In January 1971, as the Angolan War of Independence entered its most brutal phase, a young medical officer in the Portuguese army disembarked in Luanda to begin his two-year military service.
He soon found himself assigned to a military outpost in the east of the country, responsible for the welfare of the ill-trained and poorly equipped conscripts who manned the base and who were taking ever greater casualties as Angola’s guerilla groups intensified the war against their colonial masters.
In a continuation of the series on writing, publishing and criticism begun by Darryl Accone in the Mail & Guardian last week, M&G books critic Percy Zvomuya argues that with South Africa’s publishing boom and “‘writerly’ phenomenon” there seems to be a lack of corresponding “writerly burden” – that is, a culture of serious reading, serious thinking and serious engagement with the ideas contained in the waves of new South African writing washing up year after year.
Zvomuya finds plenty of bread for his blame-butter: publishers are partially responsible, for example, for not being more careful with their manuscripts. He gives mini-sticks to several books as examples, including Kopano Matlwa‘s Spilt Milk, Kgebetli Moele‘s Room 207 and Angela Makholwa‘s Red Ink.
Under the heading, “Part of the problem”, Zvomuya also identifies book critics – not excluding himself – and BOOK SA as purveyors of literary schlock, confessing that he sometimes feels that African writers of the older generations – like Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, JM Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nadine Gordimer – are really the only ones to bother reading.
Finally, Zvomuya questions whether there are any “young writers working at the moment who are worthy of these forebears”. He singles out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu, Hisham Matar, Jose Eduardo Agualusa and K Sello Duiker, but then runs out of names.
Our response? Much respect, Percy, and it’s a fair cop: while we at BOOK SA, for reasons of conflict of interest, don’t do any reviewing of our own, we certainly occupy the role of cheerleader for SA Lit – though we also cover controversies and negative reviews without fear or favour – and proudly so. Publishing in SA makes for an exhilarating ride, and we firmly believe that more South Africans should be buying and reading more South African books. But we’d also be thrilled if, suddenly, there was more taking-to-task of writers and publishers – more sticks, as it were, with which to stir the literary pot. All it takes is for a few brave editors to start allocating more column inches in their papers to books, then publish criticism that is as trenchant on the page as we all know it can be off.
Here’s Zvomuya’s piece:
‘So many writers, so little writing,” wrote Darryl Accone, the Mail & Guardian’s books editor, in his piece examining the state of writing in South Africa. That seems a good point to pick up the baton and continue.
I have lost count of how many people I meet who identify themselves primarily as writers. Most of the time they are journalists, DJs, students, people who have at one point or the other sat down to post a blog, tweet, write down a rhyme …
Poets and writers — it’s difficult to think of a more abused pair of nouns. We revere them but with sainthood comes desecration. No doubt, the rise of the “writerly” phenomenon has to do with the scores of people spawned by South Africa’s publishing boom, scores who have instantly become authors and have attained the celebrity status that goes with it.
In a society in which sushi eating and owning fast cars are favourite pastimes, the elevation of the writer figure is encouraging. But what is disturbing is the unwillingness to carry the “writerly” burden — to read and think, to engage ideas and other people robustly. This may have something to do with the little reading that goes on.
Angola’s Jose Eduardo Agualusa was a speaker at SILA 2010. Get to know the fiction of a writer whose reputation in the Portuguese-speaking world precedes him:
José Buchmann laid the photographs out on the big living room table, large A4 copies, black and white on matt paper. Almost all of them showed the same man: an old man, tall, slender, with a mass of white hair that tumbled down to his chest in thick plaits then disappeared into the heavy strands of his beard. As he appeared in the photographs – dressed in a dark shirt, in tatters, on which you could still make out a sickle and hammer on his chest, and with his head held high, his eyes ablaze with fury – he’d remind you of some olden-day prince now fallen into disgrace.
‘I’ve followed him everywhere these past few weeks, morning to night. Want to see? Let me show you the city from the perspective of a wretched dog.’
It was quite a treat to meet Jose Eduardo Agualusa, the Angolan writer about whom one has heard much, but who figures very little in South African literary discussions, despite his stature in Europe and Latin America.
It was “Portuguese night” at SILA yesterday; Agualusa was in conversation with Alfonso Gonzalez Jerez, a journalist based in the Canary Islands. He described Agualusa as “the best-known Angolan writer internationally”, but led with a question that put this identity into some doubt: “Are you a European writer or an African writer and, if the latter, what does that mean?”
