SCRUT261 1..82 - Unisa

COVER

Editor
...............................................
Leon de Kock
Co-editor
................................................
Deirdre Byrne
Associate Editors
................................................
Gwen Kane
David Levey (Reviews)
Khombe Mangwanda
Therona Moodley
Karen Scherzinger
Ivan Rabinowitz (Poetry)
Michael Titlestad
Editorial Board
...............................................
David Attwell (UNP); Louise Bethlehem (Hebrew University, Jerusalem);
Mathew Blatchford (Fort Hare); Elleke Boehmer (Leeds); Duncan Brown (UND);
Dennis Brutus (Franklin Pierce College, New Hampshire); Cherry Clayton (Guelph);
Laura Chrisman (Ohio State University); Stephen Clingman (Amherst, Massachusetts);
Ampie Coetzee (UWC); Annette Combrink (Potch); MJ Daymond (UND); Christo Doherty (Rhodes);
Carisma Dreyer (Potch); Miki Flockeman (UWC); Andrew Foley (JCE); Michael Green (UND);
Michiel Heyns (Stellenbosch); Myrtle Hooper (Unizul); Hilton Hubbard (Unisa);
Ronel Johl (RAU); Dirk Klopper (RAU); Loren Kruger (Chicago); Alan Lawson (Queensland); Craig Mackenzie (RAU);
Julia Martin (UWC); Sikhumbuzo Mngadi (RAU); Tony Morphet (UCT); Sarah Murray (Stellenbosch);
Lewis Nkosi (Wyoming); Laraine O'Connell (Timbuveni College of Education); Kole Omotoso (UWC);
Martin Orkin (Haifa); Andries Oliphant (Unisa); Tony Parr (UWC); Mzo Sirayi (Unisa); Sue Starfield (Wits);
Jane Starfield (Vista); Joanne Tompkins (Queensland); Jean-Philippe Wade (UDW);
Dennis Walder (Open University); Dan Wylie (Rhodes).
The cover was designed by Thea Venter.
ISSN 0041±5359
Editorial Policy: The journal places emphasis on theoretical and practical concerns in English studies in southern Africa.
Uniquely southern African approaches to southern African problems are sought. While the dominant style will be of a
scholarly nature, the journal will also publish some poetry, as well as other forms of writing such as the interview, essay,
review essay, conference report and polemical position. The editorial board invites contributors to break the mould of
orthodox scholarly writing. It welcomes a variety of styles in a spirit of redefining the parameters of the discipline and its
discourses.
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Articles
scrutiny2 issues in english studies in southern africa vol 6 no 1 2001
SONJA LADEN
Consumer magazines for black South Africans: Toward a cultural economy of the South
African (print)media 3
JOHAN GEERTSEMA
A PRAAG Spring? Dan Roodt, globalisation and the new struggle for Afrikaans 17
..................................................................................
Interview
LEON DE KOCK INTERVIEWS JOHANN ROSSOUW
The trouble with Afrikaans 28
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Review essays
MICHAEL MARAIS
Very morbid phenomena:``Liberal Funk'', the ``Lucy-syndrome''and JM Coetzee's Disgrace 32
DAN WYLIE
The metaphysics of snails and other sentient beings 39
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Poetry
Poems by Finuala Dowling, Stephanie Saville and Elza Lorenz 45
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Prose poem
MATTHEW CURR
In our case 56
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Public lecture
BRIAN PEARCE
Research in the arts 59
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Conference report
KIM WALLMACH and MICHAEL TITLESTAD
Where isTuesday? The ICLA Conference, August 2000 66
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Reviews
NICK MEIHUIZEN
Snails, rains and birds 69
DAVID LEVEY
South African poetry ^ the inward gaze 75
ZAIDEE SMALL
The surface of a bad planet 77
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Notes on contributors 79
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~T .......
Consumer magazines for black South Africans
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Despite having been
deprived of political
rights for so long, black
South Africans have long
since been more than
passive subscribers to,
and casualties of,
colonialist legacies and
the apartheid regime
he dynamics of South Africa's
mediaindustryingeneral,
and its print media in particular, have
typically been analysed in terms of
political economy frameworks that
tend to focus largely on the economic
role of the South African state and its
institutions, the creation of state
corporations and their joint ventures
with private capital and the ways in
which these have set about monitoring
and controlling the black press and
other media (see Tomaselli and Muller
1987 and 1989; Tomaselli and
Louw 1991; Louw 1993; Switzer 1997;
Tomaselli 1997 and 1998). Given the
predominance of colonialism in Africa
and the primacy of apartheid and its
institutions in the recent history of
South Africa, the scholarly preoccupation
with the formal constraints
imposed by and through South Africa's
political economy and their role
TOWARD A CULTURAL ECONOMY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN (PRINT) MEDIA
SONJA LADEN
in shaping the country's socio-political
history is both understandable and
methodologically fitting.
This top-down politically-oriented
approach is also understandable in
view of the way concepts of ``free
enterprise'' are thought to have entered
the discourse of apartheid following
reform measures instigated by
the Wiehahn and Riekert Commission
Reports in the late 1970s. 1 Although it
is clearly the case that, for decades
after these reforms, black South
Africans continued to remain disenfranchized
and were formally excluded
from official decision-making
processes in most socio-political and
economic spheres, the point I wish to
make here is that despite having been
deprived of political rights for so long,
black South Africans have long since
been more than passive subscribers to,
and casualties of, colonialist legacies
and the apartheid regime. In what
follows I expand on and try to refine
this view both conceptually and descriptively,
beginning with the former.
Social change in South Africa and the
limits of political economy analyses
South Africa's remarkable and historic
turnaround and/or transformation
can only be fully understood if we
acknowledge that, alongside the
~3 ....ARTICLES
state's regulated modes of exploitation,
black South Africans were at the
same time actively engaged not only in
political protest, resistance and social
unrest, but also in a changing cultural
dynamic, in which their sense of
cultural agency was slowly but surely
being transformed into new forms of
more or less organized sociability.
Indeed, at the level of unofficial sociocultural
practices, perhaps the very
proclivity of black South Africans
toward formulating new forms of
``civil'' sociability and generating new
cultural options is best viewed as an
enterprising response to the oppressive
circumstances induced by various
modes of British and Afrikaans colonialism.
For it would appear that
social groups often manufacture a
sense of social cohesion precisely in
the face of economic, political and
ideological pressures that seek to tear
them apart, especially, I suspect, when
there is little or no agreement about
the modes of social cohesion and
solidarity, through which a broad
sense of collective identity can be
manifested and regulated over time.
I further suggest that many earlier
debates on the construction of social
identity and selfhood in South Africa
have too frequently, and in all too
restricted a manner, been grounded

on reductive articulations of the colonial situation
and the subsequent modernization of Africa. These
discussions seem to have promoted a unilateral view
of power and domination in (South) Africa and a
wrongful disregard for historical manifestations of
human agency in a specifically African context. The
latter might include deliberate constructions of
dependency and the valid institutionalization of what
Jean-FrancË ois Bayart calls ``the politics of the belly,''
and may frequently be apparent in the accumulation
of wealth, access to possibilities of social mobility and
the exercise of power through regulated relations of
intimacy (such as mistresses), nepotism and sorcery
(Bayart 1993:xviii). Following Bayart, I believe many
intellectuals, both Western and non-Western alike,
often fail to historicize these aspects of African social
experience, since they do not conform to egalitarian
principles of social organization and received understandings
of the procedures entailed in democratization
processes. Unfortunately, too, these principles
and understandings are officially regarded as the only
socially appropriate, and hence morally justifiable,
codes of social conduct and
organization. This leaves little
room for acknowledging African
societies as historical and political
entities in their own right and
flies in the face of attempts by
many African bodies to establish
new socio-cultural figurations
and discover how best these
may be maintained within the
distinctive terms of reference of
the societies in question.
It is in this sense that it is vital,
I believe, to tease out analyses of
the South African media beyond
the frameworks of political economy
into what might be dubbed
the realm of a strategically managed
``cultural economy,'' and in
so doing to establish a broader
picture of the complex, heterogeneous socio-semiotic
factors (agents, cultural components, institutions,
market strategies and regulative mechanisms) through
Received views
of the South African
media in terms of
a political economy
correspond with, and
often confirm as
self-evident, conventional
understandings of
South African history
which South African society in general, and the South
African print media in particular, have been, and are
still being re-configured. 2 A particularly interesting
case in point is that of consumer magazines produced
for black South Africans. Their ongoing, systematic
publication (from 1951 on) cannot readily be
accounted for, nor fully explained, in purely economic
terms of supply and demand, or in political economical
terms relating to the ownership and control of their
producers and/or publishers. Nor is the cultural
``work'' performed by these magazines adequately
described by neoclassical economic perceptions of
human agency as motivated solely by self-interest,
utility and actual material gain. In fact, consumer
magazines for black South Africans nicely illustrate
that ``not all economic action arises out of what are
traditionally thought of as economic motives'' (Fukuyama
1995:18).
Over and above providing a more nuanced picture
of cultural change in contemporary South Africa,
illuminating the cultural implications of South Africa's
economico-political past
has other advantages. For one,
received views of the South
African media in terms of a
political economy correspond
with, and often confirm as selfevident,
conventional understandings
of South African history.
In so doing they frequently
echo the ``official'' story of
South African history in general,
and represent an ``official''
history of the South African
media in particular. Attempting
to tease out the tensions between
the political economy of the
South African media and the
socio-semiotic complexities of a
cultural economy of consumption,
consumption patterns, and
consumer practices, promises to
denaturalize this ``official'' story, and give voice to
``unofficial'' versions of South Africa's modern-day
socio-cultural history that may well be no less valid
~4 ....ARTICLES

and/or relevant. It is important to note,
however, that ``official'' and ``unofficial''
versions of South African history
are by no means mutually exclusive:
quite the contrary ± they are discerned
here as frequently overlapping sites of
investigation, which promise to crossfertilize
one another. Hence, I believe
that unraveling the tensions between
political, economic and cultural factors,
and examining how these are brought
to bear on the everyday lives of media
consumers, readerships and audiences,
will facilitate new understandings and
cross-analyses of a distinctively South
Africanculturalidiomanditsdiverse,
often strategic, manifestations in the
media.
Before turning to consider consumer
magazines as ``cultural tools'' (see
Swidler 1986; Even-Zohar 1994, 1997),
I would like to cite a different yet
related example of the way South
Africa's recent (re)admission into the
global arena has been facilitated by
attempts to engender a ``cultural economy.''
I refer in particular to more or
less formal attempts to model the new
South Africa along the lines of what
might be called a ``rainbow nation''
repertoire that proudly attempts to
celebrate South Africa's ``unity in
diversity.'' Among other things, this
repertoire has been emblematized by
the central role played by Nelson
Mandela as an international symbol of
national reconciliation ever since his
historic release from Robben Island in
February 1990, through various stages
of negotiated settlement with President
FW de Klerk and the National Party,
South Africa's first democratic elections
and Mandela's swearing-in as
president of the Republic of South
Africa (27±28th April and 10th May
respectively), and intermittently
throughout Mandela's presidency. Given
the ways the National Party
historically enacted and authorized its
own agenda, whereby South Africa was
experienced as the literal embodiment
of segmentation and difference, the
present government's decision to represent
South Africa as a ``rainbow
nation'' manifesting a ``liberal'' ideology
of non-racial inclusiveness is quite
understandable, although not beyond
interrogation. Significantly, however,
this synthesized version of the new
South Africa through a ``rainbow
nation'' discourse has been favourably
embraced and reproduced in the popular
imagination(s) of many ordinary
people, both within South Africa and
abroad. I might add that although it is
currently critiqued by a number of
intellectuals, the scope and strategic
effectiveness of the ``rainbow nation''
synthesis and corresponding (re)constructions
of ``Ubuntu'', how these are
acutally put into practice, and the
cultural significance(s) of their concrete
manifestations are only beginning to be
assessed (see, for example, Laden 1997;
Kamwangamalu 1999; Blankenberg
1999). I intend to take a closer look at
two of the strategic uses to which
components of the so-called rainbow
nation repertoire have recently been
put, namely the 1995 Rugby World
Cup, and the strategic transformation
of Shosholoza, the Zulu theme song
unofficially chosen and unanimously
sung by all South Africans (black,
white, coloured and Asian) in support
of the national Springbok team, representing,
as it were, a new unified South
Africa during the World Cup events
held in 1995.
The prominence of the 1995 Rugby
~5 ....ARTICLES
World Cup tournament is particularly
interesting, for rugby has long been
perceived as a leading disseminator of
``indigenous'' Afrikaans nationalist
sensibilities (Grundlingh, Odendaal
and Spies 1995:90±105, 106±131;
Shepperson and Tomaselli 1996), and
integral to white popular culture. As
John Nauright recently pointed out,
however, the Rugby World Cup is an
extremely important international
sporting event among television viewers,
rated the world's fourth largest
(Nauright 1997:177), and choosing to
host this series of events was no doubt
motivated by a strategic decision on
behalf of the South African government
and media to use this opportunity
to optimize capital gain and international
prestige in the name of the
``South African nation'' (whatever this
might mean), public and private organizations,
and individual South African
persons. Further, it was genuinely
hoped that the Rugby World Cup
would signify South Africa's re-entry
intothemarketofworldsportandthat
this re-entry would, in turn, mark the
start of a new era in marketing South
African sport and sportsmen throughout
South Africa and abroad, and
perhaps even usher in the Olympic
Games (which, as noted by Nauright,
Cape Town hoped to host in 2004).
Prior to the event, then, President
Mandela ``pledged full support for the
national team and the event, with the
concession that the Springbok team to
play in the tournament would be the
last nearly all-white rugby team to
represent the country in a World Cup''
(Nauright 1997:177). Bearing this in
mind, the official decision to market
the new South Africa ``globally,'' as it
were, as ``the nation and the world in
union'' (Nauright 1997:177), suggests a

commitment to what Igor Kopytoff (1986) has termed
entrepreneurship in an African context, which is
``devoted to achieving independence or favorable
terms of dependence, acquiring adherents, and making
alliances'' (Kopytoff 1986:40). The decision could
also be said to dovetail with a sense of social
organization that was grounded less in logically
coherent existing social norms than in the range of
potentially operational actions intended to maximize
the sense of well-being and material gain facilitated by
South Africa's diverse, coexisting social networks (see
Nauright 1997:177). But it should be perceived, not as
a direct reflection of existing social cooperation
directed toward accessing symbolic and material gain,
but rather as a collective commitment toward
motivating and activating such synergy.
Further exemplifying how social conduct chosen by
black (and other) South Africans is determined not
only by their memberships in particular social groups,
or by the nature of given social events or situations is
the ``unofficial'' transformation of Shosholoza into a
national sporting anthem for the new South Africa.
Originally a mineworkers' song sung by miners on
their way from Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work
in South Africa's gold mines, Shosholoza became a
religious anthem sung by black Lutheran students in
the 1960s and 1970s, and following South Africa's
victory against the New Zealand All-Black team in
the 1995 Rugby World Cup, assumed a new sociosemiotic
role as the new South Africa's main sporting
anthem (see Nauright 1997:174). Recorded by radio
celebrity Dan Moyane, Shosholoza was widely distributed
throughout South Africa and sung at various
types of gatherings by South Africans of all creeds
and colours in celebration of the South African team's
victory over their All-Black opponents (attested by
the presence of this author at the time). Finally,
through the hordes of foreign spectators who visited
South Africa for the 1995 Rugby World Cup,
Shosholoza was inscribed in the ``global imaginary''
as part of the conciliatory image of the new South
Africa.
Over and above these examples, however, I believe
the extent to which an inclusivist ``rainbow nation''
synthesis is actually being implemented in South
Africa is less important than the ways in which
specific perceptions of this synthesis are strategically
utilized at various moments (a futher analogy may be
drawn here with aspects of the African Renaissance
discourse). In other words, the ``rainbow nation''
discourse advocating ``unity in diversity'' is seen here
as a means of prefiguring new repertoric options for
successfully managing South Africa's cultural diversity,
not as an authentic move to construct genuine
cultural synergy in South Africa. More significantly, it
marks the strategic establishment of a new South
African cultural repertoire that is negotiated through
joint action and motivated by the promise of what
large numbers of South Africans believe they stand to
gain in both symbolic and material terms. Survival, I
would venture, more than authenticity, is at stake
here. Hence, the ``rainbow nation'' repertoire may be
viewed as a means for generating and activating the
cultural principles of collective solidarity and interdependence
through new and/or newly-transformed
cultural options. I shall now consider to what extent
consumer magazines can be seen to function along
similar lines.
Consumer magazines for black South Africans:
a socio-semiotic approach
It may rightly be asked how the magazine form comes
to be a viable print-commodity for black South
Africans; why, after all, should consumer magazines
be culturally relevant or meaningful to them, given
the high rates of illiteracy in South Africa, the high
cost of the magazines themselves relative to the
earnings of many black South Africans and the fact
that they typically promote a range of lifestyle options
and commodities that, for all intents and purposes,
seems to lie well beyond the reach of most of their
target readership? Here, following Silverstone, Hirsch
and Morely (1992:15±31), I acknowledge that the
incorporation of magazines into the routines and
patterns of people's lives may take place on different
levels and may be visible in different ways. Like other
objects and forms of technology, magazines may have
many functions, some of which may be far removed
from the declared intentions of their inventors and
marketers, being more organizational than overtly
~6 ....ARTICLES

functional, while others may change
and/or entirely disappear. In other
words, the actual purchase of a magazine
does not mean that it will necessarily
be ``used'' or even ``read'' in the
ways we assume: it may be purchased,
perused and studied in various ways
(silently, by a single individual or read
out aloud to others) and to different
ends (browsed in or paged through for
visual rather than verbal gratification),
set aside for deferred reading sometime
in the future, displayed for show in
various social environments (at home
or in public places), etc. In the case of
magazines for black South Africans,
there is, for instance, a large ``pass-on''
readership, the ratio of which has been
estimated at 1:10 (personal communication
with Barney Cohen, former
editor of Drum, early 1990s). Although
I cannot yet present conclusive parameters
for the market growth of the
magazines in question (see AMPS
1997), the very durability of those
established several decades ago (Drum
1951, Bona 1956, True love 1975, Pace
1978) and the launch and ongoing
production of new ones (Tribute 1986
and Ebony South Africa 1995), in itself
attests to some measure of their success
(an exception is Thandi, which merged
with Bona in 1995).
In other words, against arguments
that would reduce the magazine-form
among black South Africans to a
mechanism of cultural imperialism, and
in partial response to some of the
questions raised above, I contend that
the socio-semiotic ``work'' of magazines
extends way beyond their immediate
or most apparent use-value.
My own research spans seven consumer
magazines published primarily,
though not exclusively, in English,
intended for and consumed largely by
black South Africans. These include
Drum (first issued in 1951), Bona (first
issued in 1956), Pace (first issued in
1978), True love (first issued in 1975),
Thandi (first issued in 1985, merged
with Bona in 1999), Tribute (first issued
in 1986), and Ebony South Africa (first
issued in November1995).
Although inferring a readership's
outlook from their reading material is
by no means automatic, for, as book
historian Natalie Zemon Davis rightly
argued many years ago, people do not
necessarily always agree with or promote
the values and ideas in the
material they read (Davis 1975:191), it
is helpful, also following Davis, to
consider printed artifacts not simply as
sources for ideas and images, but as
both indicators of and contributors to
social relationships. Hence, I maintain
that ± though unconsciously ± these
magazines make perceptible middleclass
ideals and values that have long
since become what Clifford Geertz calls
``local knowledge,'' that is, tacit
knowledge shared by virtually everyone
in a given culture, whose process of
acceptance is no longer recalled.
Further, because they enable us to trace
practicesthatbynowarepartofa
social ``unconscious,'' in the South
African juncture consumer magazines
provide us with greater insight into the
workings of socio-cultural entities than,
let's say, overtly subversive political
publications. In other words, it is
precisely the priority they seem to grant
to ``aspired to,'' not necessarily ``given''
states of affairs, which should alert
scholars to their hitherto unexplored
cogency as historical meaningful documents.
It follows, then, that magazines
render meaningful, without necessarily
~7 ....ARTICLES
always putting into action, a shared
repertoire of everyday experiences,
lifestyle options and social practices,
which is best described, from a Western
or European standpoint, as typically
``middle-class'' or ``bourgeois''. 3
It should further be stressed that the
circulation and consumption of consumer
magazines is in no way enforced
or imposed on their readers, any more
than their layout and subject matter are
dictated by the publishing houses that
own them. In the case of magazines for
black South Africans, all the publications
in question, with the exception of
one (Ebony South Africa ±owned
jointly by the African-American publisher
John H Johnson and a South
African partnership comprising Keith
Sandile Kunene, Hugh Masekela and
Welcome Msomi), were initially owned
by white publishers, yet the trajectories
of their ownerships and the ways in
which their readerships have been
constructed, maintained and expanded
have been further complicated by
recent organizational reshuffling and
shifts in corporate holdings and distributions
of ``white'' and ``black''
capital (see Tomaselli 1997, 1998;
Hawthorne 1997:31). Further, the said
magazines are mediated by black as
well as white editors, journalists and
advertisers; this attests both to the
social stratification of black print
media officials as cultural agents and to
the fact that the magazines themselves
are an embodiment of this agency.
Many black media personalities are
social celebrities and use their cultural
prestige actively to promote their magazines
and the images they convey as a
means of reinforcing their own status
as established members of an elite
stratum. Like other social celebrities,

they inspire in their reading public individual and
collective aspirations by suggesting and endorsing
new models for social conduct. This is done both
overtly, albeit seemingly by chance, by regularly
supplying the public with glimpses of their own
lifestyles, experiences and personalities, and covertly,
through their strategic decision-making procedures
concerning the content and layout of the magazines.
As role models, they stimulate the reading public's
desire for new knowledge, self-perceptions and
glamorous lifestyle practices, even as they authorize
the marketing of new material commodities, including
the magazines themselves.
Significantly, then, consumer magazines comprise
seminal ways of formulating new cultural repertoires,
functioning as modeling-apparatuses that inspire
cultural reordering and revitalization (see Even-Zohar
1994, 1997 and 1999, and Sheffy 1997). Given the
extreme cultural diversity of South Africa's peoples, it
is highly profitable to examine the formation of new
repertoires through the conceptual filters of intercultural
contacts and cultural interference (see Even-
Zohar 1990:53±55; 93±96), 4 and as integral to the rise
of a prevailing consumer culture in South Africa.
Accordingly, magazines are best perceived as cultural
tools that comprise both material commodities in
themselves and vehicles for the dissemination of a
range of other cultural commodities, practices and
beliefs (Beetham 1996:2). 5 For the purposes of this
paper, consumer culture and matters pertaining to the
culture of consumption are best understood in terms
of devising new ways of doing things in life, accessing
new resources and sets of strategies directed at the
social (as well as individual) production of selfhood.
Moreover, as Robert Foster recently points out in
regard to print advertisements (Foster 1999), acts of
consumption admit us to what Orvar Lofgren calls
``the microphysics of learning to belong'' (Lofgren
1996), whereby routine practices, including those
relating to mundane daily routines of consumption,
produce a sense of shared identity and belonging. In
particular, I argue that, from roughly the 1930s on,
black South Africans have grasped consumption and
consumer practices as viable ways of reorganizing
their social, political, economic and cultural lives.
Historically, the regulation of the print media directed
at black South Africans marks the onset of a new
phase in the South African urban cultural economy,
in which black South Africans are provided with vital
tools to devise and access new options and legitimize
existing ones, and in so doing, exercise social mobility
by imagining, and strategically prefiguring, new
senses of individual and collective identity. In this
respect, I recommend that an historical view of the
South African print media is most profitably charted
by focusing on the relations between ``the material
and the cultural, on the culture of things-in-use'' in
South Africa, rather than strictly on ``current debates
concerning the relations between ownership of material
goods or things, status, and inequality'' (Lury
1996:5). It is crucial, however, to note that, even as
consumer magazines are strategic mechanisms for
devising new cultural practices and new forms of
social organization and afford us crucial insight into
leading processes and procedures of cultural change,
they are not as significantly carriers of continuity and/
or stability, as attested by their fairly conservative, at
times even stereotypical representations. In addition,
as I have noted elsewhere, it would appear that the
relatively ``low'' cultural position of magazines in
Western cultures as seemingly non-committal artifacts,
perceived as trivial and frivolous, designed to
evoke pleasure and enjoyment and relaxation rather
than to provide ``serious'' reading matter, may be
precisely what ensures the endless regeneration of
their appeal and facilitates their endless reproduction
(see Laden 1997:125±26).
It is crucial to emphasize that the socio-cultural
motivations for the production, dissemination, and
the uses to which magazines are put, are by no means
perceived here as limited to whether or not people
have ``real'' access to the options they evoke, or
whether they are able to afford them (see Lury 1996;
Williams 1985). Indeed, as suggested earlier, their
cultural force lies in their organizational or motivational/aspirational
cogency, that is, in the ways they
strategically prefigure and engender new social
options for vast numbers of people. At the same
time, examining magazines for black South Africans
is viewed as an attempt to fathom some of the ways
~8 ....ARTICLES

people think about, and come to make,
material decisions. In this respect, the
rhetorical dispositions of the editors
and journalists involved in their production
may be considered as evidence
of the ways choices are made and
repertoric options patterned into specific
social practices, so long as these
are supplemented by evidence about
other ways in which magazines are
``used'' in social contexts.
In particular, the social position of
black print media practitioners is discerned
as a determining factor in
negotiating social mobility and access
to resources, and choice-making procedures
are perceived as components of
more or less conscious strategic mechanisms,
both rational and irrational.
This correlates with linguist Carol
Myers-Scotton's understanding of the
way, generally speaking, within the
given constraints of possible options,
people will select for themselves ``the
`best' choice,'' that is, the most feasible
choice that is not simply available and
accessible (on the distinction between
them, see Even-Zohar 1990:53±55), but
deemed most advantageous (Myers-
Scotton 1998:9). It almost goes without
saying that the regularity with which
people appear to wish to optimize gain
and/or ensure survival does not imply
that their choices are indeed always
successful.
Recasting literacy: visualization,
authorial irony, and domesticating
the public sphere
Since a detailed assessment of the
seven magazines examined in my
research lies beyond the scope of this
paper, I touch briefly on the historical
impact of the magazine form for black
South Africans and on some of the
primary socio-cultural significances of
individual titles and magazine sections
from a formal and discursive/rhetorical
perspective.
Elsewhere I have ascribed two primary
dispositions to all seven magazines
under investigation, the first
didactic and the second aspirational
(Laden 1997), so I will try to summarize
the main points. From a didactic
standpoint, many of the magazines in
question function as informal educational
apparatuses, which try to instill
in their readers the very reading skills
and methods of comprehension required
to access and retain the shared
knowledge they wish to impart. In this
sense they comprise informal educational
channels for basic literacy and
numeracy skills and impart a miscellany
of basic information, even as the
subject matter of many of their features,
columns, readers' letters and
advertisements conveys a firm didactic
stance, for they do not take for granted
their readers' familiarity with the range
of urban practices and commodities
they seek to promote. Hence, medical
columns instruct readers on the most
basic matters of health and hygiene,
elementary first aid and safety around
the home and workplace, family planning
and protection against sexually
transmitted diseases; practical advice
columns instruct readers regarding
efficient housekeeping and business
practices, legal matters, home economics
and thrifty consumerism, food
preparation, domestic and household
chores such as sewing, mending,
household repairs, home-decoration, as
well as parenting, marriage guidance,
and entertaining.
The aspirational disposition of these
~9 ....ARTICLES
magazines is manifest in the ways they
seek to promote role models and
express views designed to establish
standards of ``social correctness'' for
their community of readers. They
attest, for example, to the invaluable
nature of the nuclear family as opposed
to the traditional, extended family; they
denounce teenage pregnancies, abortion,
and the widespread practice of
childbearing out of wedlock. There are
articles that repeatedly affirm the social
merit of education, sanction religion
and religious practices, promote honesty,
truthfulness and sincerity in individual
and social relationships and
advocate respect for one's elders (which
is especially important in African
societies), while still others confirm the
social stigma of impotence, infertility
and childlessness. Assuming the combined
roles of primers and modern-day
civility manuals, these magazines also
provide commentary on political and
domestic issues, legitimize and institutionalize
new socio-linguistic usages,
debate what comprises ``proper'' social
conduct, air views about traditional
customs vs modern practices, and
more.
Let us now take a look at the first
successful mass-circulation magazine
aimed at a black readership in South
Africa, Zonk (1949±1964), a non-political
entertainment magazine that upheld
a policy ban on overt political
comment (see Manoim 1983). The
significance of Zonk is twofold: first, it
marks a seminal moment in inscribing
and authorizing the membership of
black South Africans in new urban
social networks, introducing a newly
viable print-commodity format combining
the verbal medium with the
visual into South Africa's commercial

lack press. As a photomagazine modeled on the
American black publication Ebony (issued in 1945),
Zonk was the first black magazine in South Africa to
feature four-colour comic strips, full-colour advertising
on inside pages, full-colour covers, lots of pictures
and bold lettering. In other words, Zonk played a
central role in disseminating new image technologies
that are multimodal in the sense that they concurrently
make use of devices from more than one
semiotic mode of communication. Hence, the magazine
page becomes a distinct spatial unit, in which
visually organized graphic modes of representation
(printed words and pictorial material) are both
combined and converged. This enables us to conceptualize
the magazine page as an integrative
representational unit, which, itself, incorporates
operative suggestions for the effective retrieval of
some of its combined elements as statements or
knowledge about the world.
The prime impact of introducing visual modes of
representation alongside blocks of relatively uninterrupted
text in Zonk (and later in Drum, Bona, True
love, Pace and Thandi, though less markedly so in
Tribute and Ebony South Africa) lies in the way this
signifies an important stage in the history of urban
culture in South Africa, whereby we begin to witness a
more or less regulated integration of traditional
thought-patterns with newly-emerging urban ``ways of
knowing.'' Through this still-evolving integration, new
modes of intelligibility and a diverse range of meanings
for rural, migrant and urban black South
Africans, whether illiterate, semi-literate or literate,
begin to suggest new ways for black South Africans to
make sense of their changing circumstances. On a
different level, combining strategies for reducing data
and relationships from a multitude of domains in the
natural world to graphic modes of representation or
visible patterns via the use of contemporary print
technologies, pictorial materials (illustrations, photographs,
technical drawings, printed pictures and
comic-strips) and colour-techniques, alongside reproductions
of the printed word and blocks of text,
suggests that, during the late 1940s, the massproduced
magazine for black South Africans was
assigned a new socio-semiotic function, through
which it at once assumed, and itself enhanced, the
internalization, organization, and reconceptualization
through visualization of a new repertoire of cultural
goods, experiences, and practices in the process of
coming-into-being among black South Africans at the
time. Hence, mass-produced magazines for black
South Africans introduced in the late 1940s comprised
an important and complex node of verbal/textual and
visual information, perceived images and schemas
that embodied a synoptic network of cultural models.
Particularly useful to persons in various stages of
demographic mobility and cultural transition, these
models provide readers with implied instructions for
regulating new modes of social action, which they are
likely to internalize and follow ``naturally,'' consciously
or not.
Drum, Bona, True love and Pace were also central in
facilitating the historical transformation of oral
traditions into literate modes of print-culture,
although they cannot all be addressed here. While
the transmission of oral traditions into patterns of
literate culture is by no means straightforward, it can
be shown that the multimodal composition of certain
sections of the magazines listed above marks the
integration of traditional codes of oral storytelling
into new, urban ways-of-knowing. An interesting
example in this respect is the Mngosi gossip column
comprising the opening page in Pace. A regular
feature of Pace since 1985, Mngosi is written jointly
by editor-in-chief Force Kashane, assistant editor Joe
Khumalo, current assistant editor and two-time
winner of the Mondi Award for outstanding journalism
in South Africa, and a variety of Pace journalists
and feature editors. The writers of Mngosi seek to
relegitimize and enhance the participatory nature of
oral culture and performance, among other things, by
reinstating the practice of storytelling as a received
source of African ``cultural capital,'' enhanced by
technologies of print culture.
Mngosi's tone is informal and chatty, as befits a
gossip column, and although it seems to focus largely
on what appears to be ``idle chatter,'' it is replete with
anecdotes about public figures, from politicians to
film stars, media personalities, leading businessmen/
~10 ....ARTICLES

