TEN YEARS - DISA

i&afficrEltte W®L 1 mm. 1 mm® 4 ED§§ §
S. Ndebele's story, 'The Test', is waiting for him. And so is the 'civil war'
of the period after September 1984.
The magazine wasn't there yet, either. Our first leap was premised on volatile,
unstable assumptions about the legacy of 1976, the new terrain into which
the boy was leaping. The cultural perimeters of apartheid had been breached,
though in the months before the magazine was launched the state was trying
to seal off the threat. Many of the 18 organisations banned in October 1977
had cultural programmes, and the directors of Ravan Press and the South African
Committee for Higher Education were among the individuals banned at
that time. From this point on, though, it would always be the case that the
fistful of repression contained a pinch of reform. The period of the Wiehahn
and Riekert Commissions also brought changes in the censorship system which
Staffrider would profit from, surviving its early string of bannings without
making any concessions on what it chose to publish. Embroiled in the Info
scandal (essentially a contest within the state about the nature and control of
the 'repressive reform' apparatus) the regime had to concede to opposition
groups the space in which to regroup and mobilise. Staffrider hung out its pennant
over this space. Quite quickly, as political and labour organisations established
themselves and developed cultural programmes with clearer ideological
positions, it lost the special significance it held for a while (at its height,
the print run touched 10 000 copies). Soon enough, it became a relic, something
that reminded its readers and contributors (many of them now engaged
in organised forms of struggle) of a particular stretch of the road behind them.
To one group of people, perhaps, it remains more than a museum piece.
The oddest thing about Staffrider was always this: that it was a literary magazine.
Yet it was. Of course, one could turn this statement around and say that
the odd thing about most of its contributors was that they were writers. Yet
they were. It happened, at that time in South Africa, that literature became
overburdened with a number of other social and political functions. While only
a narrow view of literature would exclude these functions from among those
literature can perform, it is true that existing literary forms must undergo a
considerable development before they begin to be adequate to these 'new' functions
(often discovered to be not so new in this very process of formal development
because the writer, in his constant search for 'models' in the past,
discovers old forms which once served comparable functions: consider the
case of the South African writer who tries to find written equivalents for some
of the techniques of oral literature). By the same token, it happened that an
unusual number of people found they could best participate in the making of
a new society, or best pursue their more personal aspirations, by writing. If