Agualusa demurred, retreating behind the international border drawn by Jerez in his opening remarks. “I’m neither: I’m an Angolan writer. I’ve a novel set in Brazil, and one in India, but the action is viewed, as it were, through the eyes of an Angolan. I think writers are entitled to have the world at their disposal.” One’s audience, or market, does not dictate how one identifies in this world.
Agualusa mentioned Angola’s strong ties with Latin America – ties at least as strong, indeed, with those the country has with the rest of Africa. It has to do with the sense of place Angola supplies. The writer mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1978 visit to Angola – at the behest of Fidel Castro – and how, to Marquez, it felt like returning to his childhood. “And when I read Marquez, it’s true, there’s continuity [between Angola and Latin America]. His world is my world.”
Commenting on the differences between Angolan writing and writing in Portuguese from other parts of the world, Agualusa said: “The Brazilian masters, the Portuguese, have great technique, better technique than we have. So we have to find a different solution to make others interested in our realities: and our solution is in our stories. We have loads of stories in Africa, stories that you want to tell, good stories.”
Agualusa’s first novel, A Conjura, was published in 1989, and had an Angolan first print run that I thought I mis-heard at first: 15 000 copies. Books then were apparently subsidised by the state and didn’t cost much to buy. Now, he lamented, they’re expensive and inaccessible to most Angolans. South Africans will know the feeling.
Turning to the question of what power writers wield in African societies, Agualusa remarked, “What frightens politicians is not books, but media: newspaper interviews, overseas coverage, and now the internet… newspapers are currently repressed in Angola: some have been bought, others burned down…” Jerez interjected: the governor of the Canaries once purchased the entire print run of a newspaper that carried a corruption story, straight off the boat as it came into port. There’s just something about seeing your name in print, it seems: it drives politicians crazy. South Africans, of course, are currently not seeing anything to contradict this.
On the rise of Angola as a serious economic force in Africa, Agualusa said that the current geopolitical situation was, unfortunately, conducive to tyranny in his home country. Portugal, which relies on Angola for so much, economically – and which has a sizeable ex-pat community in Angola to consider – is fearful of upsetting Angola’s rulers and won’t openly criticise it. The USA, said Agualusa “just doesn’t care” about Angola, as long as its companies can operate freely there; internally, progressive voices are silenced; and Angola’s African neighbours only want to read a success story into the situation.
“The real problem in Angola has always been a lack of debate,” he said. But it remains his home.
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Also on stage at SILA that evening were publisher Celso Pedro Augusto Muianga of Mozambique and Portugal’s Jose Rui Martins, who discussed cultural collaboration between the two countries.
With the efficiency of a certain British advertising campaign, Camilla Toulmin’s ‘Climate change in Africa’ does ‘exactly what it says on the tin’. The book avoids writerly flourish and rhetoric to deliver a nuts-and-bolts analysis somehow shoe-horned into a tight 150 pages. Six of the nine chapters are given over to a particular aspect of climate change (water, food, forests, cities, conflict and carbon markets), each delivering a wide-ranging overview and ending with a brief prognosis that often identifies those areas where the author finds some hope for the future.
Toulmin avoids making the necessary articulation of facts and statistics overly dull by granting her readers with a degree of both agency and intelligence to unpick some important and recurrent themes. Not least of which is the part world leaders and corporations have played in subordinating Africa to their own interests. Even with her tendency for understatement, Toulmin exposes the injustice that underpins the costly price Africa will pay for events for which they are the least responsible. Sadly, many readers of the book – and indeed this review – will hear the echoes from slavery, colonialism and onwards to the rigged markets of global capitalism (to which Africa is still waiting for her invitation) loudly reverberating. One is reminded of the movie poster that proclaimed ‘your murderers come with smiles’.
What a treat! Estelle Jobson sends us snaps of southern African books for sale in Italy that she’s come across.
Jobson, who is based in Rome, has previously reported for BOOK SA on the Turin International Book Fair. These snaps come from Turin; Assolibro bookshop in Genova; a book festival of Roman publishers at the Piazza del Popolo; and Bookabar, one of Rome’s trendiest bookshops.
This is what SA Lit looks like, in translation – can you spot who’s who?