women and sports figures. As noted by
literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks
(1986), in its most banal form as
``distilled malice,'' gossip toys with
reputations, generates truths, halftruths
and falsehoods about the actions,
intentions, and emotions of
others (Meyer Spacks 1986:4±5). But,
while, at face value, gossipers often
seem to be intent on furthering their
own social or political ambitions, in
this case there is perhaps more to a
gossip column than meets the eye.
Indeed, Meyer Spacks also points to
another more ``serious'' side of gossip,
whereby ``its participants use talk
about others to reflect about themselves,
to express wonder and uncertainty
and to locate certainties, to
enlarge their knowledge of one another''
(Meyer Spacks 1986:4±5). In
this sense, gossip is also an important
mode of self-expression and a form of
instilling social solidarity. Mngosi, I
would argue, uses the ``maliciousness''
of gossip to more ``serious,'' or even
benevolent social ends. 6
There is also a salient presence
throughout Mngosi columns of a
combined discourse entailing one or
more narratorial voices and a foregrounded
simulation of spoken discourse.
This suggests that what might
be at stake here is a form of the
narrative mode defined by Russian
Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum as skaz,
later clarified by Bakhtin as the often
parodistic relationship between double-voiced
utterances. Eikhenbaum
notes that skaz is not a simple mode of
narration, ``but tends to reproduce
words in mimic and articulation, while
sentences are not only selected and
linked according to the principle of
logical speech, but even more accord-
ing to the principle of expressive
speech, in which articulation, mimic,
sound gestures, etc. play a special
role ...'' (Maguire 1974:272±73).
Irony and parody render Mngosi a
form of parodistic skaz in which the
writers' storyteller traits are clearly
differentiated from their professional
personas, as, let's say, Force Kashane,
editor-in-chief of Pace magazine, and
Joe Khumalo, award-winning journalist.
7 Parodistic skaz is exemplified,
for instance, in the predominance in
Mngosi of anecdotes/accounts that call
attention to the speakers' position
toward the story-cum-anecdotes they
are about to construct: ``Listen to this
juicy one''; ``You guys out there had
better watch out'' (Pace July 1992);
``Jislaaik! [Afrikaans vulgarization of
``Jesus!''] if you ain't heard this one,
you ain't heard nuthin', man!'';
``Shh ... come hither, lona bondaba
[you with everyone ± Zulu] and get it
straight from the gossip factory'' (Pace
Dec/Jan 1992); ``Hela wena ([hey
you ± Zulu], jy praat te veel [you talk
too much ± Afrikaans]'' (Pace April
1997).
From its inception in 1985 until mid-
1996, the full-page spread of Mngosi
was printed in colour. Framed in red,
its texts, comprising between five and
seven brief anecdotal narratives or
accounts, were printed against a bright
yellow background. Above the title was
a series of passport-like photographs of
the authors themselves, topped by the
onomatopoeic PSSSSST, clearly intended
to herald the gossip-like, secretive,
semi-sensationalist tone of the
subsequent accounts and in so doing
stimulate the readers' inquisitiveness
and evoke their delight at being made
~11 ....ARTICLES
party to previously unshared knowledge,evenasthisknowledgewas
clearly being made public before their
very eyes. From 1985 to mid-1996, the
column's title, ``Mngosi with the Pace
gang'', bore a subtitle: Sondela wena
ndabazabantu (Zulu), roughly translated
as ``Come everyone who wants to
hear about everyone else's affairs.''
Following Myers-Scotton (1998:84±86;
90±91), it would appear that when the
column debuted in 1985, choosing a
subtitle in Zulu represented a marked
choice intended largely to function as a
neutralizing strategy designed to encode
solidarity among Pace's predominantly
urban readers (who
presumably reside in and around Johannesburg,
where Zulu is considered
to be the most prevalent African
language), confirming that the attitudes
and expectations of the column's producers
and those of its readers were on
a par. However, by mid-1996 it seems
that the neutral solidarity conveyed by
the column's vernacular subtitle was
no longer considered to be a priority;
for, by then, the producers of Pace
assumed that ``readers were familiar
with the column and removing the
subtitle would do no harm'' (personal
communication with Force Kashane,
editor, January 1998). Since the middle
of 1996 Mngosi has appeared without a
subtitle, on a more subdued black and
white full-page spread, with the title
appearing in black typeface, except for
the word Mngosi, which appears in
bold, brightly coloured typeface.
Photographs of Mngosi's writers have
always been integral to the headline,
although the team of writers and their
number have always been open to
change. Further, although Mngosi has
always been represented as a collaborative
effort, it has never featured a

group photograph of its writers, preferring instead to
focus individually on each collaborative writer, as
attested by their individual photographs. Until 1996
these photographs were displayed in a horizontal line,
yet in Mngosi's new multimodal layout they are
portrayed as part of the headline, enclosed in a pale
blue comic-like bubble whose vector points overtly to
the letter ``I'' in the word Mngosi. This multimodal
combination of colour imagery, black and coloured
typeface, and photography, with a comic-strip convention,
may well be inspired by the availability of
new image technology, yet it also seems to testify to
the ironic self-perception of Mngosi's writers.
Other forms of authorial distancing are made
manifest in a comparative analysis of the title and
subtitle of Mngosi. To begin with, placed in the initial
position of the opening column of Pace, the column's
title and subtitle comprise what might be called a
multimodal headline, a kind of ``hook'' intended to
attract attention and lure readers into reading the
column and then the entire magazine (much like the
instrumental opening in a rock song). While all
headline writers tend to make use, among other
things, of the potential effects of sound (in texts
designed for reading), this headline is more complex:
it is multimodal in the sense that it involves a complex
interaction of visual elements and verbal English
presented to the eye, over and above contextual and
background knowledge (Goodman 1996:69). Prefiguring
the overall tone of the column as a whole, the
multimodality established by the headline and its
writers simulates an informal, conversational atmosphere
right alongside, and augmented by, visual
devices and sound gestures such as onomatopoeia.
While the informal, chatty tone of Mngosi may in fact
be a strategic attempt to introduce magazine-reading
as a new literacy pattern, it also pays homage to
traditional notions of the way black South Africans
are known to delight in humour and conversation,
even as these are interspersed in written, not spoken
forms of gossip (cf Tiyo Soga 1892, cited in Couzens
1984:3±5). By resorting to a stylized use of English
that is clearly multimodal (that is, using devices from
more than one semiotic mode of communication at
the same time), highlighting their own linguistic
diversity, Mngosi's writers clearly perceive themselves,
and are in turn perceived by their readers, as cultural
enablers who enhance their own professional and
social status. By flaunting their ability to switch from
one linguistic code to another, they show off their
linguistic prowess and present themselves as multidimensional
individuals (see Myers-Scotton 1998:26).
Take the following example from an issue of Pace
dated March 1996:
If you are famous please do not go around making other
people miserable. Maybe I should say if you are famous
don't think everybody in this sunny rainbow country has to
know you. This ex-soccer star, or should I say soccer legend,
visited some bundu somewhere in le KwaZulu. He
went to a supermarket to grab a fewnyana things. At the till
he did not want to wait inthe queue, so he went upfront.One
angry lady asked: ``Hey, mister, what's wrong with you ^ can't
you see the others in the queue?'' ``Don't you know who I
am?'' he retorted arrogantly. ``Yewena bhuti wekhanda elikhulu
^ I don't care a hoot ukuthi uwaubani get in the
queue.'' Uyezwake fame or no fame nayo iqueue.
I have deliberately chosen a somewhat trivial, nonspecific,
anecdotal account, which seems to have no
narrative punch-line or point, yet I believe it is
symptomatically expressive of the kind of social
commentary and authorial distancing regularly enacted
in the column. Presented in what appears to be a
didactic, fable-like format, which reads almost like an
aphorism, the combined speakers seem to be addressing
the reader directly, using the first person singular.
However, the mundane description of the deliberately
nameless ex-soccer star indicates that his identity is
presumed to be common knowledge among those
socially ``in the know,'' writers and readers alike, and
invokes an analogy between the soccer star and his
alleged fans, the readers. Readers like myself, who are
``not in the know,'' have little or no chance of being
welcomed into the circle and are hence knowingly left
out. Interpersing uses of the vernacular into the
overall English medium through codeswitching, the
columnists seem to position themselves ambiguously,
at once alongside their readers and a cut above them,
but their final remark seems equally fitting on both
counts: ``know your place, brother, even if you are a
soccer legend, you too must queue.''
On another level entirely, the way Mngosi's writers
allude to themselves as ``the Pace gang'' may seem trite
~12 ....ARTICLES

and insignificant, yet in the context of
black urban history in South Africa it is
noteworthy in at least two respects.
First, in view of the historical centrality
of criminal ``gangs'' (themselves modeled
on imported American prototypes)
in the structuring and organization of
South African township life, especially
during the 1940s and 1950s, the allusion
is by no means coincidental, nor
does it seem to be neutral (see Sampson
1956; Coplan 1985; Bonner and Segal
1988; Nicol 1991:42±74). It may be
argued that members of ``the Pace
Gang'' wish to distance themselves
from the (ambiguous) historical representations
of township criminal
``gangs'' and, in so doing, foreground
their own authority and education,
even as they encode greater social
distance from their readers and increase
their own social status.
Last, but by no means least insignificant,
let us take a look at True love,
the only surviving magazine for black
South African women (since Thandi
merged with Bona in 1999). True love's
past, like its name, is steeped in irony.
Although today it is clearly a women's
magazine, True love's origins are quite
paradoxical: it was conceived as a softporn
publication targeted at a male
readership of migrant labourers, many
of whom worked on the mines. In
1975, following Drum's declining sales
due to steady competition from Bona,
Drum editor Jim Bailey decided to issue
a ``sister'' publication which he named
True love. Modeled largely on the
photo-comic magazine introduced into
South Africa via Zonk (in 1962), True
love focused mainly on sex scandal
stories and its name was merely a
cover-up for a publication that bore no
likeness whatsoever to a women's
magazine. Presumably aware of a
similar attempt by an editor of Ebony
USA, who used the ``girlie magazine''
option as a means of boosting Ebony's
sales (see Wolesley 1971), Bailey clearly
hoped a magazine based on this model
wouldbesuccessfulenoughtooffset
losses incurred by Drum. This version
of True love worked well for several
years, but when Bailey was forced to
succumb to censorship and forgo the
sex scandals, True love lost tens of
thousands of readers and Bailey finally
sold Drum and True love to the
Afrikaans publishing house Nasionale
Pers in Cape Town (personal interview
with Barney Cohen, executive editor of
Drum and True love 1992). Nasionale's
proprietors sought ``to tap the growth
market of black print-media readers''
(Chapman 1988:217) and decided to
recast True love as a women's magazine.
Up until then, magazines for
black readers in South Africa had
targeted a predominantly male readership
(for example Zonk, Drum, Bona,
and Pace), although they all also
addressed women, as indeed do Tribute
and Ebony South Africa. Needlessto
say, though, by 1984 there was already
a thriving market for magazines targeting
white South African women.
The new women's magazine format of
True love published by Nasionale soon
prompted the Argus group, Nasionale's
main rival, to launch a second
magazine for black South African
women,andin1985Thandi, sister
publication to Bona, wasborn.The
new women's format of True love was
givenanexpandedtitle,True love &
family, and a slogan: ``For the woman
who loves life.'' Coupling the Western
romantic notion of ``true love'' with an
idealized notion of the household unit
identified in Western modernity as ``the
~13 ....ARTICLES
family,'' this version of True love was
once again revamped in July 1995, just
over a year after South Africa's first
democratic elections (April 1994). Targeting
younger black South African
women ``determined to make every
aspect of their lives a success'' (editorial,
Khayani Dhlomo-Mkhize, July
1996), this new, updated version of
True love is printed on glossy paper
with chrome plates, high-tech layout,
typeset and design, has had the ``&
family'' appendix removed, and has
been given a new, still current slogan
``All a woman needs.'' Like the previous
slogan, albeit somewhat differently,
this slogan is also non-specific
and apolitical, a catch-all phrase, which
purposely avoids identifying its readership
in any exclusivist way. But the
blanket universality of this slogan
cannot simply be collapsed into that of
the earlier one, as they were coined at
very different historical moments.
While the earlier (1984) slogan was
probably conceived with the idea of
fashioning an entirely new readership
of black middle-class women from a
heterogeneity of people from vastly
different ethnic, cultural and linguistic
backgrounds, the 1995 slogan was
targeted at members of an alreadyexisting,
socially stratified black middle-class
readership spanning roughly
two generations of black middle-class
magazine readers.
Most significantly, as the only general
interest magazine for black South
African women, True love provides a
benchmark for assessing some of the
ways consumer magazines for black
South Africans have effected changes
in the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary
South Africa and legitimized
the social mobility of black

South Africans residing in urban environments. By
focusing on the experiences of urban black women as
wives, housewives, homemakers, mothers and working
women from a variety of professional and other
occupations, True love has secured a new, predominantly
female readership, even as it is responsible for
recasting, through the domestic domain, the roles
played by women in a new, informal public sphere
where shifting social responsibilities are (re)negotiated
and gradually institutionalized. In so doing, True love
confirms and places beyond question the urban status
of South Africa's black middle-class, endorsing the
roles and social standing of black women within it.
Here I believe the magazine's producers have been
committed (albeit not always consciously) less to a
feminist program than to a broader agenda of sociosemiotic
change in South Africa.
More specifically, True love articulates many of the
routine, trite, yet often representative uses black
South African women make of goods, experiences,
practices and beliefs while organizing their individual
and collective identities and everyday lives. These
pertain to changes in traditional, rural vs modern,
urban patterns and social positions concerning, for
instance, rights for women, marital and sexual
relationships, notions of sexuality, rites of courtship
and sexual attraction, the ``nuclear'' vs the traditional
extended family, kinship relations, access to contemporary
modes of household economy and household
utility services (running water, sanitation and electricity),
new work options, careers and occupations,
media options (such as public service broadcasting ±
radio and TV), patterns of reproduction and contraception,
gendered roles within the family, the kitchen
(as a concretized space in its own right), changing
systems of provision and patterns of consumption
(foods such as maize, potatoes, corn and eggs),
procedures of food preparation, eating and drinking
as social activities, changing physiognomies and uses
of the body, body images and gestures, bodily
attributes and deportment, standards of beauty, and
more. These topicalities are negotiated both in a
variety of magazine departments (editorial copy,
feature articles, and/or regular columns) and in a
wide range of advertisements.
Finally, an interesting question is begged here,
namely, what makes the women mentioned above
choose to read True love, when they have the option
of selecting any one of a variety of women's
magazines available in South Africa today. But the
differences between magazines intended for black and
white women in South Africa, the different motivations
of their producers and readers, and the extent to
which these differences are likely to be upheld, will
have to wait for another paper.
Notes
1 As noted in Norval (1996), the Wiehahn reforms were
concerned primarily with ``the status of urban blacks
and their residence rights in `white' urban areas'' (Norval1996:229).Committedtodepoliticizingtheeconomic
order by claiming to support a liberal market
economy that rejected the previous exclusion of the
black/African workforce, the Wiehahn report advocated
the inclusion, or ``co-optation''of the trade unions
into a regulated framework based on premises of ``labour
democracy'' (the right to work, to free association,
to collective bargaining, to strike, to protection and to
development).The Riekert Commission, by distinguishing
between ``urban insiders'' and ``rural outsiders,'' for
the first time recognized the rights of a limited number
of Africans to reside permanently in South African cities,
and inadvertently initiated a set of urbanization
strategies, which ultimately came to undermine the territorial
dimension of apartheid (see Davenport
1989:440^45 and Norval1996:228^9).
2 Correspondences between the fields of political and
cultural economy are indebted here to (1) Pierre Bourdieu's
sythesis of the economic and symbolic orders,
whereby the logic that orders each is the logic of ``capital''
(Bourdieu1984), and James Carrier's problematization
of the Market modes as an adequate representation
of Western economy (Carrier 1997). For Bourdieu,
capital includes material objects, many of which have
symbolic value, intangible attributes and properties,
such as prestige, status and authority (ie symbolic capital)
and cultural capital (culturally-valued taste and
consumption patterns) (see Bourdieu1986). As pointed
out in Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, ``for Bourdieu, capital
actsasasocialrelationwithinasystemofexchange''
(1990:13), so that the term relates to all material and
symbolic goods which are perceived as worth aspiring
to or are indeed sought after in particular social situations.
Crucial here is the way Bourdieu extends ``the use
of the term `economic' and its correlate `capital' to include
the exchange of anything of value'' (Mahar, Harkerand
Wilkes1990:207), so that the powerdimensions
of cultural, symbolic, and economic capital are relatively
interchangeable, although not always equally so
in all directions (that is, cultural resources and social
networks might be forms of capital, but they are not always
equivalent to money and/or property). Nonethe-
~14 .... ARTICLES

less, the notion of culture as capital paves the way for
establishing structural homologies or analogies between
cultural and economic forms of capital, while
perceiving symbolic capital as a particular instance or
exemplification of economic capital.
On another level, Carrier (1997) postulates that it is
important to distinguish between understandings of
Western economy produced by formal economists
(frequently replicated, I might add, by politicians), and
those commonly held by non-specialist members of
the entities this economy purports to organize and describe
(Carrier 1997:1^67; 129^57). Carrier points out
the complex relationship between what he calls the
``Market model'' and the ways people actually think
about and go about conducting their economic lives.
Further, he usefully argues that the model of the market
is ``as much concerned with defining the difference between
self and other as it is with its putative purpose of
describing a form of socio-economic activity'' (Carrier
1997:32).Carriergoes ontointerrogate essentialized associations
of the Market model with constructions of
the modern West (most notably with America), advocating
an unpacking of the socio-cultural underpinnings
of the socio-economic patterns and practices
entailed in and affiliated with the ``capitalist Market
economy.'' In these constructions, the Market is reductively
construed as analogous with ``impersonality, selfregard
and calculation'' (Carrier 1997:32), and Market
actors are typically perceived as autonomous individuals
looking out primarily for their own best interests,
at all times seeking ``to avoid pain and seek pleasure''
(Carrier 1997:34). Carrier stresses the need to investigate
instances in which the Market mode may be manifested
as a collective social enterprise, in which choice
and autonomy culminate in forms of social constraint,
andwhichisoftengroundedintheverysocio-cultural
interdependencies and values Market model adherents
would seek to deny.
3 Following Bourdieu (1984:230^1 and passim;
1985:724^34), my use of the term ``middle-class'' refers
here to the upwardly mobile lifestyle preferences and
social practices manifested by increasing numbers of
black South Africans who may not necessarily qualify
statistically for admission to this socio-economic stratum.
For although in terms of economic capital and/or
production, many of those I would ascribe to South
Africa's black middle-class may best be classified as
belonging to the working class or petit bourgeoisie,
through many of the cultural practices they engage in,
they tend to affiliate themselves with and are in turn affiliated
with the relative ease, respectability and belonging
typically attributed to those occupying the middle
position (situated, let's say, between the working class
and the upper class). In this sense, they conform to accepted
views of the middle-classes as people who
seek to distance themselves from necessity and basic
material considerations as primary concerns, striving
overtly for cultural capital (knowledge, culture and education)
and social esteem (Bourdieu 1984 passim;
Wilkes 1990:121). As a result, they often manifest a keen
interest in style itself (Lury 1996; Swartz 1997), and at all
~15 .... ARTICLES
times aspireto ways of lifethat ``speak [...] ofaworld better
than they have'' (Wilkes1990:128).
4 Even-Zohar's notion of cultural interference suggests
ways to account for discrepancies between recent
ideological notions and specific cultural practices: it
urges us to acknowledge the importance of accessing
new social and cultural resources and enables us to
problematize received, unilateral, often distorted views
of cultural hegemony and social hierarchy. Moreover, it
allows us to reassess the ambiguous standing of
``white'' South African culture, which on the one hand
provides a structural and aspirational yardstick for the
social practices of South Africa's black urban dwellers,
while providing a no less significant point of departure
for accessing new resources and generating new socio-cultural
formations in which elements from indigenous,
European, Asian, and African-American cultures
converge and undergo transformation.
5 They function as material goods on at least three levels:
as products of the print industry; as sites that advertise
and promote the consumption of other commodities;
and as part of the cultural production of collective
meanings in which they also construct a range of identity
options for communities of individual readers.
6 On the relevance of historical gossip to the dynamic
process of oral traditions in Africa, see Vasina
(1985:17); for a comprehensive account of gossip as
oral tradition and its transformation into print forms see
Spacks (1986); foran in-depth account of the dynamics
oforal historical narrative in the changing environments
and everyday lives of indigenous South Africans, see
Hofmeyr (1993).
7 Here it is worth noting that over and above being editor
of Pace, Kashane is also a practicing sangoma (traditional
healer) in Soweto, where he is also a preacher
and choir leader (at The Lion of Judah's Apostolic
Church) and in 2000 cut an album of religious music
entitled Masibambaneni. In this sense he exemplifies
some of the ways individual members of the urban
elites in South Africa are currently forging for themselves
newly-composite social personas as leading
cultural agents. Frequently combining autochthonous
practices with modern modes of conduct, and stressing
both, these modes of self-presentation revalidate,
even as they construct and transform, a sense of ``past''
rural experiences for today's black urban dwellers (see
Geschiere and Nyamnjoh [1998] for a similar discussion
of witchcraft related to ``variations in the evolvement
of urban-rural relations'' in Cameroon).
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ownership.Time.
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told: oral historical narrative in a South African chiefdom.
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Press and James Currey.
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sociolinguistic perspective to a pan-African concept. Critical
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Cambridge University Press 64^94.
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~16 .... ARTICLES

The struggle for Afrikaans
language rights that might
be expected to bear the
~I .......
hallmarks of ``fascism''
appears to draw
on a number of
contemporary theoretical
constructs: alterity;
landscape and identity;
linguistic imperialism; the
nation and globalization
llustrating the problematic
status of the ``colonial'' and
``post-colonial'' in South Africa, DennisWalderstatesthat``Itmaysurprise
some to know the degree to which ...
the predominantly white, Afrikaansspeaking
descendants of the original
settlers see themselves as the colonized,
the victims first of British imperialism,
and then of worldwide threats to their
identity'' (1998:154; see also 2). And,
back in 1989, Annamaria Carusi argued
that, for both whites and blacks in
South Africa, ``the label `post-colonialism'
is not an issue at all'': for whites
``Post-colonialism, as a desirable state
of affairs, has been accomplished, de
facto, and in a most successful manner.
The South African nation exists because
of the success of the construction
of Afrikanerdom'', while ``For the
black majority ... to speak of post-
A PRAAG Spring?
...................................
DAN ROODT, GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW STRUGGLE FOR AFRIKAANS
JOHAN GEERTSEMA
colonialism is pre-emptive'' (1989:80).
Carusi therefore asks: ``What then is
the use of the term `post-colonial' in a
context where it is not seen as applicable
by either one in the customary
colonizer/colonized opposition, and
where the terms themselves are in
question?'' (1989:80).
In each case, the fly in the postcolonial
(and postcolonial) 1 ointment
would seem to be ``Afrikaans speaking'',
or ``Afrikanerdom''. In this brief
essay, I consider some of the ramifications
of a new, resurgent Afrikaans
identity politics against colonialism,
and therefore perhaps postcolonial,
focusing on the writings of Dan
Roodt, founder of PRAAG, the Pro-
Afrikaans Action Group (but also
evident in articles appearing in the
recently established philosophical and
cultural-political journal Fragmente,
and in the activities of the so-called
Groep van 63). That is, it is my intent
to consider more closely ``the trouble
with Afrikaans'', or the troublesomeness
of Afrikaans. Perhaps rather
surprisingly, a project (the struggle for
Afrikaans language rights) that might
be expected to bear the hallmarks of
``fascism'' ± in that, after all, Afrikaners
would seem to be attempting to
regain the national linguistic, cultural
and political rights they enjoyed under
apartheid (and that was the National
~17 .... ARTICLES
Party's raison d'eÃtre), and given the
``fascist'' history of recent Afrikaans
language politics ± appears to draw, in
a highly sophisticated way, on a
number of contemporary theoretical
constructs, current in much so-called
postmodern and postcolonial thinking:
radical alterity; the link between
landscape and identity; linguistic imperialism;
the nation; and, in particular,
globalization. I shall attempt very
briefly to provide an outline of some
of the most significant concepts of
such a neo-Afrikaans ``postcoloniality''.
In particular, I want to adumbrate
some of Dan Roodt's more
significant or, at least, interesting
ideas as they appear in his ``Grasperk''
columns and in essays that have
appeared elsewhere, such as on the
PRAAG website. Roodt is a prolific
writer, and of necessity I can provide
only a brief overview. What appears
more or less constant through the
diverse range of issues Roodt addresses
is the position of language, in
particular of Afrikaans and what is
perceived to be its neo-colonial marginalization
by a South African government
apparently intent on
advancing English as South Africa's
lingua franca. In this regard, of
course, there is a not unfamiliar
postcolonial paradox implicit in this
article, as it is written in the language
of the globalizing, totalizing, ``mono-

cultural'' oppressor: English. What's more, Roodt is
not overly fond of English academics, the types who
read scrutiny2 ± or write for it.
II
In his column ``Grasperk'', on the Internet journal
LitNet, 2 Dan Roodt regularly offers a provocative
vision of what may be called a neo-Afrikaans
postcoloniality. It is characteristic of his writing that
it forcefully reclaims from the past an Afrikaner
identity that differs starkly from the stereotypical one
that equates the Afrikaner with the likes of Eugene
Terreblanche (leader of the AWB). Indeed, a serious
objection that might be raised with regard to Roodt is
precisely his choice more or less completely to ignore,
in the process of reclaiming a different Afrikaans
identity, the highly problematic, even fascist, nature
of recent Afrikaner history, as well as of the Afrikaans
language: that is, he ignores or denies ``the sexually
repressive, racially violent, Calvinist culture of Afrikanerdom''
(Walder 1998:174), or, at least, the
version of Afrikanerdom that was dominant in the
twentieth century. In any event,
Roodt rejects the almost automatic
association of ``right wing''
with ``Afrikaner'': ``According to
some people being Afrikaans
means per se something like
being right wing''. 3
Roodt has sharply criticized
this tendency in a strident, some
might say ill-mannered, attack on
Nadine Gordimer, in which he
casts her as neo-imperial, and
asserts his indifference to her
position: ``I have no idea whether
you are a widow of a knight or
baronet, a woman Knight Commander
or holder of Grand Cross
in the Order of Bath, the Order of
the British Empire, the Royal
Victorian Order, or the Order of
St Michael and St George which, as you well know,
would have bestowed upon you the title of `Dame' ''
(http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/nad.asp). He sar-
Dan Roodt
forcefully reclaims
from the past an
Afrikaner identity that
differs starkly from
the stereotypical one
that equates the Afrikaner
with the likes of Eugene
Terreblanche
(leader of the AWB)
castically apologizes for using ``a lot of utterances in
what you have so often termed `the guttural tongue',
that horrible language, Afrikaans'' and accuses
Gordimer of seeing Afrikaners as ``rocks'': `` `Rocks
in the veld', is that not your vision of us? The lower
forms of life, the Boere, Dutchmen, white or coloured
trash, that populate your novels ...''. He then quotes,
and analyses, the following passage from The Conservationist
(Gordimer 1974:48) in which an Afrikaans
family, the De Beers, are described in terms
which Roodt finds offensive, and which he compares
to ± and finds worse than ± Nazi descriptions of Jews:
The [De Beer = Afrikaans] child will sink, she will drown if
she lets go of her mother, yet her clinging is flirtatious, she
tries to make him look at her so that she may at once hide
her head against the mother's thigh. She's a beautiful child
as their children often are ^ where do they get them from? ^
and she'll grow up ^ what do they do to them? ^ the same
sort of vacant turnip as the mother ... . To go into those women
must be like using the fleshy succulent plants men in
the Foreign Legion have to resort to.
The question Roodt here raises is what the
antecedent of ``their'', ``they'', ``them'' and ``those''
is. And to him the answer is
quite clear:
~18 .... ARTICLES
For ``they'' here we can probably
readnotonlytheDeBeerfamily,
but Afrikanerdom tout court, the
``Effwikaanuhs'' as our state television
currently calls them. We are
here in the realm of the STEREO-
TYPE on the scale of a Nazi gatheringwithallthoseEngelseshouting
Sieg Heil! or Kill the rocks! or whatever
they shout in their moments of
inner concord on who exactly happens
to be the master race.
Roodt explains what he discerns
as Gordimer's apparent
hatred of Afrikaans and Afrikaners
in terms of her supposed fear
of their superior literature as
against her own ``anti-apartheid
Mills & Boon''. Interestingly, in
doing so he claims for Afrikaans
literature the status of a Deleuzian minority writing ±
and in implicitly ethical and postcolonial terms:

