Alternation article template - Alternation Journal - University of ...

Johannes A. Smit
It will not bring the ‘Baasskap’ barbarians to their senses.
But it will establish the contempt and opposition of the world. And it
will hearten those who are trying to keep alive the flicker of human
values in South Africa as we go down into the Pit.
It is a small flicker. But if the flame of freedom is ever to
burn again in South Africa, it will have to start with small
beginnings. It will have to start in the conscience of a few individual
writers in South Africa and all over the world.
It will have to start soon (Brutus [1963] 2006: 48).
4.2 If Brutus’s critique of the racism to the white side is needle sharp,
his problematisation of the negritude movement, is equally telling. In his
1962 Fighting Talk article, ‘Negritude, Literature and Nationalism: A Word
from South Africa’, he first comments on ‘negritude’ as coming especially
from French Africa:
Yet, he muses:
– an expression of a peculiar blackness or African-ness in literature
which is related to matters like the development of an African
personality and the cultivation of a recognizably African literature
(Brutus [1962] 2006:49).
… on this subject, South African writers are strangely silent. True,
the trio of Lewis Nkosi, Zeke Mphahlele, and Bloke Modisane,
effectively punctured the mystical aura which surrounds the
concept—and in his ‘African Image’ Zeke drove a truck through it.
He nevertheless does not want to reject it out of hand – to ‘dismiss
the subject by pungent criticism’ – but gives it its due, in that it:
• is typical of the ‘Gallic tendency to ratiocination and the abstraction
of theory from a small number of observed facts’;
• can be partly understood as ‘a reaction against European-ness or
whiteness’; and
34