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Here’s a hint – some of the books as they appear on shelves closer to home:
James Ngculu’s memoirs cover the full uMkhonto weSizwe experience, from leaving South Africa for exile and training in Africa, the Soviet Union and socialist Europe, to playing a frustrating waiting game in Angola – and witnessing the 1984 mutinies and the horrors of camp Quatro:
But a great deal is dedicated to Angola in the book. Ngculu explains how that war-ravaged country dispelled any romanticism about armed struggle.
Although being an MK soldier and understanding the discipline that goes with that is an honour, Ngculu does not shy away from the frustrations and utter despair that many recruits felt in the camps. These had many causes, but two come across quite strongly: idleness and abuse of power. Ngculu writes: “The most traumatic thing in the camps was waiting. This waiting became the source of all our frustrations and feelings of despondency.”
Alert! Perusers of this week’s Mail & Guardian may have noticed that the letters page contains a scathing attack by Paul Trewhela on Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, authors of the new Chris Hani biography, Hani: A life too short.
The M&G hasn’t put the letter online (yet), but a longer version of it has just appeared at Politicsweb – and, like the original, it carries the whiff of serving a dual purpose: first, as an aggressive (not to say openly hostile) act of setting the historical record straight; and second, as a lever for promoting Trewhela’s own book. The shortcomings that he finds in A life too short are remedied, he says, in his treatment of the ANC and SWAPO’s military prison system, Inside Quatro.
Trewhela’s attack appears to boil down to a claim that Smith and Tromp glossed over Hani’s supposed role in secret prison executions. A contest for control over the narrative of the struggle leader’s legacy, then:
There is a serious problem with the recently published biography, Chris Hani: A Life Too Short (Jonathan Ball, 2009), written by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp. Sello M Alcock hints at the problem but does not identify it in his review in the Mail & Guardian (16 October), when he notes that they “manage only to gloss over” certain complex episodes in Hani’s life in exile.
The authors are senior journalists in South Africa, which makes the matter more disturbing.
Smith is an executive editor of The Star, the premier daily newspaper in the country and the leading media organ of the Independent News & Media group. Tromp is a senior reporter on The Star. This year he won the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year award, the CNN African Print Journalist of the Year award and the Vodacom Regional Print News Journalist of the Year award.
Their biography of Chris Hani fails on a most basic criterion, however: integrity to sources.
The result is that complexities in Hani’s life are obscured, and not made properly accessible to the reader.
The crucial chapter concerns Hani’s relation to the mutiny of about 90 percent of the trained troops of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola in 1984, the incarceration of leaders of the mutiny in Quatro prison camp, and their subsequent fates.
South Africa’s Bush/Border War irrevocably changed life for generations – whether for soldiers, fearful parents, or those worried about the spread of die rooi gevaar on the one hand and apartheid terror on the other.
Today, the stories of those who fought on behalf of the National Party-led government have proliferated into their own genre – grens literatuur or “border literature”.
The Sunday Times‘ Aubrey Paton profiles three recent titles:
I learned recently that South Africa has a literary genre all its own — Grens Literatuur (Border Literature) — devoted to accounts, fictional and otherwise, of the Bush War.
Apparently the genre dates back a good 40 years: popular Afrikaans hero Captain Caprivi featured first in the film Aanslag op Kariba and then in Huisgenoot as a “foto comic”, another uniquely South African form.
Like many English-speaking South Africans, I was blithely unaware of this wealth of local writing: in the last decade, however, it has become difficult to ignore the outpouring of books on the war and, curious about a culture I never experienced, I have started to read them.
The Angolan Writers Union (UEA) has published a new collection, Pegadas do Passado, by poet Angolan Carlos Pedro:
Benguela – “Pegadas do Passado” (Footprints of the Past) is the title of the poetry book presented last weekend by the Angolan writer Carlos Pedro, in the southern Benguela Province.
With an initial print of 500 copies, the book contains 29 pages and reflects everyday fundamental aspects, with the key issues being nostalgia, social imbalance and dreams.
The author has told Angop that he chose this title due to his historic and cultural trajectory, having considered the nostalgia, social imbalance and dreaming as “sensible elements which live in humans.”
Verdict: carrot
Verdict: stick
The Angolan Writers Union (UEA) has published a new collection, Pegadas do Passado, by poet Angolan Carlos Pedro:
Apr