It seems to me that your own stature as
author is based on a kind of censorship, ie
that those other South African (or non-
South African, according to the Anglocentric
definition) authors, such as Etienne
Leroux, for example, should not be read
outside South Africa by dint of being genetically
or culturally inferior or both.
However, while this enormous body of
work outside the narrow, Northern Suburbs
chit-chat paradigm that is taken for
literature in the Anglocentric world of
``South African literature'', remains repressed,
the era of the anti-apartheid Mills
& Boon will hold sway.The danger to you
and others is that somehow this corpus of
`òther literature'' gets discovered.The only
way to silence the ``other authors'' whose
brilliance, imagination and style will forever
eclipse your ponderous platitudes, is to
permanently eradicate their language. Or
to bring back the camps ^ the English
ones ^ to delete their bad genes forever.
Afrikaans literature, according to
Roodt's version of Gordimer, does not
count as ``South African literature''.
(This is an ill-founded accusation,
which Roodt often repeats, and which I
briefly consider below.) He sweepingly
dismisses Gordimer's and other English
writing in South Africa, and suggests
that the likes of Gordimer fear the
inventiveness and originality of a writing
which ``will forever eclipse your
ponderous platitudes''. This would
then be the reason why she wants to
``eradicate'' Afrikaans. The final stab is
the imputation that Gordimer would
favour concentration camps: Nazi-like,
but English ± like those used against
Boers in the South African War. In
view of Gordimer's own history and
identity, this probably comes close to
being vulgar, if not libellous. Roodt's
narrow Afrikaner ethnocentricism is, at
least in this piece, as offensive as the
hatred of Afrikaners of which he
accuses Gordimer.
In contradistinction to Gordimer,
whose work Roodt finds mediocre
and offensive, JM Coetzee finds some
(rather begrudging) praise. If he dislikes
Gordimer because he thinks she
doesn't like Afrikaners, then he likes
Coetzee because he is half Afrikaans
and doesn't particularly seem to like
the English or, for that matter, their
language. 4 Despite the fact that Roodt
appears to find Coetzee's works congenial,
he remains dismissive, not only
of Coetzee, but of ``South African''
literature as such. In the context of a
critique of the notion of ``South
African'' literature, on the grounds
that English-speaking critics all too
easily take this term as referring to
English ``South African'' literature,
but without specifying that this is the
case, and in the process ignore a vast
body of works written in other South
African languages, Roodt in effect
dismisses Coetzee as only another
``English realist'':
I personally actually find Coetzee quite
close to the English realist tradition, and I
would imagine that Etienne Leroux, for instance,
is a far more ``formally inventive''
writer than Coetzee, not even to mention
the many fun, experimental and ``postmodern''
texts which have appeared in Afrikaans
since 1980. But again, of course,
these books do not belong to the collection
of ``South African writing'' and therefore
do not come into consideration. 5
In his review of Disgrace, this
begrudging praise of Coetzee ± and
dismissal of English writing in South
Africa ± is repeated:
The book is, on the whole, well written and
reads fluently, almost as if it were written in
one sitting.Coetzee again sets the standards
in the Anglophone novel in South
Africa, but, then again, that is surely not
too difficult in relation to the rest with their
glaring generalities and malice. 6
It amuses Roodt no end that
Coetzee has an Afrikaans name;
~19 .... ARTICLES
indeed, even though he is a mediocre
writer and only appears good against
the background of South African
literature in English, Roodt nonetheless
claims him for Afrikaans or, at
least, questions his status as an
English writer in a scathing review of
Attridge and Jolly's edited collection,
Writing South Africa. He is scathing
because they, and almost all other
English academics in South Africa,
supposedly exclude Afrikaans writing
when they refer to South African
literature. This is a dubious claim, as
surveys of ``South African literature''
in English as often as not explicitly
state what their focus is (for example,
Smith 1990), or otherwise actually do
include (cover) Afrikaans literature
(Chapman 1996). 7 In any event, elsewhere
Roodt claims that the exclusion
of Afrikaans writing from South
African literature (whether it actually
occurs or not) would be a positive
development (2000a:103). For Afrikaners
are, or should no longer be,
``South Africans''. Being kicked out of
``South African'' literature would be a
kind of liberation, an enforcement of
the minority status of Afrikaans and
Afrikaners in a global, post-national
context. Afrikaans speakers are exiles
at home, and should relish the fact
that they have moved beyond the
nation (indeed, they ought to break
down the global and its manifestation
in South Africa, the new state), that
there is no patria left for them: ``But
we want no acknowledgement from
the fatherland; we are satisfied to flee
from it, to find, in our exile and
alienation, a home in words, these
Afrikaans words'' (2000a:103). 8
I want to return briefly to Coetzee and
the place of Disgrace in Roodt's
argument:

[I wish] to question Coetzee's Englishness. In the first place,
Coetzee is an Afrikaans surname, and if one reads Coetzee's
autobiography, Boyhood, one realizes that Afrikaans
was the language of his fatherand English that of his mother.
Coetzee is therefore no different from a very huge number of
Afrikaners: he is bilingual.
While some of us maintain an identification with Afrikaans as
a first language despite a relative competence in English,
Coetzee has identified with English and publishes in English.
But Coetzee's English identity has not been formed without
turmoil, because in Boyhood he says, for instance:
If he had a choice between Son and his own father as a
father, he would choose Son, even though that would mean
he would be irrevocably Afrikaans and would have to spend
years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans boarding-school, as
all farm-children do, before he would be allowed to come
back to the farm. (100)
Elsewhere in the text the boy refers to himself and his brother
as ``English only in a way'' (67). 9
Roodt conveniently overlooks the fact that Coetzee
does not fit snugly into any ethnic (or other)
categories. He is as little an Afrikaans as an English
writer. On the contrary, if Coetzee is ``English only in
a way'', then he is also Afrikaans ``only in a way''. In
any event, Coetzee's work, as little as his position
within South African writing, does not lend itself to
``easy binary division''. For instance, the protagonists
of Coetzee's novels
... tend to be figures on the margin of the defining axis of racialized
conflict which defined apartheid in the Western imagination.
This exploration of the multiplicity of positions and
identities in South Africa is one of the features that recommends
Coetzee's novels as distinctively ``post-apartheid''
narratives. (Barnett 1999:294)
This would confirm some of the points Roodt
makes about Coetzee, yet it can also be used against
his own argument. If Coetzee's work resists canonization
within an English tradition, the same would be
the case as far as any other tradition is concerned.
Nevertheless, Roodt finds in Coetzee an Engelsman
whose work questions Englishness, and the position
of English:
Recently I have started thinking that perhaps J M Coetzee is
not an English writer in the usual sense, even though he
writes in English. Especially in his latest work, Disgrace,there
is something of a non-English identity which comes to the
fore. Indeed, the Afrikaans translation of ``disgrace,'' namely
``skande'' [shame] represents much more strongly what
Coetzee wants to transmit to us here. 10
Part of the ``disgracefulness'' or ``shamefulness'' of
Disgrace that Roodt appreciates is the proximity of this
novel and its author to what he believes Gordimer
considers the shameful tradition of an Afrikaans
tradition of writing, in which there are no holy cows,
and which is formally much more adventurous and
aestheticized than almost all South African English
writing:
Petrus's inability to see that rape is a serious and punishable
offence implies an unbridgeable epistemological apartheid
which, perhaps, lies at the basis of the South African dilemma.
Inthis sense Coetzee departsfromthe anti-apartheid Mills &
Boon perpetrated by Gordimer et al in a way which draws
him closer to the ``disgraceful''Afrikaans tradition.
David's involvement with Byron and his attempts to write an
opera on him should not be seen as the attempt of somebody
to maintain an absurd Western aesthetic interest in
Africa, but as an aesthetic transgression of the political. 11
It has been argued that this is precisely what
Coetzee's fiction does: it exceeds the political, not
only aesthetically but also ethically (see Marais 1998).
Certainly one would agree with Roodt's conclusion
that Coetzee interrogates identity within a South
African context, and that he examines the possibility
of communicating not only across cultures but,
specifically, that he explores exactly the ``epistemological
apartheid'' to which Roodt refers. Indeed, one of
the hallmarks of Coetzee's work surely is the extent to
which it seeks to explore the division between self and
other, and the degree to which it refuses to indulge in
representations of the other. That is, it is fiction that
attempts to respect the radical alterity that Roodt
identifies here.
According to Roodt, ``Europe'' and ``Africa'' are
fundamentally incompatible: ``It is a matter of radical
otherness, `paradigm incommensurability' in the
language of a Thomas KuÈ hn or Paul Feyerabend'', 12
as he puts it in an essay on the future of Afrikaans. He
considers NP van Wyk Louw's epic Raka as a
dramatization of the conflict between these two
incompatible entities, symbolized respectively by the
protagonist Koki and his violent antagonist, Raka. It
is precisely this radical alterity which Roodt fears is
being repressed by the ANC's headlong rush into
globalization. It is a radical alterity which will, in the
~20 .... ARTICLES

absence of Afrikaans (which he, following
Louw, believes embodies a
bridge between Africa and Europe),
return with a vengeance:
Make no mistake, with the stimulation of
anglicization and globalization there is already
a return to origins at work in South
Africa.The Africans have not yet started
rejecting English, but they already reject
Western medicine, science, logical
thought, rational politics, tolerance and
everything which goes with this. Just look
at Mr Robert Mugabe, or our own Mr
Mbeki's opinions regarding AIDS and HIV.
Africa will have its hour of vengeance on the
West, and it will be sweet. Africanism, African
Renaissance, African revolution, all
terms we hear daily, implicitly are about rejecting
the Western model of thought and a
radical return to African thinking. But, in the
absence of a bridging language like Afrikaans,
a halfway house where people can
stay in their trek to another form of knowledge
and world view, it is going to be a return
to the primitive, to the animal, to the
Raka principle. Koki is already dead, and we
are going to miss him. 13
Thus the repression, not only of
Afrikaans but of African culture, is
linked to the process of globalization.
In order more fully to consider this
link ± and Roodt's romanticized version
of Afrikaans ± I want to turn to a
consideration of his understanding of
globalization.
III
In an important essay, Roodt considers
the ANC's ``nostalgia for revolution''
and relates this to the
problematic of globalization as a kind
of neo-imperialism. In short, it is his
contention that the ANC is neoimperial,
and that this neo-imperialism
is in a complex way connected, via
its intimate relation with the South
African Communist Party, to its
current insistence on ``African solu-
tions'', which leads to a paradoxical
belief in the importance of an English
monoculture. This is evident in its
hankering back to an outmoded
nineteenth-century nationalism ± with
its emphasis on a patriotic ``Simunye''/``We
are one'', 14 as well as in its
attempts to become part of a new
supra-national global world order, a
global patria or world state. Yet while
there is the danger that the nation
state will simply be replaced by supranational
entities, a central paradox of
globalization ± as also evident in the
ANC's neo-imperial efforts ± is that it,
at the same time, produces ``minority
effects,'' which encourage a post-national
rediscovery of ethnicity, in
particular a cultural and linguistic
specificity, in the face of the ``monoculture''
(cf Roodt 2000a:99-100). Just
like the multinational corporations,
the ANC attempts to homogenize
diversity. However, if ``Globalization
certainly subverts the identity of the
Afrikaans speaker, by the same token
[it also subverts] the ANC's nation
building project''. 15
According to Roodt, ``The ANC's
conversion to capitalism has not
changed its revolutionary base ± the
latter being a playful reference to Karl
Marx's term. In many respects there is
still a nostalgia for revolution at work
in this party and especially its leader
which one would be stupid to
ignore''. 16 To explain the ANC's
thinking on race ± which, in terms of
his two-nations rhetoric, has the president
calling Tony Leon a ``white
politician'', and whites members of a
``foreign ruling class'' ± Roodt considers
pronouncements by Mbeki that
~21 .... ARTICLES
confirm the degree to which Mbeki's
thinking is informed by classical
SACP theorizing:
Within the classical thinking of the SACP ^
andinthisMrMbekidoesnotdifferfrom
them at all ^ race and class coincide in
South Africa. Indeed, in Africa ^ the time
has come,MrMbekitalksasifheisa
worker simply because he is black.The
conceptual problem of the existence of
black workers, especially Afrikaners, was
solved by both the SACP and Mr Mbeki
with the aid of Lenin's phrase ``labour aristocracy''.The
white workers are thus not
true members of the proletariat, but of a
labour aristocracy which makes them allies
of the bourgeoisie. 17
Roodt also notes Mbeki's references
to ``colonialism of a special type'', 18
and again relates this to SACP
thinking. All this is evidence to Roodt
that there is an underlying revolutionary
dynamic present in the ANC.
In Roodt's analysis,
Race is therefore just a kind of convenient
excuse for the revolutionary movement.
One can see the struggle against socalled
``racism'' as part and parcel of the
``recovery of the pride, the identity and the
self-confidence of the African majority'' (in
theTambo memorial lecture) for which Mr
Mbekialsopleadspassionately.Hencethe
interest in matters such as subliminal racism,
the recognition of African culture,
science, art and technology on an equal
footing with that of the West, and in finding,
for instance, an African solution to AIDS.
Thus to accept the justified nature of Western
thinking on AIDS, as opposed to other
theories, is in itself racist because it denies
the African's ability to triumph over AIDS
without the Western manner of thinking. 19
Ultimately the doctrine of ``colonialism
of a special type'' is meant to
restore black pride, but this is not its
end purpose: rather, it is a means to
the eventual revolution, that of a
classless society and a ``new nation.''
According to Roodt (and this is a
central point of his argument), the
ANC's nation-building project is in

essence revolutionary, an attempt to reorder South
African society evident in the ``transformation'' of
society and especially in the resuscitation ± ironically
± of the old colonial ideal of a monolingual national
culture, which happens to be English.
This tendency in South Africa of establishing a
``monoculture'', and the resulting marginalization of
Afrikaans and exclusion of ``other'' narratives, is to
be understood within the context of globalization:
``Globalization provides the background or de cor
against which English domination must come into
being''. 20 Ultimately, this forms the basis of Roodt's
argument in favour of Afrikaans: advancing it
becomes central not only in the struggle against the
globalization supported by the ANC, but against
globalization itself. Against an English globalization,
with its exclusion of the other narrative ± ``the big
mono, monomania, monoculture, monopoly, monomorphism,
mono-ethnicity, monolingualism, monostoria''
21 ± Roodt would like to see
Afrikaans as the language which expresses, as the medium, of
a non-exclusive, non-chauvinist, non-racist narrative which interacts
carefully with the diversity of South Africa.We ought to
glorify and celebrate the motley mix-up against the monotone
and uniform. We [Afrikaners] must recreate and rediscover
ourselves and, in this process, give shape to a new way of
being South African. It should not define any nationality or nationalism,
but rather be a ``celebration of difference or otherness''.We
differ from the rest, we are other, we are unique; this
is the content of our South African being. 22
I started this essay by noting that Roodt is
attempting to reclaim an/other Afrikaans identity.
He might, on one level, be pre-eminently suited to
such a task. As a self-confessed atheist who refused to
go to the army in the 1980s and left South Africa for
France for this reason, and whose published texts
(among them Sonneskyn en Chevrolet [Sunshine and
Chevrolet], the protagonist of which is a dwarf named
Fellatio, and Kommas uit 'n boomzol [Commas from a
Marijuana Joint], which was, willy-nilly, a parody of
the acclaimed Afrikaans poet DJ Opperman's collection
of poems Komas uit 'n bamboesstok) were banned
by the previous regime, Roodt cannot be categorized
easily, and certainly cannot be accused of being
simply a right-winger:
It is further important to me to detach Afrikaans from a Christian
National identity. I am not a Rapportryer and I have
never considered becoming one.To me what matters much
more is the right of the individual to retain his own identity. My
struggle is thus still liberal rather than nationalistic ... . (Phillips1996:5)
23
Such sentiments are contrary to what might have
been called an official version of what it meant to be
an Afrikaner under the National Party: conformist,
nationalist, Christian. Indeed, he might be said to
have a degree of street cred 24 and clearly was no
darling of the old establishment, whether political or
literary. 25 It is against the background of his antiestablishment
credentials that Roodt calls for a
``Great Afrikaans Demonstration'' in support of the
equal treatment of Afrikaans, but which would also
liberate Afrikaners from their status of conservative
collaborators:
South African history seems to me, in many respects, to be a
mystery. I do not understand when the switch took place that
saw Afrikaners change from being a group of people who
were critical and had a tendency towards resistance, into
complaisant collaborators (also under the NP). It is now, however,
necessary to rediscover and reconfirm the tradition of resistance,
protest, critical thinking, courage which may be read
inthepastinseveralmanifestos,trekmovements,strikes,rebellions
and the defiance of the British Empire. 26
Here Roodt positions the fight for Afrikaans
language rights within a broader anti-colonial struggle.
Indeed, one finds here an insistence on a democratic,
critical, ``left-wing'' Afrikaans tradition against the
monolith of the British Empire. A rediscovery is needed
of this Afrikaans tradition because it has somehow
become occulted, repressed in the conformity required
by ± and offered to ± the National Party during the
years of apartheid. 27 For Roodt, the struggle for
Afrikaans language rights is a struggle against globalization
and the language of Microsoft. The struggle for
Afrikaans, and against a ``South African'' identity, is a
struggle against the ``mono'':
Increasingly, the emphasis in a certain current definition of
being South African falls on mono: monolingualism, monoculture,
monopoly, not only beer monopoly, but also that of political
power, and then something which I want to name using a
hybrid term, monostoria. Storia is, of course, Italian for history,
from the Latin historia, but in Afrikaans this reminds us of the
very ordinary ``story''. Inthe end there are many stories in South
Africa, some better told than others, some more moral than
~22 .... ARTICLES

others, but from these many stories or numerous
narratives we are sometimes able
to recognize ourselves and to say the magic
words: ``I am a South African''.
Roodt understands English as a
``meta-language'', in terms of which
diverse stories are translated into one
meta-narrative. The presupposition
underpinning such a view of English,
lending it, too, a privileged place in
South Africa, is that English (and
English speakers) are somehow nonethnic,
``the universal, the global, the
transcendental''. 28 But Roodt quite
jocularly identifies a paradox in such a
transcendental view of English: for it
to be global, it has to be non-ethnic,
yet English speakers ± in particular
English academics of a certain political
persuasion ± are highly distinguishable
as a group that glorifies its
own language and culture and dismisses
those of others (as Roodt
claims Gordimer does). There is thus
a deeply ingrained ethnicity at the
heart of South African Englishspeakers'
celebration of their language,
and their insistence that it be
the true, only South Africa language
(or language of note). Moreover, this
ethnic insistence can only take place at
the cost of a South African identity:
insistence on English is an insistence
based on its global force and the global
nature of an English ethnos, which in
effect amounts to restoring ``the colonial
relation to the mother tongue or
metropole''. 29 It is Roodt's argument
that the only way the multicultural (or
polycultural) would be dissolved within
the monocultural is through a certain
neo-colonialism. Thus he accuses the
ANC government, and its Englishspeaking
intelligentsia, of participating
in a re-establishment of colonial power
relations, with South Africa at the edge
of Empire, and the Anglo-American
metropole still at the centre. The
consequences of such a relation are the
erasureofdifferencebeforethelevelling
of a globalizing economic and
cultural force. Roodt's thought is,
therefore, significantly postcolonial in
the sense of anti-colonial, not postcolonial
in the sense that colonialism
would somehow be a thing of the past.
On the contrary, in Roodt's analysis
the current South African regime is
nothing if not neo-colonial in impulse.
Some of the arguments rehearsed
above would, of course, not sound
strange to those who are reasonably
familiar with contemporary theory. In
his analysis of globalization, in connection
with the effects of this phenomenon
both on the economy and on
culture, Roodt draws on the work of,
among others, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas,
Deleuze and GuattarõÂ, Foucault,
Nietzsche and Heidegger to argue that
globalization is a form of transcendent
religiosity (hence the punning title of
one of Roodt's essays on globalization:
``Die `glo' van globaal'' [the ``believing''
of/in the global]): ``My hypothesis is
that, at the bottom of what is apparently
a secular, economistic insistence
on globalization, a form of religious
thought, a faith or belief, is in actual
fact at work''. 30 It is a new assertion of
thedesireforGodinthefaceof
Nietzsche's ``death of God.'' Paradoxically,
globalization is a ``secular or
secularized spirituality''. 31
The central paradox he discerns in
globalization is that ``growing communication
and the absence of tariff
borders are supposed to result in a
wider selection for the consumer, yet
the converse tends to be the case as
the `global enterprise' with its `global
product' dominates the game ±
whether economically or cultu-
~23 .... ARTICLES
rally''. 32 Thus the process of globalization
has sombre consequences for
diversity: Roodt cites the fact that,
since the invention of the motor
vehicle, the number of manufacturers
will probably have been reduced from
more than 1 000 to around 5 in a few
years' time. The same phenomenon is
apparent at the level of language and
culture: of the 5 000±6 000 languages
today, around half are threatened by
the dominance of large languages,
especially English. This will, for
Roodt, lead to a loss of knowledge, in
particular local knowledge and identity.
33 Such local knowledge and local
identity find their locus in natural
language. With reference to Lyotard's
conception of the postmodern, and
drawing on the work of Deleuze and
GuattarõÂ , Roodt claims that ``In a
globalized world ... natural language
is the only remaining locus of human
identity and diversity. Again the
process of deterritorializing-reterritorializing
is working hard to create a
homogeneous world language, a kind
of semantic and cultural body-without-organs,
which is also, coincidentally,
the national language of the
United States''. 34 Within such an
scenario, a small, localized language
such as Afrikaans becomes a necessary
part of the struggle against
globalization.
Conclusion
In the first (and so far only) part of a
review of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission's Report, Roodt
accuses it of being ahistorical in its
approach to apartheid:
Time and again it appears, however, that
the commission views it [apartheid] as a
monolithic, unchangeable idea which
cannot in the end be semantically defined,
but only morally in terms of ``evil'' ... . I wish

to state it very clearly: the term ``apartheid'' as used by the
commission is an ahistorical phantasm. 35
While I share Roodt's concerns with regard to
illusory monoliths, it is unfortunate that he himself
appears to totalize even as he accuses others of
totalizing. I shall mention only two such cases: he
seems to assume that the monolithic nature of the way
``South African literature'' is constructed by academics
working in the field (I referred to his attacks
on academics and authors above); and he disregards
the variety of Englishes.
Roodt does not bother to hide his contempt for the
kind of person who reads academic journals. 36 More
particularly he makes no effort to hide his scorn for
people who work in what may be called (at the risk of
totalizing) the ``English academy'' ± and therefore for
people who read journals such as scrutiny2. As I also
noted, Roodt discerns a great levelling of difference,
an appropriation and exclusion of texts, a repressive
canonization at work in South Africa and the world,
the consequence of English neo-colonialism. While
there is indeed the danger of such an English neocolonialism,
and of ``South African literature'' being
used to refer only to such writing in English, I did
point out the unfairness of Roodt's accusation, which
must be attributed to his simply constructing a
monolithic ``English academy'' of old fogeys (I do
not care to dispute that many of those teaching
English in South Africa are indeed fogeys, whether
young or old). But there would seem to be more
diversity among those involved in English studies in
South Africa than Roodt would allow for. 37
A second instance of Roodt's totalizing tendency is
that nowhere does he allow for the diversity of
Englishes, for the fact that it is simply inaccurate to
speak of ``English'' in the singular, and that he simply
ignores the creolization of English that is occurring in
various regions: one need only think of the Singlish
patois of Singapore, which may informally be
described as ``English with Chinese and Malay slang''
(Buruma 1996:302), or of local South African variants
of the language. 38 If Afrikaans is a creolized form of
Dutch, as Roodt claims it is, agreeing with Valkhoff
(``Afrikaans is a type of creole language which had its
origin in the pidginizing of Dutch''), 39 then English is
also spawning ``new'' languages. While it is true that a
globalized English tends towards uniformity and the
levelling of differences, the language itself is as prone
to the process of splintering, hybridizing and ``fragmentation''
± a renewed emphasis on the ``small unit''
of the local ± that Roodt identifies as characteristic of
the enemy of globalization, to the extent that various
manifestations of it are mutually virtually unintelligi-
ble. 40
Roodt's PRAAG is an indirect reference to the
Prague Spring opposed by the ANC in 1968. This
indirect reference is, as a matter of fact, made explicit
by Roodt in a letter to introduce PRAAG: ``Why
PRAAG? Well, it names something of a Prague
Spring, a rebelliousness against the current order and
also is intended to remind our governing party that
they explicitly supported the Soviet invasion of
Prague in 1968 and, for this reason, are not at all in
the position to teach others lessons about a `dark
history' '' (Roodt 2000:6). 41 Despite his totalizing
tendencies (and the real worry that Roodt may be
using fancy theory to cloak reactionary political
ideas), one should not overlook the apparent paradox
that probably the most strenuous critique of globalization
± and theoretically sophisticated considerations
of identity formation in present-day South
Africa ± should be taking place in the context of a
struggle for Afrikaans language rights. To this extent,
it may be possible to speak of a kind of ``PRAAG
spring'', also in the field of postcolonial studies in
South Africa.
Notes
1 My use of the terms ``colonial'',``post-colonial''and ``postcolonial''
follows that of Boehmer (1995).Thus ``post-colonial''
is a broadly historical term (`àfter the colonial''),
while``postcolonial'' is a term which indicates opposition
to, a movement beyond, the colonial.
2 LitNet is hosted by MWeb and ``Grasperk'' is available at
http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras. ``Grasperk'' may be
roughly translated as ``lawn'', but really resists translation.
It implies the notion of a border (``perk'') while, simultaneously,
also perhaps suggesting its subversion
(with its reference to ``grass'', or ``dope''). Of course, the
term also sounds similar to, while being a perversion
of, the Afrikaans for ``discussion'' or ``conversation'',
namely ``gesprek''. In a move that would probably anger
Roodt, translations are provided in the text with the Afrikaans
relegated to footnotes. Unless otherwise indicated,
all translations are by me.
~24 .... ARTICLES

3 ``Volgens sommige mense beteken om Afrikaans te
wees per se iets soos om regs te wees''
(http://www.litnet.co.za/grasperk/regs.asp).
4 Roodt's imputation that, in Disgrace, Lucy must submit,
and that South Africa's whites therefore must too, is
dealt with elsewhere in this issue of scrutiny2 (see the
review-essay by Michael Marais). I merely cite Roodt's
claim: ``the text takes this political correctness to its logical
consequence: the highest form of acknowledgement
of white guilt lies in a kind of self-abasement and
self-destruction'' [``die teks voer bloot hier politieke korrektheid
tot sy logiese uiteinde: die hoogste vorm van
blanke skulderkenning leª in 'n soort selfverlaging en
-vernietiging''] (http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/
disgrace.asp). Roodt praises Disgrace, with Andrë
Brink's Donkermaan (available in English asThe Rights
of Desire), as an exemplar of a new literature of doubt
(see http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/twyfel.asp),
and as an interrogation of, among other things, the status
of English and colonialism in South Africa (see
http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/disgrace.asp).
5 ``Self vind ek Coetzee maar taamlik nä aan die Engelse
realistiese tradisie, en ek sou meen dat Etienne Leroux,
byvoorbeeld, 'n veel `formeel vindingryker' skrywer as
Coetzee is, om van die vele prettige, eksperimentele en
`postmoderne' tekste in Afrikaans wat na¨ 1980 verskyn
het, nie eens te praat nie. Maar natuurlik, weer eens,
hierdie boeke behoort nie tot die versameling `South
African writing' nie en kom daarom nie in aanmerking
nie'' (http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/grasperk/
anglos.asp)
6 ``Die boek is in die geheel goed geskryf en lees vlot,
byna asof dit in een sitting geskryf is. Weer eens stel
Coetzee die standaard in die Engelstalige romankuns
in Suid-Afrika, maar dan is dit sekerlik nie te moeilik te
midde van die res met hul skryende gemeenplase en
kwade wil nie''.
7 See De Kock (1997) for a full critique of Chapman's
``coverage'' of South(ern) African literatures.
8 ``Maarons wil geen erkenning van die vaderland heª nie;
ons is tevrede om daaruit weg te vlug, om in ons ballingskap
en vervreemding 'n tuiste op te soek in
woorde, hierdie Afrikaanse woorde.''
9 ``Ek wil die Engelsheid van Coetzee bevraagteken. In
die eerste plaas is Coetzee 'n Afrikaanse van en indien
'n mens Coetzee se outobiografie, Boyhood, lees, kom
'n mens agter dat Afrikaans die taal van sy vader was
en Engels die¨ van sy moeder.Coetzee is dus nie anders
as 'n baie groot aantal Afrikaners nie: hy is tweetalig.
``Terwyl sommige van ons 'n identifikasie met Afrikaans
as eerste taal behou in weerwil van 'n redelike kompetensie
in Engels, het Coetzee met Engels geJ4dentifiseer
en publiseer hy in Engels. Coetzee se Engelse identiteit
is egter nie sonder wroeging gevorm nie, want in Boyhood
seª hy byvoorbeeld:
IfhehadachoicebetweenSonandhisownfatherasa
father, he would choose Son, even though that would
mean he would be irrevocably Afrikaans and would
have to spend years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans
boarding-school, as all farm-children do, before he
would be allowed to come back to the farm. (100)
``Elders in die teks praat die seun van homself en sy
broer as `English only in a way' (67).''
10 ``Die gedagte het onlangs by my ontstaan dat JM Coetzee
miskien geen Engelse skrywer in die gewone sin is
nie, al skryf hy ook in Engels. Veral in sy jongste werk,
Disgrace, is daar iets van 'n nie-Engelse identiteit by
JM Coetzee wat na vore tree. Trouens, die Afrikaanse
vertaling van``disgrace,'' naamlik ``skande,''gee veel sterkerweerwatCoetzeehieraanonswiloordra.''
11 ``Petrus se onvermoe« om in te sien dat verkragting 'n
ernstige en strafbare oortreding is, spreek van 'n
onoorbrugbare epistemologiese apartheid wat miskien
onderliggend is aan die Suid-Afrikaanse dilemma.
``In hierdie opsig neem Coetzee afskeid van die antiapartheid-Mills-&-Boon
wat Gordimer et al bedryf op
'n manier wat hom nader trek aan die `skandelike' Afrikaanse
tradisie.
``Ook David se betrokkenheid by Byron en sy pogings
om 'n opera oor hom te skryf, moet gesien word nie in
die lig van iemand wat 'n absurde Westerse estetiese
belangstelling probeer handhaaf in Afrika nie, maar as
'n estetiese oorskryding van die politieke.''
12 ``Dit gaan om radikale andersheid,`paradigma-onmeetbaarheid'
in die taal van 'nThomas KÏhn of Paul Feyerabend''
(http://www.praag.org/opstelle13.htm).
13 ``Maak geen fout nie, met stimulering van verengelsing
en globalisering, is daar reeds 'n terugkeer na die oorsprong
aan die gang in Suid-Afrika. Die Afrikane het
nog nie begin om Engels te verwerp nie, maar hulle verwerp
reeds die Westerse medisyne, wetenskap, logiese
denke, rasionale politiek, verdraagsaamheid en alles
wat daarmee saamhang. Kyk maar vir mnr. Robert Mugabe,
ofons eie mnr. Mbeki se menings oor VIGS en MIV.
`Àfrika gaan sy uur van wraak op die Weste heª ,endit
gaan soet wees. Afrikanisme, Afrika-renaissance, Afrika-rewolusie,
alles terme wat ons daagliks hoor, gaan
om 'n verwerping van die Westerse denkmodel en 'n radikale
terugkeer na Afrikadenke. Maar, in die afwesigheid
van 'n brugtaal soos Afrikaans, 'n halfweghuis
waar mense kan vertoef in hul trek na 'n ander vorm
van kennis en weª reldbeskouing, gaan dit 'n terugkeer
wees na die primitiewe, na die dierlike, na die Raka-beginsel.
Koki is reeds dood, en ons gaan verlang na hom.''
14 As I show below, Roodt takes this argument further by
pointing to the phenomenon that, in actual fact, in President
Mbeki's``two nations''doctrine there is an attempt
to enforce oneness by means of the claim that ``We are
two''. For a carefully considered examination of the
monomorphic insistence on ``oneness'', specifically in
thecontextofliterarystudies,seeDeKock(1997).
15 ``Globalisering ondermyn sekerlik die identiteit van die
Afrikaanssprekende, maar so ook die ANC se nasiebouprojek''
(http:www.praag.org/opstelle11.htm).
16 ``Die ANC se bekering tot kapitalisme het ... nie die rewolusioneª
re ònderbou' ^ lg. synde 'n speelse verwysingnaKarlMarxseterm^vandiepartyverandernie.
~25 .... ARTICLES

