BELOVED BOOKMAN
The late Alan Paton men could write about blacks
I READ Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country when I was 15. It was a riveting book. I kept re-reading the words at the beginning of the first chapter. They almost had a magical effect on me. The words described Ixopo, the protagonist's village. I was taken there myself and could see it with my own eyes.
My contemporaries did not think very much of African writers. It was said that they were boring. Who wanted to read about events in an African village? As for South Africa, we all knew that novels from that country would be dealing with apar- theid in some way or the other. James Hadley Chase and Sidney Sheldon were then in vogue. The most popular book was Napoleon Hill's How To Become a Mil- lionaire. Mr Hill, let it be said, is an American. I shared this view for a while until I discovered that some of the novels in Heinemann's African Writers Series were not boring after all. It was then that I discovered the doyen of African literature, Chinua Achebe — and Alan Paton.
I do remember my copy of Cry, the Beloved Country. It was decrepit and smelt of kerosene. Many people, I had con- cluded, must have stayed up late at night reading one of the best books that have come out of Africa. I never left it behind. I took it to the tavern to drink chibuki (maize beer) with my friends and however drunk I would get I would make sure that it was secure. I would get so completely carried away by it that I would forget the pot of beans that my sister had instructed me to tend. More than once, as I scraped the burnt beans from the bottom of the pot, she had threatened to throw the copy down the pit latrine. I later gave her the copy to read. She found it so interesting that she stayed in bed for two days, reading it.
As I began to read Cry, the Beloved Country, a strong suspicion began to mount in me. Alan Paton was white and I, like most of my contemporaries, was then very suspicious of white people. We be- lieved that it was all very well to admire and emulate the white man's ways. But at the end of the day we were not the same. White people looked different; talked different; and smelt different. Would they be able to understand black people? I had thought it impossible.
I remember arguing on that basis with an Asian teacher of mine who had written about Africa. (At that time I was writing a story set in Washington, a place I had never been to). We were often told that most of what white explorers such as David Livingstone had written about Africa was false. The time had come for us blacks to write the truth seen through African eyes.
It was at this time that I discovered negritude. My flimsy understanding of it was that Europeans had wiped out an African civilisation that had thriven in the past. I had also dipped into Walter Rod- ney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
I had a bipolarised view of the world. I saw everything in terms of race. White men were there to defend the interests of the white and black men the interests of the blacks.
Why, then, was I going to believe what this white South African, Alan Paton, was going to say about black people? I thought the racial conflict in South Africa was a clear-cut one. On the one hand there were the blacks and on the other the whites. Alan Paton was white, ergo anti-black. If he was to treat his black characters with sympathy, then it was mere chicanery, which I then associated with whites.
As I read on, my suspicion waned. I forgot that what I was reading was written by a white man. I was momentarily trans- posed from the Lusaka shanty town where I lived to South Africa. What I was reading was simply written by an outstanding wri- ter, a genius. He did not pontificate; neither did he reach out for the ready- made clichés as some public figures on our continent are wont to do.
The protagonist, who goes in search of his son in Johannesburg, is not only con- fronted with the racial problem but with the problem any African who moves from his rural village to an urban centre would face. The violence and the unpredictability of the city would have confounded a Zambian, a Tanzanian or a Nigerian.
Years later, I was to read Leo Tolstoy's short story 'Alyosha the Pot'. Whenever I thought about this masterpiece, Alan Paton's short story `Ha'Penny' came to mind. The clear language and the love which both writers had for their characters impressed me. All the suspicion with which I treated him in my teens has now been replaced by respect and admiration.
I admired Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country not because some pundit had uncovered its literary merits. I admired it because it is a great work.
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