To understand all is . . .
a start
David Wright
THE DIAMONDS AND THE NECKLACE: A SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNEY by Richard West
Hodder & Stoughton, £14.95, pp.219
How can one explain what is at the same time a tyranny and a free country?' Shortly after the murder of Steve Biko in a prison cell, Richard West was taken to the famous multi-racial Johannesburg Market Theatre to see a public comment: an exhibition of lifelike and blood-curdling sculptures portraying police brutality. So far as that goes, I myself saw the play with which the Market Theatre opened. To my astonishment it was as subversive a piece as you could imagine: Marat-Sade, and ran for weeks to Black and White audiences this was before they were legal — without raising so much as a cheep from the censor. But the next production, a farce by Spike Milligan, got banned for blasphemy.
Mr West's book is a gallant and perci- pient attempt to understand if not explain that land of tragi-comic paradox, of farcical and sinister Alice-in-Wonderlandery, whose different peoples call it South Afri- ca, Suid-Afrika, or Azania. More than most countries, as Mr West points out,
South Africa needs to be understood in the light of its history and geography, and above all in the history and character of its ruling minority, the difficult, often admir- able and often obnoxious Afrikaners. His subtitle, 'A South African Journey', indi- cates a journey in time as well as place. Each of the 11 chapters focusses upon a particular town or city, beginning with Cape Town, which the Dutch first colo- nised, to end with Johannesburg, whose gold destroyed in less than two decades the old Boer republics. Here Mr West has found an effective formula for delineating South Africa as she is. He has no excuses to offer for apartheid, the real cruelty of which, as he underlines, is felt less by the Blacks than by the luckless Coloureds of the Cape, who once, under the British, had the vote; but have had that, and their very homes, abolished by the inhumanly ideolo- gical apartheid laws dreamed up, not by militant Boer descendents in the old Trek- ker republics of the north, but by remote intellectuals, 'liberal' Cape Afrikaner academics, over their coffee-tables in the University of Stellenbosch. And as an English South African I can underwrite this apercu: 'To a large extent the apart- heid system was aimed not at the blacks but the British.'
Informative digressions include an account of the first South African 'little review', Voorslag, edited in 1926 by a trio of remarkable young men — Roy Camp- bell, William Plomer, and Laurens Van der Post — which achieved notoriety by attack- ing the colour bar. But Mr West's book will not be welcome in some quarters. Extrem- ists of whatever colour are given rough and salutary handling. It is not just the evil done by the far right but that advocated — and carried out — by the hard left that he exposes. So far it has been the Blacks and Coloureds who have suffered most at the hands of both White and Black extremists. To the oppression of the former must be added oppression by the latter: eg the necklace — a tyre filled with petrol and ignited to burn alive Black or Coloured moderates and terrorise those who refuse to co-operate or join strikes — a form of execution very seldom inflicted on Whites. The imprisoned leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, to whom a statue has been erected in London, nonetheless refuses to condemn or repudiate these atrocities — his wife Winnie Mandela remarking, 'With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country'. Or maybe, as has happened elsewhere in Africa, again enslave it.
South Africa is changing fast — the country I left in 1933, when there was no apartheid but an impregnable colour bar, I found almost unrecognisable on my return in 1969, when there was apartheid but comparatively no social colour bar. And according to Mr West's book, since my last visit in 1983 things have changed even more. Black industrialists now own houses
in exclusive Johannesburg suburbs whereas under the old apartheid laws not even Black servants were allowed to dwell with their White employers. All this may seem less than nothing to the newcomer, but to one brought up there in the 1920s it offers a real gleam of hope. But though the picture Mr West draws of increasing Black prosperity in the towns is true enough, what of the appalling rural slums in Trans- vaal and elsewhere, to which Black Johan- nesburgers were forcibly deported when apartheid was at its zenith? Though Blacks in South Africa are materially better off on average than in most if not all of the Black republics, it is also true that many, too many, are starving.
Mr West's sympathetic but fair-minded assessment of the little-known but much- abused Afrikaner nation (for South Africa is a state but not a nation, so many different peoples are contained in it) is of great value: for they are the key to turn or not to turn — the South African deadlock. He admires them for having been a pastoral nation that escaped the infection of the French Revolution which 'produced the twin evils of socialism and nationalism... to reappear in this century in the still more virulent form of commun- ism and fascism', though they are now at long last succumbing to the materialism fruited by the Industrial Revolution.
His final chapter deals with perhaps the best writer South Africa has ever pro- duced: Herman Bosman, an Afrikaner of genius, who is still scarcely known over here although all his works are in English. I have to declare an interest: more than 30 Years ago I was the first, outside South Africa, to print Bosman, whose short stories compare with those of de Maupas- sant and Saki. Set in the Transvaal back- veld and told in the persona of Oom Schalk Lourens, these taut satires, full of black humour, are an ironic, deadpan, and dead- ly showing-up of the racial and other prejudices of the rural Afrikaner. But, to my amazement, Mr West thinks that Bos- man is 'still disliked by the English- speaking literati' in South Africa. As Linda CaIvey pointed out in a letter last week, this is not so. When I was last there I found a Bosman cult rivalling that of Dylan Thomas going strong; his books were on sale everywhere and a complete edition of his works had just been published. And in 1979 I was present at the unveiling of a Cenotaph over Bosman's grave and can report that the ceremony was attended by most of the• English-speaking literati in Johannesburg, including Nadine Gordim- er; but — as a newspaper reporter later Complained — few Afrikaners. Bosman died a young man, after an even more rackety life than Dylan Thomas (he was condemned to death, then reprieved, for shooting his stepbrother). But Mr West's account of it strikes me as a trifle lurid. His sources of informatibn are known to me, and are to be taken with a pinch of salt.
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