In baie opsigte is daar steeds 'n nostalgie vir die rewolusie
by dië party en veral by sy leier werksaam wat 'n
mens dom sou wees om te ignoreer'' (http://www/
praag.org/opstelle12.htm).
17 ``Binne die klassieke denke van die SAKP ^ en mnr.
Mbeki verskil hierin geensins van hulle nie ^ stem klas
en ras in Suid-Afrika ooreen. Trouens, in Africa ^ the
time has come, praat mnr. Mbeki asof hy 'n werker is
bloot omdat hy swart is. Die konseptuele probleem
van die bestaan van blanke werkers, veral Afrikaners,
is deur beide die SAKP en mnr. Mbeki opgelos met behulp
van Lenin se frase `arbeidsaristokrasie'. Die blanke
werkers is dus geen ware lede van die proletariaat nie,
maar van 'n arbeidsaristokrasie wat hulle bondgenote
van die bourgeoisie of burgery maak.''
18 Visser (1997) argues that race (and its coincidence with
class) lies at the heart of the doctrine of colonialism of a
special type, and claims that race is essentialized in it
(1997:80, 81, 86, 89).
19 ``Ras is dus bloot 'n soort kapstok om die rewolusioneª re
beweging aan te hang.'n Mens kan die stryd teen sogenaamde
`rassisme' sien as deel van die `herstel van
die trots, die identiteit en die selfvertroue van die Afrika-meerderheid'
(in die Tambo-gedenklesing) wat
mnr. Mbeki ook hartstogtelik bepleit. Vandaar die belang
van kwessies soos subliminale rassisme, die erkenning
van Afrikakultuur, -wetenskap, -kuns, en
-tegnologie op gelyke voet met die¨ van die Weste, en
om byvoorbeeld 'n Afrika-oplossing te vind vir VIGS.
Om dus die gefundeerdheid van Westerse denke oor
VIGS te aanvaar, teenoor ander teoriee« , is opsigself
rassisties want dit ontken die Afrikaanse vermoe« om
self oor VIGS te triomfeer sonder die Westerse manier
van dink.''
20 ``Globalisering verskaf die agtergrond of dekor waarteen
Engelse oorheersing tot stand moet kom'' (http://
www/praag.org/opstelle1.htm).
21 ``die groot mono, monomanie, monokultuur, monopolie,
monopolis, monomorfisme, mono-etnisiteit, monolinguJ4sme,
monostoria''
(http://www/praag.org/opstelle1.htm).
22 `Àfrikaans die segstaal en medium van 'n nie-eksklusiewe,
nie-chauvinistiese, nie-rassistiese verhaal te
maak wat sorgsaam omgaan met 'n Suid-Afrikaanse
veelheid. Ons behoort die bonte mengelmoes te verheerlik
ente vier, teenoordie monotone en eenvormige.
Ons moet onsself herskep en heruitvind, en in die
proses gestalte gee aan 'n nuwe Suid-Afrikanerskap.
Dit moet geen nasionaliteit of nasionalisme definieer
nie, maar eerder 'n ``viering van verskil of andersheid.''
Ons verskil van die res, ons is anders, ons is selfs uniek;
dJ1t is die inhoud van ons Suid-Afrikanerskap'' (http://
www.praag.org/opstelle1.htm).
23 ``Dis verder vir my belangrik om Afrikaans los te maak
van 'n Christelik-Nasionale identiteit. Ek is nie 'n Rapportryer
nie, en die idee om een te word het nog nooit
by my opgekom nie. Vir my gaan dit veel eerder oor die
reg van die individu om sy eie identiteit te behou. My
stryd is dus steeds liberaal eerder as nasionalisties ....''
24 At the same time, Roodt has also been accused of
being overly intellectual. Compare Chris Louw's outspoken
anti-intellectualism with regard to Roodt's plan
for a demonstration and march for Afrikaans. (http://
www.litnet.co.za/seminaar/chrisaandan.asp)
25 See Retief (2000:26) and Nieuwoudt (2000:44) for interviews
with Roodt and background to his career in
the1980s.
26 ``Die Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis lyk my in baie opsigte
na 'n misterie. Wanneer Afrikaners presies oorgeskakel
het van 'n kritiese, versetvolle groep mense na die inskiklike
kollaborateurs van onlangs (ook onder die
NP), verstaan ek nie. Dit is nou egter nodig om die tradisie
van verset, protes, kritiese denke, waagmoed wat in
die etlike manifeste, trekbewegings, stakings, rebellies
en trotseer van die Britse Ryk in die verlede te lees is,
te herontdek en te herbeaam'' (http://www.litnet.co.za/
grasperk/opmars.asp).
27 See Roodt's review of Van Zyl Slabbert's book, Afrikaner
Afrikaan, for an outline of his perspective on the relation
between Afrikaners and liberalism. (http://
www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/afrikaner.asp)
28 ``die universele, die globale, die transendentale'' (http://
www.praag.org/opstelle1.html).
29 ``die koloniale verhouding tot die moedertaal of metropool
herinstel'' (http://www.praag.org/opstelle1.html).
30 ``My hipotese is dat daar onderliggend aan die oe« nskynlik
sekuleª re, ekonomistiese aandrang op globalisering
eintlik 'n vorm van godsdienstige denke aan die
werkis,'ngeloofof'nglo''
(http://www.praag.org/opstelle7.htm).
31 ``sekuleª re of gesekulariseerde, geestelikheid'' (http://
www.praag.org/opstelle7.htm).
32 ``groeiende kommunikasie en die afwesigheid van tariefgrense
is veronderstel om 'n wyer aanbod aan die
verbruiker te bewerkstellig, dog die teenoorgestelde is
eerder waar, omdat die `globale onderneming' met sy
`globale produk' die spel ^ hetsy ekonomies, hetsy kultureel
^ domineer'' (http://www.praag.org/
opstelle7.htm).
33 ``globalisering [behels] 'n verlies aan plaaslike identiteit''
[``globalization involves a loss of local identity''].
34 ``In 'n geglobaliseerde weª reld ... is natuurlike taal die
enigste oorblywende lokus van menslike identiteit en diversiteit.
Weer eens is die proses van deterritorialiseringreterritorialisering
sterk aan die werk om een homogene
weª reldtaal te skep, 'n soort semantiese en kulturele liggaam-sonder-organe,
wat toevallig ook die nasionale
taal van die Verenigde State is.''
35 ``Telkens blyk dit egter dat die kommissie dit [apartheid]
as 'n monolitiese, onveranderlike idee beskou wat uiteindelik
nie semanties omskryfbaar is nie, maar bloot
moreel in terme van `boosheid' ... . Ek wil dit baie duidelik
stel: die term `apartheid' soos die kommissie dit gebruik,
is 'n ahistoriese hersenskim''
(http://www.litnet.co.za/grasperk/wvk.asp).
36 ``Ek het onlangs 'n bietjie meer filosofies na die verskyn-
~26 .... ARTICLES

sel gekyk, en omdat ek, anders as dosente en politici,'n
broertjie daaraan dood het om myself te herhaal, wil ek
vandag net hier en daar, asook kortliks, na my vorige
argument verwys'' (http://www.praag.org/
opstelle8.htm).
37 One may in this regard also mention Visser's vituperative
attack on a number of academics in the field of
English ^ specifically, postcolonial ^ studies in South
Africa. I do not have the space here to elaborate, but
Visser (like Roodt) seems wilfully to generalize and misread.
38 For more information on Singlish, see http://www.
thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/singapore/people/
language/english.html
39 `Àfrikaans 'n soort Kreoolse taal is wat sy oorsprong
had in die pidginisering van Nederlands'' (http://
www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/identiteit.asp).
40 ``verbrokkeling''; ``klein eenheid'' (http://www.praag.org/
opstelle7).
41 ``Waarom PRAAG? Wel, dit benoem iets van 'n Praagse
Lente,'n opstandigheid teen die heersende orde en wil
ook ons regerende party daaraan herinner dat hulle
die Sowjet-inval in Praag in1968 eksplisiet gesteun het,
en daarom allermins vir ander lesse oor 'n `donker geskiedenis'
te leer het.''
Works cited
Attridge, Derek & Jolly, Rosemary (eds).1997. Writing South
Africa: literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970^1995.
Cambridge: CUP.
Barnett, Clive.1999. Constructions of Apartheid in the international
reception of the novels of J M Coetzee. Journal
of Southern African studies 25(2):287^301.
Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and postcolonial literature.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
Buruma, Ian.1996.The missionary and the libertine: love and
war in east and west. London: Faber and Faber.
Carusi, Annamaria. 1989. Post, post and post. Or, where is
South African literature in all this? ARIEL 20(4):79^95.
Chapman, Michael. 1996. Southern African literatures. London:
Longman.
Coetzee, J M.1997. Boyhood. New York: Viking.
ööö.1999. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg.
De Kock, Leon. 1997. An impossible history. Review of Michael
Chapman, Southern African literatures. English in
Africa 24(1):103^117.
Gordimer, Nadine. 1974. The conservationist. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Landow, George. 2000. English in Singapore and Malaysia:
an overview. http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/
post/singapore/people/language/english.html
Louw, Chris. 2000. Letter. http://www.litnet.co.za/seminaar/
chrisaandan.asp
Marais, Michael.1998. Writing with eyes shut: ethics, politics,
and the problem of the other in the fiction of J M Coetzee.
English in Africa 25(1):43^60.
Phillips, Fransi. 1996. Dan Roodt en die taalstryd. Beeld
(boeke),5.25July.
Roodt, Dan. 2000. Afrikaners kan nou hul saak stel. Kwana,
28 January-3 February:6.
ööö. 2000a. Die nuwe a-patriotisme. Fragmente 6:98^
103.
ööö. Die krisis van Suid-Afrikanerskap. http://www.
praag.org/opstelle1.htm (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die `glo' van globaal. http://www.praag.org/
opstelle7.htm(18October2000)
ööö. Globalisering en kultuur. http://www.praag.org/
opstelle8.htm (18 October 2000)
ööö. Nasiebou: 'n Europese les. http://www.praag.org/
opstelle11.htm (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die ANC se nostalgie vir rewolusie. http://
www.praag.org/opstelle12.htm (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die toekoms van Afrikaans. http://www.praag.org/
opstelle13.htm (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die nuwe `regs'. http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/
regs.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die groot Afrikaanse betoging. http://www.mweb.
co.za/litnet/gras/opmars.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö. Open letter to Dame Doctor Nadine Gordimer.
http://www/mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/nad.asp (18 October
2000)
ööö. Van Zyl Slabbert se Afrikaanse liberalisme. http://
www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/afrikaner.asp (18 October
2000)
ööö.Waarheid as ongelyke speelveld (deel1): 'n resensie
oordie WVK-verslag. http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/
wvk.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö.Perke van die politiek korrektes: J MCoetzee se Disgrace.
http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/disgrace.asp
(18 October 2000)
ööö. Oor groepe en groepvorming. http://www.mweb.
co.za/litnet/gras/groep63.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö. Die sloping van 'n hegemonie: 'n kritiek op litereª re
anglosentrisme. http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/gras/
anglos.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö. Oor twyfelliteratuur. http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet/
gras/twyfel.asp (18 October 2000)
ööö.Taal, landskap en identiteit. http://www.mweb.co.
za/litnet/gras/identiteit.asp (18 October 2000)
Smith, Malvern van Wyk.1990. Grounds of contest: a survey
of South African English literature. Kenwyn: Jutalit.
Visser, Nicholas.1997. Postcoloniality of a special type: theory
and its appropriations in South Africa. The yearbook of
English studies 27:79^94.
Walder, Dennis.1998. Post-colonial literatures in English: history
language theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
~27 .... ARTICLES

The trouble with Afrikaans
.............................................................
Afrikaans is starting
to emerge as a
legitimate unifying force
for members
of this community
who feel
marginalized in
post-apartheid
South Africa
ow would you describe the
~H.
present ferment around Afri-
......
kaans? What is Praag and the Group
of 63, and what are they fighting for
or against?
The present ferment around Afrikaans
can be related to at least two
factors, namely the position and
symbolism of Afrikaans in postapartheid
South Africa, and the continued
process of democratization in
South Africa.
As far as the first factor is concerned,
two remarks need to be made.
First, Afrikaans is in the process of
losing many of the higher-language
functions it has fulfilled for more than
125 years. Whereas the language has
undoubtedly shed much of its apartheid
political baggage, and is hence
prospering in the private and civil
domain (as, among other instances,
LEON DE KOCK INTERVIEWS JOHANN ROSSOUW
the everyday language of communication
and as language of arts and
culture), the same cannot, alas, be said
of the higher-language domain. In
commerce, education, law and
science, to name only four areas, the
language is letting blood, partly due
to the anglicization which comes with
globalization and partly due to an
overt policy of monolingualism pursued
by the current government,
particularly in the civil service and
public life. The same applies, in more
or less equal measure, to the official
African languages, where the increasing
neglect is even more pronounced.
The differences are, however, that
African languages have much less to
lose (admittedly due to the historical
neglect of these languages by the
apartheid government) and that Afrikaans
is South Africa's only fully
modernized indigenous language. The
question that is often asked is: `What
makes Afrikaans so special?' The
answer lies precisely in the fact that it
is our only fully modernized indigenous
language, a fact which has a lot to
do with Afrikaans speakers' efforts
long before apartheid as well as the
standardization of the language.
Further, partly due to the discredit
which Afrikaner nationalism has
brought to ethnicity as a rallying
~28 .... INTERVIEW
point for Afrikaners, and partly due
to a genuine effort at reconciliation
between white, coloured and black
speakers of the language, Afrikaans is
starting to emerge as a legitimate
unifying force for members of this
community who feel marginalized in
post-apartheid South Africa. This, it
could be argued, is the symbolic
charge of the language here and now.
As far as Praag and the Group of 63
are concerned: I think that Dan
Roodt, the leader of Praag, is better
qualified than I to describe them, but I
shall, nevertheless, for the purposes of
the interview, attempt to answer your
question.
Praag (Pro-Afrikaanse Aksiegroep)
was founded by Dan Roodt. It
originally intended to resist the denigration
of Afrikaans and the other
indigenous languages of South Africa
in the current dispensation, appealing
at first for a march on the Union
Buildings as a display of people's
power. Subsequently, this call seems
to have been dropped. The movement
has started to focus, rather, on Afrikaans
as such and in its latest newsletter
it speaks of the concept of
cultural autonomy, following on the
Belgian model, as a goal for the
Afrikaans-speaking community. De-

spite the fact that for nearly a decade several leading
Afrikaner intellectuals have warned against the new
pressures on the language, Dan Roodt has almost
single-handedly succeeded in relaunching this important
debate within the Afrikaans-speaking community.
This can be ascribed not only to his sometimes
brilliant post-colonial analyses of the current South
African situation, but also to his generally militant
and challenging tone. It must, however, be said that
my own discomfort with Praag is with some racist and
xenophobic tendencies in Roodt's latest public statements.
Here I refer in particular to a letter that he
published on September 22 on LitNet in which he
claimed that ``black'' culture is generally more
tolerant of acts like rape and murder than ``white,
Eurocentric'' culture.
The Group of 63 was born from an initiative
facilitated by Fragmente: Tydskrif vir Filosofie en
Kultuurkritiek, South Africa's only independent philosophy
journal, which maintains a strong focus on
cultural and social issues, especially globalization and
its effects on minorities. Fragmente thought that various
voices in the Afrikaans community
during 1999, of which ZB du
Toit's magisterial ``Die nuwe toekoms''
must be singled out, contributed
to giving a new and
heightened relevance to minority
politics as a progressive vehicle for
the Afrikaans-speaking community.
Thus, it initiated a summit
meeting at Hammanskraal from
May 5 to 7 to which academics,
writers and intellectuals who had,
according to Fragmente, acontribution
to make on this question,
were invited. The idea of the
summit was simply to facilitate a
strategic discussion around issues
facing the Afrikaans-speaking
community.
Contrary to all the organizers'
expectations, especially given the widely representative
range of voices that attended the meeting, a
The question that is often
asked is: `What makes
Afrikaans so special?' The
answer lies precisely in the
fact that it is our only fully
modernized indigenous
language, a fact which
has a lot to do with
Afrikaans speakers' efforts
long before apartheid as
well as the standardization
of the language
genuine, ecumenic ambience reigned during the
meeting and there was unanimous agreement that
an initiative had to be founded to develop the interests
of the Afrikaans-speaking as well as other religious,
linguistic and cultural minorities in South Africa and
elsewhere. A working committee was elected and
various projects were identified.
Mostly due to a lack of funding, it quickly became
apparent that the Group would have to focus its
attention mainly on intellectual interventions in the
public sphere. Hence we took a number of positions
on issues ranging from Afrikaans in public life to
racism and reconciliation. The Group has succeeded
within this relatively short space of time to establish
itself as a serious opinion-setter in Afrikaans, despite
its very minimal infrastructure. We have set up a
website, mostly an archive of our press releases and
writings of our members, which can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/groep63. Interested people
can also join our Email list. Due to a lack of
administrative capacity this is, sadly, the closest we
have come to some form of
membership, despite constant
requests from people who wish
to become members. We are,
however, committed to hosting
a follow-up summit no more
than a year after Hammanskraal,
where, I hope, some form
of structure with registered
membership may be established.
It seems to me there are two
different issues here. There is a
language issue and a political
issue. Praag and people sympathetic
to the Group of 63 have
lately taken President Mbeki to
task for his statement, in the
Oliver Tambo memorial lecture,
that whites are a `foreign ruling
class'. Many people, including
Leftist commentators such as Ebrahim Harvey in the
Mail & Guardian, feel a strong degree of discomfort
with the president's apparent obsession with race, and
~29 .... INTERVIEW

here the noises emanating from the camp
of new Afrikaner resistance will find
much support. In this area, the present
government's Milner-like `English-only'
campaign, which Dan Roodt and others
have lambasted, does indeed begin to
look like a sinister form of oppressive
singularity, a betrayal of the ANC's
founding desire to fight oppressive formations
of all kinds.
However, when it comes to `higherlanguage
functions', I for one would
want to ask the question: why this need
for `official' and `higher' language recognition?
This is where Afrikaans'
political baggage is most prominent.
Surely the `highest' language function is
to be found in literature and philosophy,
which by all counts is flourishing in
Afrikaans? Why this continuing need to
be `official', when the language's vitality
and true growth surely lie elsewhere?
It is also in this area that entities such
as Group of 63 and Praag seem to pick
up extremely undesirable bedfellows.
Without mentioning names, there are
some hideous old verkramptes now
nestling in these formations ± formations
which might otherwise be described
as forward-thinking. Do the new Afrikaans
resistance groups recognise this
tendency, and do they plan to cleanse
themselves of this very old stink? Or
would you disagree with my analysis in
this respect?
There are indeed two distinct issues
here, as you put it. But what is often
overlooked is that language and politics
can't be separated. How can you,
for example, speak of democracy when
the plurality of languages in a society is
denied? And how can you want to
develop poor parts of the country if
people are not addressed in their
mother-tongue?
Afrikaans is no exception to this
rule. In fact, the language would not be
where it is today if political struggles
were not part of its history. It was these
struggles that gave a new sense of
purpose to Afrikaners after the Anglo-
Boer War and which led to the
language's official recognition in 1928.
My contention is that current South
African historico-political debates suffer
from severe amnesia. This country's
history didn't start in 1994, nor did it
start in 1948. The fact that the language
became tainted by the politics
practised during the apartheid era does
not mean that we can, or should, now
disentangle the language from its political
associations. As naive as this
sounds, this is what commonly happens
at present.
This is directly related to the issue of
higher-language functions. For clarity's
sake I must state that, although I
also see literature and philosophy in
one sense as the `highest' function of
language, in the present context I am
speaking of the conventional sociolinguistic
meaning of the term, i.e.,
language as it functions in public life,
especially in institutional spheres such
as universities, courts of law and so on.
Now the astonishing thing is that
people, presumably due to the recent
political baggage of Afrikaans, are
apparently unable to realize what is
common currency in any informed
debate regarding the status of languages
elsewhere in the world, that is,
that no language can properly maintain
itself in the era of English-driven
~30 .... INTERVIEW
globalization without some form of
institutional protection. People can
write the most beautiful poetry or the
most perceptive philosophy, but this is
not, in and of itself, going to ensure
that one or two universities maintain
their official Afrikaans status, or that
Afrikaans remains a language of record
in court. What is often overlooked
is that the current boom of
Afrikaans culture and entertainment
would not have been possible without
the investments, official and monetary,
of the previous generations. Without
similar investments in the present,
where will the language stand in 20
years? Will I be able to write philosophy
in Afrikaans if some form of
standard Afrikaans is not maintained?
Since 1994 more than a third of
Afrikaans-medium schools have become
dual- or English-medium and this
tendency continues. This is a political
problem which poems alone will not
solve.
What needs to be done is that a new
politics of the future must be invented.
Here the metaphor of the Klein Karoo
Kunstefees is apt. When it began, it
was accused of being a laager: today it
is a model of Afrikaans inclusiveness
and reconciliation. The question is this:
how do you translate the cultural
energy of Oudtshoorn into political
terms? What would an Oudtshoorn of
Afrikaans political life look like?
This is precisely what we are attempting
from within the Group of 63:
creating a new ecumenical and forward-looking
civil movement. It is here
that your question regarding ``verkramptes''
is relevant. The answer to
this is relatively simple. Before 1994,
apartheid was the determining factor in

Afrikaans politics. Some people were opposed to it,
some wanted to reform it, some wanted to continue it,
and some were politically uninvolved because of it.
The Group of 63 accepts that with the demise of
apartheid a whole new political landscape has opened
up. We accept that people had their various reasons
for their political positions of the past, but that it
would serve no purpose to debate them in this new
political landscape. What counts now is one's
commitment to the new democratic order, to furthering
efforts at the incomplete democratization of South
Africa and to finding a meaningful place for the
Afrikaans community in this order.
In my personal capacity, as someone who is 30 and
was opposed to apartheid for the bit that it still
mattered (I was in my second year at university when
FW de Klerk made his famous speech of 2 February
1990), I am highly irritated by what I perceive as a
new moralism in Afrikaans politics, whereby those
who were opposed to apartheid (or claim to have
been) now claim the moral high ground and both act
as gatekeepers to the new politics and will not allow
any space for growth in people's opinions. This is
bluntly undemocratic and presumptuous.
~31 .... INTERVIEW

~I .......
Very morbid phenomena: ``Liberal Funk'',
the ``Lucy-syndrome'' and JM Coetzee's Disgrace Disgrace
.............................................................
Does Coetzee suggest
that white South Africans
must be prepared
to accept humiliation
by black South Africans
to the point of
abnegating
all social rights?
n JM Coetzee's Disgrace
(1999), the character Lucy
Lurie is raped by three black men on
her smallholding outside Salem in the
Eastern Province. For reasons that are
never directly articulated in the novel,
Lucy responds to her ordeal rather
enigmatically: she does not report the
rape to the police and she continues to
live on the smallholding without
attempting to secure the premises.
Critics in South Africa have responded
to Coetzee's depiction of the
rape and ensuing events in terms that
are predictable in a literary establishment
which seems, as a matter of
course, to reduce heterogeneous political,
social and literary positions to
the simplistic oppositions of race
politics. On the one hand, Coetzee has
been criticized for the supposed conservatism
or racism implicit in his
portrayal of the rape of a white
woman by black men. Although this
criticism is most evident in the African
National Congress's submission to the
MICHAEL MARAIS
Human Rights Commission's inquiry
into racism in the media, it can also be
seen in Michiel Heyns's dismissive
reference to Disgrace as a ``Liberal
Funk'' novel (2000), that is, as representative
of a sub-genre of the South
African novel that records liberal fear
at the marginalization of whites in the
post-apartheid period. On the other
hand, Coetzee's portrayal of Lucy
Lurie's passivity following her rape
has been read as exemplifying whites'
acceptance of their peripherality in the
``new'' South Africa. This interpretation
was first offered by Athol Fugard
and has since become something of an
orthodox response to the novel, which
is somewhat ironic, given that Fugard,
by his own admission at the time of
his comments, had not yet read the
novel:
I haven't read it, and I'm sure the writing is
excellent, ... but I could not think of anything
that would depress me more than
this book by Coetzee ^ Disgrace ^where
we've got to accept the rape of a white
woman as a gesture to all the evil we did in
the past.That's a load of bloody bullshit.
That white women are going to accept
being raped as penance for what was
done in the past? Jesus! It's an expression
of a very morbid phenomenon, very morbid.
(Fugard 2000)
In fact, this ``reading'' is now so
commonplace that Dan Roodt recently
suggested that the term ``Lucy-
~32 .... REVIEW ESSAY
syndrome'' be used to signify the
notion that white South Africans
should be prepared to abase themselves
in atoning for their collective
responsibility for apartheid. Witness,
in this regard, Roodt's response to
Carel Niehaus's appeal for such humility
on the part of white South
Africans:
Mnr. Niehaus se pleidooi vir `nederigheid'
deur die sogenaamde `wittes' is niks minder
as 'n aandrang daarop dat hulle moet
afstand doen van hul grondwetlike regte
en hulself onvoorwaardelik moet onderwerp
nie. Dit kan die `Lucy-sindroom' genoem
word, na aanleiding van Coetzee se
Disgrace waarna hy insgelyks verwys.
Lucy se denke is dermate aangetas deur
die ideologie van wit skuld dat sy Afrikanisering
verwelkom, en berus daarin dat sy
na willekeur verkrag mag word deur drie
jong swartes in 'n weª reld waar wetteloosheid
see« vier en waar die polisie en die
regstelsel gesien word as reste van 'n immorele
eurosentrisme. (2000:4)
Although at odds with each other in
many respects, both Heyns's and
Roodt's readings see Disgrace as
representing white marginality in
post-apartheid South African society.
While Heyns regards the novel as a
reactionary expression of white, liberal
``gripes'' in the face of black
empowerment, Roodt sees it as an
articulation of whites' acceptance of
their insignificance in the new dispensation.
Which interpretation is

accurate? Has Coetzee, whose entire oeuvre problematizes
South African liberalism and the sub-genre
of fiction writing that it has engendered, suddenly
converted to liberalism and become an exponent of
the liberal novel? Alternatively, has he captured, in
Disgrace, the mood of penance that has been
surfacing recently, highlighted by the revelations of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and
culminating in Carl Niehaus's ``declaration of
commitment by white South Africans,'' in terms of
which signatories acknowledge that they benefited
from apartheid? In his depiction of Lucy's apparent
``acquiescence'' in her violation, does Coetzee
suggest a politics of abasement for white South
Africans that is similar to that proposed by Karl
Jaspers in his views on the collective responsibility of
the German people for the excesses of the Nazis?
Does Coetzee suggest, that is, that white South
Africans must, as part of their analogous responsibility
for the depredations of apartheid, be prepared
to accept humiliation by black South Africans to the
point of abnegating all social rights?
One is hard pressed to find
textual justification for either of
these readings. What one does
find, however, is that Roodt's
reading of Lucy Lurie's abasement
is staged as a misreading in
the novel. In a pivotal passage,
David Lurie struggles to understand
his daughter's passivity and
eventually challenges her as follows:
I don't agree with what you are doing.
Do you think that by meekly accepting
what happened to you, you can
set yourselfapart from farmers like Ettinger?
Do you think what happened
here was an exam ^ if you come
through,yougetadiplomaandsafe
conduct into the future? Or some sign
you can now paint on the door-lintel
to make the plague pass you by?
(Coetzee1999:112)
Lucy responds to her father's challenge by telling
him that he has misunderstood her:
in depicting Lucy's
violation, Coetzee
clearly does ask
questions about race
relations in
post-apartheid
South Africa
``Stop it, David! ... I am not just trying to save my skin. If that
is what you think, you miss the point entirely'' (1999:112).
And when he continues his interrogation with the
questions, ``Is it some form of private salvation you
are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate
the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?''
(1999:112), she again, very pointedly, tells him that
he has misinterpreted her: ``No. You keep misreading
me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. Until
you make an effort to see that, I can't help you''
(1999:112).
What is interesting, here, is that this passage
forms a mise en abyme which prefigures the very
terms in which the text as a whole may be misread.
By means of David Lurie, the reader-figure in the
novel, Coetzee installs an interpretation of his work
that, in the context of South African literary
literalism, is quite obvious, and then very calculatedly
undermines it. Why does he do this? It seems to
me that, in depicting Lucy's violation, Coetzee
clearly does ask questions about race relations in
post-apartheid South Africa. However, Lucy's
rejection of her father's facile
interpretation of her apparent
acquiescence in her violation ±
that is, the manner in which
Coetzee asks these questions ±
warns against answers that fall
within those simplistic dualisms
(Europe: Africa, colonizer: colonized
and white: black) that
shaped the apartheid era and
which persist in the post-apartheid
period.
How are we to read Lucy
Lurie's passivity without, like
her father, ``missing the point
entirely''? The difficulty in answering
this question is that
Coetzee provides no obvious
corrective to Lurie's reading.
There is, however, one fairly
obvious way of tracing the
question which the novel implicitly asks in staging
Lucy's passivity and her father's response to it, and
that is to place the rape scene in its philosophical
context in the text, that is, in the Hegelian relation of
dominance and subservience which Coetzee so often
~33 .... REVIEW ESSAY

