor) is both interesting and innovative, and anticipates Ndebele’s call (in the 1980s) for a “rediscovery of the ordinary”. Mphahlele should in fact be acknowledged as the founder of a central tradition of black writing in this country. The chapter concludes by acknowledging the latent or overt sexism of some of this writing, but points to the difficulty of arriving at any simple or categorical assessment of “Drum writing”.
Chapter 5: The District Six Writers – the ‘Protest School’?
This chapter focuses attention on the group of “District Six” writers who were in many ways the counterparts of the Sophiatown-based Drum writers. They shared an ascribed identity as “coloured” South Africans, and the chapter explores the ways in which their ambivalent positioning as members of this group is reflected in their work. The key writers are Richard Rive, Alex la Guma and James Matthews; all of whom feature in the recently republished 1963 anthology, Quartet, edited by Rive. The discussion of Rive’s stories establishes the need to return to the original versions of these stories, rather than the retrospectively edited versions that appeared in Advance, Retreat (1983).
The chapter also discusses Rive’s claim that these writers were the founders of the tradition of “protest writing”, and points to some of the difficulties inherent in the use of this term. The section on La Guma pays much needed attention to his short stories, a somewhat neglected part of his fictional oeuvre.
Chapter 6: Post-Sharpeville
This chapter looks at the post-Sharpeville silence and assesses the crippling impact of repression, censorship and exile on black South African writing. A number of “little magazines” nevertheless continued to provide an outlet for black writing, the most important of which was The Classic, founded by Nat Nakasa. The chapter examines little-known stories by writers like Alfred Hutchinson and Arthur Maimane, and offers the first informed assessment of the role played by publications such as New Age and Fighting Talk in keeping short story writing alive.
Chapter 7: The Rise of Black Consciousness
More that anything else BC marks the divide between the writers of the 1950s and early 1960s (associated with Drum) and the more militant, assertive, uncompromising writers associated with Staffrider. Crucially, BC provided a new, inclusive definition of “blackness” to which these writers could appeal. The chapter outlines some of the constituent elements of Black Consciousness thinking as defined, in particular, by Steve Biko, and demonstrates that this movement was the logical response to the predicament in which many of the 1950s writers, artists and intellectual found themselves.
The second part of the chapter assesses the work of Mbulelo Mzamane, who serves as a link between the earlier generation of Drum writers and the writers of the 70s. If one looks at his first collection of short stories, Mzala, there is little sign of the kind of strident protest that he argues for in his own critical articles. In his foregrounding of township speech, lifestyles and culture, and in his humorous or ironic treatment of character and situation, Mzamane builds on the foundations laid by the Drum writers. The discussion of his stories also points to his implicit endorsement of the norms of a masculinist or sexist culture.
Chapter 8: Staffrider and the 1970s
This chapter assesses the contribution of the Staffrider writers, and compares and contrasts their work with that of their Drum precursors. It identifies crucial differences in the style, editorial policy and informing ideology, and looks at the reasons for the failure of Sepamla’s attempt to revive The Classic.
The bulk of the chapter consists of a fairly detailed assessment of the work of two key writers, Mtutuzeli Matshoba and Miriam Tlali. For both writers, the impulse to write was inseparable from the political events unfolding around them (in particular the Soweto uprising of 1976); in their thinly fictionalised narratives they often seem to be eye-witness reporters of events. Tlali’s work is grounded in her experience of what it means to live in South Africa as a black woman. Although she is reluctant to accept the designation “feminist”, her stories explore the predicament of her female protagonists as they struggle with both racism and traditional patriarchal attitudes. Tlali is almost alone in exploring ways in which black women might challenge prevailing discourses, reclaim agency and explore their situation as conscious, active and (sometimes) resisting subjects.
Chapter 9: Writing in the Interregnum
Njabulo Ndebele’s short stories anticipate the kind of thinking that emerged towards the end of the 1980s. He seeks to avoid entrapment by either the liberal establishment, or by the familiar binaries of apartheid thought. The continuities between his fictional and his critical work are explored, as well as his indebtedness to the Black Consciousness tradition.
The work of two very different writers is explored in the second part of the chapter. Joel Matlou (like Ndebele) wrote for Staffrider, while Zoë Wicomb writes from exile in the UK. Matlou’s simple, apparently artless style makes for a mode of storytelling that is diametrically opposed to that of Mtutuzeli Matshoba, the writer most closely identified with Staffrider.
The discussion of Wicomb’s collection of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, published by Virago in 1987, finds both continuities and differences with the work of the earlier ‘District Six’ writers, as well as some points of comparison with the work of Njabulo Ndebele. Self-reflexivity is identified as a constituent feature of her writing – something rather new in fiction by black South African writers. The theme of exile is central to her collection, and in this respect it forms a link with the whole exile tradition of South African writing.
Chapter 10: Conclusion
This chapter begins by recalling some of the critical commonplaces which this study resists. It is reductive or simplistic to view the work of all (or almost all) black writers as a species of “protest writing”, or as trapped in the conventions of “spectacular” representation. It may in fact be inappropriate to judge the work of black South African writers in terms of a Western aesthetic grounded in rather different conventions and conditions.
Some of the features or leitmotifs that characterise the work of black South African are identified in summary form. One of these is a recurring tension between tradition and modernity – hence Mphahele’s use of the term “ambivalence”. Another is the exploration of the hybrid culture of the township. From Mphahlele to Ndebele, black writers provide vivid and compelling accounts of the dynamics of township life. Mphahlele’s phrase “the tyranny of place” captures the hold which the life of the township exerts over the imaginations and sensibilities of these writers. The circumstances of township life also help to explain the preference for the short story form, and for a style which in Mphahele’s words, is often “racy, agitated, impressionistic”.
Bibliography
This is a comprehensive listing of both primary and secondary sources.