draws upon in his fictional reworkings
of the plaasroman.
In his critical writing, Coetzee has
located in the genre of the plaasroman
an anxiety about the rights of white
ownership in the colonial context ± an
anxiety which is evident in the virtual
exclusion of black labour from the
pastoral idyll that is usually invoked
by texts in this genre. This ``silence
about the place of black labour,''
Coetzee suggests, ``represents a failure
of imagination before the problem of
how to integrate the dispossessed
black man into the idyll'' (1988:71). In
those of Coetzee's novels that invoke
the plaasroman ± for instance, In the
heart of the country and Life & times
of Michael K ± the place of black
labour is not concealed but revealed in
the portrayal of relations on the farm.
What is significant about the foregrounding
of race relations in these
texts (apart from the evident economic
disparities), is that they usually
follow a discernible pattern, that is,
they are developed in terms of a
suspended or failed dialectic of recognition.
In order properly to establish
this point, and to trace its
implications, it is necessary briefly to
summarize Hegel's argument on the
problem of recognition among selfconscious
individuals which determines
relational modes within society.
Hegel argues that the real issue
underpinning humanity's struggle
with nature for cognitive and technological
mastery is self-knowledge and
independence (1977:145±158). When
an individual who has asserted his/her
independence by pitting him/herself
against nature encounters another
such individual, his/her autonomy is
challenged, and Hegel contends that
such an individual may seek to solve
this problem by eliminating the challenger.
This ``life-and-death struggle,''
however, turns out to be a false
solution, because what the challenger
contests is not so much the other
individual's independence as his/her
legitimacy. And, in the absence of the
challenger, there is thus no-one left to
affirm that legitimacy (Hegel
1977:113±115).
As a solution to the problem of
independence and recognition, in Hegel's
terms, enslavement constitutes
an advance on the life-and-death
struggle: while the loser remains alive,
the victor gains both independence
and recognition (1977:115±119).
However, this relation of dominance
and subservience is fundamentally
unstable and ``self-frustrating'' (Findlay
1977:xvii), since the master can
never know whether the recognition
that ``he'' receives is a function of
``his'' reduction of the challenger to an
extension of ``his'' will. The problem,
here, is that the master's ``truth of his
certainty of himself'' (Hegel 1977:116±
117) is grounded in this enforced
recognition and is thus relative and
contingent. Hegel explains this point
as follows: ``What now really confronts
him is not an independent
consciousness, but a dependent one.
He is, therefore, not certain of beingfor-self
as the truth of himself. On the
contrary, his truth is in reality the
unessential consciousness and its unessential
action'' (Hegel 1977:116±
117). On the other hand, the slave
may realize that it is through his/her
labour that nature is dominated and,
accordingly, that the master is super-
~34 .... REVIEW ESSAY
fluous (1977:117±119). Rebellion is
thus endemic in the very structure of
this relationship.
Hegel's concern with the problem
of recognition is that it defines social
relationships: indeed, it determines the
course of history. In Hegel's view, the
violence of history is precisely a
function of individuals vainly attempting
to satisfy their desire for
recognition. The only way of breaking
out of this cycle is by bringing an end
to the entire struggle for affirmation.
This is where the dialectical nature of
Hegel's thought becomes evident:
apart from the struggle to the death
and domination, a third kind of
relation may exist among self-conscious
individuals; namely, community
or, more precisely, the reciprocal
recognition of independence which
leads to community (1977:104±138).
Hegel's real concern thus is with how
a genuine community which is informed
by ``Spirit,'' that is, an `` `I'
that is `We' and `We' that is `I' ''.
might arise (1977:110). Only a mutual
recognition of independence, that is,
an acknowledgement by each individual
of the other's right to exist, can
bridge the gap between the ``I'' and
the other ``I'' and thereby end the
struggle for affirmation. In fact, according
to Hegel, such mutual recognition
is the actual point of this
struggle: throughout, each party has
failed to realize that recognition must
come from an individual whose independence
has itself been acknowledged.
Coetzee's use of Hegel in his depiction
of relations in his reworkings
of the plaasroman suggests that he sees
relations in the colonial context as

eing determined by the need for affirmation. In
terms of this concern, his writing is fairly typical of
much post-colonial writing that focuses on the ways
in which the colonizer asserts and maintains a
culturally-conferred subjectivity (and thereby confirms
his/her knowledge of civilized superiority) by
domesticating colonial difference. What is not
typical of such writing, though, is Coetzee's attempt
to resolve the problem of recognition that installs
those relations and dualisms that determine the
course of colonial and post-colonial history. Now, it
is exactly this concern with bringing an end to the
struggle for affirmation that is foregrounded by his
allusions to Hegel's dialectic of recognition in In the
heart of the country. In this novel, Coetzee does not
simply characterize the relationship between Magda,
her father and the servants as one of dominance and
subservience. If anything, the emphasis in his
portrayal of this relationship is ultimately on
Magda's desire for equality. Thus, she expresses
her longing for ``words of true exchange, wisselbare
woorde'' (Coetzee 1978:101) and wishes to be a kind
of a synthesis: ``The medium, the median ... .
Neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child,
but the bridge between, so that in me the contraries
should be reconciled!'' (1978:133). By implication,
what Magda desires here is the end of history ± if
one subscribes to the view that history is determined
by a cycle of domination and counter-domination in
which individuals who strive to fulfil their need for
recognition are entrapped. In other words, she
aspires to that state which Coetzee, in his discussion
of Harmonie in Pauline Smith's The beadle, refers to
as ``the achievement of an ideal equilibrium or stasis
or finality in social relations such as could survive
forever'' (1988:67). As Coetzee points out, though,
the idyll of Harmonie, which is grounded in the
occlusion rather than acknowledgement of black
labour, belongs to the past. What one finds in In the
heart of the country, by contrast, is desire and not
nostalgia. Magda's desire is futural, always yet to be
fulfilled: she wishes to transfigure relations on the
farm. Quite emphatically, as Hendrik's assertion of
power over her in raping her indicates, her attempts
to resolve the struggle for recognition fail. Instead of
a dialectical movement, there is a mere inversion of
the terms in the relation of dominance and
subservience. As Magda puts it, ``There has been
no transfiguration. What I long for, whatever it is,
does not come'' (Coetzee 1978:113). She is thus
unable to transcend the cycle of domination and
counter-domination that determines the course of
the farm's history.
Coetzee's depiction of the problem of recognition
in his description of Lucy Lurie's relationship to
Petrus on the smallholding in Disgrace proceeds
along similar lines to Magda's relationship to
Hendrik and Klein-Anna: that is, as a failed dialectic
of recognition. Indeed, Disgrace stages the same
desire to resolve the struggle for affirmation that is
found in In the heart of the country. The first
indication that this is the case emerges in Coetzee's
invocation of the staples of the plaasroman. So, for
example, Lucy is directly associated with the ethos
of the plaasroman when her father reflects that she is
on the farm ``because she loves the land and the old,
landliche way of life'' (Coetzee 1999:113). And, in his
following description, it becomes apparent that she
is part of a South African literary topos that can be
traced back to the nineteenth century: ``Now here
she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house
full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing
at farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou''
(1999:60).
Interestingly, Lucy Lurie describes her relationship
with Petrus in terms that are nominally divested
of power. For example, she initially terms Petrus her
``assistant'' and then qualifies this euphemism with
the word ``co-proprietor'' (1999:62). Later, she says
that she is unable to ``order Petrus about. He is his
own master'' (1999:114). In having Lucy claim its
absence, Coetzee is, of course, pointing to the
presence of the problem of recognition in this
relationship. Lucy's denial signifies a desire to
transcend the cycle of domination and counterdomination
that determines the course of history. In
short, she desires the end of history, the attainment
of stasis in social relations.
As in the earlier novel, Coetzee systematically
~35 .... REVIEW ESSAY

problematizes his female character's
desire to resolve the problem of
recognition in her life on the farm.
Unlike the Karoo farm in Life & times
of Michael K, which, in the course of
K's stay, is described as ``a pocket
outside time'' (Coetzee 1983:82), that
is, as a locus removed from the
struggle for power which generates the
history of the society beyond its
precincts, the smallholding in Disgrace
is always depicted as being
firmly situated in a history of conflict.
In itself, Coetzee's choice of geographical
locale, that is, the Salem area of
the Eastern Province, invokes a history
of frontier wars waged on the
issue of land between the British
settlers and the Xhosa people in the
nineteenth century. Moreover, this
history is directly referred to by David
Lurie's comment on ``old Kaffraria''
(Coetzee 1999:122) and his remarks
on his daughter's settler-like lifestyle:
Dogs and a gun; bread in the oven and a
crop in the earth. Curious that he and her
mother, cityfolk, intellectuals, should have
produced this throwback, this sturdy
young settler. But perhaps it was not they
who produced her: perhaps history had
the larger share. (1999:61);
She talks easily about these matters. A
frontier farmer of the new breed. In the old
days, cattle and maize.Today, dogs and
daffodils.The more things change the
more they remain the same. History repeating
itself, though in a more modest
vein. (1999:62)
Lucy Lurie's description of her
relationship with Petrus as one that is
ostensibly divested of power is therefore
placed in the context of a history
that has been defined by that imperial
permutation of the master-servant
bond: the relationship between (European)
colonizer and (African) colonized.
And, as the novel proceeds, it
becomes increasingly apparent that
this history of violent conflict is still in
progress and that it is played out, in
miniature, on the smallholding. So, in
fact, there is little evidence of a mutual
recognition of independence in Lucy's
relationship with Petrus. For instance,
Petrus describes the nature of his
involvement with Lucy in significantly
less neutral terms than she does: he is
her servant, her ``gardener and dogman''
(1999:64). This revelation, together
with its tone of resentment,
intimates that Petrus's material ambitions
should be read not simply in
economic terms, but in the context of
a desire for recognition. In this regard,
it is noteworthy that, in the course of
the novel, Petrus progressively takes
over the farm. Thus, David Lurie
reflects as follows: ``Against this new
Petrus what chance does Lucy stand?
Petrus arrived as the dig-man, the
carry-man, the water-man. Now he is
too busy for that kind of thing. Where
is Lucy going to find someone to dig,
to carry, to water? Were this a chess
game, he would say that Lucy has
been outplayed on all fronts''
(1999:151).
The discrepancy between Lucy
Lurie and Petrus's perception of their
relationship points to the former's
desire to achieve mutual recognition
and community, and to the fact that
this desire remains unfulfilled in the
novel. In other words, what Coetzee
sketches out in this text is a failed
dialectic of recognition. Although
Lucy does not see herself as a term in
a power relation, she is one. Her
desire for community is overtaken by
the struggle for affirmation that determines
the events that form the
history of which she is a part. It
~36 .... REVIEW ESSAY
follows that she finds herself in a
remarkably similar position to Magda
who, in In the Heart of the Country, is
ultimately unable to renegotiate her
relationship to Hendrik and Klein-
Anna and is, instead, ineluctably
reduced to a term in a relationship of
dominance and subservience. Moreover,
in Disgrace, as in the earlier
novel, Lucy's failure to transfigure
relations on the smallholding is
marked by an assertion of power in
the form of rape. Indeed, as David
Lurie's following reference to the
rapists indicates, the rape of Lucy is
not only an assertion of power, but
also one that occurs in the specifically
Hegelian context of a struggle for
affirmation: ``Slavery. They want you
for their slave'' (1999:159). To this
assertion, Lucy Lurie responds elliptically:
``Not slavery. Subjection.
Subjugation'' (1999:159). Significantly,
there are numerous suggestions
that Petrus may be implicated in
the rape of Lucy and, at the end of the
novel, she is on the point of handing
over her title deeds to him in exchange
for his protection. She explains Petrus's
offer of marriage in the following
way to her father: ``Petrus is not
offering me a church wedding followed
by a honeymoon on the Wild
Coast. He is offering an alliance, a
deal. I contribute the land, in return
for which I am allowed to creep in
under his wing. Otherwise, he wants
to remind me, I am without protection,
I am fair game'' (1999:203).
Thereafter, she instructs her father to
propose an arrangement in terms of
which she signs the land over to
Petrus, but retains the house and
thereby effectively becomes ``a tenant
on his land'', a ``bywoner'' (1999:204).

In Disgrace, then, Coetzee stages a desire to resolve
the struggle for affirmation that has determined the
history of apartheid and which, the novel clearly
implies, continues to manage those interactions
between people that shape the events that constitute
history in the post-apartheid period. More specifically,
he stages the thwarting of this desire and
therefore, in Hegelian terms, an incomplete dialectic
of recognition. Clearly, the rape of Lucy and her
apparent acquiescence in this violation are depicted as
moments within this failed dialectic and are therefore
part of the larger question that is raised by the text's
portrayal of an incomplete dialectical movement: that
is, how may mutual recognition be achieved? What
can bring an end to the cycle of domination and
counter-domination, through which individuals
vainly attempt to satisfy their desires for recognition,
that determines the course of South African history?
What we do know from the novel is that recognition
cannot be achieved through a power struggle, as
this would merely perpetuate the cycle of domination
and counter-domination. If read in this context, Lucy
Lurie's passivity may be seen as a refusal to remain in
the oppositional position relative to the rapists that
she is forced to occupy at the time of the rape. As her
following words indicate, what horrified her most
during the rape itself was the realization that her
rapists hated her personally without ever having
known her as a person: ``It was so personal ... . It
was done with such personal hatred. That was what
stunned me more than anything. The rest was ...
expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set
eyes on them'' (1999:156). Of course, it is the
oppositional position of historical antagonist into
which she has been coerced which enables these
strangers to `know' her. In total disregard for her
singularity as an individual, her difference, they
recognize and respond to the stereotype with which
they have forced her to conform.
David Lurie misses this point and its manifold
implications. Accordingly, he is of the opinion that his
daughter should oppose her assailants: ``They ought
to instal bars, security gates, a perimeter fence, as
Ettinger has done. They ought to turn the farmhouse
into a fortress. Lucy ought to buy a pistol and a twoway
radio, and take shooting lessons'' (1999:113).
What he does not realize, is that were Lucy to do this,
were she to wait for the `barbarians' in this way, she
would be endorsing the oppositional position that was
imposed upon her by the rapists. Through her
passivity, in other words, she resists a form of
resistance that would require of her to remain a term
in an opposition which violates her difference.
Lucy Lurie's passivity is thus premised on a
recognition that, in part, at least, she has been raped
not only by three black men, but by ``history speaking
through them'' (1999:156). Her passivity is precisely
an action that resists the terms of this history and
thereby refuses to supplement it. Through her
passivity, she refuses to perpetuate the cycle of
domination and counter-domination out of which
colonial history erects itself.
Is one to assume, then, that the novel suggests that
passivity is a means of ending the struggle for
affirmation? Not at all. Nonetheless, Lucy Lurie's
passivity is comparable to the silence of, say, Michael
K and Friday. It is an index to an otherness that,
despite having been violated, cannot be contained.
That is, it points to a difference which exceeds
attempts at containment within the violently reductive
antinomies that are a feature of colonial relationships.
In suggesting Lucy's excessive alterity in this way, the
novel of course exposes the violence of the relation of
power in which the self routinely constitutes and then
maintains itself as a subject by negating the difference
of the other person.
In fact, the novel indicates that a recognition of the
other person's independence can never be achieved
within a relationship that is structured in a manner
which forces other beings to serve a specular function.
However, the novel's focus on Lucy Lurie's
excessive alterity does not simply imply, contra Hegel,
that the master-servant relation cannot modulate into
community. In foregrounding the way in which
Lucy's alterity exceeds attempts at containment,
~37 .... REVIEW ESSAY

Coetzee also points to the existence of that which
exists beyond history, which history fails to negate,
and which therefore may be acknowledged if one is
able to bracket the presuppositions of history. If one
is able to acknowledge this radical alterity, one will
have recognized the independence of the other being.
Indeed, it is only through a self-effacing acknowledgement
of and respect for the other person's
difference that one can recognize that person's
independence.
Without offering a political programme, Disgrace
therefore does imply what is needed if one is to
address the endless struggle for affirmation that
determines colonial and post-colonial history. It
proposes a renegotiation of interpersonal relations
which would install respect for the otherness of other
beings and thereby obviate the possibility of violence.
In terms of this theory, political change is an
inevitable function of change within the subject. A
self which structures itself as a subject in terms of
responsibility for the other simply cannot engage in
endless struggles for affirmation. Whether or not one
agrees with this ethical philosophy, the novel requires
the reader to think beyond conventional antinomies
which, as it shows, threatens still to determine our
interactions and thus our history. By implication, it
requires the reader to imagine possibilities of being
and belonging with difference that are excluded by
these dualisms. To read the novel merely as a
manifestation of ``Liberal Funk'' or as an articulation
of a politics of white abasement is therefore to reduce
it to a term in precisely those dualisms that it
questions and seeks to destabilize. Such readings are
not simply to be dismissed as exercises in flag-waving.
At a more fundamental level, they evince a failure of
historical imagination.
Works cited
Coetzee, JM.1978. In the heart of the country. Johannesburg:
Ravan.
ööö.1983. Life & times of Michael K. Johannesburg: Ravan.
ööö.1988. Farm novel and plaasroman. In: White writing:
on the culture of letters in South Africa.NewHaven:Radix:
63^81.
ööö.1999. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg
Findlay, JN. 1977. Foreword to Hegel, GWF. Trans. AV. Miller.
Phenomenology of spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fugard: 2000. I don't want to live in the past. The Sunday Independent.
22 January. Independent online. Online.
http://www.iol.co.za/general/newsview. (15 Jan 2001).
Hegel, GWF.1977 [1807] Trans. A V Miller. Phenomenology of
spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heyns, M. 2000. Something to support after a life of opposition.
Rev. of Andre Brink'sThe rights of desire.The Sunday
Independent, 20 September.
Roodt, Dan. 2000. Brief aan Beeld oor Carel Niehaus se
anachronistiese tirade. Praag. Online.
http://www.praag.org/briewe.htm. (22 Nov. 2000).
~38 .... REVIEW ESSAY

The metaphysics of snails and other sentient beings
.............................................................
One certainly can have
~I .......
enough of Carapace
magazine's whimsical,
quirky meditations
on snail-ness, but one
can scarcely have
enough, in a country
which takes
itself way too
seriously, of whimsy
and quirkiness
'm submitting a new entry
for The Guinness book of
records: the greatest number of snail
poems written in any one country, or
by any one person. South Africa would
win (so to speak) hands down, entirely
due to the inspiration of Gus Ferguson.
Some people seem to be irritated
by this influence. This is churlish. One
certainly can have enough of Carapace
magazine's whimsical, quirky meditations
on snail-ness, but one can scarcely
have enough, in a country which
takes itself way too seriously, of
whimsy and quirkiness.
Other South African poets have
striven for humour, but none with the
stylistic finesse and philosophical
depth of Ferguson. Others have also
ROBIN MALAN.THE PICK OF SNAILPRESS POEMS. CAPE TOWN: DAVID PHILIP.
STRESSED-UNSTRESSED: THE BEST OF GUS FERGUSON. CAPE TOWN: DAVID PHILIP.
ARJA SALAFRANCA.THEFIREINWHICHWEBURN. DYEHARD PRESS.
SUSAN RICH.THE CARTOGRAPHER'S TONGUE.WHITE PINE PRESS.
DAN WYLIE
tried publishing poetry, but none with
the stylistic finesse, dedication and
love that Ferguson has. His birthing,
under various imprints, of some 90
volumes ± 43 represented in Robin
Malan's Snailpress selection ± is a
huge achievement amongst South
Africa's tenuous small-press enterprises.
Ferguson's influence has extended,
and continues to extend, far
beyond mere snail poems.
I wonder if there has ever been a
Borgesian ``Anthology of Anthologies.''
Or at least an anthology of
prefaces to anthologies? Anthologies
in South Africa have had a rough ride,
stretched on the rack of political
absurdities and conflicting ``correctnesses.''
(Remember the Heart in exile
furore.) One could usefully compare
their introductions and self-defences.
In this company, the prefatory notes
to The pick of Snailpress poems are
mercifully short, mercifully obvious.
And astonishingly ± perhaps significantly
± free of politics.
No carping over the personal bias in
Malan's selection is necessary. This
goes, too, for Ferguson's personal
biases as publisher. Yes, the poetry has
been uneven. This is because Ferguson
has been brave enough to nurture
likely talents, even when some of their
~39 .... REVIEW ESSAY
poems are, frankly, feeble. He has also
(as Patricia Davison points out in the
brief introduction) almost by default
acquired a smattering of the doyens ±
Abrahams, Cullinan, Maclennan ±
who are still producing, in my view, the
pithiest poetry in the country.
This last statement will be controversial,
of course. Rob Berold, for
example, will argue, not without
justice, that the cutting edge of poetry
is to be found amongst our young
black poets, and that the ``old mainstream''
simply doesn't understand
what's happening. Those young black
poets, and a parallel stream of white
``experimental poets'', are not included
in the Snailpress line-up.
Bunch of fuddy-duddies!
Is this something to be deplored?
Not necessarily. No one has the right
to dictate what kind of poetry should
be written, and I doubt whether anyone
has the omniscience to know
exactly what's going to prove most
important. One can make a persuasive
case, for instance, that the development
of the inner self, a global mode
of apprehension, or the evolving
dynamics of a-marital love, infinitesimally
slow though these developments
are, will prove to be vastly more
socially influential and sustained than

even the most dramatic of, say, political flurries. Lyric
poetry, precisely because it's ``inward-looking,'' can
be seen as the primary witness to these deep
groundswells of social change and meaning.
All this poetry deserves to be out there; it will
flourish or sink according to perceptions of its worth.
No point killing it in the womb. There's space for it
all. Yes, there's a seriously limited readership; but the
readership won't be expanded by stifling poetry under
a pillow of normative conventions ± and I include
here the convention that only experimentation has
real worth. The charge that Ferguson has overdone it,
produced too much, engineered an ``artificial readership,''
is absurd. We're not talking about fashions
amongst kids' toys here, but an almost invariably
loss-making enterprise which at every level requires
courage and commitment. Poetry is an artform
struggling to swim in an acid-bath environment of
non-readers on the one hand and viciously discriminating
readers on the other. Out of interest and
support I'll acquire Snailpress volumes ± and anyone
else's I can find. This doesn't make me feel ``artificial''
in the least, any more than Harry Potter's audience is
``artificial.'' I don't feel artificial even when I read
crap in the Eastern province herald. People read
because they want to, and because they can.
All that said, certain discriminating generalizations
might be of value. There are some striking features
about this Pick of Snailpress selection, and they are
features of constraint ± or, less charitably, narrowness.
One narrowness is thematic. Of the 80 poems in
Malan's selection, almost all relate some personal
experience. The autobiographical voice is paramount.
Almost all focus on, or are focussed through, very
everyday activities: embroidery, washing, circumcision,
driving, getting sick. Roughly a quarter are
about family relationships, mostly child and parent.
Maybe 16 are about personal love relationships; a
similar number are about ageing and death. Virtually
all are set within a very small physical compass ±
bedroom, suburb, a specific landscape, a tight social
group ± and are almost unremittingly realistic. Only a
small number deal explicitly with the ``New South
Africa'', political transition, and black-white rela-
tions. Of the poems that treat contact between white
poet and black person, there's a striving to see the
latter as equal in some way, a tendency even to
suppress the race issue altogether. In this rather
monotonous landscape of lyric intensity, Keith
Gottschalk's poem ``Teaching political science'',
pounding with rhythms more characteristic of 1980s
protest poetry, stands out like a lone flashing blue
light in a Soweto taxi-rank.
Nothing wrong with all this, as I've said, unless one
is looking, Government-wise, for a forced representativeness
of national issues and populations. But it says
something, I think, about where a major strand of
South African poetry has turned in the course of the
1990s. In part, I guess, it's evidence that lyric
inwardness is, at last, kosher again, doesn't have to
be apologized for. Honest self-examination is, rightly,
deeply important to these poets.
Still, I found myself longing to be liberated from
another narrowness: a certain commonality of style, a
sameness of free-verse easiness, of deliberate contemplative
coherence, of narrative straightforwardness.
I longed to be enlivened by some obvious
experiment, some wild failure, a fantasy. I wanted to
be compelled to make some radical leaps of interpretative
connection. Though I have no visceral
affection for them myself, I longed for the verbal
inventiveness of a Rampolokeng or a Nyezwa. I
longed to see someone really grappling with form
(knowing that Brettell and Eppel do, in poems not
included in this selection). I wanted something less
spelled out (Adam Schwartzmann, and Stewart
Conn's ``Outsider'', come close to being satisfyingly
elliptic, but interestingly they're hardly South African).
Where is our Amichai, our new Sidney Clouts? I
wanted more that was unrestrainedly passionate,
instead of all these difficult, tangential, over-considered
nuances of half-love. Where is our Neruda? I
wanted something thick with intellect and ideas and
reading (Michael Cope's ``Rain'' is full of reading, but
it's rather strained). I wanted more poetry that
encompasses many worlds and histories and disciplines
other than the self-consciously poetic and
merely deftly observed, that has an epic dimension.
~40 .... REVIEW ESSAY

Where is our Walcott? And there's
almost nothing about the violent evil
that courses through all our lives and
environments (Cope's ``Uvongo'' and
Mzi Mahola's ``In memoriam Sizwe
Kondile'' being two exceptions).
Where is our Hughes?
There is very little in this collection
(and I include my own poems in this
judgement) that is truly ambitious.
Much that is highly readable, sympathetic,
tight, touching, solid, even
excellent ± Maclennan's ``The poetry
lesson'', Sandra Meyer's ``Porpoise'',
Ingrid de Kok's ``Mending'' are
among my favourites. Much that is
sentient, little that's sententious. But
ambitious ± no.
And I longed for more humour. An
injection, perhaps, of the man responsible.
Fortunately, David Philip
have produced another very welcome,
appropriate and necessary tribute to
Gus Ferguson, Stressed-Unstressed.
Ferguson, for all his whimsy, is not
to be underestimated. A good deal of
sharp critique and philosophical
thinking underlies his squibs. He's not
afraid to tackle the nature of the
universe itself. In one characteristic,
scrappily charming drawing, the mock
Japanese script that hovers above two
seated monks like pipe-smoke is
``translated'': ``If the universe can be
viewed as a text, then life is a typo''.
This is at once a recognition of the
world's faultiness, a comment on
language itself, a poke at postmodernist
theories about reality, and a sly
mockery of the poet's own predilection
for the Zen-like aphorism.
Many of Ferguson's gently satirical
jabs are directed at the pretensions of
ease with which human beings stave
off the uncertainty of the cosmos, its
tyrannies of time and space. We are,
in effect, figured as the ``Cosmick
carp'', adrift in a watery universe that
``has no sides,/ Circumference or
rim.'' Liberty, it turns out, is paradoxically
oppressive: ``Infinity describes
his cage ±/ A gaol is what he's
in./ He harbours secret fantasies/ For
tether, stake and lock .../ [for] A tiny
goldfish bowl''. On the other hand,
ease itself crushes: ``The monotonous
perfection/ Of this paradisal pond
sucks'', as the frog wittily croaks in
``Only one life he croaked''.
In this kind of paradoxical oscillation,
attitude is all. Ferguson's poetry
is suffused with the aphoristic selfmockery
of the Zen Buddhist who is
unfailingly rigorous in form but can't
quite take what he says seriously. This
is different from treating serious
issues, though. Hence Ferguson can,
with barely-laughed-away alarm and
a snarl, lament the culture of cars
which has made ``Cyclists of the
crepuscule'' an endangered species,
while using other aspects of modern
(particularly computer) technology to
punchy or winsome effect.
On the death of an old computer
Ascii to Ascii,
Dos to Dos.
I believe that God
encrypted the universe
for fear of hackers.
Ferguson is not about to allow
himself to become mechanistic: to his
bloodless machine he says, ``You're
never bored, but can't regret/ Not
~41 .... REVIEW ESSAY
wanting what you cannot get''
(``Liveware blues''). At the same time,
machinery sometimes echoes ± indeed
is an extension of ± our own desires for
pattern: ``His ECG scans perfectly,/De
dum de dum de dum'' (``Light Verse at
the end of the tunnel'').
Ferguson himself also scans perfectly;
he is a craftsman of a high
order. The rhythms are the essence of
his jauntiness, his fundamental equanimity
in the face of a universe which
``eternally/Envelops death and life;/
Both trouble and tranquillity,/ Harmony
and strife.'' What might border
on complacent cliche is constantly
destabilized by the irruptions of mystery,
the sense of a never-ending
unfolding, life's capacity for surprise
that shatters the poet's own aphoristic
sermonizing, like the starlings that
disrupt his lecture in the self-deprecating
``The walls of Redwing''.
Despite the irrepressible frivolity,
there's an undertow of regret at
human folly in much of the poetry,
and an almost Romantic reaching for
equanimity in the lyrical evocations of
nature. There are lyric poems in this
volume, too, for which Ferguson is
less well-known. Perhaps rightly:
alongside the others, they seem to lack
bite, their metaphors are mild and
unforceful when compared to the
sharp allegories of the more satirical
poems. At times, though, they are
lovely: the poem ``Pebbles'', while its
couplets still border on the comic,
ends beautifully: ``A flustered tide that
rolls and kneads/ Its oceanic worrybeads''.
In these quieter lyric moments,
there's a sense of Ferguson
reining in, pausing, like his ``Plover'',

to ``lift impatience to a state of grace'', to take
appreciative stock of an ecology larger than the
merely human.
The reference in ``Pebbles'' to ``worry-beads'' also
alerts us to a dimension of Ferguson's poetry easily
skimmed: its wide-ranging allusiveness, taking in (to
make a random selection) Biblical myths, Samurai
culture, Fascism, karmic law, plant biology, semiotic
theory, feminist paranoias, Greek myths, Hindu
literature, fugues, Dante and Donne, Joyce and
Hopkins and Basho. A generosity of reference most
of us would, or should, envy.
In sum, here is a generous soul, self-consciously
posing as wise and equally self-consciously undermining
himself, metalinguistic, delighting in disorder
as well as pattern. Ferguson's metaphysic is that of
the snail: spiritual as well as spirited without being
religiously sectarian or hectoring, somewhat portentously
humble, attentive to everything, all but selfless,
slightly defensive. Humour is the shell against the
slings and arrows of outrageous seriousness, but
beneath it one can detect the vulnerable flesh
palpitating. Ferguson accepts on the one hand the
unfathomable, even idiotic mystery of life, a universe
committed to ``A schizoid urge to generate/ Its own
diaspora'' (``The amoeba is immortal''), but whose
patterns are reflected in our own propensities:
So let us praise while yet we may
Those things that take the tortuous way,
Which twist and turn spontaneously
To stem the trend to entropy.
In contrast to this playful reach, this profusion of
personae, this courting of the archaic forms of poetry
for contemporary purpose, Arja Salafranca's poems
exhibit many of the features I identified as typical of
the The pick of Snailpress. Salafranca's poems in The
fire in which we burn are uniformly focussed on
relationship, on the body. They are free-verse, deadly
serious, uncompromizingly autobiographical, visceral.
They are shorn of intellectualizing and of overt
ideas: were it not for passing references to music and
cafe s, you would hardly guess she lived in a ``culture''
at all. They are unified in tone ± sad, embittered, selfabsorbed.
Salafranca has no shell; hers is a metaphysic
of faithless and injured desire.
The title comes from Star trek; the final lines of the
final poem capture the premature nostalgia of a
young woman too often hurt: ``The past doesn't die,
can't die,/ it's the fire in which we burn''. Salafranca
ruminates, at times with the obsessive observation
(but little of the metaphoric density) of a Sylvia Plath,
on the nuances of bruising love and (mostly) loss of
love. Tiny, conventional motions resonate with
emotional significance:
He drinks wine,
sniffing it before he drinks.
Ipushthesplintery
bones to one side of my plate
as this man
tucks into his scarlet pasta sauce.
The curtains billow,
the only other table is
occupied by two couples.
(``Twenty five'')
But they resonate only in context: this poem comes
alive, not through its language, which is deadpan,
Raymond Carver-like (if not downright drab), but more
in its connections with the numerous other gastronomic
metaphors in other poems: ``I'm turning to substitutes,/
getting fat on the lard/ of what happened ... I gnaw like
there is no tomorrow'' (``I feast on the past''). In the
extract from ``Twenty five'' above, the symbolism of
action is largely allowed to speak for itself, with a
satisfying subtlety. At other times, the language of
directness can collapse into near-vapidity:
I lie staring at the blinking
clock, feeling guilt and hurt
and deceit course through me.
I clutch at myself in desperation.
But there is no one ...
(``The cold'')
Sigh. This sounds like someone who hasn't quite
grown out of the ``teenagers'' she knows still live on
inside her increasingly, prematurely cynical psyche
(``That hunger'').
~42 .... REVIEW ESSAY

When Salafranca does step out of
herself, it is to make perhaps too selfconscious
a point, especially in the
two poems about fat women, ``The
bruise'' and ``Fat girls in Des
Moines''. The former seems particularly
laboured. Salafranca is perhaps
at her best when she releases herself
into something closer to the surreal, as
in the compact ``Where we're at'':
It's where we're at:
trees coming out of breasts,
men dancing naked.
Buds growing
out from necks
where heads should be.
But then the poem clunks into the
obvious: ``And so we flower on/ ±
tentatively reaching out to the new
century,/ trying to be adults''.
Nevertheless, Salafranca is generally
to be commended for her economy
of language and image, and for
clarity of observation. She's a sentient
being with an almost terrifying sensitivity
to the nuances of withdrawal
and suburban self-disgust.
Hugely more satisfying is Susan
Rich's extraordinary debut volume,
The cartographer's tongue. It would be
too easy to say that this is because she
is not South African. Rich's connection
with this country is tenuous,
having come out here as a Fulbright
Fellow, given some readings, and
produced one or two ``South African''
poems which appear in this volume.
But there's a thickness of language, a
scope, an intellectual depth combined
with compassion, a selflessness, a level
of demand on the reader, which make
this a volume worth re-reading many
times.
As the title indicates, The cartographer's
tongue is about travel, talking,
mapping the self that shifts with
travelling, language itself. Geographically,
the poems range from Niger
to Sarajevo to Taos to Cape Town.
Extraordinary horrors, extraordinary
beauties: this is, as it were, a metaphysic
of voracity, a poetry voracious
for experience. Everywhere, Rich
confronts demographic devastations,
upheavals, wars, ruins, and the love
and courage that persists amongst
those ruins. Everywhere, in a way
which is somehow neither self-indulgent
nor detached, she maps these
external changes of scene against her
own challenged and shifting notions
of selfhood and of home.
In a concentrated vignette of the
year of her birth, ``1959'', Rich has her
father toast her: ``may she peel the
skin from this schizophrenic age''.
This she proceeds to do in the poems,
with an intensity of observation that is
both empathetic and unflinching:
What is it to live inside the body,
to reside in a geography of pain;
afraid of what sight desires
but is unprepared to see?
(``The woman with a hole in the middle of
her face'')
``Atrocity'', Rich intones. A word
which she finds magnetic: ``such a
luscious word,/ delicate, ebullient,
pure'' (``Atopos: Without Place'').
That's a typical piece of radical replacement
of connotation. Atrocity is
so magnetic it becomes near-obsessive,
as she recognizes:
I have a taste for burnt, crusty things: food
brittle and carboned to black,
houses where the Serb militia have been. I
adore the hard surface,
~43 .... REVIEW ESSAY
the finality of things charred and distorted
beyond belief,
the decaying corners of morning toast, a
pie crust singed, scarred skin.
(``Sarajevo'')
Finality; distortion. Rich wilfully,
determinedly, abandons the first in
order to court the dangers of the
second. Maps' stabilized ``Symbols of
airports,/ cross-stitch of railway tracks''
offer illusory certainty, but really they
connect her with ``moving things''. She
goes with ``explorers/ and Bedouins,
with men/ who imagine just one path
exists:/ A precise route to meaning''
(``How to read a map''). She grapples
with Niger students' belief in ``ready
answers,/ the elegance of the equation,''
assuming ``the answer is decipherable,/
visible on my bronzed skin, my hair''
(``The toughest job''). But, like the
mapmaker in ``The language of maps'',
Rich knows that ``the language of maps
is always changing'':
The mapmaker is measuring the earth,
seeking the accurate. She knows her projection
must distort the geography of the world.
Tracing distance and direction
on parchment, paper, or cloth;
she chooses the one which best suits her
purpose.
The notion of home thus become
deeply problematic, and Rich works
to shed attachment even to that: ``I
searched to forego belonging/ like a
Bedouin who leaves her home/ hung
inside a desert tree/ knowing it does
not really matter'' (``The myth of the
perfect move''). The Bedouins' landscape
of drifting dunes is particularly
symbolic:
Nomads are said to know their way by an
exact spot in the sky,
the touch of sand to their fingers, granules
on the tongue.

But sometimes a system breaks down. I witness a shift of
light,
study the irregular shadings of dunes.Why am I travelling
this road to Zinder, where there is really no road?
(``Lost by way of Tchin-Tabarden'')
Rich enjoys working with the breakdowns ± but a
certain impossible idealism lingers, a scent of home:
I want to know as Aisha knows
when it's time to follow
the ambivalent line of landscape
keep faith in dunes that disappear.
(``Nomadic life'')
The vigour of Rich's search is caught in the depth of
the many questions which energize the collection: ``In
which direction do islands face?''; ``Which culture remains
unmarked?''; ``How to construct new cartographies?'';
``What is it that a body needs to remain alive?''
Do I leave to take a stand?
Or circle around the globe,
passport in hand to get away from the incessant
no-win scenes, the frantic filigree of the familiar
pressing like dead dreams inside my head?
...
Must I write only of hometown corners
swan boats, street cars, Boston harbor ^
to stay in the odd intersections
New Englanders call squares?
And which house is the home where I remain? ...
Home or travel, and which is which
and whose choice is it to say?
(``The filigree of the familiar'')
Answers are never stated, but are implied in the
very scope of the poems, the thickness of language,
the accuracy of observation which never patronizes or
exoticizes. An empathetic humanity is what makes it
possible to ``stay inside this world'', to ``take this
globe'' as her own (``The mapparium''). This is despite
the limitations of language, the shortfalls inevitable to
translation. She writes that the people of Taos ``shape
their words more thoughtfully,/ in sentences slower/
than I've known before/ as if language itself/ is an
impediment to knowing/ what they know'' (``TaosenÄ
o''). ``Everything is an echo/ of the thing it thinks it
is'' (``Train travel'').
This is a poet who will not be deterred by mere
contingency, however. She will redraw the cartographies
of her world, rather like her charmingly feisty
``Wendy in the `90s'':
This time she would know better.
There would be no sewing shadows
mending the boys' tails, hot afternoons
cooking alligator, skinning
the pirates for stew.
She'd rather walk the plank.
Why would she go with him?
After the storytelling
windows open to the night
she would not be fooled by promises
of fairy dust or tempted with the offer
of mothering lost boys.
No patience with false Romance
she'd go only for the flying ...
While maps and mapmaking are the central
metaphor of The cartographer's tongue, there'a a
variety of voice and subject I can't do justice to here: a
meditation on the civility of the electric chair; a
meeting with a former lover; a tarot reading; a
scorching yet finally self-deprecating portrayal of a
ghastly seat-mate on a plane; her mother's death; an
exploration of the glorious(!) smell of the culture of
gasoline which ends as a moving elegy to her father.
Not all the poems are of equal weight, but that's okay.
The best poems balance vivid, wrenching physicality
with powerful abstractions. In ``Whatever happened
to the bodies ...'', a poem about hearing news of a
Middle East bomb-blast, she forcefully compresses
three levels:
I listen to Linda Gradstein as I Comet clean the kitchen sink.
Every scrap of flesh, every drop of blood, you try to get it,she
repeats.
Behind my house the raku kiln is firing masks and beads.
Whatever happened to the bodies cut and maimed?
Whatever held the hand which lit the gas?
Whatever scenario we imagine, we miscast.
I listen ready to participate ^ scrubbing souls fromTel Aviv's
streets.
Propel the senses to migrate beyond what I can think.
The echoes between ``masks'' and ``miscast'' are
wonderful; language really does become ``ready to
participate'' here. And that last line might well stand
as manifesto for this unblinking, demanding, deft,
beautiful poetry.
~44 .... REVIEW ESSAY

FINUALA DOWLING
Repair
........
Two friends of mine, hardly blood brothers,
have this in common: that they lost their mothers
to heaven or a better man at the tender age of four ±
the same age as Beatrice when they met us.
Like all my friends they brought her treats,
teased her sweetly or applauded her feats
so that I thought, how good ± they are healed ±
they are here with us grown ups on the other side.
Until I noticed how when Beatrice cried
the great racking sobs of a child who is tired,
or defeated, or strung out like straining wire,
these friends followed when I carried her to bed,
stayed for the story, the caressing of the head,
waited for the bottle, the curtains drawn across
on a room full of children and their irreparable loss.
~45 .... POETRY

Under Anaesthetic
....................
FINUALA DOWLING
I woke up and heard
them hacking and yabbering
and jawing and sawing
off some real bone of
mine to replace it with
a prosthesis to which
I must have consented.
It was an all-male team,
the chain-saw gang.
The chief surgeon, in the
airline flaps, who had least
liked my hips (or was it my
stocking tops?), hence the
blindfold eyes, was my ex.
He was moving his lips
to keep his mind off the
blood, which always made him
sick. Among others at the
task in their respective
masks, I recognized one who'd
always slaughtered his own
meat and so should not have
balked to see me on the block.
But you know, once they get
to the caucus on which cuts to
take and which not, it's pretty
much over and you're a
carcass anyway. Of course
~46 .... POETRY

when I came round again, though
I was not myself, I said: ``I was
awake, I heard it all, every last
syllable,'' and they replied
``You're wrong, it's quite
impossible.'' To which
I must have assented.
~47 .... POETRY

Fine in the Transkei, I
.......................
FINUALA DOWLING
I was fine in the Transkei, I
rode the potholed road, oh
I eyed the blanketed old oh
I smiled an oyster smile, I
dote on bloat black swine, I
I slide on wine, oh float on boat,
and swam to mangrove island, man.
Not bored in the Transkei, I
stored a general store, nor
warred when white men swore or
saved a craven slave; I
climbed the windy hill till
chill cling in my sides, I
note unstolen phone, oh.
Till rising tide arrive I
sigh to be alive I
silver through the blue. You
saw the full moon too, you
warmed the meeting sheets, you
knife the dying cray-day, I
hold my fears at bay.
Pairs lay and kissed who
missed the passing kiss too
much to hit the clicks or catch
the thatchers thatch or
walk through cows, not flowers ±
Though all those hours were ours.
I was fine in the Transkei, aye.
~48 .... POETRY

I read the last page first
.......................
FINUALA DOWLING
I read the last page first.
That's my confession:
I know the worst ±
I read the last page first.
When I was a child
we drove in the dark past a neon sign
for the cocktail bar
at the Balmoral Hotel
pretty pink lips
touching a glass of champagne
and I thought
that's it ± that's Life ±
take me there.
That page was the first.
That's when and how
I developed the thirst.
But now I read the last page first.
I married a man
who said he'd always loved that neon sign
yearned to be a bubble on those pink lips
when he was a boy driven past
the knocked down, no more
Balmoral Hotel
and I thought
this is it ± this is Life ±
I am here.
~49 .... POETRY

That page was the first.
A poignant tale, that's why
my bubble burst.
But now I read the last page first.
I stood in the aisle
of Shoprite Checkers with ghostly pink lips
and a man with a foreign accent said
excuse me are you married
as if this were still the ladies bar
of the Balmoral Hotel
and I said
this is not a bar ±
read the sign.
~50 .... POETRY

FINUALA DOWLING
Blackjack
...........
blackjack n. The spiky, adhesive seed of the weed Bidens pilosa which
clings firmly.
He loved her words which caught
him so much like blackjacks
that he wanted to undress
her because she seemed such
an attractive person and so
different from his wife.
He wooed and wooed with
all his exercise till she
succumbed in a bed of
country veld where
blackjacks hooked onto
her unwanted underwear and
that was very nice but
he missed her words and
her body was as smooth as
his wife's. So very tenderly
he removed from her sweater
the blackjacks one by one and
sent her back to her writing
board where she pinned
her blanket-stabber weeds
one by one and bit
back the cat-yowl sting.
~51 .... POETRY

The idea of you
................
FINUALA DOWLING
I thought I'd always love
fat men, loud men, flamboyant men,
useless men, molly-coddled men, lazy men,
cheating men, material men, gimme men:
Men like shopping malls.
I've always liked vegetarian men,
fussy men, mean men, demanding men,
angry men, know-it-all men, men-in-therapy,
look-at-me men, childless men:
Men like problem pages.
But all the time I was loving them,
before I'd even met you,
I was longing for you (the idea of you)
as one longs for pillow and sheet.
A man as calm as a beach walk,
as rangy as a cowboy and his lasso,
a man with livestock and hills
and a river with fish, and a racing bike,
whose heart still runs free
down some farm road of his infancy;
who fixes things and reads and sings
and doesn't want to hear anything
but my voice in a shell and
doesn't want to hurt anyone
but my enemies (the idea of them),
or keep anything
except the idea of me.
~52 .... POETRY

STEPHANIE SAVILLE
Mr Muse
..........
I am a woman poet in need of a muse.
I conjure one up
A mystical forest nymph
All long locks and floating skirts.
She is pretty, and mystical.
All she arouses in me is ...
She'll have to go.
I'd prefer a meaty male muse
To be my inspiration
A well defined bicep and a significant bulge
Should be my stimulation.
He wouldn't have to say much
Just be beautiful and
do some flexing and some twitching.
I could wonder at the blue veins charging up his
muscly military arms like little tunnels for projectiles.
Rough-soft stubble should coat his chin
For me to rub.
I would make him do that clenching thing
With his jaw and his butt.
I would arrange him artistically, at twilight,
Naked
on an unmade bed
in a gauzy room ±
one nut-brown leg bent and splayed out to the side.
~53 .... POETRY

One relaxed hand just-not
touching his flaccidity
Another clenched in the curls of his hair
Gentle crepuscular light
Blending and softening.
He may sleep, sighing rhythmically, or
grin at me as I watch him
± I'd be open to both.
I could write poetry about that.
~54 .... POETRY

Inland roads wind back
upon themselves and the old year
as we raise glasses to toast
with red wine
and repartee.
By evening we unpack
moth-balled memories
when cool has settled on the skin
Ma's heart rewinds
to old melodies
± hymns and choral
music in her chambers ±
flowing from her widow's cruse;
demons skulk back from the armoured
shield of her-and-her-Lord.
Arrows of fear pierce her left breast
but bent shadows
must remain far
while she ever seeks
the Light
with lantern of tremelo hums
Creases carve paths for my mouth ±
Looking more and more like Pa, she says
when she fell in love
so long ago
and why she loves me so
(filling a strange silence
with sweet dessert wine
from her tongue)
while I rub the calloused feet
and limping old words in their Sunday best
row slowly out to sea
towards those lovely distant gates
Turning eighty / Op tagtig
...........................
ELZA LORENZ
In die binneland kronkel paaie
op hulself terug die ou jaar in
as ons weer moet glasies klink
met gekerriede seà goed
en rooiwyn;
vroeg saans onthou ons noÁ g
en meer
sodra die vel koel en glad word
Ma se hart wen terug
na ou wysies
± psalms en koormusiek
in haar kamers ±
vloeiend uit haar weduweeskruik;
demone deins terug
voor die pantserskild
van haar-en-haar-Here.
Pyltjies vrees tref die linkerbors
maar geboeÈ skadu's
mo e t ver bly;
sy, met bewerige stemlantern,
in die Lig
My plooie leà vore om die mond ±
Trek al meer op jou pa, seà sy
soos toe sy verlief geraak het
lank gelee
die dat sy so lief is vir my
('n vreemde stilte
loop vol met die soetwyn
van haar tong)
terwyl ek skurwe voete invryf
en ou deftig gekispakte woorde
stadig uitroei op die donker see;
die lieflike poorte reeds in sig
~55 .... POETRY

~I .......
t was on the Internet, you see. They asked
about the institution, of learning that is, not
where I've been, well I mean this one, Unisa, no not in
that sense, but anyway, about the place as public
funded set-up.
I have no foot-notes, yet.
It's not funded or subvented or cross-referenced.
No addenda or compendia or other endia or academic
machinations, or do they say machinery?
I have no range statements or four by four field
expectations of this. I have no compass or outcomes
or other ejaculatory effusions or knowledge of how
far or so on; well, not exactly or always the same.
Range is always a difficult thing to predict in that
sense, anyway. And outcomes always seem, anatomically
at least, unpredictable.
Once upon a time there were two men.
Fay and Drab.
Drab believed in language.
Fay felt that
writing, just writing and
reading something helped.
And this was the start of the war. Because Drab
would teach language by rule and grammatical law
and Fay felt. That is about it. Fay felt. He felt that as
you read a bit more so you learnt to write a bit better;
In our case
..................
MATTHEW CURR
and as you wrote a bit better you generally picked
things up and learnt to read better. But Drab's face
grew dark and his sense of the cause grew and a noble
rage was inflamed at this intangible lure. If that is
what it was. It looked that way. Just read. Nonsense.
There is no mark schedule, or grid or other
computable outcome or income or teachable something,
at all. And Drab called for recruits and the
forces grew in righteous indignation at the folly of
indulgence of spoilt first-language patronising unhelpful
irresponsible ... fayness.
And yet Fay would
quietly
illogically
quizzically
somehow insist that
we teach something of a language
and something of a literature.
What does that mean? It is so vague. Where is the
mark correlation chart, the criteria of assessment, the
verb divisions and the codified deflections of gradual
language acquisition models based on Withers and
Summerston's paradigm of !994 (modified from
Chetsky's Prague-Indiana Summary)?
And the battle raged. And Fay would
be fayish
And Drab would be morally superior and pupil
responsible and Fay's footsoldiers would indecently,
unaccountably indulge in belle lettres and Harry
Potter and silly things while Drab's virtuous children
~56 .... PROSE POEM

would insist on measures and scales and electronic
assured internationally corroborated systems of linguistic
... what? And Drab would speak for the
downtrodden and the hungry and those in need those
that smoked, in bitter circumstances, little in their
little and he remembered his own lean sufferings and
identified so warmly and deeply with the sad and the
hurt and the many unfed against the few fat and
insensible fay ones. And so it came to pass
that when the day arrived and the fat few were
exposed and the wall fell and truth and responsibility
and social identity and gender sensitivity and political
equity were banners high on the castle walls of the bad
spoilt cruel old regime
then it came to pass
that a New Order was declared. Drab found other
Drabs in other freer parts of the world and Rules were
made
and Range Rovers and Range statements and Range
Rain Gauges
and inputs and Sotvecs and Kiwi fruit were
bought and plane
tickets to far away places, further farther than Garries
or Soetmelkvlei or Indwe or Southfield and we were
truly amazed and stunned and wrote a lot a lot a lot
and did not understand but knew that it was virtuous
and although we still could not understand we knew it
was for a higher cause and Drab had platoons of
obedience and there were big dogs who barked at Fay
if he couldn't march straight and he was put in
uniform and explained to and Fay was a little
uncomfortable
and unfunded
and without points
and not-so-fay-anymore.
Drab grew tall and strong and his uniform had
expensive braid and he lived in a big house and he
wrote a lot quite a lot a lot and he explained to slow
people and sometimes got impatient because it was
for the good of the many and sometimes he shouted
and lost his temper and sounded like a real bully ± but
his guards explained in New Zealand and Australian
and Scottish that it was a Noble Cause and a better
gender and a beautiful world of love and boundaryless
goodness would unfold like a butterfly if we just
waited and paid a bit more. The one guard in
particular who had a loud voice and a huge dog to
guard his guardship made everything plain to us and
we wrote no more fayness or just reading or writing or
anything for fun or irresponsible kak like that we
learnt to say everything the same and The dog had a
huge metal metronome in place of thinking and we all
had lessons in How to Sing the Same Song to equal
measures and we had to say I am Happy, Really
Happy before break and the world did not really open
like a butterfly but we knew it would because the
people FROM OVERSEAS who knew much better
about religious freedom and economies of scale and
goodness and brotherhood told us to wait and pay a
little more for books which would not be available
just now but in 2008 and maybe in 2010 the Diary of
Books would be published in Large Folio with fully
subvented counter lineation and indented portfolios
for class enthusiasm and reading by the firelight of
social responsibility Volume II ± it was printed in the
old East German Republic but the page that said so
was torn out and someone got into a lot of trouble for
asking about when the day of independent thinking
was actually going to be.
Teachers who liked just reading and who had been
caught open-booked doing nothing but having fun
classes and thinking about anything were noticed and
noted and a lot of them were reported for dereliction
of duty and were explained to that that sort of no use
no outcome teaching had to stop. Now. And Fay
started coughing and was not so fay or bright any
longer. And they started to weigh pupils and the
books were measured and teachers and coefficient
principles were applied and the Big Dog shouted very
loudly I was scared to death and wished Fay was back
even though he was a spoilt moff and how we used to
laugh and exchange books that had no fucking
pedagogical fucking purpose of funding administrated
tensile subvention or variant analogous
complexities according to noun-defined sequester
reading scales from the Alaska/Delta papers of the
~57 .... PROSE POEM

non-aligned non-LiAsge countries who won't use
DDT or eat meat or fuck too hard or say insensitive
things or hurt lizards, if they can help it. And as the
schools got poorer and the teachers spent longer
making radio programmes for the Big Diary and their
Programmes were deregistered for lack of adequate
field assessment then the Pinkmen from far away were
flown in to explain to us and they sat with Drab in a
posh house and ate a lot and giggled and were chums.
But the classes grew and there were no books yet but
the Pinkmen said we must wait because it is worth it
to wait and I thought of hangbal and I knew he was
right and even though the Pinkmen didn't look like
they had balls to hang I was sure it would be worth it
in the end and that the New Age would Come and the
Moment would be worth it and the Moment of
Serious Learning and Real Education would be earthmoving
and the measure of earth and field and range
statements would be as nothing to the great heaving
and explosion of social Joy at the people who
explained from far away. And they had to be looked
after well because they knew more and had our
interests, not theirs or their Royalties at heart and we
were quiet and penitent and many who had Dared to
Question or especially those who had Read for Fun
were extremely penitent and cleaned the shoes of the
Aussie knowers (that was their Senior Rank title) and
we just learners and not-knowers in the order of the
day as it was written in the Great Diary of Knowledge.
And the schools were poorer and the books
were fewer and even the Minister was worried
and he called to see Fay who was
Fayless and sad and quite ill and asked if
Just Reading and Just Writing would be of use.
But General Drab blew up to a great size and his
Knowers all shouted and his publishers were very,
very cross indeed and the Minister even was nogal
scared and said sorry to the Pinkmen who knew more
and knew everything about a country they didn't
know and a people they knew even less.
And the schools were grey and learning was by
Rule and the scales were heavier and we did not ask
questions in class but asked each other after school
because it was approved and asked our aunties about
trigonometry and used an iron to draw graphs by
because she said her knowledge was also valid for
parabola curves or symmetry details or value buying
at the right price in the brochure we got in the post.
And the
Pinkmen saw it all
and the Pinkmen said it was good
and the Pinkmen seemed to grow larger and shinier
while we waited for the Brave New Age and the Great
Moment of COMING Together.
Courses became corregulative Instances and Instant
puddings became Digestible Instances and the classes
got bigger and the teachers fewer and the Pink Plane
Ticket Inspector Knowers (PPTIK's) were initiated
and installed (II'd) into directive Certainty Areas of
Understanding and Explaining to Non-Knowers
(CAUEN's).
And I looked in the Great Diary and behold
I thought it said
We teach something of a language and something of a
literature
which sounded modest and plain
but I couldn't read the words there because there was
a Diagram or Knowledge Certainty and Educative
Enforcement and the Big Dog had its photo in colour
and I looked for the words and the fun and I
remembered reading and Dullness spread in a wet
cloud over the page and a dog growled and Pinkman
from an antipodal region hit me and sent me to a deep
pison prson prison for teaching of stubborn cases of
outrageous questioners and other non knowers and
poor spellers. And I did think I saw Fay there but I
was not sure because the big guard with the dog
switched on the electric fence of institutional correction
and automatic spelling by electro-facing dependencies
survey and the light seemed to fade and
we had nothing to read
so we all sang ``How Happy we are'' and all
together and waited for knowledge by formula
detection (the Glasgow approved revised model used
in sheep farms and croft dwellings and other informal
educative erections (IEE's).
~58 .... PROSE POEM

Research in the arts
.............................................................
What is research?
~A .......
We do research to
further the cause of
knowledge in our
discipline; to further the
status of the discipline;
to further our own
academic reputations;
to provide us with
intellectual stimulation
and a feeling
of achievement
s a working definition, one
might say that research is an
original contribution to knowledge in
one's discipline. It also involves the
mastery of the discipline's methods,
theories and procedures.
Why do we do research?
We do research for many reasons: to
further the cause of knowledge in our
discipline; to further the status of the
discipline; to further our own academic
reputations; to provide us with
intellectual stimulation and a feeling
of achievement. We also do research
to make our work more interesting
and to stimulate new ideas in our
teaching.
LECTURE TO FACULTY OF ARTS,TECHNIKON NATAL, 25 APRIL 2000
BRIANPEARCE
How do you do research?
You start from what you know and
ask yourself the question: ``What do I
want to know?'' You examine what is
already known in your discipline and
ask yourself: ``What needs to be
known?'' You set out to find ways of
``knowing,'' by a detailed examination
of source material. You then find
that you have made a ``discovery.''
You are like an explorer who has
suddenly set eyes upon a new phenomenon
which has not been analysed
before.
You start examining this phenomenon
by seeing it in relation to other
phenomena, by charting or documenting
the complex web of relationships
which are set up by this
new discovery. You start analysing
and documenting this discovery in
theformofanacademicpaper,
bringing this new item of knowledge
to the attention of the academic
world.
You send your paper to a journal in
which it may be published, or you
present your findings at an academic
conference. Alternatively, you may
write a book or thesis on the subject.
(Ideally, you can present a paper at a
conference, write an article, a thesis
~59 .... PUBLIC LECTURE
and a book.) You submit the results
of your research to your academic
institution for evaluation, whether by
examiners (in the case of a thesis) or a
research committee.
You experience pleasure at the
thought of having contributed to the
world of knowledge. You wish to
repeat this experience by doing more
research. You are motivated not by
money (such as a research grant) but
by intellectual achievement. Nevertheless,
you gratefully accept the
resulting research funding.
Research, creativity and objectivity
Research often starts in the form of an
intuition. Often we draw on our
imaginations to send us on the search
for knowledge. What may start as an
intuition or an idea then has to be
tested, analysed and examined from
every possible angle or perspective.
Not all creative ideas are necessarily
good ones from the point of view of
academic research and the researcher
will invariably have to reject a great
many before finding one which can be
pursued and validated from an academic
perspective.
Some creative ideas are more suited

to finding form as works of art than as works of
academic research. It is for this reason that art itself is
not academic research although it may form the
object of research. In the field of Drama Studies, a
production of a play does not automatically rate as
research. However, a production may become research
if it is analysed and documented in an
academic context. Art is, I believe, also a form of
applied research, or creative research. Works of art
may be recognized as ``artefacts'' by the National
Research Foundation. At the University of Natal, a
``research equivalent'' is recognized in the performance
fields. The question of the relationship between
art and research is, however, a complex one and I will
return to it later.
For academic researchers, creative ideas do not
exist in a vacuum. They are a direct result of the close,
objective examination of source material and the selfreflexive,
critical analysis of that material from a
theoretical perspective.
The source material used by
researchers varies from subject to
subject. In the field of Drama
Studies, primary sources may
include performances, interviews,
video recordings, prompt books,
set designs, theatre reviews,
photographs, illustrations, programmes,
dramatic texts. Secondary
sources may include
essays, articles, biographies,
books of criticism or theatre
history, reference works and encyclopedias.
Researchers need, in addition,
to be aware of modern theories of
aesthetics and criticism, not so
that they can slavishly follow the
latest theoretical fashion, but in
order to engage in a critical debate with their material
and see their own research from a conceptual
perspective.
The new contribution to knowledge has to be
presented in the form of an argument ± a logically
constructed statement. In other words, a critical,
analytical perspective complements and helps to form
the idea and serves to justify it in academic terms.
Finally, researchers have to demonstrate the originality
and validity of their ideas. 1 They have to prove
that the idea (or thesis) is an original contribution to
knowledge.
Criticism and self-criticism
You experience pleasure at
the thought of having
contributed to the world of
knowledge. You wish to
repeat this experience by
doing more research. You are
motivated not by money
(such as a research grant)
but by intellectual
achievement. Nevertheless,
you gratefully accept
the resulting research
funding
Any researcher needs to be open to criticism, to the
extent even of actively seeking criticism. Such criticism
is provided by one's supervisor (or second
advisor) if one is writing a thesis. However, as many
different critical perspectives as possible should be
sought. At London University, PhD students in the
Department of Drama and Theatre Studies were
required to present seminars on their research to other
lecturers and postgraduates in the department; a great
deal of useful critical discussion
developed as a result of these
seminars.
Similarly, postgraduates and
lecturers in other disciplines (not
only those within the Arts Faculty)
were often willing to read
one's work and to offer criticism.
Some of the best criticism I
received was from academics in
Physics or Chemistry, especially
with regard to the clarification
of my ideas and arguments. In
turn, I would assist them by
reading extracts from their
work. In this way, different
perspectives and insights are
gained. At universities and technikons
in South Africa, there
could be more interaction between
researchers in different disciplines, in order to
stimulate a truly critical and self-critical academic
environment.
~60 .... PUBLIC LECTURE

I have also found that students are
useful critics, in the sense that you are
able to test your ideas on them and
their feedback helps to clarify your
thinking. Often, when doing research,
you get lost under a mass of information
and detail. Teaching students
forces you to get to the crux of the
matter. Sharpening the focus of your
critical thinking in such a way is often
what is needed when preparing a
paper for publication.
Other people, who are not students
or academics, may also be interested
in reading your work. My late mother
was a splendid critic of my work,
offering very insightful criticism. On
one occasion when I had written a
book review, she said, ``I agree with
what you say, but you could have said
it in a much less hostile way.'' And she
was right. I re-phrased the review,
taking her advice into account. The
result was a review that appeared far
more balanced and objective in tone.
And I, too, started to realize that I
had overstated my case and, in the
process, had not noticed some positive
aspects of the work which I was
reviewing. Criticism is exactly that:
both positive and negative. You need
to value both aspects, in the hope of
improving the quality of your research.
Research and practical work
In the Department of Drama Studies,
Technikon Natal, the claim is often
made that ``we are a practical department.''
The division between being a
practical department and an academic
department is, I feel, a very tenuous
one at an academic institution. If
practical work were all one required
to provide vocational training for
students, then the students might just
as well get their experience by working
in the field, under the supervision of
their employers.
If we emphasize practical work at
the expense of academic research, we
are going to miss out on many
opportunities. Our practical work is
not going to be informed by a critical,
analytical approach. Similarly, our
academic work is not going to be
stimulated by practical experimentation.
Research should inform all practical
work in a creative arts department.
There should be no conflict
between the need for practical work
and the need for research. Practical
work can be the object of research.
Indeed, practical work can be recognized
as applied research, if it is
analysed, evaluated and properly
documented.
Research and teaching
Too often we think of teaching and
research as opposites, whereas actually
the two are very closely related.
Ideally research should be a direct
stimulus to teaching and should improve
the quality of students' work.
This it does by providing students
with the example of active engagement
in the pursuit of knowledge
(rather than simply the re-cycling of
existing knowledge), and offering
them insights which are fresh and
challenging.
Teaching helps to clarify academic
thinking, but it can also itself provide
a very legitimate form of research.
~61 .... PUBLIC LECTURE
Over the years, I've written a number
of published articles on my own
teaching experience.
I would encourage fellow researchers
to capitalize on their
teaching experience. When you start
analysing your teaching, you'll be
surprised at how many potential
areas of research are available to you
during the classes you teach. As soon
as you start looking at teaching from
this perspective, you will find that
your teaching itself changes and that
it becomes more exciting, innovative
and challenging. You start experimenting
more and noticing the results.
You start changing your
courses and testing your old, established
ideas. In this sense, every
lecturerinanArtsorDesigndepartment,
is a potential researcher
and has fresh and valuable research
material available at virtually every
moment of the working day.
Research and vocational training
At technikons and universities in
South Africa, there is the need to
provide courses which lead graduates
to job opportunities. Does an emphasis
on research conflict with this
need? I do not believe that it does; on
the contrary, research should lead to
postgraduates becoming more employable
within their chosen professions.
The old idea of academic researchers
as reclusive scholars, sitting in a
library paging through dusty books,
has undergone considerable modification
over the years. Researchers are
actively involved in their studies, able
to chart a course which is directly

elevant to their own ideals and ambitions. Research
topics can be designed to suit a student's specific
career path. Furthermore, research offers opportunities
to meet influential people within the professional
world, to travel, to develop life skills, to
increase one's confidence and employability. There is,
increasingly, a need for individuals within the professional
world to be creative thinkers, capable of doing
original research.
Art, artefacts and research
Let's return to the complex and controversial question
of the relationship between art and research.
Some forms of art are recognized as ``artefacts'' by the
N.R.F., while others are not. In my own department,
I frequently hear the cry that ``productions are
research'' and that they should be recognized by the
Research Committee.
Any production requires research into the text, the
historical and political background of the play, the
costumes and manners of the period, the setting.
These are the most obvious areas where the director
is involved in research, but this is not necessarily
original research. Much of this information can be
obtained from secondary sources such as books on
theatre and costume. What, then, about performance
itself? Could that not be regarded as
research?
There can be no doubt that the work of major
directors like Peter Brook or Peter Stein can be
considered as research of a highly original and
valuable kind. Their productions are conceptually
directed. They are set up as research projects and
receive research funding. Furthermore, such productions
are carefully documented and evaluated.
Yet within the professional theatre itself, there are
productions that are quite clearly not original, either
as art or as research. For every innovative new staging
of an opera at an international opera house, there
may be five or more re-stagings of standard repertory
items and this is true, also, of ballet productions. In
the same way, not every Shakespeare production can
be regarded as original research. Sometimes directors
simply work within established performing traditions,
or established traditions of interpretation.
For a production to be considered research it has to
be conceptually innovative. It needs to explore new
ideas. It needs to involve some form of experimentation.
In our department, Debbie Lutge recently directed
a production of People of Heaven. 2 The play itself was
innovative and exploratory, and no previous performing
tradition existed. This production was, in my
opinion, quite clearly, an example of original research
into isiZulu culture and its relationship to contemporary
Western society.
The question arises: is it enough for originality to
be expressed in performance for it to qualify as
research? The question is not whether or not
performance can indeed be research, but rather one
of how to evaluate that research.
A further question is: who is to do the evaluating?
Theatre critics, actors, directors or lecturers? An
academic article can take months to be evaluated and
accepted by an editorial board. A production has a
limited number of performances and cannot be as
easily transported from one research centre to another
for evaluation. One solution might be to record the
production ± but a film or video recording can give a
false impression of a live performance.
Performances, because of their transitory nature,
cannot be considered to be ``artefacts'', which is why
Professor Temple Hauptfleisch of Stellenbosch University,
prefers the term ``cultifacts'', 3 which covers a
wider range of creative activity.
At present, at Technikon Natal, the only way of
getting research accreditation for a production is for
the director of the production to write a critical article
on his or her work and present it for publication in an
accredited journal.
~62 .... PUBLIC LECTURE

Ironically, a production that is
highly successful when judged purely
on performance terms may be less
innovative as research (when documented)
than a production which has
failed dismally at the box-office. Yet
this phenomenon may well be because
original creative work is not always
fully acknowledged by theatre critics,
or by the general public.
When I was preparing this lecture, I
showed my notes to Professor Michael
Green of Natal University, who kindly
offered criticism and advice. He made
the point that, ``the value of research is
not measured by the success or failure
of its object of study. Some of the best
research around has been into the
failure of something''. 4 This is a valid
point, I think, in relation to the study of
art and performance.
For the moment, the partial solution
to the problem of finding accreditation
for works of art remains
that directors and artists need, as
much as possible, to document their
creative work through writing articles
which are published in academic
journals. Instead of getting upset by
the unfairness of the situation, we
should accept it as a challenge. In this
way we might, moreover, be able to
influence the manner in which creative
work is valued within our institutions
and within the larger academic community.
Finding a research topic
The first item of advice I can give is to
find some area of research that is new,
that has not been plundered before by
scores of other researchers. However,
this does not mean avoiding tradi-
tional areas of knowledge if it is
possible to offer a new critical perspective.
The other side of the coin to the
advice that you should find a new area
of research, is that you should find an
area of research that really fascinates
you, that you find intellectually stimulating
and challenging. You need
to believe in your research topic if you
are going to pursue it at Masters or
PhD level.
A great many researchers who
begin PhDs never finish them. The
dropout rate at British universities
for PhD students is considerable. I
have spoken to a number of people
who have dropped out of PhD
courses, and in each case they have
said that they lost interest in their
research.
Choosing a research topic out of
passing interest (because it seems like
a good or opportune thing to do)
substantially increases the chances of
losing the motivation needed to sustain
interest over a three year period ±
which is really the minimum length
for a successful PhD.
As one develops as a researcher,
one can enlarge one's scope and
develop more than one research interest.
I think that researchers should
draw up lists of all the possible areas
of research, which might interest
them. Other lists worth drawing up
are of research areas that are of
current interest within your institution,
city or province, so that you
don't have to go overseas to pursue
~63 .... PUBLIC LECTURE
your primary source material ± unless,
of course, you have the financial
backing to do so.
In selecting a research topic, it is
important to seek a balance between a
fresh, new area of research (or a new
critical perspective), personal tastes
and intellectual interests, and the
availability of primary source material.
In looking at research issues that
are of concern to us here in South
Africa, I would single out ``interculturalism''
as being one of particular
importance (and of interest to
international journals). In my own
department, both Debbie Lutge and
Jay Pather are interested in this area
of research, and I would imagine that
it would be of equal interest in the
Fine Art Department. In Drama
studies, we have an ideal opportunity
to explore the interactions between
some very rich and diverse cultures.
Writing research articles
When writing a PhD or a Masters
dissertation you need constantly to
substantiate your argument with documentation
of the research undertaken.
However, when you are writing
an article based on your thesis, you
have already done your research and
proved the validity of it by the
acceptance of the thesis by your
institution. There is no need to repeat
all of that documentation. If anyone
wants to check your research they can
refer to your thesis by obtaining it on
microfiche, or by looking for it in the
library. So in writing articles for
journals, you don't have to back
everything up to quite the same extent

as you did in the thesis. You can refer to your thesis
just as you would refer to any other work of reference,
giving the title, date, university and page numbers. In
other words you can paraphrase your own work, in
order to make your article as clear, pithy and sharply
focused as possible.
I was once asked to look at an article someone
had written, which he couldn't get published. I could
immediately see why the editors rejected it. The
sentences were long, rambling and badly structured.
Each had a parenthesis in it. The article didn't seem
to reach a conclusion. The footnotes were so
extensive that they were almost twice the length of
the article ± and the style was extremely wordy.
Clearly the writer had done a great deal of research,
but the article did not present the findings in a clear
and precise way.
My advice is to use simple, clear language, and to
make your ideas as comprehensible as possible. I
would also advise researchers to read their articles
aloud to another person, to make sure that their
meaning is absolutely clear. In this way you improve
your style as a writer.
Editors want articles that get to the point and are
refreshing and stimulating to read. Since they seek
articles that are at the ``cutting edge'' of research, you
should state the originality of your approach in a
straightforward way.
In other words, a crisp, articulate, clearly-defined
approach is what is needed. And this is where (in my
experience) academics in the Arts and Humanities
disciplines can learn a great deal from academics in
the Sciences, where clarity of presentation is of the
utmost importance. My experience is that original
research which is clearly written or well-crafted is
readily accepted by journals.
Art as research or research as art?
I want to end off in a somewhat provocative way by
suggesting that the difference between the artist and
the academic researcher is not as great as we
sometimes imagine. As a researcher one experiences
aesthetic pleasure in making a new discovery, writing
a new article or expressing oneself in a lecture or
written paper. In the same way too, the artist, in
creating a work of art is often engaged in a criticism
of reality as he or she knows it. In both cases, the
artist and the researcher are involved in creating a
new idea, a new concept. They help to change the way
in which we perceive reality, or the way in which we
perceive ourselves.
Joan Fourie (1999:5) summarizes criticism of the
present system of funding for visual and performing
arts research in South Africa, discussing the fact that
an artefact is only accepted as such if accompanied by
a written motivation or report that shows evidence of
criticism, interpretation and evaluation. She argues
that this
would mean that the fine artist, for example, who has the
ability to write well, but whose artwork is mediocre would
stand a better chance of receiving recognition than the one
who is an excellent artist and who makes major innovative
contributions in visual terms.
Now this would be an unfair situation if it did
occur. However, I believe that with a little encouragement,
supervision and advice, the excellent artist who
is a less skilled writer could quite easily present his or
her work in such a way that a research committee
would perceive it as the more original work. A good
artist has a better chance of being a good writer than a
mediocre artist. Furthermore, the artist in writing his
or her report, can draw on reviews or critical
comments from colleagues.
In my own subject, the outstanding influences in
the history of directing, such as Stanislavski, Edward
Gordon Craig, Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski
and Brook have, in each case, been highly
articulate exponents of their own work. In each case,
they have been outstanding directors and theorists.
I believe that writing is about content, about the
ideas of the artist or researcher. The form of the
writing follows the idea. If an artist is mediocre and
has no original ideas, then that is going to be reflected
~64 .... PUBLIC LECTURE

in the writing, which will similarly lack originality or
vision.
Oscar Wilde (1990:948±997) argued that criticism is
an art. Whether this is true or not, I do feel that the
artist, whether an actor, director, choreographer,
painter, sculptor or musician, is at an advantage
when it comes to writing a critical essay. I see it with
my own students, where the development of individuals
as actors or directors goes hand-in-hand with
their development as writers. In drawing on their
creativity, they write first-class critical essays.
As researchers in the Faculty of Arts, we are all at a
considerable advantage when it comes to writing up
our research, since we are trained to recognize
originality and to draw on our creative imaginations.
We should be publishing more research articles than
academics in other disciplines.
Notes
1. This was advice that my supervisor, Robert Gordon,
gave me when I was completing my PhD at Royal Holloway,
University of London.
2. People of heaven by Genbia Hyla, directed by Debbie
Lutge at the Courtyard Theatre,Technikon Natal,1999.
3. According to Hauptfleisch, the term ``cultifact'' was originally
proposed by ReneTredoux.
4. My thanks to Professor Michael Green for his advice
and suggestions.
Works cited
Hauptfleisch,Temple.1999. Artistic output and arts research:
Some introductory ideas on the notion of research
equivalents. Bulletin 6(1):6^10.
Fourie, Joan.1999.The challenge pertaining to an accountable
system for the recognition of visual and performing
arts research in South Africa. Bulletin 6 (1):2^5.
Wilde,Oscar.1990.The critic as artist. In: The complete works
of Oscar Wilde. Leicester: Blitz Editions.
~65 .... PUBLIC LECTURE

Where is Tuesday?
.............................................................
Our most abiding
image of the
conference is of
a delegate, a look
of vague bewilderment
on her face,
rummaging through
the file-thick
programme asking
a passerby,
``Where is Tuesday?''.
ne of those interminable
~O. ...... moral stories told at high
school assemblies ± the general didactic
point of which still eludes us ±
concerns a group of blindfolded individuals
asked to describe an elephant
on the basis of touch. Each
individual deduces the shape and size
of the creature on the basis of the
particular part he or she encounters.
The person feeling the trunk describes
a rough-skinned, snake-like beast, the
one who seizes the tail extrapolates a
pig, and so on. The potential for
individual (mis)readings is, presumably,
proportional to the size of the
beast. Hamsters, it follows, probably
THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE (ICLA):
THEORY OF LITERATURE DEPARTMENT,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA, PRETORIA (13^19 AUGUST 2000)
KIM WALLMACH and MICHAELTITLESTAD
sow less descriptive confusion than
pigs who are, in turn, more amenable
to representation than elephants.
The annual conference of the International
Comparative Literature
Association is an elephant. The individual's
encounters, academic and
social, though guided by a ``map''
comprising a file in which hundreds of
possibilities are listed, are governed by
the laws of chance as much as by
intention and design. Our most abiding
image of the conference is of a
delegate, a look of vague bewilderment
on her face, rummaging through
the file-thick programme asking a
passerby, ``Where is Tuesday?''. It
could be argued, though, that it takes
a conference of this magnitude to
represent the machinery of the institution
in process; that it is precisely a
sprawling variety of loosely-related
academic practices that creates a rich
city of possibility and facilitates any
number of combinations, possibilities
and journeys. Our representations in
this report are only descriptions of
pigs and snakes.
Whereas traditionally the ICLA has
assembled in either North America or
Europe, this was the first time in the
fifty years of its existence that it met in
~66 .... CONFERENCE REPORT
Africa. This is significant since it
shows the intention of the ICLA ``to
provide recognition of the diversity of
the locations and conditions in the
development of our knowledge''
(Letter from the President, Jean BessieÁ
re, ICLA Bulletin xvii(1±2) 1997).
Five hundred Comparative Literature
researchers attended the congress
convened by Professor Ina GraÈ be of
the UNISA Department of Theory of
Literature. She explained the appeal
of South Africa:
Our continent, with its enormous wealth of
languages and its rich literary traditions, is
a perfect environment for the practice of
comparative literary studies. South Africa
itself, as a multilingual society with a variety
of literatures, is emblematic of this. Local
changes, coupled with the impact of global
change on literatures and cultures, make it
most opportune for some of the leading
comparatists from Africa, Asia, Europe and
the Americas to meet in South Africa.
(UNISA bulletin 25(5), October 2000)
In her plenary address to the
delegates, Nadine Gordimer developed
many of these themes. She
questioned the place and methods of
the literary institution both in a world
given over increasingly to the visual
media and in a country like this in
which illiteracy is rampant. Further,
she ruminated on the implications of
the ``decline of the book'' as texts
become aggregates of flickering and

fleeting electronic signifiers. Certainly it is conferences
such as this, in contexts such as South Africa, which
cast into relief the potential and limitations of
institutionalized language and literary studies.
The conference theme, Transitions and transgressions
in an age of multiculturalism, highlighted
questions of translations across linguistic, national,
continental, ethnic and temporal borders. There
seemed to be a general acknowledgement of the need
for an ethics of difference, but a growing awareness
that institutional approaches to these ethics are
regularly embedded in a peculiar Western story of
history and importance. The revenge of minor
languages and literatures, while a fashionable political
position, has been far from conclusive. To dwell on
the asymmetry of borders, then, remains essential,
and our end goal, acknowledging the limits of
translation, should be the development of an ethics
of reciprocity. We need, it seemed to emerge in
discussions, to think less of crossings between pure
and isolated entities than of transforming our
practices through exchanges.
The ICLA conference contributed
significantly to this possibility
by disturbing the self-evident
ethnocentrism of the West.
It is incumbent on organizers
of conferences in dealing with
such matters, to address the most
basic aspects of translatability.
Van Dijk (1988:6) explains that
text, talk and communication are
used by group members to learn,
acquire, change, confirm, articulate,
as well as to persuasively
convey ideologies to other ingroup
members, to defend them
against (or conceal them from)
out-group members, or to propagate
them amongst those who are
(as yet) infidels. To know what
ideologies actually look like, how they work and how
they are created, changed and reproduced, we need to
look closely at their discursive manifestations.
As South Africa becomes
a more visible
destination for the
academy, we need to
consider very carefully
both the windows on
the nation we offer
delegates and the
ways in which we
contextualize their role
as spectators
But do these discursive manifestations translate?
There was by no means a clear answer to this question
at a conference that was officially bilingual (English
and French), but which in practice was relentlessly
monolingual. Most fascinating were the discursive
manifestations of monolingual chairpersons of bilingual
sessions, doomed forever to occupy the outfield
by their lack of linguistic competence, but nevertheless
gamely striving to draw together the themes
outlined incomprehensibly in French with the English
presentations. Similarly indicative of endeavours to
cross the divide were Norman Strike's charming
attempts, as Master of Ceremonies, to translate into
French the names of Pretoria guesthouses, announced
by the pony-tailed bus driver from ``African Edge,''
the organization responsible for accommodation,
travel arrangements and tours. Unperturbed by his
learned audience or the status of the preceding
speakers, the bus driver delivered instructions from
the podium as if speaking to an L2 kindergarten class
(loudly, slowly and pedantically): ``Now as I have told
you, there are five buses; five. Called Bus A, Bus B,
Bus C, Bus D, and ... [expectant
pause] ... Bus E''.
Overall the organization was
exemplary and the people responsible
deserve to be congratulated.
Despite the complexities
entailed in planning the delivery
and coordination of 600 papers,
delegates could range freely between
various sections of the
conference. Their options were
never limited by an inability to
locate venues or by the pointless
time constraints that characterize
so many conferences of this
scale. Of course, any congress of
this magnitude will run into
difficulties. In this case it was
the social programme that
proved problematic. ``African
Edge'' was responsible for an array of excursions on
the Wednesday of the conference week. Many of the
buses failed to leave on time having not taken account
~67 .... CONFERENCE REPORT

of the logistics of collecting delegates
from diverse venues. As a consequence,
tours were abbreviated and
delegates frustrated. As South Africa
becomes a more visible destination for
the academy, we need to consider very
carefully both the windows on the
nation we offer delegates and the ways
in which we contextualize their role as
spectators. Clearly organizers have
come to realize that South Africa is
not a game park. However, superficial
changes entailing visiting alternative
sites (such as Soweto) are inadequate.
What is needed is comprehensive
reappraisal of how we wish to showcase
this country in meaningful ways.
~68 .... CONFERENCE REPORT
And so the elephant wandered off
into the past. We are left with the
impression of a successful meeting of
scholars and writers who forded the
great grey-green greasy Limpopo (one
way or another) to share ideas about
borders, boundaries and the precarious
possibility of crossing over.

Snails, rains and birds
Robin Malan (comp). 2000. The pick of Snailpress
poems. Cape Town: David Philip.
Mzi Mahola. 2000. When rains come. Plumstead:
Carapace poets.
PR Anderson. 2000. Litany bird. Plumstead: Carapace
poets.
NICK MEIHUIZEN
Paging through the books before me, I am struck once
more by Gus Ferguson's beneficent and generous
influence on the local poetry scene. I will deal with the
Carapace books second: first I will look at The pick of
Snailpress poems, which is something of a tribute to
Gus and the people involved in the Snailpress
enterprise. The compiler, Robin Malan, who needs
no introduction to those familiar with the anthologies
Inscapes and New inscapes, must be congratulated on
the range and quality of the present one. I'm not a
person who much enjoys anthologies, but for The pick
of Snailpress poems I make an exception. I should
mention my familiarity with many of the books
represented in the anthology, and this might have
some bearing on my response ± like seeing old friends
in new surroundings, which enhance their presence.
The poems span remarkably productive years during
a time of intense socio-political change. They emerged
from a context where it was felt that explicitly
political poetry had become stale and limited, where
a ``purer'' type of creativity was encouraged, even by
such figures as Albie Sachs, with his memorable image
of an IFP-aligned novelist writing a Tugela-based
equivalent of And quiet flows the Don, free of partisan
feelings and perspectives, alert to all the complex
pressures of existence.
While art cannot be produced to order, the type of
breadth Sachs then desired was becoming apparent, at
least in the field of poetry. Excellent and varied work
emerged and much credit must go to Snailpress for
this. There were grumbles. The sheer volume of the
poetry that was published made some people suspect
lack of discrimination, lack of critical finesse and lack
Reviews
............
of committed direction. Thus they found it frivolous,
or bland, or without bearing, especially after the
apparently life-or-death earnestness of the protest
poetry that had gone before. Malan's compilation
supports my impression at the time, that there was
work of quality and importance being produced
under the Snailpress imprint. This is not to say that
there weren't lapses and inconsistencies (some of these
are reflected in the present volume too), but the
celebration of creativity hosted by Snailpress was
surely a worthwhile one in terms of old concerns once
more becoming tenable, new ones being opened up,
and new challenges being faced.
Briefly to change the focus, when it comes to the
creation of an anthology so soon after the event, as it
were, I would, all the same, raise a question or two.
Why anthologize works that appeared in their own
volumes three years ago, or even a year ago? It does
seem a bit odd. Pondering the problem, I arrived at
the following answers: the anthology introduces
readers to the original volumes, many of which must
still be in circulation, and which deserve a larger
audience. It also underlines the significance of the
effort involved, at a time when this significance is still
current. It thus forces a revaluation of the creative
output of the past decade. Related to this, and, I
suspect, at the crux of the matter, the volume is a
cultural distillation of an extraordinary time in the
history of South Africa. From this viewpoint, one
actually mourns the slimness of the book and begins
to fantasize about a more lavish, more definitive
production, replete with photos and mini-biographies,
in the American style. Not in character? I suppose
not.
Contrary to some prejudiced conceptions, Snailpress
was concerned with current local issues. Many
of the poems in the 80 pages of this volume deal with
important social and political questions, but (in
keeping with its ethos of tolerance) also with other
age-old subjects: love, various types of relationship,
flora, fauna, partings, longings, the creative process,
celebrations and general musings on life. Examples of
socio-political poems that stand out (though they are
~69 .... REVIEWS

all very different) are Tatamkhulu Afrika's ``Hooligans''
(3±5), Michael Cope's ``Uvongo'' (18±21),
Moira Lovell's ``Commuter-taxi ride: Zimbabwe,
'96'' (46±47), Mzi Mahola's ``Ukuhlangana no
Rhulumente'' (53±54), Mike Nicol's ``Marabou''
(60±61), and Peter Wilhelm's ``Driving home to
drinks'' (74). These poems, apart from their inherent
technical strength, tend to gain conceptual strength
from obliquity, from slantwise reflection on the
people and concerns they deal with. In ``Hooligans''
a knife thrown by a gang-member into the baroque
door of a clock-tower is wrenched out, ``splintering
the frail,/ immaculate design'' of the door, while
businessmen, ``briefcases sandwiched to their sides,/
lengthen their paces as they near'' (4). The attitudes,
impact, and situation of all present are well-realized
through these apparently peripheral details, as is a
type of respectfully distanced empathy, which perceives
in the gang of hooligans a familial structure, an
unlikely centre of care, comprising different characters
and roles:
the storyteller rises, cuffs
the sleeper till he wakes,
steadies him as he stoops
to check his knife,
with incongruous solicitousness collects
his cap and places it
at the correctly jaunty angle on his head ...
``Marabou'' is a Latino-flavoured narrative, which
shares magic-realism qualities with Nicol's novel, This
day and age (1992). The narrator is a recently dead exrevolutionary
president, imagining the public mourning
that will follow his lying-in-state, remembering
``the power of [his] favours'', the ``weet girls who
flowered beneath tender fingers'', yet all the time
obsessively concerned with the marabou, death-birds
to his mind, sinister agents of decay:
... No dominoes,
no smoking in the courtyard, marabou
live in shadow: darkness has the feel of feathers;
curtains stir with a stench I remember
when the storks came among our huts.
Here is the consciousness of forcefully acquired
political supremacy, of the rise from peasant hut to
presidential palace, of a latter-day Ozymandias intent
on post-mortem continuity, indulging in the trappings
of death as he indulged in the excesses of life: the
temptations, the corruption. But this is Ozymandias
from the inside, so to speak, his death-meditation a
type of confession and an unwitting warning. Finally,
there is an acceptance of nothingness as complete as
the lone and level desert sands in Shelley:
... There is no turning
back from this death: I am alone.The guard
plays dominoes, drinks Algarve wine;
from my face, marabou gently wipe cold tears.
Dominoes and black and white birds, wine and
tears ± the elements harmonize and so help draw
matters to a close. The concluding gentleness is at
once ironic and sincere, a more complex, more human
response to power and men of power than we find in
Shelley.
Poems that have love or relationships as their
subject include Lionel Abrahams's ``Celebration'' (2),
Cherry Clayton's ``Unwritten letters to my mother''
(15±16) and ``Forest path'' (16±17), Ingrid de Kok's
``Aubade'' (29±30), C.J. Driver's ``Well, goodbye''
(32±34), Geoffrey Haresnape's ``Mulberry in autumn''
(41±42), the wonderful extract from Walter Saunders's
``Sea'' (65±67), and Wendy Woodward's
``Phantoms'' (75). Clayton's ``Forest path'' is typical
of her deceptively simple condensing elegance, a
formal prefiguring of the thematic redemption she
(never easily or tritely) achieves. As child replaces
lover in a setting where past passion was enacted,
where internal rhyming reinforces the ringing, pure
presence of the moment, the significance of the larger
forces beyond us manifests itself. The realization
comes as the poet walks through the forest with her
child; he runs ahead, she waits for him to return:
In the pause of time that
his absence makes, in the hush
of space that his silence
wakes, I see for a moment,
in a cleft in the forest,
how love can go, and still grow.
Saunders's formal approach is altogether larger, as
is his focus. Friends on holiday in their car struggle
with an inadequate map, each one's character
emerging delightfully in the course of their struggle.
The form is loosely based on pentameters and the
style is conversational and unforced. The extract
sprawls over three pages of seemingly unimportant
confusion, which nevertheless shows the closeness of
the people involved, the ties of their friendships, the
ways they regard each other (including the absent
map-provider ± who for this reason also features as a
comic presence in the extract) and the way they
~70 .... REVIEWS

complement and amuse each other. In keeping with
this general tone of relaxed camaraderie, the one
epiphany of the extract is low-keyed and highly
effective because of this:
They drove out of the tunnel & into another world:
green sward trimmed neatly before them &, instead of
waving
cane, was a row of banana trees with their bunches of
plump fingers slowly yellowing in the tropic air,
and immediately behind these the untamed bush,
tangled and dark, where the ilala palm spreads
its sword-pointed fans, and where you might see
the queen of it all, the prodigal crane-flower ^
There is an interesting tension here, which registers
the suspense of expectation: that is, the restrained
``might'' is set against the unrestrained ``queen of it
all'', and these forces pull against each other in a
never-resolved tug-of-war, where the latter, though, is
the hoped-for victor.
An arresting poem that draws on the natural world
is Basil du Toit's ``Unravelling a shark'' (34±35). I'm
glad to see he is still writing, as his Home truths,
published by Carrefour in 1988, seems to me one of
the strongest local volumes of those years. In this
poem the vivisection of a shark is managed in a
precise and illuminating way by the skilled deployment
of tropes:
Slabs of plumbing run the length of its body
like the dust bag in a vacuum cleaner;
its works are as plain and practical
as the rubber windpipes in a car's engine.
The metaphor and similes are at once successfully
descriptive and appropriately mechanistic (in the light
of popular conceptions of sharks as unfeeling
machines). Through them, the organic and the
inorganic interpenetrate. The effect is compounded
by an additional metaphor within the final simile,
which suggests that even a car has more understandable
life than a shark. But this shark is not a
covert scapegoat for late capitalist mechanization.
For what purpose, then, is it so relentlessly dehumanized?
Well, in the end its dehumanization makes the
final shock of the poem all the more extreme ± for Du
Toit's shark turns the mirror on ourselves:
Ourguiltierbrainsdeploreitsgrab-and-eat
mentality, preferring spoons and graces,
but sometimes we use the mauling ethics
of the shark: betraying, and moving on,
leaving behind us the shocked and shattered meat
of marriages, girlfriends, daughters.
The sense of disgust is extreme, but the image, to
my mind, reflects self-loathing (or a general contempt)
more than actual human nature, which is far too
complex to long endure with any credibility such a
reduction.
One of my favourite poems on creative process is
Don Maclennan's ``The poetry lesson'', which I have
commented on elsewhere, but I'm pleased to see it
included (50±51). I'd prefer to focus now, rather, on
the late N.H. Brettell's ``Mother and child'' (12),
which concerns Job Kekana, the wood-carver. The
poem is a skilful portrayal of the blending of medium
and message, as perceived in the sculptural works of
Kekana: a holy mother and child and a crucifixion.
Brettell understands and appreciates so well the
necessary deference to materials in aesthetic production.
He broaches ideas linked to pre-Enlightenment
similitude and the ``grand representation'' between
macrocosmos and microcosmos, natural and human,
but the resultant object here is consistent with humble
necessity and the honesty of plain substance:
Follow the living grain through bend of shoulder,
Falling through fold of doek, burgeoning through curve of
breast,
Smoothing with love the baby's pumpkin skull;
The mother's lips and brooding frontal bar
Swell with the veins that carried up the sap
The milk of life.
In its inevitability, the final synthesis (albeit
predictable) is very powerful:
God made flesh must keep the grace of flesh.
So the strict chisel follows out the grain,
Feels its way up through burr and whorl and flaw
Till wood and flesh and god are one.
There is much else that is worthwhile and good in
the volume, apparent from the passages, images, and
words that stick in one's mind after one has put it
down: Leon de Kock's ``guttural remorse slammed
silent/ by a faceful of Coca Cola'' (27), Ken Barris's
``living torso'' who ``rolls and stumps along on its
arms'' (10), Patrick Cullinan's ``I woke one night and
saw a man/ explode with death, a snorting arch of
agony'' (25), Rod MacKenzie's remarkable perspectivism
in ``Child and couple'' (48±49), and Dan Wylie's
~71 .... REVIEWS

evocation of an innocent war casualty in ``Death in
the family'' (77):
In the bush war, once, in a firefight,
inawelterofpanicandleaves
we gunned down a girl.White fat
leaked from a nick in her buttock
as she sank into herself, and died.
This is only a sample, but I think it demonstrates
the quality and broader concern of the poets involved,
and shows more clearly than my own remarks that
Gus Ferguson was not indulging a whim, was not
providing an outlet for pampered aestheticism from
the predominantly white suburbs, but was helping
give voice to an important creative process in our
national development.
I turn now to the Carapace books. Mzi Mahola's
When rains come caused me some disappointment, as
I admired his first book, Strange things. My
disappointment is centred in a common problem I'm
particularly aware of, having taught many years at an
Historically Black University. The problem has to do
with second-language usage and the inevitable complexities
surrounding it, particularly in connection
with tone and overtone, where much depends not on
rules, but on an innate sense of the powers,
possibilities and various shapes and resonances of
the language. It is easy to strike a false note, even for a
first-language speaker, but doubly so for others. The
false notes jar in this book, and are usually linked to
tired cliche s or archaic, quaint or inappropriate
adjectives. Sadly, as seems to be the case here, the
more of the language one learns, the more danger one
is in of acquiring such words, and (it follows) the
more eager one is to experiment with them: ``his gaze
beams'' (7); ``marvel at the water/ Frolicking'' (8); ``its
joyous course'' (8); ``The hydra-headed beast'' (10);
``With lame hopes,/ Frozen promises'' (12); ``To listen
to the chuckling waves,/ The squeaking mermaids''
(15), and so on.
There is, however, another side to this issue, which
is much more productive and more intriguing. This
occurs when the second language is pushed in new
directions with a vigour that overrides or negates any
awkwardness or inappropriateness. The phenomenon
is common enough in the creation of slang, of certain
Americanisms (``language with its sleeves rolled up''
as someone once called it), but has its own particular
character in the versions of English used in this
country. It is as if the false notes must be struck in
order to arrive at these true ones. It might be argued
that the false notes are only false from a first-language
perspective. I don't believe so, and, anyway, I would
still distinguish between types. How much more
powerful than the cliche s above is the final line of
the following, which tells of a response to the childvictim
of a road accident:
It hurts to see the bone of his fragile forehead
Smiling at you
And his twiggy legs
In unfamiliar shape.
It breaks you to hear his frightened voice
Calling your name.
It leaves a stubborn feeling.
(``Pains of growing,'' 38)
The ``smiling'' bone is unusual but certainly
appropriate, as is ``It breaks you'', which has all the
economy of colloquial utterance. What really fascinates
me, however, is ``stubborn'' in the last line,
which would never be used in that way in standard
English, but which conveys a fusion of resistance,
anger, disbelief, shock, and near-reversal of faith in
the nature of life. Thus the traditional primary sense
of obstinacy is extended to incorporate a clamping,
cramping mood, a felt experience rather than a mere
description of an attitude. It is, though, consistent
with much of the book that the same poem begins
with the unreflective and tired, ``It's tragic to see a
small child'' (my italics).
It may be that Strange things was more rigorously
edited by the poet: the difference in quality shows.
When rains come is an uneven work. But having said
this, let me go on to comment on some of the
admirable things in the book, as it certainly has its fair
share. I think of the details of a flood in ``Let there be
water (God said)'' (8±9):
I've also seen its dirty washing
Hung high on trees to dry
After the rains,
But too high for the tired tide to take down.
I've also seen some of our sheep
Bloated in the mud,
Limbs extended,
And, where our crops grew,
Saw dongas smiling,
Men weeping.
~72 .... REVIEWS

The final ironic juxtaposition has all the necessary
intensity.
A similar sharp vision is apparent in the critique of
neo-colonialism that surfaces from time to time:
``Now with elastic hands/ They pluck/ Fruits of
other's sweat/ Like a flight of birds'', where the simile
is given ironic impetus by the fact that Europeans
were once called ``swallows'' by local people (``Sweat
of their brow'', 10±11). In ``Impassable bridge'' (16)
the poet is the butt of a superior secretary of a former
friend, now in a high place; in response to his angry
``Tell him poisonous mushrooms/ Sprout under rotten
logs'', she says, ``lizards don't fly/ For their food/
They crawl''. A hard blow to one's pride; but the
strength of this poem lies in the fact that it is the
secretary who has the last word. The poet is too wellversed
in the realities of power to have it any other
way.
The bitterness against ``trashers of moral values'' at
the conclusion of ``My ultimate song'' (34±35) is
related to the world-sorrow of ``They've grown to love
killing'' from Strange things (1994:41), but is even
more cynical and despairing in its sarcastic extremism:
``I will sweep paths/ For those who rape/ Their
offspring and mothers/ Because they sow/ A new
human species/ For our changing world''. This
bitterness is even turned against traditional values in
``The labyrinth'', and reflects, surely, existential crisis
so severe that the image of the fox chewing off its own
foot to escape from the trap comes to mind (37):
On account of our sightlessness
We worship our spirits,
(Whom God said should be left to rest)
To cancel their wrath.
We kneel before God
(Who is angered by our double standards)
To forgive the sins
Of our ignorant fumblings.
(The poem makes me think also of the plight of the
Afrikaners, increasingly alienated from their own
culture, sending their children to English schools so
that they can escape from national and international
marginalization.)
The colonial past, too, comes under scrutiny in
``What will they eat?'' (22±23), where the cattle of a
``polltax defaulter'' are confiscated. The close bond
between people and cattle is feelingly portrayed,
adding to the outrage of the confiscation:
Grief was choking my throat.
Would they know their special names?
Would they graze them in lucerne?
Give them chaff and salt?
More macabre and frightening among the poems of
this category is ``Hunting on Christmas'' (31±33), with
its image of the ``Boer vrou'' hunting black children:
``A row of wild berries separated us/ As she peeped
and bobbed/ Like sun behind clouds''. This seems like
innocent curiosity, but it isn't: she is eyeing her prey,
and soon the first shots ring out. The incongruity of
the various elements here contributes in part to the
overall impact of the poem, which reminds us of the
more brutal victimization and inhumanity of the past.
Mahola's despair is surely a function of crime
compounded on crime, corruption compounded on
corruption, as colonial and neo-colonial appear to
blend seamlessly into one another. If his vision
depresses us (and I imagine most of us are all too
familiar with his subject-matter), it serves the important
function of providing other outlooks onto the
past and present from another background and race.
It is necessary and important to de-racialize present
discontent through the reading of such poetry, lest we
all become the victims of a simple-minded prejudice
and cynicism. And despite everything, Mahola has a
faith in the inevitability of the ordinary things from
which we must all, in the end, benefit (``The land will
heal'', 19):
The sun of our land
Will ease their wrinkled spirits,
Thread those devalued hopes,
Mend their fractured souls.
PR Anderson's Litany bird is a rewarding though
difficult volume, its general style reminding me of
Adam Schwartzman's dense articulacy. As in
Schwartzman, sometimes the density irritates, because
it seems so specific to the writer and restricted because
of this. For the most part, though (again, as in
Schwartzman), one is content to live with the
irritation for the sake of the allure of the writing.
The poems tend to be personal, and tend to be about
love, but there are many variations within these limits,
giving one the sense that the range of interests in the
volume is wide. There is also a strong feeling of unity
in the book, partly developed by the reader picking up
the threads of certain simple key elements, repeated
~73 .... REVIEWS

throughout. They include: green; the dark; light; hills;
mountains; radio static; birds; the western Cape; the
Mozambique environs; salt; stars; night drives;
frontiers; valleys and angels. It is a heterodox mixture
and one that tells something (even at this level) of the
nature of the writing, which, while it depends largely
on fairly straightforward description and narrative
(conditioned by all the discontinuities of existence),
slips also into atemporal reflection and alternative
ways of seeing and experiencing.
The process is exemplified in the first poem in the
volume, ``Just so story'' (7), which begins with a
description: ``Across a darkening park,/ An upper
window view,/ How level sunlight showed,/ O Best
Beloved, you''. The description continues, but parts of
it modulate into metaphor and symbol: ``Where green
receiving stowed/ The day against the dark''. The
second stanza steps outside the event and considers
the significance of dusk in existential terms, while the
third stanza ponders on relationships: ``our/ Desire,
like Signal Hill/ Receding and somehow/ Better
wished for than had''. A truism? Perhaps, but it's
given new force by the framework, as is the measure
of uncomplicated existence portrayed in the conclusion:
``was/ It always like this, living/ Just so and none
the wiser ± / As light delivering/ Its truths knows
neither/ Why nor how, but does?''
The kind of wisdom in the ``just so-ness'' of simple
things (teased into new shapes here by quite a
complex perspectivism, and odd, slightly syncopated
variations on a basic rhythm) is to be lauded, but
elsewhere in the book can be a hindrance, especially
when it smacks of the potted Zen wisdom of a card
from Exclusive Books, as it does rather in ``Churchhaven''
(13) (``The world is God's way of breaking
your heart,/ And hope of healing it''), and at the end
of ``Map reading'' (21). Here Anderson writes of the
roads, ``Getting you nowhere, but where you are/ And
want to be. Look to the occasions/ Along the way, the
roads you happen on''. I have no quarrel with the
descriptive aspect of the same poem, though, which
seems to me excellent: ``that littoral/ Thundery with
freight trucks crossing rivers,/ Staining the map pink
with petrol, the bush/ Dustier than carpets, sweet as a
mosque''. There is a strain of South African poets
who particularly excel at description, and Anderson is
surely among their company, which is no mean
achievement. But the philosophical burden of his
poems needs to be brought to the same level.
Anderson is also strong in his use of compelling
rhetoric (``Best Beloved'', above, though not a good
example, hints at this), related to the inherent music
of words, but also to the courage of believing in one's
own voice. Reminding me of the dreadful fires of last
summer, when the entire Cape at times appeared to be
a flaming Breughel battlefield, is ``The firewatch'' (8±
9), with its potent apocalyptic rhetoric: ``safe in our
million/ Dreams we sleep through it all,/ Though we
dream of mountains/ Burning and stars falling''. The
remainder of the poem, though, is not without its
flaws, mainly to do with a type of bathos in the
conclusion, where the conflation of elements seems
contrived. The poem would've been much better, in
my opinion, had the final four lines been cut:
So we number our loves
And our days and they pass
Us over ^ smoke and wind;
And these are our prayers,
Intelligent dreams and
Shortwave prophets, for whom
Night after night we yearn.
``Yearning'' ``night after night'' for ``shortwave
prophets'' doesn't sound quite right. The bathos is in
the discrepancy between desire and its object, and the
result is almost comic or whimsical. The more general
meaning is also unnecessarily obscured by independently
activated rhetoric, it seems to me, a problem
Schwartzman too suffers from: just what are the
``prayers'', ``intelligent dreams'', and ``shortwave
prophets'' that the demonstrative pronoun (``these'')
is pointing towards, other than (as seems to be the
case) themselves? This little catalogue is self-delighting,
it exists to exult in its own music.
But let me apply a contrary and more sympathetic
perspective to this issue. Playing with the independent
energy and music of words is very necessary,
otherwise poetry becomes fixed and dead. The
dangers are there (and they might be intensified by
a reader's obtuseness or different frame of reference),
but in the final analysis it is more profitable to live
with the dangers than be content with the bland
products of a linguistic metronome or the grammarcheck
programme on your PC. This is why, despite its
shortcomings, I enjoy the book. It has an energy and
verve.
The energy and verve (along with many other
elements) are best illustrated by my favourite poem in
the volume, ``On the frontier'' (16±17). The poem is
~74 .... REVIEWS

presided over by the call of the Nightjar, or Litany
Bird (whose picture graces the cover of the book), a
call so ubiquitous on sleepless African summer nights:
``Good Lord, deliver us''. The poem combines humour
and observation in its first stanza: ``down the road a
lace of fairy lights/ Is knotted like some frivolous
galaxy:/ The night has on its summer pyjamas''. Then
emotional content emerges, sombre, nostalgic, telling
of past investments of self and feelings: ``Over my
shoulder, so many valleys away,/ My first love
marries tomorrow:/ Our moon is waning in the deeper
east/ Out over India''. But this too becomes coloured
by good-natured humour, for the waning moon is
``Declining like Venice or pineapple profits''. The
stanza closes with certain of the simple unifying
elements of the book, already mentioned: ``And all
across the province there still flow/ Rivers addicted to
valleys. Our hearts/ Are less green than they were, the
night still dark''. The next stanza draws on a
conflation of other of these elements, salt and stars,
in such a simple but apt description, that it might well
be the best image in the book:
... the night still dark
And deep and wide as an implication. As if,
Salted with stars and clouded with headlights
Climbing a hill of summer dust, the dark
Reminds our finite selves ^
Among the hilltop chapels or the huts
Weeping with women's song, from town to farm,
In homes populous with dreams or shaken
Alight withTV weather ^ we live here
On the frontier ...
The frontier is not limited to the external world.
The accomplished sixth stanza continues the sombre
mood of the third, and paradoxically extends the
notion of frontier with the use of a physical reduction:
My own hand's map is creased with frontier parishes.
We will be going over old ground all
Our lives, down shadowed valleys and dust roads
Towards some lighted farm,
Bearing a lover's treaty ...
A further reduction occurs in the final stanza,
which returns to the shortwave image cluster first
found in ``The firewatch''. Human life reflects the
virtual nothingness of such things, in an almost
metaphysical conceit:
Though all we are is some short dash after the dot
Of love, a spindle of sleep or backward
Glance, some burr in the thickets of night air,
The valley shortwave;
The just so-ness of simple things ``delivers us'' from
our ``dash and dot'' fragility, restores us to the human
community, which is, after all, so strong in its close
relatedness. Anderson's penchant for closing words of
wisdom rises above itself here, or perhaps sinks below
the level of practised rhetoric to find a commensurate
and appropriate simplicity of utterance:
Who also were children here and will be
Delivered among cousins forever,
Weaned to the common ground, the human clay
In this parish nearest to heaven, this earth.
This is Anderson at his best, but similar examples
are not unique to this book.
South African poetry ± the inward gaze
Lynne Bryer. 1999. The cancer years. Plumstead:
Carapace Publishers.
Patrick Cullinan. 1999. Transformations. Plumstead:
Carapace Publishers.
JDU Geldenhuys. 1999. The Easter visitor. Northcliff:
The Gnomic Press.
DAVID LEVEY
These three poetry collections at first sight seem
unrepresentative of South African poets, at least in
the (horrible word) demographic sense. Three whites,
and, what is worse, two men among them. One very
well-known writer (Cullinan), a steady and consistent
but little-known and under-rated poet (Geldenhuys),
and another steady and courageous voice (Bryer) who
will, sadly, write no more.
It's noticeable that each of the three writers is
markedly individualistic in approach. Each deals ±
painstakingly and lovingly ± with a microcosmic
world. There is little awareness of the South Africa of
the 2000s, no social comment, no political angst.
Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps we have all
had too much of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, the Wouter Bassons, the Allan Boesaks.
Perhaps the journey inward is now more important.
This path is certainly the one which Lynne Bryer
~75 .... REVIEWS

had to walk, through no wish of her own. Her journey
is slow, gentle, expressed exactly, carefully, yet with
no trace of self-pity:
Standing, I stare.
This then's survival:
not passive drift, nor fear,
but jaunty, sword-edge joy,
extempore:
this
balancing on air.
(``Balancing on air'')
Many of her poems are, happily, completely
innocent of explicit references to her illness. Yet their
pensive and measured manner draws attention to the
profound feelings within Bryer as she first probes,
then accepts, her destiny.
The earth is in meditation,
rock sure beneath what passes,
girt with sea and river.
Mountains are its power,
immoveable, their heads like lions'
thrust into sun, storm, cloud.
Effortless, the antelope
bounds up the slope.
Arrow-swift, graceful, it too
is in meditation, being most dearly
itself, unaware of otherness,
intent with life and joy
in the paradise of now.
(``The Earth is in meditation'')
The obvious comparison is with Anne Sexton. Both
women face their life and suffering with great honesty
and proclaim their worth and their right, not only to
exist, but especially to triumph over their sickness.
But Sexton ``row[s] towards God'', the verb suggesting
ups and downs and effort, while Bryer reflects an
inner peace and certitude:
Burned bare, clear
as a flute of silver
tuned to the breath of God
(``Bare flute'')
In stylistic control, content and depth these poems
make a worthy contribution to writing on suffering
and death and are a fitting memorial to Lynne Bryer.
Patrick Cullinan's voice reflects the experience of
thirty years of writing poetry. His is also the precise,
finely-tuned word:
The analects of Fu Manchu, dozing,
Tell us:
There's a Chinaman listening
At every bedroom door.
So that when the river rises,
Dangerously,
He is able to measure
Its inching to our snore.
(``Peril yellow'')
His poems muse about love, loss, are erudite ± in a
Western sense. One explores the intricacies of
meditating on the passionate poems of John Donne,
with the aim of teaching them, when enfolded by
teargas and riots:
Should I care
If John Donne's art was awkward, out of place?
Because it was the virtue quickening, held
Within his verse, that somehow made me keep
My brand of angry faith, being compelled
To fight for art, since art outside was cheap.
~76 .... REVIEWS
(``The passion.Western Cape.1985'')
In this selection, at any rate, this poem is the only
artefact which acknowledges an external world set in
South Africa. It is significant, then, that a crustiness,
almost a defensiveness, towards the outer environment
is exhibited. One ± this reader, anyway ± looks
around for the promised transformations, and instead
finds a finely-crafted but essentially static inner world
where not very much is happening.
Now, what does JDU Geldenhuys have to contribute?
He is also a writer of considerable learning, a
master of the allusion, the recondite word, the exact
structure. Despite his consistency and his technical
skill, he has never become widely-known or -acknowledged
as a poet. This is a pity, for he is equally at
home in Afrikaans and English (having translated
Shakespeare's sonnets into Afrikaans), and is at home
in this country's financial sector just as much as in
writing a poem. What is more, he is publishing some
of his poetry on the Web. Surely this country needs
multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural, technologicallyaware
poets like him?

Geldenhuys has written a long poem of some forty
pages in length, the sort of thing that one does not
often see in South Africa these days. The Easter
Visitor of the title is an angel of sorts, clad mostly in
strawberry-blonde hair, who manifests herself to one
Dirk Oosterhouse while his family is away for the
long weekend. The poem is a source of rich
description with a decided undertone of humour:
... he saw standing there
a girl or angel dressed in silver foil
almost vamping Dicky with flare on flare
of ashen light.
Dirk/Dicky/Ricardo/Rix/Richard/Dick has many
problems peeing; he has nearly as many struggles in
wrestling with his lust for this ``hologram''. Might one
hazard a guess that he also has identity problems? No.
The poem is a romp, a controlled fantasy, playing on
words and ideas, completely satisfying in its own way.
It is quite a feat to sustain the momentum over forty
pages, but Geldenhuys does so. The journey here is an
inner journey in a way, for a number of metaphysical
issues are raised, and at the end Dick is left alone, to
return to his humdrum life of wife and kids, yet still
remembering the beautiful hair of his visitor which
has, briefly, so transcended his existence.
One might term these three collections self-indulgent,
creating a private escape from a still-tormented
country and its people. This is a serious charge, and
one that can be levelled with some justice. Yet the
inner world is the mirror image of the outer world,
and creative artists have the right to explore either or
both. To me these three volumes are welcome, for
they are the work of mature poets whose inner vision
is keen. Their inner gaze will afford Cullinan,
Geldenhuys and others, the stillness and focus to
return to the outer world with purpose and zest.
The Surface of a Bad Planet
Ellis, Bret Easton. Glamorama.
Vintage, 2000.
ZAIDEE SMALL
``You do not write for praise, or thinking of your
audience. You write for yourself, you work out between
you and your pen the things that intrigue you.''
(Bret Easton Ellis, at the time of the controversy
sparked by his then newly-released American Psycho)
Ellis's philosophy on the dynamics of his creative
process no doubt contributed significantly to the
public outrage and vilification with which the 400page
American Psycho was met. According to
``respectable'' publishers (like Simon & Schuster
who cancelled the book's publication) and several
women's groups, Ellis's depiction of mind-boggling
scenes of violence and misogyny perpetrated by the
serial killer protagonist, manifested the mind of a
psychopath. Ellis's sensible retort was ``... I think
most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate
between the writer and the character he is writing
about''. The brouhaha naturally called into question
the worth of his work. That was ten years ago. Now,
with the release of Glamorama (``the novel'', we are
reminded by Ellis, ``that took seven years to write'')
no doubt remains that he is an important writer.
Jonathan Shipley's review of Glamorama three
months ago begins ``Good God, Bret Easton Ellis
can write! ... Ellis is the writer for this generation.
Much talk is made of Thomas Wolfe ... Taking the
torch from him? Bret Easton Ellis''.
~77 .... REVIEWS
***
``A smart suit'', she sighs. ``Being buff. A cool haircut.
Worrying about whether people think you're famous
enough, or cool enough or in good enough shape
or ... or whatever''. She sighs, gives up and stares at
the ceiling. ``These are not signs of wisdom, Victor'',
she says, ``This is the bad planet''.
Glamorama, like American Psycho, depicts civilization
(in Ellis's words) as ``colossal and jagged''. The
novel is an epic satiric reflection of the structured
chaos we call ``society''. Ellis reveals an obsession,
that goes way beyond simple intrigue, with a world of
``glamour'' and that which is signified by it: superficial,
yet cut-throat, ambitions of fame or notoriety
aided by enormous wealth, sordid sex, the flagrant use
of costly narcotics and interminable pursuits of
freakish beauty. This is the ``surface'' constructed by
Ellis and depicted in a relentlessly bizarre style. ``We'll
slide down the surface of things'' echoes throughout
Glamorama, and aptly articulates Ellis's endeavour.
The protagonist is Victor Ward: model/icon/aspirant
nightclub promoter whose philosophy on life
reads ``Success means loving yourself, and anyone
who doesn't think so can fuck off''. Victor is firmly
located within this Jet-Set Society of Spectacle where
Image is Everything: ``... my heart continued pound-

ing uneasily but really I was drawn out and apathetic
and even that feeling seemed forced and I didn't fight
it and there was nothing I could do. For courage I
kept telling myself that I was a model, that CAA
represented me, that I'm really good in bed, that I
have good genes, that Victor ruled ...''. It is a surreal
celebrity culture constituted of the impossibly beautiful,
the unbelievably brash and the outrageously
bored. Everyone flaunts a particular brand of
neurosis. The reader is glutted with the excesses of
these characters. Scratching at this ``surface'' Ellis
reveals absolute banality.
Ellis trains his spy-glass on this world of absolute
banality for a third of the novel, mercilessly reflecting
the world of glamorama. An initial ``screwball''
comedy of manners (as Ellis called it), the apparent
innocuousness of glamorama is undermined and
subverted as the author connects The Trendy to
international acts of terrorism. This world of beauty
and fame is the rabbit-hole of Alice's Wonderland. It
is, as Victor's supermodel-girlfriend observes, in a
moment of unintentional clarity, ``the bad planet''.
We are acutely aware of the vocabulary and social
context of the characters. The lingo is that of the
modern-day Manhattan twenty-something hedonist
on the rise. It is a vocabulary of despair. The flippant
and debonair impertinence of most of Victor's retorts
(``whatever, dude ± just spare me!'') locates a
character profoundly indifferent to anything or anyone
that does not promise or affirm a reality of what
is ``hip'' or ``cool''. Victor's concerns do not extend
beyond an instant recognition of a designer label or
sofa. His obsessions include donning Prada whenever
possible, his washboard abs and being seated in the
front row, not the second, at the Calvin Klein show.
This is social responsibility in glamorama.
The social milieu is alarmingly sterile. Alienation
rages on with the conspicuous absence of any form of
human exchange between the characters. Tragedy is
caricatured and moments of existential peril are
articulated only as weary afterthoughts:
``We were in a nonzone.Ten or eleven producers were found
dead in various Bel Air mansions. I autographed the back of
a Jones matchbox in my ``nearly indecipherable scrawl'' for
some young thing ...There was a sale at Maxfields but we
had no patience.We ate tamales in empty skyscrapers and
ordered bizarre handrolls in sushi bars done up in industrialchic
decor with names like Muse, Fusion, Buffalo Club, with
people like Jack Nicholson, Ann Magnuson, Los Lobos,
Sean MacPherson, a fourteen-year-old male model named
Dragonfly who Jimmy Rip really dug.We spent too much
time at the Four Seasons bar and not enough time at the
beach. A friend of Chloe's gave birth to a dead baby. I left
ICM. People told us that they either were vampires or knew
someonewhowasavampire.DrinkswithDepecheMode.
So many people we vaguely knew died or disappeared the
weeks we were there ^ car accidents, AIDS, murders, overdoses,
run over by a truck, fell into vats of acid or maybe
pushed ^ that the amount for funeral wreaths on Chloe's
Visa was almost five thousand dollars. I looked really great''.
The novel's success resides in its increasing absurdity.
Ellis is concerned with ``finding the comedy in the
horror and chaos of it all, drawing that out.'' And the
absurdities, ironically, are not that absurd. Christopher
Lawrence points out: ``Glamorama works
because it is only marginally more surreal than the
evening news featuring Barbara Streisand whispering
in the President's ear or Ginger Spice retiring from
pop music to become a UN envoy''.
``The better you look, the more you see'' ± yet
another of Victor's glamorous mantras. It is also a
camp and wry observation in view of the fact that the
``shadowy looking-glass'' of the world into which Ellis
immerses us at the beginning is synonymous with the
nightmarish trap at the end. This is no delusional
manifestation within the drug-addled mind of Victor
Ward, nor is it merely an aspect of a more logical or
benign ``reality''. Once Victor is privy to the inescapable
madness of his reality, the horror of glamorama
is complete. Ellis depicts a terrifying world in which
superficial beauty and values are the currency and
which guarantee its destruction. Glamorama is a
thoroughly modern novel as it captures a sense of
the profound spiritual exhaustion of our age.
~78 .... REVIEWS

Notes on contributors
..........................
Loren Kruger is a graduate of UCT and Cornell University and currently teaches at the University of Chicago. She
is the author of The national stage (University of Chicago Press, 1992), The drama of South Africa
(Routledge,1999) and a range of articles, including, most recently, on ``Soul city'' (in Research in African
literatures), and, with Patricia Watson Shariff, on educational comics in SA (in Poetics today).
Sonja Laden lectures in the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv University. She is about
to submit her doctoral dissertation on consumer magazines and the emergence of a black middle-class in South
Africa. She has also researched the writing practice of New Historicism, and published a number of articles in both
her areas of interest.
Johan Geertsema has taught in the English Department of the University of Pretoria since 1994, but has recently
resigned to begin a job involving the design of TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) at the National
University of Singapore on 1 March 2001. He received his PhD from UCT in 1999.
Michael Marais lectures in the Department of English at Rand Afrikaans University. He recently completed a
doctoral thesis on the fiction of JM Coetzee. He is currently interested in the relationship between Maurice
Blanchot's aesthetics and Emmanuel Levinas's ethics.
Finuala Dowling is a freelance writer. She has published several short stories and has recently started to write
poetry.
Matthew Curr works in the Department of English at Unisa. He has interests in eighteenth-century and medieval
literature. And satire of course.
Brian Pearce is a lecturer in drama studies at Technikon Natal. He was recently appointed Editor, Shakespeare in
Southern Africa and Research Co-ordinator, Faculty of Arts, at Technikon Natal. His publications include articles
in Speech & drama, New theatre quarterly, Comparative drama, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, South African
theatre journal.
Dan Wylie was raised in the forests of Eastern Zimbabwe, and now teaches English at Rhodes University. He has
published a volume of poetry, The road out (Snailpress, 1996), and a study of the mythology of Shaka, Savage
delight (University of Natal Press, 2000). He is currently pursuing elephants through both literature and bush.
Kim Wallmach lectures in Translation Studies at Unisa. Her primary areas of research concern feminist
translation, corpus translation (and interpreting) studies and translation theory.
Michael Titlestad works in the Department of English at Unisa. In addition to studying and listening to jazz, he
teaches literary theory and African Studies.
~79 .... NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nick Meihuizen has taught English at the University of Zululand for 15 years and published articles, essays, and
reviews on poetry (SA, Irish, Romantic) both nationally and internationally. His book on Yeats, Yeats and the
drama of sacred space, was published by Rodopi in 1998. He is currently working on two historical novels
concerning the Portuguese in 16th-century Africa.
David Levey teaches in the Unisa Department of English and enjoys thinking about the relationships between
literature and religion.
Zaidee Small lectures in the Department of English at Unisa. She has a strong interest in the field of literary
theory, with a view to specialized study on lesbian, gay and the emerging field of Queer theory.
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